No kidding, I know a guy with an artificial valve. It's noisy as hell. I can hear it from 6-8 feet away in an office setting. Then again, I can hear an analog wristwatch in the same environment.. That's the main reason I don't wear a watch around anymore, it's damned annoying.
Hope I don't have some kind of Captain Hook syndrome going on. Eck!
...Quite alot like the giant electromagnet in the door from Cryptonomicon. Except it just wiped the drive and blew the electronics by it simply being a huge-ass electro magnet-EMP type thing..
Because, obviously, not all of the republican judges dissented. The law sucks for Average Joe, not many would say otherwise. However, they probably made the right decission. The dissenters did so mostly to voice their frustration at the law, I feel... And that's great.
Their collective job is to judge the law, not change it's meaning... If they're doing otherwise, they need to be out. However, that dosen't stop the minority from voicing their opinion by dissenting when they know what the others are leaning towards. Like I said, they may know any particular law is stupid, but it's their job to uphold the letter of the law until it becomes otherwise.
Finally, I wasn't talking specifically about the case presented in the article, but on the two anecdodes I presented--furthermore I supposed that eventually money pressure from big conservative-allied businesses would pressure congress or the white house would to influence courts positions on the issue because it's a vital part of their growth strategy.
In most instances, however, many property owners are offered quite a bit below market value for a particular piece of land... And the bad thing you can't sell it. The very instant someone wants your property for eminent domain purposes your property value is nonexistant because there's no potential for profit--or any profit more than the county wants to give you, anyhow.
It's the preverbial 800lb Gorilla. Take a bushel of bananas to appease him or be crushed.
Uhuh, while most commercial eminent domain grabs in the US are by two of the most markedly conservative corporations: Wal-Mart, and Walgreen's, often using coercive tactics on local governments and municipalities? Yeah, that would fly far... Until Wal-Mart and friends got unhappy, that is.
Thing is, I'm not against eminent domain, for some reasons. If an area truly is blighted, then by all means, urban renewal is a valid option... That's the problem though, "blighted" is often used incorrectly, because it's such an ambiguous term.
I'm in Denver, and last year, though the City of Arvada, Wal-Mart basically wanted to drain a local, pristine lake neighboring some offices and a commercial district, so that they could put a Super Wal-Mart right next to a Sams' Warehouse. The plan basically was such that 1/4 of the lake would be filled in and used as parking. Please. It was called "blighted" because back in the early 70's (before I was born) Arvada drew up some pie-in-the-sky plan to put a bunch of skyscrapers in this particular area... So, the lake wasn't living up to the economic development plan, therefore it's blighted. It could've been your house, they wouldn't give a shit.
The same thing happened to a 95 year old lady that's a friend of the family. She owned a pretty successful convenience store in Westminster, and it was always taken care of. Guess what? Walgreen's happened. As far as I know, they haven't succeed... Yet. But they've been battling for their land for over a year.
I'm not convinced that a conservative judge would do any good in this case. These corporations will continue to battle it out in whatever way they can, because hey, what's better than free property and tax increment financing for many years to come?
A judge judges the law, at any rate. If the law says that it's law to eat babies every Sunday, a judge aught to do his job and make sure that people get punished appropriately for not eating babies on Sundays. If you don't like it, you'd better seek to change the law!
Genuine Advantage -- I think that more or less means that it's Microsoft's Genuine Advantage... They've got you bound and gagged, and stuffed in their basement for the next time they've got an urge.
It's kind of like how DRM dosen't stand for Digital Rights Management... Uhuh.
I've wanted to try and make a meade for years now. Seems easy enough. I just need to clear out some junk to keep it for the weeks it needs! Ugh! Bye bye computer stuffs.
Exactly, it sounds like this has much the same effect of differential GPS. If you could count on most of the APs not moving, that's a safe enough bet, a measured datapoint known exactly by survey--like they do with differential GPS--could make this extremely accurate.
You DO know that a microdrive is basically a minituarized hard drive in a flash card package?
Obviously he does. Maybe you missed this part: "so if moving parts are not your thing (but spending lots of money is) then you can easily pick up a 4GB Ultra II."? I mean, it's in what you quoted for chirssakes.
Legalized abortion costs the public virtually nothing and has a much greater effect on reducing crime...
Is that kind of abortion of the postadolescent variety? Because a superhero might be able to help greatly with that, too!
I can see it now: The Aborter. He's a mild mannered abortion clinic doctor by day, helping rid the world of unwanted babies... By night he's on par with The Punisher, except he has a custom-formulated serum that makes villians crap their intestines right out, resulting in a long, miserable (and incredibly messy) death! He also has sonar vision (don't ask how that happened, you don't want to know!) that can also detect "bad seeds", while they're in the womb!
Exactly. When one force dosen't follow the rules the other wants to (usually the larger force), they disgrace their tactics.
A guerilla war back then was dishonorable from the English aspect. Our guys aimed for their officers, also considered dishonorable.
I don't see so much difference between what the terrorists do and what our founding fathers did... Except perhaps aiming for civilians--I don't think they did that.
Maybe I was a bit hasty and curt. But it is slashdot, where it's fun to flame AC's. So.
I can see the point about thermal stresses, but I don't know if it's much of a practical problem for appliances, and I'd expect that they've done their research on which alloys tend to last longer. Much smaller filaments in SEMs tend to last in the high hundreds to thousands of hours at the same temperature. Bigger filaments in EB welders tend to very rarely fail, unless there is a vacuum leak or some such, or so I understand. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think they tend to keep them continiously heated--or that it would be a good idea to do that when introduced to the atmosphere.
I dunno, I'll have to test my tubes to see what's going on, but I'm sure you're right. It's also entirely likely that I'm just a big jerkwad. It kinda' struck me funny that someone would enginner a tube heater to reduce start-up times.
At any rate, it gives me another reason to move to LCD's... Stupid filaments!:D
Yeah, that was pretty cool. I left for pretty much the whole day, and I come back to a finished download and a 4:1 transmit:receive ratio. It must've really picked up in speed. Awesome feature, because a typical torrent probably would've crumbled.
It's working for me, but it's going miserably slow. 9 seeds, 49 peers, 1-2kbps. This is the first time I've used trackerless BT, so it'll be interesting.
At least the swarm speed has picked up from 220kBps to 1MBps. That's a good sign!
Sales to other businesses must be tracked, and tax collected if you sell to a consumer....... The idea is that the tax ends up being paid somewhere along the line.
Yeah, that's sounding near-exactly how I understand national sales tax works in Australia. Everyone in the supplier's-distributors line accounts for the taxes, which eventually get passed onto the consumer for that item. I may be mistaken, but IIRC, taxes might have to be paid on certian used items--if they were re-sold retail for example. I'm not sure, though. Apart from that, it seems reasonable enough.
While it's very easy to hurt somebody living 'paycheck to paycheck', as they have no safety barrier, I should note that it's not really any different than the situation as it is right now - Where they often have to wait an entire year to get their refund for any income taxes. I would also note that they only pay tax when they spend money, so the most they'll have to 'wait' is thirty days. Also, I'd like to note that living 'paycheck to paycheck' is far more often a result of poor money management, than substinance level income. Money management should be taught far more, but it's something that I feel the parents need to teach, as a school teaches skills, it takes parents to actually teach a kid to use them.
Certianly, I can't argue that many people have poor plannig abilities. In reality, that's probably a good part of what seperates the middle and lower class. If you have those skills, you've got a good chance of getting out of the lower class rut, but if you don't, "sorry out of luck" I guess. They don't teach much in school nowadays, assuming one actually goes. It'd take a pretty focused individual or some outside intervention (military service?) to break the social barrier. Chicken and the egg as it were.
In hindsight, if food/medicine were the main expenditure of a lower class household, with your idea that food shouldn't be taxed, it might not be so bad. On the FairTax FAQ, though, it seems they don't want to distinguish between different goods at point of sale, but when it comes time for the rebate. 23 cents on the dollar over a month seems to be a little more drastic than 15% over a year from my perspective.
I've known plenty of people that wouldn't want to take a job with the state or government, primarily because they wouldn't be getting paid weekly/bi-weekly--even if they got better pay and benefits. Of course, to someone of average inteligence that's a non sequitur on a grand scale--but all you can do is pick your chin off the sidewalk and go the other way! They're so entrenched that they can't look out to see the horizon. Anyway, I digress... They'd at least have to learn to plan around the month instead of around the year--not impossible, but some from the school of hard knocks might get some more short-term bruises.
Aside from being punished for spending on non-deductible (on a car perhaps) items by a fair amout (almost $2,00 on a person making 24,000 yearly), it seems sane.
It leaves me wondering, however, if this plan is more a sneak attack aimed at people without valid SSNs rather than good 'ol tax reform... I.e. illegal immigrants... Because suddenly it would become very expensive very quickly to live here without some compensation--not that I have a particular problem with that, they cost us quite a bit in a variety of ways--but I fear they're propping the economy up. If that's the guise, why not call it what it is? I'm sure lots of people will support an anti-illegal tax plan, even if it meant the quiche would fall shortly thereafter.
It would certianly make for some interesting possibilities on the black market if there wasn't adequate policing of imports, though. The mob wouldn't have had it so well since prohibition!
I don't disagree, on principle. Our tax system is thoroughly screwed up. Has been for a long, long time. It needs to be changed, but it's never going to be. The powers at large are enjoying the benefits of the law as it is, unless there was some extreme pressure from the people, they'd never even consider a drastic change.
As you point out, you'd have to have a registered business to lower your tax liability; most people smart enough to have a small fortune (assets greater than a couple million or so) already have their own registered small business, and use it as some type of tax-shelter. As far as I'm concerned, you'd be stupid not to--unless you actually like paying Uncle Sam for thousand dollar toliet seats! Most people that have lots of money didn't get there by not being smart about it.
I mean, unless the government actually required businesses to have some sort of consistent profit, this wouldn't change anything.
I don't have the answers, in some ways FairTax sounds great, and in other ways, it sounds terrible. It sounds quite alot like Australia's tax system (dealing with credits), except the government gets to keep your money before giving it back.
For instance, it WOULD hurt people that live paycheck to paycheck--which is quite alot of people. They pay the taxes up front and wait a month to get their monthly refund? It sounds like the government has quite a good amount of time to capitolize on having everyone's money. With all of the monthly sending of checks and whatnot, it's going to make it's own new level of bureaucracy--even if it does eliminate the IRS, and that's never a good thing.
I dunno, I'm no expert in macroeconomics, and I'd never claim to be. Maybe it would work, maybe not. I doubt we'll see a change soon, though... And I doubt people will be quite happy with seeing 20 some percent sales taxes, even if it does help them in the long run.
Well if that's the case, and I don't think it is, a pro would have made sure it was all in focus and more evenly lit.
And it could also be that the arperature/lens combination would make such a thing impossible to do--if the face was not in focus, what's the point? The background adds to the subject, without it, the picture would be that of just a goofy looking kid.
The blocks qualify him as a goofy kid posing next to a building. It is a valid professional photographic technique to have the subject in sharp focus, and everything in front and behind of it blurred (although it's perhaps a bit tasteless if done excessively, or on a poor subject). Every one mildly interested in the art has taken a similar photo.
That's a great idea with the disposable cameras. I Would've never thought of that. Then again, knowing my family I should be afraid of what they'd take photos of *shiver*
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No kidding, I know a guy with an artificial valve. It's noisy as hell. I can hear it from 6-8 feet away in an office setting. Then again, I can hear an analog wristwatch in the same environment.. That's the main reason I don't wear a watch around anymore, it's damned annoying.
Hope I don't have some kind of Captain Hook syndrome going on. Eck!
...Quite alot like the giant electromagnet in the door from Cryptonomicon. Except it just wiped the drive and blew the electronics by it simply being a huge-ass electro magnet-EMP type thing..
Because, obviously, not all of the republican judges dissented. The law sucks for Average Joe, not many would say otherwise. However, they probably made the right decission. The dissenters did so mostly to voice their frustration at the law, I feel... And that's great.
Their collective job is to judge the law, not change it's meaning... If they're doing otherwise, they need to be out. However, that dosen't stop the minority from voicing their opinion by dissenting when they know what the others are leaning towards. Like I said, they may know any particular law is stupid, but it's their job to uphold the letter of the law until it becomes otherwise.
Finally, I wasn't talking specifically about the case presented in the article, but on the two anecdodes I presented--furthermore I supposed that eventually money pressure from big conservative-allied businesses would pressure congress or the white house would to influence courts positions on the issue because it's a vital part of their growth strategy.
In most instances, however, many property owners are offered quite a bit below market value for a particular piece of land... And the bad thing you can't sell it. The very instant someone wants your property for eminent domain purposes your property value is nonexistant because there's no potential for profit--or any profit more than the county wants to give you, anyhow.
It's the preverbial 800lb Gorilla. Take a bushel of bananas to appease him or be crushed.
Uhuh, while most commercial eminent domain grabs in the US are by two of the most markedly conservative corporations: Wal-Mart, and Walgreen's, often using coercive tactics on local governments and municipalities? Yeah, that would fly far... Until Wal-Mart and friends got unhappy, that is.
Thing is, I'm not against eminent domain, for some reasons. If an area truly is blighted, then by all means, urban renewal is a valid option... That's the problem though, "blighted" is often used incorrectly, because it's such an ambiguous term.
I'm in Denver, and last year, though the City of Arvada, Wal-Mart basically wanted to drain a local, pristine lake neighboring some offices and a commercial district, so that they could put a Super Wal-Mart right next to a Sams' Warehouse. The plan basically was such that 1/4 of the lake would be filled in and used as parking. Please. It was called "blighted" because back in the early 70's (before I was born) Arvada drew up some pie-in-the-sky plan to put a bunch of skyscrapers in this particular area... So, the lake wasn't living up to the economic development plan, therefore it's blighted. It could've been your house, they wouldn't give a shit.
The same thing happened to a 95 year old lady that's a friend of the family. She owned a pretty successful convenience store in Westminster, and it was always taken care of. Guess what? Walgreen's happened. As far as I know, they haven't succeed... Yet. But they've been battling for their land for over a year.
I'm not convinced that a conservative judge would do any good in this case. These corporations will continue to battle it out in whatever way they can, because hey, what's better than free property and tax increment financing for many years to come?
A judge judges the law, at any rate. If the law says that it's law to eat babies every Sunday, a judge aught to do his job and make sure that people get punished appropriately for not eating babies on Sundays. If you don't like it, you'd better seek to change the law!
Genuine Advantage -- I think that more or less means that it's Microsoft's Genuine Advantage... They've got you bound and gagged, and stuffed in their basement for the next time they've got an urge.
It's kind of like how DRM dosen't stand for Digital Rights Management... Uhuh.
I've wanted to try and make a meade for years now. Seems easy enough. I just need to clear out some junk to keep it for the weeks it needs! Ugh! Bye bye computer stuffs.
Exactly, it sounds like this has much the same effect of differential GPS. If you could count on most of the APs not moving, that's a safe enough bet, a measured datapoint known exactly by survey--like they do with differential GPS--could make this extremely accurate.
Well, you see, there was this mutant porpoise, an x-ray machine, and, a tin of Dolphin wax, and uhm, .... Yeah.
You DO know that a microdrive is basically a minituarized hard drive in a flash card package?
Obviously he does. Maybe you missed this part: "so if moving parts are not your thing (but spending lots of money is) then you can easily pick up a 4GB Ultra II."? I mean, it's in what you quoted for chirssakes.
Legalized abortion costs the public virtually nothing and has a much greater effect on reducing crime...
Is that kind of abortion of the postadolescent variety? Because a superhero might be able to help greatly with that, too!
I can see it now: The Aborter. He's a mild mannered abortion clinic doctor by day, helping rid the world of unwanted babies... By night he's on par with The Punisher, except he has a custom-formulated serum that makes villians crap their intestines right out, resulting in a long, miserable (and incredibly messy) death! He also has sonar vision (don't ask how that happened, you don't want to know!) that can also detect "bad seeds", while they're in the womb!
Yeah! Fer Men wifout teef! //ouch those are hard! :P
Exactly. When one force dosen't follow the rules the other wants to (usually the larger force), they disgrace their tactics.
A guerilla war back then was dishonorable from the English aspect. Our guys aimed for their officers, also considered dishonorable.
I don't see so much difference between what the terrorists do and what our founding fathers did... Except perhaps aiming for civilians--I don't think they did that.
Wow, so, that's probably what compells the Scotts to deep-fry Mars bars!
Maybe I was a bit hasty and curt. But it is slashdot, where it's fun to flame AC's. So.
:D
I can see the point about thermal stresses, but I don't know if it's much of a practical problem for appliances, and I'd expect that they've done their research on which alloys tend to last longer. Much smaller filaments in SEMs tend to last in the high hundreds to thousands of hours at the same temperature. Bigger filaments in EB welders tend to very rarely fail, unless there is a vacuum leak or some such, or so I understand. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think they tend to keep them continiously heated--or that it would be a good idea to do that when introduced to the atmosphere.
I dunno, I'll have to test my tubes to see what's going on, but I'm sure you're right. It's also entirely likely that I'm just a big jerkwad. It kinda' struck me funny that someone would enginner a tube heater to reduce start-up times.
At any rate, it gives me another reason to move to LCD's... Stupid filaments!
Yeah, that was pretty cool. I left for pretty much the whole day, and I come back to a finished download and a 4:1 transmit:receive ratio. It must've really picked up in speed. Awesome feature, because a typical torrent probably would've crumbled.
This is moronic. CRTs don't have a heater to keep the tube warm.
They have a tungsten filament that is heated to ~4500 degrees, at which point electrons start to fly off of it. Maybe this is where you're confused.
It's working for me, but it's going miserably slow. 9 seeds, 49 peers, 1-2kbps. This is the first time I've used trackerless BT, so it'll be interesting.
At least the swarm speed has picked up from 220kBps to 1MBps. That's a good sign!
Goatse is one thing, but that mental image is on a whole new plane of disgusting.
Wow.
I'll have it there--the possibilities of entertaining hacks available too cheap to pass by, with their own little snack included... Yeah!
I'll be the first to plaster someone's car with ever-changing goatse pictures!
Sales to other businesses must be tracked, and tax collected if you sell to a consumer. ...... The idea is that the tax ends up being paid somewhere along the line.
Yeah, that's sounding near-exactly how I understand national sales tax works in Australia. Everyone in the supplier's-distributors line accounts for the taxes, which eventually get passed onto the consumer for that item. I may be mistaken, but IIRC, taxes might have to be paid on certian used items--if they were re-sold retail for example. I'm not sure, though. Apart from that, it seems reasonable enough.
While it's very easy to hurt somebody living 'paycheck to paycheck', as they have no safety barrier, I should note that it's not really any different than the situation as it is right now - Where they often have to wait an entire year to get their refund for any income taxes. I would also note that they only pay tax when they spend money, so the most they'll have to 'wait' is thirty days. Also, I'd like to note that living 'paycheck to paycheck' is far more often a result of poor money management, than substinance level income. Money management should be taught far more, but it's something that I feel the parents need to teach, as a school teaches skills, it takes parents to actually teach a kid to use them.
Certianly, I can't argue that many people have poor plannig abilities. In reality, that's probably a good part of what seperates the middle and lower class. If you have those skills, you've got a good chance of getting out of the lower class rut, but if you don't, "sorry out of luck" I guess. They don't teach much in school nowadays, assuming one actually goes. It'd take a pretty focused individual or some outside intervention (military service?) to break the social barrier. Chicken and the egg as it were.
In hindsight, if food/medicine were the main expenditure of a lower class household, with your idea that food shouldn't be taxed, it might not be so bad. On the FairTax FAQ, though, it seems they don't want to distinguish between different goods at point of sale, but when it comes time for the rebate. 23 cents on the dollar over a month seems to be a little more drastic than 15% over a year from my perspective.
I've known plenty of people that wouldn't want to take a job with the state or government, primarily because they wouldn't be getting paid weekly/bi-weekly--even if they got better pay and benefits. Of course, to someone of average inteligence that's a non sequitur on a grand scale--but all you can do is pick your chin off the sidewalk and go the other way! They're so entrenched that they can't look out to see the horizon. Anyway, I digress... They'd at least have to learn to plan around the month instead of around the year--not impossible, but some from the school of hard knocks might get some more short-term bruises.
Aside from being punished for spending on non-deductible (on a car perhaps) items by a fair amout (almost $2,00 on a person making 24,000 yearly), it seems sane.
It leaves me wondering, however, if this plan is more a sneak attack aimed at people without valid SSNs rather than good 'ol tax reform... I.e. illegal immigrants... Because suddenly it would become very expensive very quickly to live here without some compensation--not that I have a particular problem with that, they cost us quite a bit in a variety of ways--but I fear they're propping the economy up. If that's the guise, why not call it what it is? I'm sure lots of people will support an anti-illegal tax plan, even if it meant the quiche would fall shortly thereafter.
It would certianly make for some interesting possibilities on the black market if there wasn't adequate policing of imports, though. The mob wouldn't have had it so well since prohibition!
I don't disagree, on principle. Our tax system is thoroughly screwed up. Has been for a long, long time. It needs to be changed, but it's never going to be. The powers at large are enjoying the benefits of the law as it is, unless there was some extreme pressure from the people, they'd never even consider a drastic change.
As you point out, you'd have to have a registered business to lower your tax liability; most people smart enough to have a small fortune (assets greater than a couple million or so) already have their own registered small business, and use it as some type of tax-shelter. As far as I'm concerned, you'd be stupid not to--unless you actually like paying Uncle Sam for thousand dollar toliet seats! Most people that have lots of money didn't get there by not being smart about it.
I mean, unless the government actually required businesses to have some sort of consistent profit, this wouldn't change anything.
I don't have the answers, in some ways FairTax sounds great, and in other ways, it sounds terrible. It sounds quite alot like Australia's tax system (dealing with credits), except the government gets to keep your money before giving it back.
For instance, it WOULD hurt people that live paycheck to paycheck--which is quite alot of people. They pay the taxes up front and wait a month to get their monthly refund? It sounds like the government has quite a good amount of time to capitolize on having everyone's money. With all of the monthly sending of checks and whatnot, it's going to make it's own new level of bureaucracy--even if it does eliminate the IRS, and that's never a good thing.
I dunno, I'm no expert in macroeconomics, and I'd never claim to be. Maybe it would work, maybe not. I doubt we'll see a change soon, though... And I doubt people will be quite happy with seeing 20 some percent sales taxes, even if it does help them in the long run.
Well if that's the case, and I don't think it is, a pro would have made sure it was all in focus and more evenly lit.
And it could also be that the arperature/lens combination would make such a thing impossible to do--if the face was not in focus, what's the point? The background adds to the subject, without it, the picture would be that of just a goofy looking kid.
The blocks qualify him as a goofy kid posing next to a building. It is a valid professional photographic technique to have the subject in sharp focus, and everything in front and behind of it blurred (although it's perhaps a bit tasteless if done excessively, or on a poor subject). Every one mildly interested in the art has taken a similar photo.
That's a great idea with the disposable cameras. I Would've never thought of that. Then again, knowing my family I should be afraid of what they'd take photos of *shiver*
The parent to which I replied said "Better yet, make it a sales tax. That way the average person doesn't have to file taxes at all!"
I simply illustrated why that would not be "fair".
So, please be getting your fuggin' "facts" straight before *you* post, thankyouverymuch.