If you're trying to bring ethics into this, allow me to ask this; Is it ethical to grant greater potential for business success to someone based on their sex? How about their physical appearence? How about their skintone? Age? Religion? Are these criteria not specifically outlined in law as protected against discrimination?
Legally it should not matter at all that this person was a white male, or a young woman, or a purple plaid martian. If you're offended at the deception then you are essentially admitting that you are at the very least biased against men, potentially biased against middle-aged white men, and are perfectly comfortable discriminating against them in favor of 19 year-old girls. You acknowledge that it is your right to define your level of support for the business opurtunity based on age and sex moreso than the potential of the business itself.
And in this case, who would be harmed? Would you feel emotionally traumatized because you were tricked into having hope for a white male you would never have given a second thought to otherwise?
Is it no less fraudulent for a white male to name a minority, or a female (or both) as 51% owner of his business that she has limited experience and no financial investment in, so that he is more able to secure priority status in government contracts? And yet this is not just a standard practice, it is almost a necessity for a white male who is win bids for those contracts.
I'd say strapping your butt to 1000s of lbs of explosives and blasting into outer space takes some serious stones. There were (and are) susbstantial risks in space flight. Every crew member knew and accepted those risks. The same cannot be said of someone who went to watch a foot race, or even ran in said race.
'Job creation' is a very effective propaganda tool. It also works in the...
...green energy stimulus programs, "community organising", unions, tax hike pushes, anti-religion movements, and most (all?) political movements from communism to socialism to fascism to monarchies to dictatorships to theocracies.
Dont pretend that the evil capitalist planet-killing industrialists have a monopoly on flat-out lying about job creation to further an end.
So while government fails to restrain its spending, it can avoid collapse by choosing instead to take more and more from you and me. Who, in turn, must limit our spending more and more to compensate for the decrease in our disposable finances. We cant just make our income magically increase, but government can!
Where is the line between what is acceptable and what is abuse?
Current Gross Domestic Product: $15.1 Trillion
Current Debt: $16.8 Trillion
Which is bigger?
And even more telling:
GDP in 2008: $14 Trillion
Debt in 2008: $10 Trillion
Which is bigger?
in the last 4 or so years GDP has risen by $1.1 Trillion while debt has risen by $6.8 Trillion.
If you actually believe we dont have a problem, you're an idiot, an Obama zealot that will not allow himself to see fault in this administration, or clinically distrubed.
First, I dont really give a shit who got us here. I'm fully aware that it's been at least in part the fault of every jackass that's been in the White House or either side of Congress for well more than a decade. I'd like to see us move past this bickering like little fucking children, recognize that there's a big fucking problem, and start working on a solution.
Second, in your family analogy, sell the damn Tesla. Sell the house. Sell everything you cant fucking afford until you bring your income back up. Stop pretending that the problem is the amount of income, and start realizing you dont need a fucking luxury sports car, or a $500 smart phone, or a $100/month cable bill. It was nice when you could afford it. Now you cant. Fix it.
Most of our "debt" is dollars we owe ourselves. Is it really debt if you owe yourself a dollar? Maybe, but it's sort of complicated.
Then explain why we paid $350Billion last year in interest on our debt?
Some nasty rich people even want to return to the gold standard which would cause massive deflation, making the savings of rich people worth *more*.
There's no possible way to return to the gold standard, because there isnt enough gold to back the amount of money that has been printed. Which begs the question; what is our dollar backed by?
First, I think you're wrong about the timeframe. For most startups they will say you need to be ready to post a net loss for the first three years. After that you need to seriously start considering folding up the shop. For small businesses like a restaurant that rule of thumb could be as low as 1 year. Now, for a major corporation it might be as high as 5 years. You have to develop, design, build infrastructure, etc. But 7 years would be for only the biggest corporations and even then it's on the outside edge or rational.
Second, even if I were to take your 7 years as a reasonable timeframe (and I dont), you're saying that Tesla is "on the right track" because it is behind your profit curve by 40% ?
1) When our national debt has increase %250 in the last decade, that's a good indicator. When are nation's credit status has been downgraded by multiple credit assessors, that's a good indicator. When our interest rates on our borrowing from other nations increases indicating a weakened confidence in our ability to repay debt, that's a good indicator. When one of the fastest growing economies in the world (China) is making deals with other countries (India, Australia, etc.) to trade currency directly and no longer against the dollar, that's a good indicator. When the spending of the federal government equates to 30% of the entire US economy, that's a good indicator. When over the last 20 years federal spending has outpaced inflation by 70%, that's a good indicator. In short, I did not decide it. Credit professionals did. Industries have. The financial regulators of other nations have. And these are just some of the key indicators with MANY more available.
2) If your economy is strong then you are already generating greater revenue than in a weaker economy. More people are building, purchasing, lending, borrowing... It's a better market with more taxable activities. You dont need to raise the tax rates in a better economy because there is more income to the fed by the very nature of the better economy. Even more so than higher rates on any group (or all groups) during a weak economy.
3) The entitlement programs are all seeing increased reliance. These programs are consumed at greater pace only in part to the weakened economy. Another major contributing factor is the age of those consuming these services, with millions of baby boomers hitting retirement age and taking from the programs and a lower birth rate decreasing contributors to the programs. A third contributor is a rapid increase in the number of people categorized as disabled. A fourth contributor is the rapid growth in undocumented imigrants consuming aid without contributing to taxes. And there are more reasons beyond these that have little to do with the state of the economy itself. Point being even after you "resolve" the state of the economy, you have a state of culture and demographics to deal with as well. It doesn't "fix" itself when (if) the economy comes back strongly.
4) "What's the investment difference between one person with $1 billion investing... ten thousand people with $100k each investing?" First difference is a wildly successful business professional with a proven track record of picking winners, and many people with average (?) success rates. Second, a person who has dedicated themself to evaluating investments, tracking trends, weighing options, and spending dozens of hours weekly doing so, compared to someone who might work at it an hour or two a day. Third, the scope of investment is dramatically different. 1000 people with stock in Apple is not the same thing as a billionaire who funds the startup of an entire company. The 1000 people, as you point out, are speculating the Apple stock will go higher and they will make some money. It's a bet based on past performance. The biilionaire isnt helping Apple hire another 100 people to sell the iPhone12. He's helping start a business with a different scope, a different goal, a different expertise, that hires 100 people. Or maybe 10,000 people. He puts money out there, even in a bad economy, hoping to make a leap into a new concept that will make him even more rich, and potentially providing innovation that a coprorate behemoth may never have considered. You are comparing apples (no pun intended) and swordfish.
If you take what's happened over the last 4 years as an indicator, when unemployment is high we pay people to not work for 2+ years, we pump billions into weak green energy companies that even with a good product cant sell it for a profit, you dictate to banks and manufactures that they WILL take your money even if they say they dont want it or need it, you pressure the banks you gave the money to lend to people everyone knows are
The only reason you say that defecit spending is a good idea right now, is that if we stopped we'd have to close a shitload of programs.
Defecit spending is not a bad thing, in principle. But that relies on the premise that you are not over-extending yourself to a point that you cannot feesibly repay the debt. Having a credit card with a balance is not stupid. But it is stupid to have 10 credit cards all maxed out when you make $50k / year, and even more stupid to be applying for more. Our government is at that point.
No amount of taxation can close the gap if we do not cut spending. You could take every dime from the richest Americans and still be spending more than we take in. AND you wouldnt have the on-going capital in the economy that that richest Americans are responsible for.
Fine, dont tax food, rent or utiliities for any home making less than $50k?
Tax the shit out of luxuries. That way those rich bastards with 3 summer homes, 2 Bentley's and a private jet are sending cash to Washington daily. I'm good with that. Those living the most lavishly get taxed exponentially more. Great.
The point is, you STILL cant get the left to do this. You know why? Because there are so many RICH on the LEFT living like rockstars. They are hypocrits that love to bash those rich assholes you're hear condemning, and yet live very much like them and even mroe so in a great many examples. They will not vote to do the right thing because they would bend themselves over in the process. My point being that you love to demonize those corporations but instantly give a pass to the Hollywood elite and the political figures saying all the right things but acting the opposite.
In other words, you just see it as an opportunity to rationalize the beliefs you already have, and to justify the activities/behaviors you plan on doing anyway. Big crabs = I was right to do what I did!
Is that not precisely what this report did? They work from the preconception that emmisions are the source of the bulk of CO2 rise, which increase carbon in the oceans, which means "that as greenhouse gas emissions grow, so will these crustaceans".
It's no more acceptable to allow someone to reach a conclusion that meets their preconcptions when you happen to agree with those preconceptions as when you do not.
The richest in the nation utilize the tax code to their advantage. That's not tax-evasion, it's accounting. And you can damn well bet that every single liberal/lefty/anit-capitalist that's ever made a speach about the horrible rich and their corporations pays someone to do the exact same thing, or does the best they can on their own.
Bloomburg, Huffington, and Michael Moore aren't knowingly sending a single red cent more to the fed than they need to.
Want to solve this? Flat tax, straight sales tax, no loopholes, no subsidies. Close the shit down and make it absolutely even across the board. You are no more able to get the left to push this kind of reform than the right.
And just a little more fuel for thought; the public is who the government is supposed to work FOR. If the public doesnt want it, the government shouldnt even be attempting to ram it down our throats. But you are obviously one of those elitist pinheads that thinks you and a small group in Washington are better equipped to tell everyone everywhere how to live their lives.
I all honesty, you are 100% right about the budgets. I still have this naive hope that Americans will wake up and recognize that a SIXTEEN TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT is unbelievably irresponsible and that taxes will never close a gap that huge.
If you want to argue that there is value in an organization for that, fine. Do so. See if you get support for it. But that's not what NASA is. NASA has never been a humanitarian effort, nor a social effort. It's mission has always been and should always be, to advance aeronautics and space sciences.
What Obama did by making such a ludicrous statement was the equivelent of saying that The Department of Education's primary mission is to advance nutritional standards, or that the IRS' primary mission is to study the effects of welfare in the inner cities. There might be a loose association with these other agencies and the suggested mission, but that's not what those agencies are designed to do, equipped to do, or tasked with.
In an era of decreasing budgets, marketing is key to build support to perform any activity. If it's a choice of getting funds to return to the moon because the public is receptive to the idea, or getting nothing because the count of people interested in asteroid exploration is about 12...
There are actualy several fundimental reasons to return to the moon, not the least of which being the establishment of a launch platform there that could ease exploration of deeper space.
I actually waffle quite a bit on where I land on this topic, and I've not been convinced by anyone's conclusions either way, so I wont put forth more than that.
So in summary;
The left theorizes that giving this President more power is not as harmfull as if it were Bush because this President is more responsible.
The problem is that the left hasnt the foresight to recognize that the American public is entirely capable of electing someone equally or exponentialy worse than Bush.
When will the public finally decide that the US Govt has gone too far? Honestly I would have thought it'd been years ago. The left was going batshit crazy 6+ years ago about the imperialistic Bush administration, but apparently the new flavor of crazy this administration is pulling is all hunky dory.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're trying to bring ethics into this, allow me to ask this; Is it ethical to grant greater potential for business success to someone based on their sex? How about their physical appearence? How about their skintone? Age? Religion? Are these criteria not specifically outlined in law as protected against discrimination?
Legally it should not matter at all that this person was a white male, or a young woman, or a purple plaid martian. If you're offended at the deception then you are essentially admitting that you are at the very least biased against men, potentially biased against middle-aged white men, and are perfectly comfortable discriminating against them in favor of 19 year-old girls. You acknowledge that it is your right to define your level of support for the business opurtunity based on age and sex moreso than the potential of the business itself.
And in this case, who would be harmed? Would you feel emotionally traumatized because you were tricked into having hope for a white male you would never have given a second thought to otherwise?
Is it no less fraudulent for a white male to name a minority, or a female (or both) as 51% owner of his business that she has limited experience and no financial investment in, so that he is more able to secure priority status in government contracts? And yet this is not just a standard practice, it is almost a necessity for a white male who is win bids for those contracts.
I'd say strapping your butt to 1000s of lbs of explosives and blasting into outer space takes some serious stones. There were (and are) susbstantial risks in space flight. Every crew member knew and accepted those risks. The same cannot be said of someone who went to watch a foot race, or even ran in said race.
'Job creation' is a very effective propaganda tool. It also works in the ...
...green energy stimulus programs, "community organising", unions, tax hike pushes, anti-religion movements, and most (all?) political movements from communism to socialism to fascism to monarchies to dictatorships to theocracies.
Dont pretend that the evil capitalist planet-killing industrialists have a monopoly on flat-out lying about job creation to further an end.
So while government fails to restrain its spending, it can avoid collapse by choosing instead to take more and more from you and me. Who, in turn, must limit our spending more and more to compensate for the decrease in our disposable finances. We cant just make our income magically increase, but government can!
Where is the line between what is acceptable and what is abuse?
Current Gross Domestic Product: $15.1 Trillion
Current Debt: $16.8 Trillion
Which is bigger?
And even more telling:
GDP in 2008: $14 Trillion
Debt in 2008: $10 Trillion
Which is bigger?
in the last 4 or so years GDP has risen by $1.1 Trillion while debt has risen by $6.8 Trillion.
If you actually believe we dont have a problem, you're an idiot, an Obama zealot that will not allow himself to see fault in this administration, or clinically distrubed.
First, I dont really give a shit who got us here. I'm fully aware that it's been at least in part the fault of every jackass that's been in the White House or either side of Congress for well more than a decade. I'd like to see us move past this bickering like little fucking children, recognize that there's a big fucking problem, and start working on a solution.
Second, in your family analogy, sell the damn Tesla. Sell the house. Sell everything you cant fucking afford until you bring your income back up. Stop pretending that the problem is the amount of income, and start realizing you dont need a fucking luxury sports car, or a $500 smart phone, or a $100/month cable bill. It was nice when you could afford it. Now you cant. Fix it.
Most of our "debt" is dollars we owe ourselves. Is it really debt if you owe yourself a dollar? Maybe, but it's sort of complicated.
Then explain why we paid $350Billion last year in interest on our debt?
Some nasty rich people even want to return to the gold standard which would cause massive deflation, making the savings of rich people worth *more*.
There's no possible way to return to the gold standard, because there isnt enough gold to back the amount of money that has been printed. Which begs the question; what is our dollar backed by?
First, I think you're wrong about the timeframe. For most startups they will say you need to be ready to post a net loss for the first three years. After that you need to seriously start considering folding up the shop. For small businesses like a restaurant that rule of thumb could be as low as 1 year. Now, for a major corporation it might be as high as 5 years. You have to develop, design, build infrastructure, etc. But 7 years would be for only the biggest corporations and even then it's on the outside edge or rational. Second, even if I were to take your 7 years as a reasonable timeframe (and I dont), you're saying that Tesla is "on the right track" because it is behind your profit curve by 40% ?
1) When our national debt has increase %250 in the last decade, that's a good indicator. When are nation's credit status has been downgraded by multiple credit assessors, that's a good indicator. When our interest rates on our borrowing from other nations increases indicating a weakened confidence in our ability to repay debt, that's a good indicator. When one of the fastest growing economies in the world (China) is making deals with other countries (India, Australia, etc.) to trade currency directly and no longer against the dollar, that's a good indicator. When the spending of the federal government equates to 30% of the entire US economy, that's a good indicator. When over the last 20 years federal spending has outpaced inflation by 70%, that's a good indicator. In short, I did not decide it. Credit professionals did. Industries have. The financial regulators of other nations have. And these are just some of the key indicators with MANY more available.
2) If your economy is strong then you are already generating greater revenue than in a weaker economy. More people are building, purchasing, lending, borrowing... It's a better market with more taxable activities. You dont need to raise the tax rates in a better economy because there is more income to the fed by the very nature of the better economy. Even more so than higher rates on any group (or all groups) during a weak economy.
3) The entitlement programs are all seeing increased reliance. These programs are consumed at greater pace only in part to the weakened economy. Another major contributing factor is the age of those consuming these services, with millions of baby boomers hitting retirement age and taking from the programs and a lower birth rate decreasing contributors to the programs. A third contributor is a rapid increase in the number of people categorized as disabled. A fourth contributor is the rapid growth in undocumented imigrants consuming aid without contributing to taxes. And there are more reasons beyond these that have little to do with the state of the economy itself. Point being even after you "resolve" the state of the economy, you have a state of culture and demographics to deal with as well. It doesn't "fix" itself when (if) the economy comes back strongly.
4) "What's the investment difference between one person with $1 billion investing... ten thousand people with $100k each investing?" First difference is a wildly successful business professional with a proven track record of picking winners, and many people with average (?) success rates. Second, a person who has dedicated themself to evaluating investments, tracking trends, weighing options, and spending dozens of hours weekly doing so, compared to someone who might work at it an hour or two a day. Third, the scope of investment is dramatically different. 1000 people with stock in Apple is not the same thing as a billionaire who funds the startup of an entire company. The 1000 people, as you point out, are speculating the Apple stock will go higher and they will make some money. It's a bet based on past performance. The biilionaire isnt helping Apple hire another 100 people to sell the iPhone12. He's helping start a business with a different scope, a different goal, a different expertise, that hires 100 people. Or maybe 10,000 people. He puts money out there, even in a bad economy, hoping to make a leap into a new concept that will make him even more rich, and potentially providing innovation that a coprorate behemoth may never have considered. You are comparing apples (no pun intended) and swordfish.
If you take what's happened over the last 4 years as an indicator, when unemployment is high we pay people to not work for 2+ years, we pump billions into weak green energy companies that even with a good product cant sell it for a profit, you dictate to banks and manufactures that they WILL take your money even if they say they dont want it or need it, you pressure the banks you gave the money to lend to people everyone knows are
The only reason you say that defecit spending is a good idea right now, is that if we stopped we'd have to close a shitload of programs.
Defecit spending is not a bad thing, in principle. But that relies on the premise that you are not over-extending yourself to a point that you cannot feesibly repay the debt. Having a credit card with a balance is not stupid. But it is stupid to have 10 credit cards all maxed out when you make $50k / year, and even more stupid to be applying for more. Our government is at that point.
No amount of taxation can close the gap if we do not cut spending. You could take every dime from the richest Americans and still be spending more than we take in. AND you wouldnt have the on-going capital in the economy that that richest Americans are responsible for.
Actually it suggests that I have no preconception at all. No one has convinced me of anything.
Fine, dont tax food, rent or utiliities for any home making less than $50k?
Tax the shit out of luxuries. That way those rich bastards with 3 summer homes, 2 Bentley's and a private jet are sending cash to Washington daily. I'm good with that. Those living the most lavishly get taxed exponentially more. Great.
The point is, you STILL cant get the left to do this. You know why? Because there are so many RICH on the LEFT living like rockstars. They are hypocrits that love to bash those rich assholes you're hear condemning, and yet live very much like them and even mroe so in a great many examples. They will not vote to do the right thing because they would bend themselves over in the process. My point being that you love to demonize those corporations but instantly give a pass to the Hollywood elite and the political figures saying all the right things but acting the opposite.
In other words, you just see it as an opportunity to rationalize the beliefs you already have, and to justify the activities/behaviors you plan on doing anyway. Big crabs = I was right to do what I did!
Is that not precisely what this report did? They work from the preconception that emmisions are the source of the bulk of CO2 rise, which increase carbon in the oceans, which means "that as greenhouse gas emissions grow, so will these crustaceans".
It's no more acceptable to allow someone to reach a conclusion that meets their preconcptions when you happen to agree with those preconceptions as when you do not.
The richest in the nation utilize the tax code to their advantage. That's not tax-evasion, it's accounting. And you can damn well bet that every single liberal/lefty/anit-capitalist that's ever made a speach about the horrible rich and their corporations pays someone to do the exact same thing, or does the best they can on their own.
Bloomburg, Huffington, and Michael Moore aren't knowingly sending a single red cent more to the fed than they need to.
Want to solve this? Flat tax, straight sales tax, no loopholes, no subsidies. Close the shit down and make it absolutely even across the board. You are no more able to get the left to push this kind of reform than the right.
And just a little more fuel for thought; the public is who the government is supposed to work FOR. If the public doesnt want it, the government shouldnt even be attempting to ram it down our throats. But you are obviously one of those elitist pinheads that thinks you and a small group in Washington are better equipped to tell everyone everywhere how to live their lives.
I all honesty, you are 100% right about the budgets. I still have this naive hope that Americans will wake up and recognize that a SIXTEEN TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT is unbelievably irresponsible and that taxes will never close a gap that huge.
If you want to argue that there is value in an organization for that, fine. Do so. See if you get support for it. But that's not what NASA is. NASA has never been a humanitarian effort, nor a social effort. It's mission has always been and should always be, to advance aeronautics and space sciences.
What Obama did by making such a ludicrous statement was the equivelent of saying that The Department of Education's primary mission is to advance nutritional standards, or that the IRS' primary mission is to study the effects of welfare in the inner cities. There might be a loose association with these other agencies and the suggested mission, but that's not what those agencies are designed to do, equipped to do, or tasked with.
....and unfortunately that's been corrupted by lobbyists.
You mean, the public?
That's completely false. You'd waste energy ...blahblah
I think that I mentioned that no one has convinced me of anything....
In an era of decreasing budgets, marketing is key to build support to perform any activity. If it's a choice of getting funds to return to the moon because the public is receptive to the idea, or getting nothing because the count of people interested in asteroid exploration is about 12 ...
There are actualy several fundimental reasons to return to the moon, not the least of which being the establishment of a launch platform there that could ease exploration of deeper space.
I actually waffle quite a bit on where I land on this topic, and I've not been convinced by anyone's conclusions either way, so I wont put forth more than that.
So in summary;
The left theorizes that giving this President more power is not as harmfull as if it were Bush because this President is more responsible.
The problem is that the left hasnt the foresight to recognize that the American public is entirely capable of electing someone equally or exponentialy worse than Bush.
When will the public finally decide that the US Govt has gone too far? Honestly I would have thought it'd been years ago. The left was going batshit crazy 6+ years ago about the imperialistic Bush administration, but apparently the new flavor of crazy this administration is pulling is all hunky dory.
I find it somewhat depressing that this is rated Funny.
Thank you random pedantic asshole.