>If you are going to tax the hell out of anyone making a certain amount of money, then what would be the incentive to be productive >and innovative, other than just being able to say "Hey everyone, look what I did!" ?
Because you'll still earn more money then you would if you weren't productive or inventive.
Also, what good is it to be rich if you have to live in a gated fortress and travel in an armored car? Compare the security procedures that business moguls take in Europe compared to South America.
I remember passing that same checkpoint 15 years ago. I'm not brown, but since I was driving a U-Haul they asked to look in the back. I found it unsettling too, having grown up on Cold War stories of Russians and East Germans having checkpoints for their own citizens.
There's another vehicle checkpoint on I-15 north of San Diego. It's at least 60 mi north of the border too.
DC people say the same about keeping the Metro out of Georgetown. I suppose they're counting on being rich enough to pay for $5+/$10+ gas when that day comes. At least it keeps the rabble out.
"Genes have nothing to do with it. Asians and Eastern Europeans, and for some reason their descendants in America, have a far better mathematical culture than we do"
Probably right. It's story of many immigrants. New immigrants are the hardest working. By the late 2nd generation, the kids are as spoiled and comfortable as any other Americans.
We covered up our weakness in math and science by importing foreign grad students. That lasted as long as the US was a nice place to live and their native countries had no industry.
What are you talking about? The difference in federal excise tax between gasoline and diesel is a whopping 6 cents per gallon. The difference in price is mostly explained by the elasticity of demand. Passenger car drivers cut back more vehicle miles than truckers.
Corn takes a lot of fertilizer, and prices for nitrogen fertilizer have gone up just as much as oil and gas (ammonia fertilizer is made from natural gas). Still, ethanol does create more demand for corn which can only push prices up.
Not even 30 MPG. The Jetta is also available with the 2.0T gas engine which gets 25 MPG. The 2.0T is one of the most advanced designs out there: turbocharged, direct injection, and has 200hp. The last generation Jetta with the equally powerful V6 got 22 MPG.
It doesn't matter what you or I or the average voter believes. I guarantee you the volunteer precinct captain who goes to observe isn't "in on the conspiracy" to look the other way when poll workers miscount votes in one precinct. Counting votes in open view of the public is an inherent check and balance. With that many eyeballs in the room, you'll either need to train a shitload of people in sleight of hand or pay off 20 times that many people to be in on the conspiracy.
I know the D and R parties divvy up the spoils between each other, but the mechanism of said divvying has more to do with gerrymandering and media management.
Maybe because campaigns and parties compete against *each other*? Not all campaigns and races fall cleanly on partisan lines, e.g. ballot measures and local races. When you get that many people in a room and count openly, the conspiracy to steal just one precinct gets unwieldy, to say the least.
You don't need to hire 20 citizens as observers. Most campaigns and political parties would be happy to send a volunteer or staffer as an observer of a hand count. It may not add up to 20 at every precinct, but checks and balances should be maintained as long as you have enough opposing campaigns and parties there. The bigger problem is that pollworkers have a very long day, and a hand count at closing time piles on even more work. When you include all the down-ticket races like State Reps, ballot measures, and judges, it ends up being a huge numbers of races to count.
You mean like an anonymous "snitch on your neighbor" program? John Ashcroft proposed that may back when. The fun we could have with that... (hypothetically of course)
My friends and I wondered about that in college. What if you could burn calories by thinking hard? It turns out you do, but evidently not enough to make up for lack of exercise.
Think in terms of an energy surplus. Cooked food gave humans an energy surplus over raw food which fueled brain development. Livestock animals are bred to be docile, dumb and produce a lot of meat with all the surplus food we feed them. Look up "feedlot" sometime.
You're right about the exhaust scavenging effect. Simply reducing exhaust backpressure while doing nothing else to the engine yields poor results. Other engine parameters like intake length, valve timing, ignition timing, etc. etc. all need to be tuned together. Yamaha motorcycles have a throttle valve in the exhaust called EXUP. It actually increases backpressure at low rpm to improve torque.
The big reason catalytic converters got a bad rep early on is because of compression ratio. High compression is good for both power and efficiency, but high compression engines also need high octane gas to prevent knocking. Lead was used as a cheap octane booster, but it'll destroy catalytic converters. In the early days unleaded gas was only available in low octane, and cars with catalytic converters came with weak low compression engines.
The US Defense budget is somewhere around $600 billion a year. Divide that by the 7.5 billion barrels of oil we use every year and that averages to $80 a barrel. How much of that $600B is to keep the world safe for oil? Oil has gotten a free ride with massive subsidies. It's true the retailer makes a very slim profit margin, but that's because gasoline retailing has very little value added. Most of the profit has been extracted by the time it's sold wholesale. Even more so with Zone Pricing. The little guy, in this case the small businessperson who owns the gas station, gets the shaft.
Um, you do know that political appointees are "cleaned out" with every new administration, right? That's things like Cabinet posts, US Attorneys, and Ambassadors. Please read up on the Hatch Act. Bet you can't show me one civil service employee who was fired by Clinton.
Hatch Act. Certain political appointments are partisan, but civil service jobs are subject to strict rules against partisan politicking, both in hiring and the business conducted on government time. So screening civil service applicants for political affiliation is illegal under the Hatch Act. US Attorneys are political appointments, but it's very rare for them to be fired mid-term except for gross malfeasance. To fire US Attorneys in the middle of prosecuting corruption cases against Republicans is very suspicious.
It wasn't Sony forcing coltan prices up, it was total industry demand for tantalum capacitors. I know Sony sold a lot of PS2's, but how many tantalum caps go into a PS2 anyway compared to a mobile phone? Spread the blame around to Nokia and Motorola too.
A Tahoe hybrid costs double the price and gets less than half the mileage of a Prius. 21 mpg is impressive for a vehicle of that size, but I wouldn't worry too much about our roads filling up with them.
BTW, as the only Tahoe selling without huge rebates and discounts, the hybrid damn near costs double the price of a regular base Tahoe too.
We went from a gold backed currency to an oil backed currency. With oil being a source of energy, that's a more useful measure of economic productivity than a precious metal that just sits there. That worked ok for a while as long as the oil kept coming.
So why not go all the way and have a currency backed by energy? Let's say kilowatt-hours of electricity since electricity is one of the most useful forms of energy. If some miracle breakthrough like fusion inflates the supply of power, it won't crash the currency because electricity is still as useful as it always was. Energy use is directly tied to real economic growth so paper wealth will never outstrip real productivity.
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Also, what good is it to be rich if you have to live in a gated fortress and travel in an armored car? Compare the security procedures that business moguls take in Europe compared to South America.
I remember passing that same checkpoint 15 years ago. I'm not brown, but since I was driving a U-Haul they asked to look in the back. I found it unsettling too, having grown up on Cold War stories of Russians and East Germans having checkpoints for their own citizens.
There's another vehicle checkpoint on I-15 north of San Diego. It's at least 60 mi north of the border too.
DC people say the same about keeping the Metro out of Georgetown. I suppose they're counting on being rich enough to pay for $5+/$10+ gas when that day comes. At least it keeps the rabble out.
"Genes have nothing to do with it. Asians and Eastern Europeans, and for some reason their descendants in America, have a far better mathematical culture than we do"
Probably right. It's story of many immigrants. New immigrants are the hardest working. By the late 2nd generation, the kids are as spoiled and comfortable as any other Americans.
We covered up our weakness in math and science by importing foreign grad students. That lasted as long as the US was a nice place to live and their native countries had no industry.
What are you talking about? The difference in federal excise tax between gasoline and diesel is a whopping 6 cents per gallon. The difference in price is mostly explained by the elasticity of demand. Passenger car drivers cut back more vehicle miles than truckers.
Corn takes a lot of fertilizer, and prices for nitrogen fertilizer have gone up just as much as oil and gas (ammonia fertilizer is made from natural gas). Still, ethanol does create more demand for corn which can only push prices up.
Not even 30 MPG. The Jetta is also available with the 2.0T gas engine which gets 25 MPG. The 2.0T is one of the most advanced designs out there: turbocharged, direct injection, and has 200hp. The last generation Jetta with the equally powerful V6 got 22 MPG.
It doesn't matter what you or I or the average voter believes. I guarantee you the volunteer precinct captain who goes to observe isn't "in on the conspiracy" to look the other way when poll workers miscount votes in one precinct. Counting votes in open view of the public is an inherent check and balance. With that many eyeballs in the room, you'll either need to train a shitload of people in sleight of hand or pay off 20 times that many people to be in on the conspiracy.
I know the D and R parties divvy up the spoils between each other, but the mechanism of said divvying has more to do with gerrymandering and media management.
Maybe because campaigns and parties compete against *each other*? Not all campaigns and races fall cleanly on partisan lines, e.g. ballot measures and local races. When you get that many people in a room and count openly, the conspiracy to steal just one precinct gets unwieldy, to say the least.
You don't need to hire 20 citizens as observers. Most campaigns and political parties would be happy to send a volunteer or staffer as an observer of a hand count. It may not add up to 20 at every precinct, but checks and balances should be maintained as long as you have enough opposing campaigns and parties there.
The bigger problem is that pollworkers have a very long day, and a hand count at closing time piles on even more work. When you include all the down-ticket races like State Reps, ballot measures, and judges, it ends up being a huge numbers of races to count.
Steam copy protection works for online multiplayer games, e.g CSS and TF2, but there are plenty of working cracks for single player Steam games.
You mean like an anonymous "snitch on your neighbor" program? John Ashcroft proposed that may back when. The fun we could have with that... (hypothetically of course)
at a loss.
It's pretty clear the $100M is Novell's payback for signing the patent license agreement.
My friends and I wondered about that in college. What if you could burn calories by thinking hard? It turns out you do, but evidently not enough to make up for lack of exercise.
Think in terms of an energy surplus. Cooked food gave humans an energy surplus over raw food which fueled brain development. Livestock animals are bred to be docile, dumb and produce a lot of meat with all the surplus food we feed them. Look up "feedlot" sometime.
Steak tartare is made from the most expensive cuts of beef. You'll have a pretty hard time chewing and digesting the rest of the cow.
You're right about the exhaust scavenging effect. Simply reducing exhaust backpressure while doing nothing else to the engine yields poor results. Other engine parameters like intake length, valve timing, ignition timing, etc. etc. all need to be tuned together. Yamaha motorcycles have a throttle valve in the exhaust called EXUP. It actually increases backpressure at low rpm to improve torque.
The big reason catalytic converters got a bad rep early on is because of compression ratio. High compression is good for both power and efficiency, but high compression engines also need high octane gas to prevent knocking. Lead was used as a cheap octane booster, but it'll destroy catalytic converters. In the early days unleaded gas was only available in low octane, and cars with catalytic converters came with weak low compression engines.
The US Defense budget is somewhere around $600 billion a year. Divide that by the 7.5 billion barrels of oil we use every year and that averages to $80 a barrel. How much of that $600B is to keep the world safe for oil? Oil has gotten a free ride with massive subsidies.
It's true the retailer makes a very slim profit margin, but that's because gasoline retailing has very little value added. Most of the profit has been extracted by the time it's sold wholesale. Even more so with Zone Pricing. The little guy, in this case the small businessperson who owns the gas station, gets the shaft.
It gets mighty difficult to do online banking and shopping without HTTPS. Block that, and you'll get *real* complaints.
Um, you do know that political appointees are "cleaned out" with every new administration, right? That's things like Cabinet posts, US Attorneys, and Ambassadors.
Please read up on the Hatch Act. Bet you can't show me one civil service employee who was fired by Clinton.
Hatch Act. Certain political appointments are partisan, but civil service jobs are subject to strict rules against partisan politicking, both in hiring and the business conducted on government time. So screening civil service applicants for political affiliation is illegal under the Hatch Act. US Attorneys are political appointments, but it's very rare for them to be fired mid-term except for gross malfeasance. To fire US Attorneys in the middle of prosecuting corruption cases against Republicans is very suspicious.
It wasn't Sony forcing coltan prices up, it was total industry demand for tantalum capacitors. I know Sony sold a lot of PS2's, but how many tantalum caps go into a PS2 anyway compared to a mobile phone? Spread the blame around to Nokia and Motorola too.
A Tahoe hybrid costs double the price and gets less than half the mileage of a Prius. 21 mpg is impressive for a vehicle of that size, but I wouldn't worry too much about our roads filling up with them.
BTW, as the only Tahoe selling without huge rebates and discounts, the hybrid damn near costs double the price of a regular base Tahoe too.
We went from a gold backed currency to an oil backed currency. With oil being a source of energy, that's a more useful measure of economic productivity than a precious metal that just sits there. That worked ok for a while as long as the oil kept coming.
So why not go all the way and have a currency backed by energy? Let's say kilowatt-hours of electricity since electricity is one of the most useful forms of energy. If some miracle breakthrough like fusion inflates the supply of power, it won't crash the currency because electricity is still as useful as it always was. Energy use is directly tied to real economic growth so paper wealth will never outstrip real productivity.
TFA probably meant that alcohol burns with no *flame*, or more accurately an invisible flame. It sure as hell burns with heat.