Then it would have worked for GM and Ford and Chrysler, who rolled out a new name every time they made a new car. Alan Mullally famously just put a stop to this at Ford, pointing out what everyone else has been saying, that Toyota has been using Camry and Corolla now for decades... Don't change the name...
Is a Toyota built in Ohio by American workers who pay U.S. income tax more "foreign" than a Ford built in Mexico?
If Exxon operated in a foreign country, liberals and arabs would say, that, Exxon is an evil capitalist exploiting foreign occupier. Based on those standards, what is Toyota in the USA?
- Now today that same suit still costs about quarter-ounce of gold, but 300 dollars paper money.
Except that, these days, a person would have multiple suits, all sorts of clothes, a couple of cars, more food than you can possibly eat, houses that are quite frankly beyond anything all but the richest in the 1920s could have dreamed of, video games, air conditioning, TV, and more.
Because of this, you could make the argument that the 300 paper dollars is worth far more than the 5 paper dollars was in the 1920s.
All of that was made possible because when you have fractional reserve lending, you create pools of money that can be invested in the creation of new products. If we had to wait for someone to dig up gold, we'd be worthless.
What goldbugs never fail to appreciate, is that gold doesn't have anymore "natural" value than paper money. Gold's supposed value is just as much fiat as paper money is. Whether you declare your money to be based on gold, based on paper, based on apples, or oranges, or an entire economy, money is always going to be fiat. The only non-fiat money this country had was the bank notes of the late 19th century and that turned out to be a disaster.
What the hell is gold actually good for? At least a dollar can help me light a fire or wipe my ass with it. Can't do that with gold. Gold's a terrible metal to make stuff with.. its too soft. All it is kinda shiny. But who cares about a kinda shiny rock when you have LCD screens that shine way more.
Republican bitching about GM is a total fraud.I keep hearing so-called conservatives moan about GM and the how the government shouldn't have bailed them out. They talk up the free market as if they believe in it and the truth is, they don't. The very same conservative movement that rips the northern based GM has absolutely no problem lining up to the government dole when it comes to protectionism for American food products and subsidies for American farmers. Jeff Sessions, Republican, publicly ripped GM so much, and defended Honda and Toyota so much, that, I went and made a Japanese style state flag for his home state of Alabama....:
Pretty much, Republicans have movie stars doing "Got Milk" advertisement, "Beef, its what's for dinner...".. like, the USA needs to have the government advertising fucking food. Every year American farmers get the same out of amount money that GM gets, in either direct subsidies or benefits from protectionism, and THAT, of course, based on most conservatives that I talked too, is somehow "different."
Moral of the story is this, Republicans have no credibility on balanced budgets, no credibility on economic national security, and no credibility on nationalism in general. If the GOP wants to regain its self respect, then red states must balance their budgets, and get off the federal dole themselves.
Giving away taxpayer money causes inflation. The inflation is not only in the dollar generally, but also in the price of new cars. Those who focus on the free taxpayer money they are getting may not realize that the dealer has raised prices.
Actually, giving away taxpayer money only causes inflation if the money supply increases. If you have people on the other side not paying loans back, that money created by fractional lending is effectively destroyed and the real money supply contracts. Since so many people are simply not paying loans back, dropping tons of money onto the economy isn't going to have an inflating effect.
You're still using a lot more gas (and petroleum) to get you, your spouse and your 2.2 kids around town than you would with a nice Camry..... try to legislate some morality
If we were going to legislate morality, I'd say we kick out every Asian trading partner that we have. Buying a Japanese car is treason. So, see, we all have different kinds of morality now don't we...
I believe you overlooked SCIENCE. Nothing to stop him coming back eh, you crazy believers... nothing... heh... oh my..
Ah, science is downright depressing in terms of moral retribution. Because there's no post-death penalty, if you kill more than one person, you always sorta come out with a higher score. In religion, there's a possibility of a wrathful God who will put your nutsack in a blender for 2 billion years for your crimes. By contrast, if you manned up with the love vest and blew yourself up in an abortion clinic, what sort of penalty could possibly be affixed to you?
I don't know about you guys but I'm expecting the space aliens to show up any minute.
Dude, I'm going straight to the Book of Revelations, the end of the world. Space aliens? That's scary, but if you want genuine terror, there's nothing to top God coming back to smite all the evil and villainy, especially if you happen to be an evil villain.
Travel at near light is a huge if. Accelerating some kind of gigantic people carrying ship to near light is an even larger if.
Not really... in the sense that, the energy required to achieve the velocity by itself is so enormous that the mass in the equation is a fairly small term. It's almost like, if we could accelerate a small probe to near light speed, then, we could probably accelerate people too.
Look, we can't send people. We'll probably never be able to send people.
Why not? If you travel at near light speed, you can pretty much go anywhere. Who cares if the rest of the world passes you by buy a few thousand years if you wind up ahead of anyone else on your own planet?
Ah, more sour grapes from another liberal, whose leadership has pretty much been nothing but a century of failure. Failure with Wilson, failure with Roosevelt, failure with Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and pretty soon Obama...
The British Government is dead set on getting him extradited. They are obsessed with being seen as being tough on "cybercrime" in case the US removes our already piddling access to their secret data.
I always thought the British were our ally. Last time I checked, the British Army had 30,000 soldiers crossing the border into Iraq in March 2003 and they stayed for a pretty darned good time after the rest of Europe bailed.
Seems to me that information sharing between the two countries should be more, not less.
Otherwise, societies are too self-absorbed to dedicate those sort of resources to a goal that will have ZERO benefit to them or their descendants.
It sucks for scientific types, for sure, but the best way to get the masses emotionally committed to space flight and space exploration is through religion. There's no more historically proven way that motivates people to build and explore for future purposes than the prospect of being able to worship your lord and impose his law as your religious customs see fit to do so. In 1620, it wasn't a bunch of scientists on board the Mayflower, it was a bunch of religious fanatics. In my site I'm going to go all out religion for space exploration as a national priority and argue in this order:
a) The Lord gave us the vast resources of the Heavens to use. b) The Earth is a crowd and dank cesspool of sin. c) You can establish a more Godly society on another planet. d) You can re-create the American Experiment the way the founding fathers intended.
And Lech Walesa and Charlie Wilson had a hell of a lot more to do with when the inevitable fall of the Soviet Union actually took place than Reagan ever did. Read your history.
Yeah, that history is, really more revisionism. The facts of the matter is that conventional wisdom in the United States at the time of Reagan was that challenging the Soviet Union head on was suicidal. There was a real thought that even if the Soviet Union did collapse, there would be some sort of a desperate attempt to launch a war to stay in power. Or something terrible would happen.
that's just it, most of them want that traffic, but they also want to be paid for the privilege of having a link to the article. it's just them being greedy.
Me thinks they need to learn that the internet is pretty unforgiving when it comes to shoddy content.
I really don't understand how Newspapers would not want the traffic that a link would generate. There is nothing more than I would love to have than a thousand sites with 11 word snippets of my articles linking back to me.
Does anyone find it odd that Reagan managed to somehow thwart the Soviet Empire, with its vast and genuine spy networks, enormous weapons apparatus, all without either firing a shot or compromising the Constitution? Yet, somehow, we have to do that now against, a bunch of dudes with AK-47s and some Korans? There's far more people in the USA sympathetic to the ideas of communism than islam, and so if we didn't need to spy on ourselves against the commies and the russians, why should we need to do so now against a less sympathetic islam? Could it be that right wingers have forgotten that the central premise of Reagan's vision was that the cold war is a war that would be won based on having more freedom, and not less, and that the same lesson could just as easily be applied to Islam?
hat's no less troubling than your utterly guessing at why it's okay for spending to go down, when you do not have a comparative budget either. His error is the exact same as yours. But of course, you know your bias is right, so
The error is the same, for sure. Except that, he's asking the taxpayer for more money, and I'm not. I'm saying, whatever the unaccountable slop the 2006 budget was, or the 2004 budget was, just spend that much. He's saying he needs more. SO therefor, prove it. If road construction, etc, and all of this capital spend is really somehow locked in as a consequence of population, then, the people would have probably have to pony up because they did it to themselves. But, all I get are slogans like "we have no money, its a crisis, we have to act now...", and sorry, after 8 years of Bush and now 1 of Obama, crisis driven government doesn't really do it for me anymore. Need more than a crisis to impress me these days, especially since in today's politics, everything is a crisis.
Sure it could. We would first have to exterminate all non-western peoples, then, expand into their territory. From there, gather up the wealth needed to move into space. We spread like locusts throughout the galaxy, and then into the next...
IT's old tech, but, Panasonic and Okidata still have dot matrix printers out there. The advantage is that you could put a bunch of labels on a roll and let them rip just by sending ASCII out to the serial or parallel port.
Because the tax is X% of a pie that has shrunk with the economic downturn
That I can buy.
but that's just when the most people come to collect on the services they've paid for (such as the newly unemployed filing for unemployment benefits and medicaid).
Well, one thing you could do with unemployment would be offer people a chance at a lower total payout in exchange for getting a lump sum. People could then have the option of accepting a lower paying job, but use the unemployment money to pay off debt and so be able to have a similar lifestyle that they had, even if they weren't getting paid. It would be better for the people and cheaper for the state.
Medicaid is a whole other fiasco.. but there's not much you can really do about it because the problem is really elderly care costs are going through the roof because extended families are being broken up by migratory job seeking. The long term fix would be throttle back free trade so that you can have communities of multi-generational extended families and so families could assume more of the cost of keeping an aging loved one at home. But right now that's just not reality. Who could have really thought that the bill for buying a Japanese car and a Korean TV would be grandma's house being liquidated so she can die in a nursing home.
It's just goddamn ridiculous. In 2080 our kids' kids' kids are going to piss on our graves realizing how much we f'd them over with these kind of contracts.
It is ridiculous. The crazy part is, if we didn't have so much free trade, cities would have a rich manufacturing tax base and wouldn't have to do this crap.
In the last 8 years, Arizona has had a Republican majority in their government
The moral of the story is that the "moral majority" is just as bad at spending as the Democrats are.
If they keep decimating school spending, no companies will want to relocate here, and their tax base (and draw for producing citizens, not retiree's and snowbirds) will continue to shrink.
What amazes me the most about Arizona is that the state is sitting on top of some pretty good sized mineral deposits - gold, silver, copper... I would be hawking off mining rights. You have Resolution Copper held up in permitting, and I'd think taxes from that alone would help considerably.
Slashdot Mirror
Then it would have worked for GM and Ford and Chrysler, who rolled out a new name every time they made a new car. Alan Mullally famously just put a stop to this at Ford, pointing out what everyone else has been saying, that Toyota has been using Camry and Corolla now for decades... Don't change the name...
Is a Toyota built in Ohio by American workers who pay U.S. income tax more "foreign" than a Ford built in Mexico?
If Exxon operated in a foreign country, liberals and arabs would say, that, Exxon is an evil capitalist exploiting foreign occupier. Based on those standards, what is Toyota in the USA?
- Now today that same suit still costs about quarter-ounce of gold, but 300 dollars paper money.
Except that, these days, a person would have multiple suits, all sorts of clothes, a couple of cars, more food than you can possibly eat, houses that are quite frankly beyond anything all but the richest in the 1920s could have dreamed of, video games, air conditioning, TV, and more.
Because of this, you could make the argument that the 300 paper dollars is worth far more than the 5 paper dollars was in the 1920s.
All of that was made possible because when you have fractional reserve lending, you create pools of money that can be invested in the creation of new products. If we had to wait for someone to dig up gold, we'd be worthless.
What goldbugs never fail to appreciate, is that gold doesn't have anymore "natural" value than paper money. Gold's supposed value is just as much fiat as paper money is. Whether you declare your money to be based on gold, based on paper, based on apples, or oranges, or an entire economy, money is always going to be fiat. The only non-fiat money this country had was the bank notes of the late 19th century and that turned out to be a disaster.
What the hell is gold actually good for? At least a dollar can help me light a fire or wipe my ass with it. Can't do that with gold. Gold's a terrible metal to make stuff with.. its too soft. All it is kinda shiny. But who cares about a kinda shiny rock when you have LCD screens that shine way more.
Republican bitching about GM is a total fraud.I keep hearing so-called conservatives moan about GM and the how the government shouldn't have bailed them out. They talk up the free market as if they believe in it and the truth is, they don't. The very same conservative movement that rips the northern based GM has absolutely no problem lining up to the government dole when it comes to protectionism for American food products and subsidies for American farmers. Jeff Sessions, Republican, publicly ripped GM so much, and defended Honda and Toyota so much, that, I went and made a Japanese style state flag for his home state of Alabama....:
http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/alabamasnewflag.aspx
Pretty much, Republicans have movie stars doing "Got Milk" advertisement, "Beef, its what's for dinner...".. like, the USA needs to have the government advertising fucking food. Every year American farmers get the same out of amount money that GM gets, in either direct subsidies or benefits from protectionism, and THAT, of course, based on most conservatives that I talked too, is somehow "different."
Moral of the story is this, Republicans have no credibility on balanced budgets, no credibility on economic national security, and no credibility on nationalism in general. If the GOP wants to regain its self respect, then red states must balance their budgets, and get off the federal dole themselves.
Giving away taxpayer money causes inflation. The inflation is not only in the dollar generally, but also in the price of new cars. Those who focus on the free taxpayer money they are getting may not realize that the dealer has raised prices.
Actually, giving away taxpayer money only causes inflation if the money supply increases. If you have people on the other side not paying loans back, that money created by fractional lending is effectively destroyed and the real money supply contracts. Since so many people are simply not paying loans back, dropping tons of money onto the economy isn't going to have an inflating effect.
You're still using a lot more gas (and petroleum) to get you, your spouse and your 2.2 kids around town than you would with a nice Camry..... try to legislate some morality
If we were going to legislate morality, I'd say we kick out every Asian trading partner that we have. Buying a Japanese car is treason. So, see, we all have different kinds of morality now don't we...
I believe you overlooked SCIENCE. Nothing to stop him coming back eh, you crazy believers... nothing... heh... oh my..
Ah, science is downright depressing in terms of moral retribution. Because there's no post-death penalty, if you kill more than one person, you always sorta come out with a higher score. In religion, there's a possibility of a wrathful God who will put your nutsack in a blender for 2 billion years for your crimes. By contrast, if you manned up with the love vest and blew yourself up in an abortion clinic, what sort of penalty could possibly be affixed to you?
1. Mysterious bright spot on Venus
2. Scar on Jupiter http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/25/1457245/Hubble-Photographs-Jupiters-New-Scar?art_pos=2/ [slashdot.org]
3. Unexplained high tides http://www.newsobserver.com/news/health_science/story/1620869.html/ [newsobserver.com]
I don't know about you guys but I'm expecting the space aliens to show up any minute.
Dude, I'm going straight to the Book of Revelations, the end of the world. Space aliens? That's scary, but if you want genuine terror, there's nothing to top God coming back to smite all the evil and villainy, especially if you happen to be an evil villain.
Travel at near light is a huge if. Accelerating some kind of gigantic people carrying ship to near light is an even larger if.
Not really... in the sense that, the energy required to achieve the velocity by itself is so enormous that the mass in the equation is a fairly small term. It's almost like, if we could accelerate a small probe to near light speed, then, we could probably accelerate people too.
We're not allies, we're your fucking lap dog.
Except for that part where you own all of our stuff! :-)
Look, we can't send people. We'll probably never be able to send people.
Why not? If you travel at near light speed, you can pretty much go anywhere. Who cares if the rest of the world passes you by buy a few thousand years if you wind up ahead of anyone else on your own planet?
What a strange and imaginative world you live in
Ah, more sour grapes from another liberal, whose leadership has pretty much been nothing but a century of failure. Failure with Wilson, failure with Roosevelt, failure with Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and pretty soon Obama...
The British Government is dead set on getting him extradited. They are obsessed with being seen as being tough on "cybercrime" in case the US removes our already piddling access to their secret data.
I always thought the British were our ally. Last time I checked, the British Army had 30,000 soldiers crossing the border into Iraq in March 2003 and they stayed for a pretty darned good time after the rest of Europe bailed.
Seems to me that information sharing between the two countries should be more, not less.
Otherwise, societies are too self-absorbed to dedicate those sort of resources to a goal that will have ZERO benefit to them or their descendants.
It sucks for scientific types, for sure, but the best way to get the masses emotionally committed to space flight and space exploration is through religion. There's no more historically proven way that motivates people to build and explore for future purposes than the prospect of being able to worship your lord and impose his law as your religious customs see fit to do so. In 1620, it wasn't a bunch of scientists on board the Mayflower, it was a bunch of religious fanatics. In my site I'm going to go all out religion for space exploration as a national priority and argue in this order:
a) The Lord gave us the vast resources of the Heavens to use.
b) The Earth is a crowd and dank cesspool of sin.
c) You can establish a more Godly society on another planet.
d) You can re-create the American Experiment the way the founding fathers intended.
And Lech Walesa and Charlie Wilson had a hell of a lot more to do with when the inevitable fall of the Soviet Union actually took place than Reagan ever did. Read your history.
Yeah, that history is, really more revisionism. The facts of the matter is that conventional wisdom in the United States at the time of Reagan was that challenging the Soviet Union head on was suicidal. There was a real thought that even if the Soviet Union did collapse, there would be some sort of a desperate attempt to launch a war to stay in power. Or something terrible would happen.
That is what they are really after.
Seems like it would be a lot easier to write better stuff.
that's just it, most of them want that traffic, but they also want to be paid for the privilege of having a link to the article. it's just them being greedy.
Me thinks they need to learn that the internet is pretty unforgiving when it comes to shoddy content.
I really don't understand how Newspapers would not want the traffic that a link would generate. There is nothing more than I would love to have than a thousand sites with 11 word snippets of my articles linking back to me.
Seems foolish.
Does anyone find it odd that Reagan managed to somehow thwart the Soviet Empire, with its vast and genuine spy networks, enormous weapons apparatus, all without either firing a shot or compromising the Constitution? Yet, somehow, we have to do that now against, a bunch of dudes with AK-47s and some Korans? There's far more people in the USA sympathetic to the ideas of communism than islam, and so if we didn't need to spy on ourselves against the commies and the russians, why should we need to do so now against a less sympathetic islam? Could it be that right wingers have forgotten that the central premise of Reagan's vision was that the cold war is a war that would be won based on having more freedom, and not less, and that the same lesson could just as easily be applied to Islam?
hat's no less troubling than your utterly guessing at why it's okay for spending to go down, when you do not have a comparative budget either. His error is the exact same as yours. But of course, you know your bias is right, so
The error is the same, for sure. Except that, he's asking the taxpayer for more money, and I'm not. I'm saying, whatever the unaccountable slop the 2006 budget was, or the 2004 budget was, just spend that much. He's saying he needs more. SO therefor, prove it. If road construction, etc, and all of this capital spend is really somehow locked in as a consequence of population, then, the people would have probably have to pony up because they did it to themselves. But, all I get are slogans like "we have no money, its a crisis, we have to act now...", and sorry, after 8 years of Bush and now 1 of Obama, crisis driven government doesn't really do it for me anymore. Need more than a crisis to impress me these days, especially since in today's politics, everything is a crisis.
population pyramid scheme couldn't grow forever
Sure it could. We would first have to exterminate all non-western peoples, then, expand into their territory. From there, gather up the wealth needed to move into space. We spread like locusts throughout the galaxy, and then into the next...
IT's old tech, but, Panasonic and Okidata still have dot matrix printers out there. The advantage is that you could put a bunch of labels on a roll and let them rip just by sending ASCII out to the serial or parallel port.
Because the tax is X% of a pie that has shrunk with the economic downturn
That I can buy.
but that's just when the most people come to collect on the services they've paid for (such as the newly unemployed filing for unemployment benefits and medicaid).
Well, one thing you could do with unemployment would be offer people a chance at a lower total payout in exchange for getting a lump sum. People could then have the option of accepting a lower paying job, but use the unemployment money to pay off debt and so be able to have a similar lifestyle that they had, even if they weren't getting paid. It would be better for the people and cheaper for the state.
Medicaid is a whole other fiasco.. but there's not much you can really do about it because the problem is really elderly care costs are going through the roof because extended families are being broken up by migratory job seeking. The long term fix would be throttle back free trade so that you can have communities of multi-generational extended families and so families could assume more of the cost of keeping an aging loved one at home. But right now that's just not reality. Who could have really thought that the bill for buying a Japanese car and a Korean TV would be grandma's house being liquidated so she can die in a nursing home.
It's just goddamn ridiculous. In 2080 our kids' kids' kids are going to piss on our graves realizing how much we f'd them over with these kind of contracts.
It is ridiculous. The crazy part is, if we didn't have so much free trade, cities would have a rich manufacturing tax base and wouldn't have to do this crap.
In the last 8 years, Arizona has had a Republican majority in their government
The moral of the story is that the "moral majority" is just as bad at spending as the Democrats are.
If they keep decimating school spending, no companies will want to relocate here, and their tax base (and draw for producing citizens, not retiree's and snowbirds) will continue to shrink.
What amazes me the most about Arizona is that the state is sitting on top of some pretty good sized mineral deposits - gold, silver, copper... I would be hawking off mining rights. You have Resolution Copper held up in permitting, and I'd think taxes from that alone would help considerably.