It shall be unlawful for any person, firm, or corporation to
prepare, sell, barter, or exchange in the District of Columbia, or
in the Territories, or in any place under the jurisdiction of the
United States, or to ship or deliver for shipment in or from the
United States, the District of Columbia, any territory of the
United States, or any place under the jurisdiction of the United
States, any worthless, contaminated, dangerous, or harmful virus,
serum, toxin, or analogous product intended for use in the
treatment of domestic animals, and no person, firm, or corporation
shall prepare, sell, barter, exchange, or ship as aforesaid any
virus, serum, toxin, or analogous product manufactured within the
United States and intended for use in the treatment of domestic
animals, unless and until the said virus, serum, toxin, or
analogous product shall have been prepared, under and in compliance
with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Agriculture, at an
establishment holding an unsuspended and unrevoked license issued
by the Secretary of Agriculture as hereinafter authorized.
Basically, its against the law to ship viruses around, or, a treatment that is worthless. So, if the applicability under the statute is to allow the private company to either ship a worthless test, or a dangerous one, how is that something the FDA should possibly allow?
Do you think any Pharma company would ask their research staff to identify that glowing stuff in jellyfish? Of course not.
That's why they deserve to fail then. Look, the reason that we have this corporate system, the patent system, and allow all of these people to become billionaires is so that people will be incented to take these big risks. As a Republican, by all means, I'm all in favor of people making billions of dollars, but, they have to EARN IT.
See, here's the thing, if drug companies don't invest in super drugs, and then shower the market instead of with uninnovative alternatives, pretty much, there won't be a genuine competitive advantage to any of them and there's going to be a lot of pricing pressure downwards on them.
What you are really getting at, though, is that American companies are, well, risk averse. You don't see the same kind of commmitment that like, Chrysler took when it spent decades trying to stuff a jet engine into a car, that Boeing took when it built the first 747, that Apple took when it built the Mac or that Microsoft took when it bet the company farm on Windows 95. Instead, we get a bunch of incremental crap, and not that much new, because, they think they have to hang onto something when that which hang onto is obsolete.
Innovate or die, that's my message to corporate America. If you want to get paid 100 million bucks a year, then don't be a pussy when you are a CEO.
Compared to the cost of the ground support and the space craft. Launch the damn shuttle. If it blows up, it blows up. I bet you could find plenty of Americans willing to take their place, even with a 1 in 10 chance of getting killed, in exchange for a ride into space.
Come on. To many people, spaceflight is worth the risk of death. If astronauts aren't willing to take that chance, fire them, and get someone who will.
My point is that big pharma can afford to pony up for basic research. Part of being a big business is to have the wealth to assess risks in the future and yes, they should pay for their own products. I mean, we give these pharma companies patent and copyright protections to incentivize them to do this research. In turn, they get to use this exclusivity to rape us on pricing, saying, "oh, but we're spending it all on research", then, they should spend it on the research. If you've got a drug patent, you have a monopoly just as much as AT&T did have back in the day and Ma Bell was kind enough to give us the likes of Claude Shannon, K&R, the transistor guys, and then some. I think its not unreasonable to expect that a company in the pharma business to accept the risks that go with pure research, otherwise, patents are sorta pointless, aren't they?
If "American pharma company said that they could make 10 billion dollars on stem cell products from embryonic research", then they wouldn't be at the federal teat looking for fundin
Yeah they would. Why spend a billion dollars to make ten billion dollars, and get only 9 billion in profit, when you can have the feds kick in the billion and get ten billion in profit.
American companies are always going to ask for federal funding, whether they "need it", or "not". It's just more profit, if they get it.
I guarantee you that if an American pharma company said that they could make 10 billion dollars on stem cell products from embryonic research, about 3/4 of the Republican party would immediately sell out on any contemplated private ban on stem cell research, if such a ban were even constitutional. Yeah, there's some 1/4 of the GOP that would oppose stem cells under any circumstances but for the rest of us, its like, well, we don't the feds to pay for it because it is morally squeemish, but if the private sector is down with it, that's ok if it makes grammy walk again and our stock go up and we can then deal with our religious sentiments at the time we choose to sell out, and not before. And conversely, on the left, there's a minority of the Democrats that would ban all industrial activity whatsover, because it is bad for mother earth.
The point really is that we need to stop framing debates based upon what the radicals of either side of the aisle are telling us to frame them as and to start and think for ourselves.
You know, there's enough to go around in both "party planks" to make one want to wretch. The thing to keep in mind is that on either side of the aisle, party planks are written by radicals and both sides thankfully and freely ignore them. Having party planks is stupid make work for party organizers to give them something important sounding to do, but in fact they are actually pretty meaningless, except to get the opposition riled up about some terrible thing that is in the plank. In other words, we can expect moveon to go send out spam about some terrible republican thing just as much as we can rush limbaugh go on about how terrible democrats are because these things are in their planks, and party insiders on both sides would say, well, really, "not a chance."
I think the left wing is being tricked by pharma into paying for something that the private sector can easily afford. If religion were not in the equation, then, easily, the left would come against this as the handout to pharma that it is.
Is it that these cash strapped pharma companies might be able to pony up a few shillings toward that research. I mean, why do we have to have the Federal Government subsidize Merck? Doesn't Merck have enough money to collect and dissect human stem cells? For christ sakes, it's not like it costs a billion dollars to knock a chick up, and, you could always find women and men willing to part with their respective reproductive cells for a few bucks, for sure.
I mean, if embryonic stem cells could really cure cancer, paralysis, palsy and alzheimers, and can do so much, don't you think big Phara would and should pay for their research when they stand to make not billions, but trillions off of all of these miracle cures?
I had new math and as a result my equation solving ability was utterly horrible and honestly still is... but I did find that new math laid the groundwork for databases down the road... cardinality and set theory are sort of the gist of databases... and, well, commutative and associativity are useful for understanding operators in programming languages.
Just like you wouldn't want someone to head a software development company that had no clue how software worked
I always viewed CEOs as salespeople. I don't want them necessarily to know how things work as much as I would want them to be able to sell the product and effectively relay the concerns of existing customers and the wishes of potential new customers to development teams for prioritization and implementation.
No, the FDA is saying that it is not going to do the job of the corporation for it. The company wanted the FDA to both pay for and certify that the herd was safe so that it would escape both the financial and legal damages from a mistake. So yeah, the corporation is being terrible, but the court made the right decision in this case. The beef company can't use the FDA as a vehicle to immunize itself from lawsuits brought on by its shipments of a defective product.
Seriously, hire a private testing firm and certify that your beef is 100% safe and tested from Mad Cow. The FDA is a minimum safety standard, not the maximum, and there's nothing that precludes a firm from adopting voluntary and more stringent measures. Indeed, Volvo does this with cars all the time and in doing so has captured a market for people who are safety conscious.
What's really at issue, here, is that the firm wants to get the benefit of the safety testing, but not only doesn't want to pay for it, but also wants the FDA to act as a sort of a legal shield in case somehow they screw and up still wind up selling a cow with mad-cow, even though the beef was 100% testing.
The courts actually ruled the right way - they protected the interests of the government in this case clearly above the greedy motives of a corporation, looking to actually bait liberals into jumping all over the government for not offering a legal and financial subsidy to a corporation that could easily make a business case out of testing 100% of its herd for mad cow.
Who wouldn't want someone in office who knew about how law works
Because lawyers are not leaders and the law is the property of the people, not the specialists that manage it. If anything lawyers should be like secretaries to the government, organizers of the law, but that the law is something requires specialists to deal with speaks to a self-perpetuating class of government than it does a real democracy.
After all, we computer people organize far larger things and make it more accessible to more people and in language far more precise than the law will ever be. The US code might be some monster sized thing, but I guarantee that the Linux operating system is probably larger and much more precisely stated, and, there's not a single part of it that is really that difficult to understand, if you work at it a bit. There's plenty of cross referencing, people to talk to.
For every evil, coke-headed, nihilistic, self-serving lawyer out there, there's a hard-working, fair-minded lawyer who's looking to 'stick it' to the man and all the other sell-out lawyers.
If anything, the lawyers who are fair minded tend to more be with the "the man", because corporate law is more often a 9-5 affair. On the other hand, being a plaintiff's attorney, wanting to stick it to the man, can make you rich and famous, but it is also grueling work. So your greedy and ambitious and more deceitiful people tend to be on the plaintiff side.
With that said, the plantiff's lawyers I had as clients once upon a time were among the most interesting people on the planet earth. And, yeah, some of the people that get sued for billions really do deserve it, and also, some people don't. To a certain extent, your best class action firms make the bread and butter suing some people that really don't deserve to be sued, but then they'll fund a few cases where people really do deserve to be sued and it gets all weird when you have guys at the top of the law bar pointing out that they knew and got better grades in law school than various judges on the federal circuit. It's a very chummy affair.
being the mayor of a 10.000 populated town, and being the governor of a 600.000 populated remote, desolate polar state for 2 years.
Well that's a town with 10,000 more people than any town Obama was ever mayor of... and governor of a state with 600,000 more people than Obama was ever governor of. For that matter, Biden was never governor or mayor of anything either.
The more Obama shouts that Palin is not qualified, the more it draws attention to his total lack of experience as an executive.
Bottom line is, Americans look for executive experience in Presidents. Presidents should be people who are leaders of something. So, technically, Palin is more qualified than anyone else.
There's a lot that I disagreed with Clinton on, but, I have to say that I absolutely loved the way he handled the budget.
If the Laffer curve inflection point were to the left of the US taxation rate increasing taxes in Europe would reduce revenue. Hasn't happened. Nor has Bush's tax cuts increased US revenues.
But Bush's tax cuts have -increased- revenues. However, I do agree with this.
People get tied up in all of these side shows and forget the fundamental principle of capitalism - investment of capital increases the productivity of workers and the economy as a whole. When a government borrows money it competes with private sector companies who wish to invest capital. This competition drives up the cost of capital making projects have to have higher returns to be attractive. This reduces economic growth.
This, I agree with entirely. I actually -really- liked the way Clinton managed the federal budget. I'm a big deficit hawk and I read his book in 1992, and I crossed party lines to vote for him twice because he mapped out how he was going to balance the budget, and did it. Pretty much, as much as Clinton gets tagged for being a self serving liar, he actually kept his promise of balancing the budget, and did so pretty much the way he said he was going to do.
I would have, given the choice, preferred a Bush pay off of the national debt than a tax cut. With that said, Bush's tax cuts did do the supply thing of increasing revenue. However, Bush spent all of that and then some, really, in an attempt to do the Rove thing of pulling the party to the left.
Here's the stupidity of the Democrats. If Hillary had won the nomination, she would have had my vote IF she said she was going to follow Rubinomics and balance the budget and kept her mouth shut on guns.
Obama flat out doesn't care about the deficit and he's doing the classic big liberal spending, wheras the Clintons were always doing tiny programs to show that they care but without breaking the bank, and I could live with that.
Now McCain does claim to want to balance the budget by the end of his first term. He can do this if he lets the Bush tax cuts lapse, lowers the cost of the war, and just holds the line on entitlements slightly. I know he talks about tax cuts and extending Bush's tax cuts, but I think its bullshit, quite honestly. Quite honestly, this time around, I'd rather have the USA pay off the national debt than have another tax cut.
Heh. Truly a RTFA moment....They can't store that clear text if they want to verify it.
I read the article. You miss the point. You don't "verify the password". Not over the phone, or over the computer. You verify your identity and reset the password. That's the way good security systems work.
I would have thought that the customer's password would have been one way trap door encrypted. SO basically these guys are storing all their passwords in the plain, and yeah, they must really be pants!
The power grid is both dynamic enough to handle spikes and is national already. Energy traders can and do move power from one spot in the country to the next without much difficulty. The problem is losses that occur as power is moved across larger distances... and, the problem in fixing that is eminent domain to build new grid stuff, and a desire to get the taxpayers to pay for the wires.
The bigger problem, in getting new power lines for rural areas, is actually in building transmission. Here, environmentalists make absolutely no sense. In several states, they have already killed projects to build transmission from windmill sites to areas where the power is needed.
I have to concede that you are right on this one. Certainly the national party hasn't done crap on containing spending. Good republicans are supposed to fall on the sword, slash social spending, and do the dirty work of cleaning house and then get kicked out, if they must, because they piss too many people off.
Stop making up facts, and stop attacking the poor like it's all their fault for wanting more.
I don't blame the poor for wanting more for themselves at all. I'm saying that, Democrats are not the people that will do it. Democrats are run by an environmental wing that sees the possession of material things as a problem, rather than a virtue. They don't -want- people to have more.
By the way, people eating at McDonald's get fat because they are eating too many calories. Calories consumed is a sign of wealth. I mean, assuming that all your other crap you said about America's poor is true, your argument falls flat on its face when you yourself admit that they have enough economic power to pay people to make their own food for them, and, can actually eat more than they need. That's -wealth-.
You actually have no concept of poverty. I can just tell. You know, I was poor starting out. I lived in an apartment without a car and I took the bus to work and I did not eat at McDonald's every day because it was too damned expensive.
You know what poor is? I'll tell you. Poor is when you look at the calories on the back of the package and you spend what little money you have on as many calories as you can. I used to do the whole anti-atkins diet because I was, in fact poor. I didn't have meat every day. I would only treat myself to McDonald's once a week and for entertainment I bought myself a twelve pack of cheap beer and a pack of smokes for $5 and I could at least get f--- up and watch bad TV because I couldn't afford cable.
Now, of course, Democrats and their social activist friends wrecked even that. They priced smokes and drink out of reach largely because they taxed cigarettes and sued the companies until the price was really high. They do the same to beer and they do the same to guns. So pretty much anything good that a poor person might want, Democrats have blocked. What a bunch of pompous, self serving assholes and every time I see some guy whose young and not well off trying to put together a 12 pack and a pack of smokes, I just want to say, Democrats and their lawyer friends should all be executed.
I didn't have health insurance. In fact, you know what, if I got sick, I just rode it out. I broke my toe one year and I just let it go. Oh well. People now are conditioned to think they need to spend 50k on medical care every time their shit turns green and most of the time, that's just from drinking the wrong kind of cheap beer. You had to Drewry's, not Genny Cream.
Half of this "health insurance" crisis is made up, in my view. IT's a bunch of doctors trying to sell more medicine, inventing more diseases to make people afraid, when the fact of the matter is, if you are young and stupid and 21, the only thing that's really going to put you down, statistically, is a bullet. Only old people really need health care, and I'd make the argument that we probably should take that money, and give it to the kids, so they can get a better education, rather than wasting it on someone whose already spent their life. I know that when I get my inevitable cancer diagnosis, I'm not dragging it all out.
The price of the war as calculated by Stiglitz is totally bogus. He's a totally partisan operator and he basically just makes his numbers us up.
Imagine if only we spent that money researching alternative fuels five years ago. We would have been on the path energy independence from foreign sources!!!
Well, research from alternative fuels is a speculative endeavor, wheras, gaining commercial access to 50 trillion dollars worth of oil is more of a sure thing. The thing about alternative fuels, though, is that we don't know if there is some sort of a circular economic logic that will essentially render them impossible to make cost effectively. Some say that ethanol, for example, has had negative effects on the price of food and that will ultimately spiral back into the cost of ethanol itself.
In any case, all alternative fuels are ultimately about replacing the storage of solar energy into a fuel with a fuel system we pump into energywise, ourselves. There's not going to be some process that we devise that "creates" energy, that's impossible. So, at best, alternative energy means either we are hoping for a breakthrough in fusion, settle for less fuel by using solar, or, go on a race through the planet and then the solar system to find fissionable fuels to use as the basis of an alternative fuels process.
Whoever invents the next alternative fuels could single handedly become the next Total Fina Elf and in doing so get a trillion dollars worth of revenues over a timeframe similar to the war, so, I think there's sufficient incentive for people to assume the risk of their research and just do it. But be that as it may, DOE has received about 200 billion dollars from the administration since 2001 and so I would think that's some decent research money there.
But ultimately, it's not the lab that's the problem, its the scale. I'm invested in a little company called Nova Biosource Fuels. They make biodiesel from just about any sort of feedstock there is. But, despite the high price of fuels, their stock is just getting killed because they ran into some problems ramping up their process and now they have problems actually with having enough cash to actually buy the feedstocks needed to make biodiesel profitably with.
Slashdot Mirror
let's have that law changed to make corporations beholden to the interests of the people in their community.
Why not buy Microsoft stock? Seems a lot simpler.
Well, here's the text of the statute.
It shall be unlawful for any person, firm, or corporation to
prepare, sell, barter, or exchange in the District of Columbia, or
in the Territories, or in any place under the jurisdiction of the
United States, or to ship or deliver for shipment in or from the
United States, the District of Columbia, any territory of the
United States, or any place under the jurisdiction of the United
States, any worthless, contaminated, dangerous, or harmful virus,
serum, toxin, or analogous product intended for use in the
treatment of domestic animals, and no person, firm, or corporation
shall prepare, sell, barter, exchange, or ship as aforesaid any
virus, serum, toxin, or analogous product manufactured within the
United States and intended for use in the treatment of domestic
animals, unless and until the said virus, serum, toxin, or
analogous product shall have been prepared, under and in compliance
with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Agriculture, at an
establishment holding an unsuspended and unrevoked license issued
by the Secretary of Agriculture as hereinafter authorized.
Basically, its against the law to ship viruses around, or, a treatment that is worthless. So, if the applicability under the statute is to allow the private company to either ship a worthless test, or a dangerous one, how is that something the FDA should possibly allow?
Do you think any Pharma company would ask their research staff to identify that glowing stuff in jellyfish? Of course not.
That's why they deserve to fail then. Look, the reason that we have this corporate system, the patent system, and allow all of these people to become billionaires is so that people will be incented to take these big risks. As a Republican, by all means, I'm all in favor of people making billions of dollars, but, they have to EARN IT.
See, here's the thing, if drug companies don't invest in super drugs, and then shower the market instead of with uninnovative alternatives, pretty much, there won't be a genuine competitive advantage to any of them and there's going to be a lot of pricing pressure downwards on them.
What you are really getting at, though, is that American companies are, well, risk averse. You don't see the same kind of commmitment that like, Chrysler took when it spent decades trying to stuff a jet engine into a car, that Boeing took when it built the first 747, that Apple took when it built the Mac or that Microsoft took when it bet the company farm on Windows 95. Instead, we get a bunch of incremental crap, and not that much new, because, they think they have to hang onto something when that which hang onto is obsolete.
Innovate or die, that's my message to corporate America. If you want to get paid 100 million bucks a year, then don't be a pussy when you are a CEO.
It's a joke, get over it.
Christ almighty, maybe it is time for the Americans to start bombing....
Compared to the cost of the ground support and the space craft. Launch the damn shuttle. If it blows up, it blows up. I bet you could find plenty of Americans willing to take their place, even with a 1 in 10 chance of getting killed, in exchange for a ride into space.
Come on. To many people, spaceflight is worth the risk of death. If astronauts aren't willing to take that chance, fire them, and get someone who will.
So we should do what the Democrats want us to do with union elections and get rid of the secret ballot. That's a real reform.
My point is that big pharma can afford to pony up for basic research. Part of being a big business is to have the wealth to assess risks in the future and yes, they should pay for their own products. I mean, we give these pharma companies patent and copyright protections to incentivize them to do this research. In turn, they get to use this exclusivity to rape us on pricing, saying, "oh, but we're spending it all on research", then, they should spend it on the research. If you've got a drug patent, you have a monopoly just as much as AT&T did have back in the day and Ma Bell was kind enough to give us the likes of Claude Shannon, K&R, the transistor guys, and then some. I think its not unreasonable to expect that a company in the pharma business to accept the risks that go with pure research, otherwise, patents are sorta pointless, aren't they?
If "American pharma company said that they could make 10 billion dollars on stem cell products from embryonic research", then they wouldn't be at the federal teat looking for fundin
Yeah they would. Why spend a billion dollars to make ten billion dollars, and get only 9 billion in profit, when you can have the feds kick in the billion and get ten billion in profit.
American companies are always going to ask for federal funding, whether they "need it", or "not". It's just more profit, if they get it.
I guarantee you that if an American pharma company said that they could make 10 billion dollars on stem cell products from embryonic research, about 3/4 of the Republican party would immediately sell out on any contemplated private ban on stem cell research, if such a ban were even constitutional. Yeah, there's some 1/4 of the GOP that would oppose stem cells under any circumstances but for the rest of us, its like, well, we don't the feds to pay for it because it is morally squeemish, but if the private sector is down with it, that's ok if it makes grammy walk again and our stock go up and we can then deal with our religious sentiments at the time we choose to sell out, and not before. And conversely, on the left, there's a minority of the Democrats that would ban all industrial activity whatsover, because it is bad for mother earth.
The point really is that we need to stop framing debates based upon what the radicals of either side of the aisle are telling us to frame them as and to start and think for ourselves.
You know, there's enough to go around in both "party planks" to make one want to wretch. The thing to keep in mind is that on either side of the aisle, party planks are written by radicals and both sides thankfully and freely ignore them. Having party planks is stupid make work for party organizers to give them something important sounding to do, but in fact they are actually pretty meaningless, except to get the opposition riled up about some terrible thing that is in the plank. In other words, we can expect moveon to go send out spam about some terrible republican thing just as much as we can rush limbaugh go on about how terrible democrats are because these things are in their planks, and party insiders on both sides would say, well, really, "not a chance."
I think the left wing is being tricked by pharma into paying for something that the private sector can easily afford. If religion were not in the equation, then, easily, the left would come against this as the handout to pharma that it is.
Is it that these cash strapped pharma companies might be able to pony up a few shillings toward that research. I mean, why do we have to have the Federal Government subsidize Merck? Doesn't Merck have enough money to collect and dissect human stem cells? For christ sakes, it's not like it costs a billion dollars to knock a chick up, and, you could always find women and men willing to part with their respective reproductive cells for a few bucks, for sure.
I mean, if embryonic stem cells could really cure cancer, paralysis, palsy and alzheimers, and can do so much, don't you think big Phara would and should pay for their research when they stand to make not billions, but trillions off of all of these miracle cures?
I had new math and as a result my equation solving ability was utterly horrible and honestly still is... but I did find that new math laid the groundwork for databases down the road... cardinality and set theory are sort of the gist of databases... and, well, commutative and associativity are useful for understanding operators in programming languages.
Just like you wouldn't want someone to head a software development company that had no clue how software worked
I always viewed CEOs as salespeople. I don't want them necessarily to know how things work as much as I would want them to be able to sell the product and effectively relay the concerns of existing customers and the wishes of potential new customers to development teams for prioritization and implementation.
No, the FDA is saying that it is not going to do the job of the corporation for it. The company wanted the FDA to both pay for and certify that the herd was safe so that it would escape both the financial and legal damages from a mistake. So yeah, the corporation is being terrible, but the court made the right decision in this case. The beef company can't use the FDA as a vehicle to immunize itself from lawsuits brought on by its shipments of a defective product.
Seriously, hire a private testing firm and certify that your beef is 100% safe and tested from Mad Cow. The FDA is a minimum safety standard, not the maximum, and there's nothing that precludes a firm from adopting voluntary and more stringent measures. Indeed, Volvo does this with cars all the time and in doing so has captured a market for people who are safety conscious.
What's really at issue, here, is that the firm wants to get the benefit of the safety testing, but not only doesn't want to pay for it, but also wants the FDA to act as a sort of a legal shield in case somehow they screw and up still wind up selling a cow with mad-cow, even though the beef was 100% testing.
The courts actually ruled the right way - they protected the interests of the government in this case clearly above the greedy motives of a corporation, looking to actually bait liberals into jumping all over the government for not offering a legal and financial subsidy to a corporation that could easily make a business case out of testing 100% of its herd for mad cow.
Who wouldn't want someone in office who knew about how law works
Because lawyers are not leaders and the law is the property of the people, not the specialists that manage it. If anything lawyers should be like secretaries to the government, organizers of the law, but that the law is something requires specialists to deal with speaks to a self-perpetuating class of government than it does a real democracy.
After all, we computer people organize far larger things and make it more accessible to more people and in language far more precise than the law will ever be. The US code might be some monster sized thing, but I guarantee that the Linux operating system is probably larger and much more precisely stated, and, there's not a single part of it that is really that difficult to understand, if you work at it a bit. There's plenty of cross referencing, people to talk to.
For every evil, coke-headed, nihilistic, self-serving lawyer out there, there's a hard-working, fair-minded lawyer who's looking to 'stick it' to the man and all the other sell-out lawyers.
If anything, the lawyers who are fair minded tend to more be with the "the man", because corporate law is more often a 9-5 affair. On the other hand, being a plaintiff's attorney, wanting to stick it to the man, can make you rich and famous, but it is also grueling work. So your greedy and ambitious and more deceitiful people tend to be on the plaintiff side.
With that said, the plantiff's lawyers I had as clients once upon a time were among the most interesting people on the planet earth. And, yeah, some of the people that get sued for billions really do deserve it, and also, some people don't. To a certain extent, your best class action firms make the bread and butter suing some people that really don't deserve to be sued, but then they'll fund a few cases where people really do deserve to be sued and it gets all weird when you have guys at the top of the law bar pointing out that they knew and got better grades in law school than various judges on the federal circuit. It's a very chummy affair.
being the mayor of a 10.000 populated town, and being the governor of a 600.000 populated remote, desolate polar state for 2 years.
Well that's a town with 10,000 more people than any town Obama was ever mayor of... and governor of a state with 600,000 more people than Obama was ever governor of. For that matter, Biden was never governor or mayor of anything either.
The more Obama shouts that Palin is not qualified, the more it draws attention to his total lack of experience as an executive.
Bottom line is, Americans look for executive experience in Presidents. Presidents should be people who are leaders of something. So, technically, Palin is more qualified than anyone else.
There's a lot that I disagreed with Clinton on, but, I have to say that I absolutely loved the way he handled the budget.
If the Laffer curve inflection point were to the left of the US taxation rate increasing taxes in Europe would reduce revenue. Hasn't happened. Nor has Bush's tax cuts increased US revenues.
But Bush's tax cuts have -increased- revenues. However, I do agree with this.
People get tied up in all of these side shows and forget the fundamental principle of capitalism - investment of capital increases the productivity of workers and the economy as a whole. When a government borrows money it competes with private sector companies who wish to invest capital. This competition drives up the cost of capital making projects have to have higher returns to be attractive. This reduces economic growth.
This, I agree with entirely. I actually -really- liked the way Clinton managed the federal budget. I'm a big deficit hawk and I read his book in 1992, and I crossed party lines to vote for him twice because he mapped out how he was going to balance the budget, and did it. Pretty much, as much as Clinton gets tagged for being a self serving liar, he actually kept his promise of balancing the budget, and did so pretty much the way he said he was going to do.
I would have, given the choice, preferred a Bush pay off of the national debt than a tax cut. With that said, Bush's tax cuts did do the supply thing of increasing revenue. However, Bush spent all of that and then some, really, in an attempt to do the Rove thing of pulling the party to the left.
Here's the stupidity of the Democrats. If Hillary had won the nomination, she would have had my vote IF she said she was going to follow Rubinomics and balance the budget and kept her mouth shut on guns.
Obama flat out doesn't care about the deficit and he's doing the classic big liberal spending, wheras the Clintons were always doing tiny programs to show that they care but without breaking the bank, and I could live with that.
Now McCain does claim to want to balance the budget by the end of his first term. He can do this if he lets the Bush tax cuts lapse, lowers the cost of the war, and just holds the line on entitlements slightly. I know he talks about tax cuts and extending Bush's tax cuts, but I think its bullshit, quite honestly. Quite honestly, this time around, I'd rather have the USA pay off the national debt than have another tax cut.
Heh. Truly a RTFA moment....They can't store that clear text if they want to verify it.
I read the article. You miss the point. You don't "verify the password". Not over the phone, or over the computer. You verify your identity and reset the password. That's the way good security systems work.
I would have thought that the customer's password would have been one way trap door encrypted. SO basically these guys are storing all their passwords in the plain, and yeah, they must really be pants!
The power grid is both dynamic enough to handle spikes and is national already. Energy traders can and do move power from one spot in the country to the next without much difficulty. The problem is losses that occur as power is moved across larger distances... and, the problem in fixing that is eminent domain to build new grid stuff, and a desire to get the taxpayers to pay for the wires.
The bigger problem, in getting new power lines for rural areas, is actually in building transmission. Here, environmentalists make absolutely no sense. In several states, they have already killed projects to build transmission from windmill sites to areas where the power is needed.
Tax and spend Republicans indeed.
I have to concede that you are right on this one. Certainly the national party hasn't done crap on containing spending. Good republicans are supposed to fall on the sword, slash social spending, and do the dirty work of cleaning house and then get kicked out, if they must, because they piss too many people off.
Stop making up facts, and stop attacking the poor like it's all their fault for wanting more.
I don't blame the poor for wanting more for themselves at all. I'm saying that, Democrats are not the people that will do it. Democrats are run by an environmental wing that sees the possession of material things as a problem, rather than a virtue. They don't -want- people to have more.
By the way, people eating at McDonald's get fat because they are eating too many calories. Calories consumed is a sign of wealth. I mean, assuming that all your other crap you said about America's poor is true, your argument falls flat on its face when you yourself admit that they have enough economic power to pay people to make their own food for them, and, can actually eat more than they need. That's -wealth-.
You actually have no concept of poverty. I can just tell. You know, I was poor starting out. I lived in an apartment without a car and I took the bus to work and I did not eat at McDonald's every day because it was too damned expensive.
You know what poor is? I'll tell you. Poor is when you look at the calories on the back of the package and you spend what little money you have on as many calories as you can. I used to do the whole anti-atkins diet because I was, in fact poor. I didn't have meat every day. I would only treat myself to McDonald's once a week and for entertainment I bought myself a twelve pack of cheap beer and a pack of smokes for $5 and I could at least get f--- up and watch bad TV because I couldn't afford cable.
Now, of course, Democrats and their social activist friends wrecked even that. They priced smokes and drink out of reach largely because they taxed cigarettes and sued the companies until the price was really high. They do the same to beer and they do the same to guns. So pretty much anything good that a poor person might want, Democrats have blocked. What a bunch of pompous, self serving assholes and every time I see some guy whose young and not well off trying to put together a 12 pack and a pack of smokes, I just want to say, Democrats and their lawyer friends should all be executed.
I didn't have health insurance. In fact, you know what, if I got sick, I just rode it out. I broke my toe one year and I just let it go. Oh well. People now are conditioned to think they need to spend 50k on medical care every time their shit turns green and most of the time, that's just from drinking the wrong kind of cheap beer. You had to Drewry's, not Genny Cream.
Half of this "health insurance" crisis is made up, in my view. IT's a bunch of doctors trying to sell more medicine, inventing more diseases to make people afraid, when the fact of the matter is, if you are young and stupid and 21, the only thing that's really going to put you down, statistically, is a bullet. Only old people really need health care, and I'd make the argument that we probably should take that money, and give it to the kids, so they can get a better education, rather than wasting it on someone whose already spent their life. I know that when I get my inevitable cancer diagnosis, I'm not dragging it all out.
The price of the war as calculated by Stiglitz is totally bogus. He's a totally partisan operator and he basically just makes his numbers us up.
Imagine if only we spent that money researching alternative fuels five years ago. We would have been on the path energy independence from foreign sources!!!
Well, research from alternative fuels is a speculative endeavor, wheras, gaining commercial access to 50 trillion dollars worth of oil is more of a sure thing. The thing about alternative fuels, though, is that we don't know if there is some sort of a circular economic logic that will essentially render them impossible to make cost effectively. Some say that ethanol, for example, has had negative effects on the price of food and that will ultimately spiral back into the cost of ethanol itself.
In any case, all alternative fuels are ultimately about replacing the storage of solar energy into a fuel with a fuel system we pump into energywise, ourselves. There's not going to be some process that we devise that "creates" energy, that's impossible. So, at best, alternative energy means either we are hoping for a breakthrough in fusion, settle for less fuel by using solar, or, go on a race through the planet and then the solar system to find fissionable fuels to use as the basis of an alternative fuels process.
Whoever invents the next alternative fuels could single handedly become the next Total Fina Elf and in doing so get a trillion dollars worth of revenues over a timeframe similar to the war, so, I think there's sufficient incentive for people to assume the risk of their research and just do it. But be that as it may, DOE has received about 200 billion dollars from the administration since 2001 and so I would think that's some decent research money there.
But ultimately, it's not the lab that's the problem, its the scale. I'm invested in a little company called Nova Biosource Fuels. They make biodiesel from just about any sort of feedstock there is. But, despite the high price of fuels, their stock is just getting killed because they ran into some problems ramping up their process and now they have problems actually with having enough cash to actually buy the feedstocks needed to make biodiesel profitably with.