>>Everyone always thinks that NIMBY is bad, until it is THEIR backyard.
Really? I've been supporting the building of a new nuclear plant about an hour from my house, but the odds of it happening in today's climate is rather unlikely.
The problem with environmentalists is that they believe that it is possible to get energy without any negative consequences at all. Or, putting it another way, they're opposed to energy sources that have even a single element in the "Con" column. It doesn't matter how many "Pros" there are, or how the pros and cons weigh against each other - if there's even a single downside, they're opposed to it.
What's the right word for people that reject rational decision making? Ah, yeah - morons.
>>Likewise, it is easy to get mad at Murdoch (since no one likes him anyway), but are you aware that many UK newspapers were doing the same kind of thing?
Hell, the NYT *defended* their use of hacked phone data to get stories.
Murdoch is getting run through the grinder mainly because he's Murdoch.
>>This post is exactly an example of someone who has become a parrot for the latest political memes
Does it surprise you that it was an 18-year old? =)
>>It seems like the "red state = Republicans" is therefore misnamed, or some kind of intentional newspeak
Yeah, that has always bugged me, too. According to Wikipedia, it was Tim Russert who coined it, arbitrarily, but it always seems very counterintuitive to me.
>>We just have more prisoners (2.3 million) than China (No. 2, at 1.650 million) and Russia (No. 3, at 806,000) and India combined (No. 5, at 384753). source
By your own source, the US figure includes people outside the "normal" prison system, but, say, the China figures do not include it. If you include the extra 650,000 not counted in China's 1.65M, then they're tied with the US in 1st place.
Isn't it fun when people actually read your references?
>>if I leave my car out in the road with a "Borrow my car for only ã10 an hour" scheme where I never see who borrows my car, it's OBVIOUS that the chances are I will never see my car again
There's actually several companies that do this. (http://www.zipcar.com/)
Was probably where airbnb got their idea from, actually.
>>Well to be fair, if you install windows XP from a recovery image or from an original CD you have from the original version, your computer could probably be pwned before you even have the time to download the service packs.
I once watched a friend of mine get extremely frustrated as he kept reinstalling XP over and over, only to have it get owned before the patching finished.
I finally took pity on him and put a hardware firewall between his computer and the internet... after, I think, the third time it happened. =)
Ah, but did you read the actual survey, as opposed to the Pew Survey (and other one that agrees with the Pew survey). If you phrase it as keeping the Bush Tax cuts, people are evenly divided between keeping them, keeping them for people $250k, then 72% said yes.
Also, that very NYT survey shows that people favor reducing spending over raising taxes by a 2-to-1 margin.
>>The facts are clear.
The facts are clear in your mind. That people can't disagree with you.
If you've actually gone out and talked with a lot of ring wing people, they were all very concerned about increased government spending/stimulus spending, increased government expansion of its role in our lives (Obamacare, whether that's true or not), the national debt, and so forth. The established right wing organizations, to paraphrase John Kerry, were against the Tea Party before they were for it. Once it became clear that this genuine grassroots revolt was going to make a difference in the 2010 elections, there was a lot of bandwagoning. Look at the dates of your conspiracy-theorish Koch brothers support for it. Did the funding come in before the Tea Party was started, or after it gained pre-eminence?
>>The inputs to the models are things such as the strength of gravity
Doing a lot of climate modeling on Mars, are you? =)
>>Roy Spencer, is a creationist quack who has expanded his quackery into AGW
By your own reference, he is a professional climatologist that works for NASA as a team leader and senior scientist. Bit different from your run of the mill quackery, no? But speaking on Coast to Coast AM isn't exactly a stellar character reference.
>>Did you read the guys raving about ID? Imagine you don't know anything about evolution or biology. Would you really be able to call out all the BS in that?
Crick believed that our DNA came from aliens in outer space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia#Directed_panspermia), which is a form of Intelligent Design. Perhaps not as famous as the Creationism-in-Sheepskin version that's quite popular these days, but one of the forms of ID indeed. Crick, by all accounts, was pretty good at biology. I met him once when I was at UCSD.
Ironically enough, Arrhenus believed the same thing. You know, the guy who developed the theory of the Greenhouse Effect and how CO2 contributes to Global Warming and all of that.
Not saying panspermia is right, by any means, but your tar brush is a little ironically wide there.
I've read the paper in question, but it doesn't seem to make all the sweeping claims that the various hyperbolic news stories claims it does.
>>America is no doubt not pleased with the Bush era spending.
Correct. Though to be fair, the stimulus is both Bush and Obama's fault. And a lot of congressmen from both parties.
>>But you and your TP moron friends are dead wrong as to the solution.
Naturally. Your little mind cannot comprehend those scary "numbers".
50% increase in spending, 20% decrease in revenues, in five years. It might hurt your brain cell to realize it, so I'll explain it to you slowly. We've spent too much money.
We need to reset our budget back to what it was about five years ago. Why five years ago? That was the last time our budget was $2.4T, which is also what our revenue estimates are for 2011.
>>Over 70% of Americans want the Bush tax cuts repealed
>>The TP is the epitome of cognitive dissonance, a pretend grass-roots organization
It would only be cognitive dissonance to believe it was a "pretend grass-roots organization" when I have seen with my own eyes it is not. I also don't identify myself with the Tea Party, I just noted that I have friends and family in it, and that it's quite extraordinary that you do not.
Unless you're talking about capital gains tax being set lower than the normal income tax level, but there's a reason for that. You may disagree with the reason (it encourages investment-making which leads to growth), but it's not a tax-break per se. When Warren Buffet talks about paying less in taxes than his secretary, he's talking about 1) Percentages, not absolute amounts (which are quite high), and 2) The fact that he's primarily paying capital gains tax instead of income tax.
>>$858,164M in payroll taxes, the latter of which were paid disproportionately by people who has moderate to low incomes
No. Just... no. Educate the fuck out of yourself, dude.
For one thing, philosophically speaking, Social Security and Medicare aren't taxes unless you expect them to go bankrupt in the future. Even still, they do not pay a disproportionate amount. (http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/currentdistribution.cfm)
When it comes to income tax, the lowest quintile makes money off the income tax (-10% tax rate), the next quintile pays next to nothing (3.1%), but the top quintile pays 67.2% of all income tax.
Man, those "tax breaks for the rich" are pretty powerful, aren't they? All those blue-collar workers are sure suffering what with the 3 cents on the dollar they pay to Uncle Sam. And don't get me started on the poor who *collect* money from income tax. When I was making $19k a year as a grad student, I didn't have a lot of spare money, but I never complained about the nonexistent taxes I was paying.
>>On top of payroll taxes, individual federal tax receipts were over 5 times corporate receipts.
Meaningless because they're two different kinds of taxes. Corporations pay taxes on net profits, individuals pay taxes on gross. In a bad economy, corporations don't pay "income" tax (it's really a profits tax), but the fed still gets its piece of pie when the corporations pay for wages, rent, advertising, and all those other "writeoffs" you're talking about.
>>Big corporations are all cheating on their taxes
It's not cheating when you play by the rules. (Though I have reservations about things like Google's Double Irish and the like.) Every dollar that goes into a corporation will trigger a tax event. If the corporation retains it, it pays taxes itself. If they spend it, the people they spend it on pay the tax. The net result is to incentivize spending (mostly on hiring people), which is where the tax ultimately gets paid. It doesn't matter, honestly, to separate the two. While you might be busting a blood vessel over the fact that "people" are paying more than "big businesses", believe me when I say that it's better this way. You don't want corporations retaining all of their earnings and not hiring people.
Ah, yes, Krugman. A totally unbiased opinion. Even a fairly liberal NPR article on "Is the Tea Party a grassroots organization" admits that is a real grassroots movement, with some opportunists jumping on the bandwagon once it got rolling (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129926390).
They're not astroturf. The TP really is a grassroots organization, as I have friends and family involved with the organization at the local level. There was never anybody from a national organization acting behind the scenes, and it was looked on with disfavour by a fair chunk of the RNP, as the Tea Party was against neoconservatism.
>>That's just one link with facts showing the "grass-roots" nature of the TP to be a fraud. The Internet is full of them.
It's also full of porn and 9/11 conspiracy theories. Please tell me you don't buy into those, either.
I think there's more a spreading of the market to extremes; medium-quality compacts are getting squeezed out by cameraphones at the low end where you really just want a rough reproduction of some event, and DSLRs and interchangeable lens, large sensor compacts at the high end. (Boy, I can't wait for the NEX-7).
Oddly enough, my photographer friend feels it's going the other way, with the need for DSLRs going down as the quality of P&Ss goes up. There's some shots that P&Ss will never be good at, due to the inherent limitations on lens size and sensor size, but they can take some damn good photos these days AND fit in your pocket. Slap CHDK on your camera, and you get RAW format and automatic exposure bracketing for HDR shots.
I just went hiking in Yosemite a couple weeks back, and felt sort of bad for my friend lugging around all his heavy and very expensive stuff as we went up the side of a cliff.
>>The people who attend the rallies are being spoon-fed dogma to guide their votes
I love how your worldview is so distorted, and that you so entirely lack fiscal conservative friends, that you are completely unaware of the amount of voter anger there was in America over our drunken-sailor spending habits in the last 10 years (it's not just anti-Obama, it's anti-Bush as well).
The only way your mind can deal with the cognitive dissonance is to invent the theory that these people *weren't* actually angry over the spending habits until "someone" told them to be. Lol.
The Tea Party was a grassroots movement in response to both Bush and Obama increasing the size of the government, with I/R/D fiscal conservatives becoming disillusioned at their lack of good choices at the ballot box.
While Koch is the Soros of the right wing (why not rant about all the crazy shit Soros funds, eh?), he more capitalized on the grassroots movement than started it.
I think the Tea Party is crazy on some issues, like eliminating the Federal Reserve or moving back to the gold standard (as the Pauls want), but in general they were the only political force in America fighting for smaller government. Now Obama and Boehner are both talking cuts. Normally a budget increase in the federal government is about as permanent as these things come, so I call that a success for the Tea Party, regardless of how many people they get elected in 2012.
>>We have among the lowest taxes in the developed world in this country, and we have the infrastructure to prove it.
Infrastructure spending is a very small percentage of our budget. All of our transportation funding hovers around 2% or so. (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/)
The "lowest taxes" thing is just a Democrat talking point. We have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world (second only to Japan in the OECD - http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/corptaxrates_usvsoecd_state&fed-2011-20110117.pdf). We also don't provide universal health care through our national government, as many other OECD countries do, which means you get to add health care expenses our our "tax burden" to equalize the assessments.
We're taxed quite highly, actually.
The real problem is that spending has gone up 50% in the last 5 years, while revenue has fallen 20% in the same time period (though it is estimated to break even for next year).
>>Note that the USA collects the least tax revenue of any OECD country (as a % of GDP).
Because in most other OECD countries, health care is included in the tax burden and services of the government. Add our health care expenses to our taxes, and you'll see we're very heavily "taxed".
It's also important to point out that government expenses have risen 50% in the last 5 years, but revenues have dropped 20% in the same time period (though it is projected to be back at parity next year).
So when the Republicans say it's a spending problem, they're right. When Democrats say that we need to increase revenues/taxes, well, maybe a little. Certainly not by the 50% we'll need to balance the bipartisan drunken-sailor spending spree.
>>Part of the 10th Amendment states that duties of the federal government are the fed's job, not the states. >>Utah may not decide that Mormon is the state religion.
This would be news to the founding fathers. 9 out of the 13 colonies had established religions. (http://www.kknfa.org/Religion_13Colonies.htm)
The first amendment applied to the Federal government only, not the states, and the 10th Amendment didn't overwrite this.
It wasn't until the mid-20th Century that the 14th amendment, in Everson vs. Board of Education, was ruled to prohibit establishment of churches at the state level.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Everyone always thinks that NIMBY is bad, until it is THEIR backyard.
Really? I've been supporting the building of a new nuclear plant about an hour from my house, but the odds of it happening in today's climate is rather unlikely.
The problem with environmentalists is that they believe that it is possible to get energy without any negative consequences at all. Or, putting it another way, they're opposed to energy sources that have even a single element in the "Con" column. It doesn't matter how many "Pros" there are, or how the pros and cons weigh against each other - if there's even a single downside, they're opposed to it.
What's the right word for people that reject rational decision making? Ah, yeah - morons.
>>Yes, it does- by the age of 18 most people understand what a paragraph is.
Not if they use Twitter. Then you only can construct your thoughts in pithy, quasi-related sentence-paragraphs.
>>Likewise, it is easy to get mad at Murdoch (since no one likes him anyway), but are you aware that many UK newspapers were doing the same kind of thing?
Hell, the NYT *defended* their use of hacked phone data to get stories.
Murdoch is getting run through the grinder mainly because he's Murdoch.
>>This post is exactly an example of someone who has become a parrot for the latest political memes
Does it surprise you that it was an 18-year old? =)
>>It seems like the "red state = Republicans" is therefore misnamed, or some kind of intentional newspeak
Yeah, that has always bugged me, too. According to Wikipedia, it was Tim Russert who coined it, arbitrarily, but it always seems very counterintuitive to me.
>>My My, you're just full of excuses today.
Hey, don't blame me if someone checks your numbers.
It'd also be fair to mention that between 10%-30% of the US prison population aren't actually from the US.
>>We just have more prisoners (2.3 million) than China (No. 2, at 1.650 million) and Russia (No. 3, at 806,000) and India combined (No. 5, at 384753).
source
By your own source, the US figure includes people outside the "normal" prison system, but, say, the China figures do not include it. If you include the extra 650,000 not counted in China's 1.65M, then they're tied with the US in 1st place.
Isn't it fun when people actually read your references?
>>if I leave my car out in the road with a "Borrow my car for only ã10 an hour" scheme where I never see who borrows my car, it's OBVIOUS that the chances are I will never see my car again
There's actually several companies that do this. (http://www.zipcar.com/)
Was probably where airbnb got their idea from, actually.
>>Well to be fair, if you install windows XP from a recovery image or from an original CD you have from the original version, your computer could probably be pwned before you even have the time to download the service packs.
I once watched a friend of mine get extremely frustrated as he kept reinstalling XP over and over, only to have it get owned before the patching finished.
I finally took pity on him and put a hardware firewall between his computer and the internet... after, I think, the third time it happened. =)
>>The company wasn't healthy enough financially to bother going after.
How do they know, if it isn't a publicly traded company? Does the BSA have access to IRS records or something?
The whole thing seems like a scam to me.
>>Nothing in this data is really interesting
Really? I found it quite interesting that a company called "Man Tech, Inc." can get millions in government funding.
>>no more secrets. at all. this time I mean it. now go back to putting your secrets on the internet, in plain text!
I can't wait until we all move back to using telnet.
I had some great fun with that in computer labs, back in the day.
>>You just keep on buying every game that they make.
Not me. I haven't bought a single Ubisoft game since their new DRM bullshit came out a couple years back.
Ah, but did you read the actual survey, as opposed to the Pew Survey (and other one that agrees with the Pew survey). If you phrase it as keeping the Bush Tax cuts, people are evenly divided between keeping them, keeping them for people $250k, then 72% said yes.
Also, that very NYT survey shows that people favor reducing spending over raising taxes by a 2-to-1 margin.
>>The facts are clear.
The facts are clear in your mind. That people can't disagree with you.
If you've actually gone out and talked with a lot of ring wing people, they were all very concerned about increased government spending/stimulus spending, increased government expansion of its role in our lives (Obamacare, whether that's true or not), the national debt, and so forth. The established right wing organizations, to paraphrase John Kerry, were against the Tea Party before they were for it. Once it became clear that this genuine grassroots revolt was going to make a difference in the 2010 elections, there was a lot of bandwagoning. Look at the dates of your conspiracy-theorish Koch brothers support for it. Did the funding come in before the Tea Party was started, or after it gained pre-eminence?
You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?
>>The inputs to the models are things such as the strength of gravity
Doing a lot of climate modeling on Mars, are you? =)
>>Roy Spencer, is a creationist quack who has expanded his quackery into AGW
By your own reference, he is a professional climatologist that works for NASA as a team leader and senior scientist. Bit different from your run of the mill quackery, no? But speaking on Coast to Coast AM isn't exactly a stellar character reference.
>>Did you read the guys raving about ID? Imagine you don't know anything about evolution or biology. Would you really be able to call out all the BS in that?
Crick believed that our DNA came from aliens in outer space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia#Directed_panspermia), which is a form of Intelligent Design. Perhaps not as famous as the Creationism-in-Sheepskin version that's quite popular these days, but one of the forms of ID indeed. Crick, by all accounts, was pretty good at biology. I met him once when I was at UCSD.
Ironically enough, Arrhenus believed the same thing. You know, the guy who developed the theory of the Greenhouse Effect and how CO2 contributes to Global Warming and all of that.
Not saying panspermia is right, by any means, but your tar brush is a little ironically wide there.
I've read the paper in question, but it doesn't seem to make all the sweeping claims that the various hyperbolic news stories claims it does.
>>America is no doubt not pleased with the Bush era spending.
Correct. Though to be fair, the stimulus is both Bush and Obama's fault. And a lot of congressmen from both parties.
>>But you and your TP moron friends are dead wrong as to the solution.
Naturally. Your little mind cannot comprehend those scary "numbers".
50% increase in spending, 20% decrease in revenues, in five years. It might hurt your brain cell to realize it, so I'll explain it to you slowly. We've spent too much money.
We need to reset our budget back to what it was about five years ago. Why five years ago? That was the last time our budget was $2.4T, which is also what our revenue estimates are for 2011.
>>Over 70% of Americans want the Bush tax cuts repealed
Que?
http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=1136
>>The TP is the epitome of cognitive dissonance, a pretend grass-roots organization
It would only be cognitive dissonance to believe it was a "pretend grass-roots organization" when I have seen with my own eyes it is not. I also don't identify myself with the Tea Party, I just noted that I have friends and family in it, and that it's quite extraordinary that you do not.
>>those tax breaks for the rich
Ah, yes, the mythical tax breaks for the rich.
Unless you're talking about capital gains tax being set lower than the normal income tax level, but there's a reason for that. You may disagree with the reason (it encourages investment-making which leads to growth), but it's not a tax-break per se. When Warren Buffet talks about paying less in taxes than his secretary, he's talking about 1) Percentages, not absolute amounts (which are quite high), and 2) The fact that he's primarily paying capital gains tax instead of income tax.
>>$858,164M in payroll taxes, the latter of which were paid disproportionately by people who has moderate to low incomes
No. Just... no. Educate the fuck out of yourself, dude.
For one thing, philosophically speaking, Social Security and Medicare aren't taxes unless you expect them to go bankrupt in the future. Even still, they do not pay a disproportionate amount. (http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/currentdistribution.cfm)
When it comes to income tax, the lowest quintile makes money off the income tax (-10% tax rate), the next quintile pays next to nothing (3.1%), but the top quintile pays 67.2% of all income tax.
Man, those "tax breaks for the rich" are pretty powerful, aren't they? All those blue-collar workers are sure suffering what with the 3 cents on the dollar they pay to Uncle Sam. And don't get me started on the poor who *collect* money from income tax. When I was making $19k a year as a grad student, I didn't have a lot of spare money, but I never complained about the nonexistent taxes I was paying.
>>On top of payroll taxes, individual federal tax receipts were over 5 times corporate receipts.
Meaningless because they're two different kinds of taxes. Corporations pay taxes on net profits, individuals pay taxes on gross. In a bad economy, corporations don't pay "income" tax (it's really a profits tax), but the fed still gets its piece of pie when the corporations pay for wages, rent, advertising, and all those other "writeoffs" you're talking about.
>>Big corporations are all cheating on their taxes
It's not cheating when you play by the rules. (Though I have reservations about things like Google's Double Irish and the like.) Every dollar that goes into a corporation will trigger a tax event. If the corporation retains it, it pays taxes itself. If they spend it, the people they spend it on pay the tax. The net result is to incentivize spending (mostly on hiring people), which is where the tax ultimately gets paid. It doesn't matter, honestly, to separate the two. While you might be busting a blood vessel over the fact that "people" are paying more than "big businesses", believe me when I say that it's better this way. You don't want corporations retaining all of their earnings and not hiring people.
>>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/opinion/13krugman.html
Ah, yes, Krugman. A totally unbiased opinion. Even a fairly liberal NPR article on "Is the Tea Party a grassroots organization" admits that is a real grassroots movement, with some opportunists jumping on the bandwagon once it got rolling (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129926390).
They're not astroturf. The TP really is a grassroots organization, as I have friends and family involved with the organization at the local level. There was never anybody from a national organization acting behind the scenes, and it was looked on with disfavour by a fair chunk of the RNP, as the Tea Party was against neoconservatism.
>>That's just one link with facts showing the "grass-roots" nature of the TP to be a fraud. The Internet is full of them.
It's also full of porn and 9/11 conspiracy theories. Please tell me you don't buy into those, either.
Oddly enough, my photographer friend feels it's going the other way, with the need for DSLRs going down as the quality of P&Ss goes up. There's some shots that P&Ss will never be good at, due to the inherent limitations on lens size and sensor size, but they can take some damn good photos these days AND fit in your pocket. Slap CHDK on your camera, and you get RAW format and automatic exposure bracketing for HDR shots.
I just went hiking in Yosemite a couple weeks back, and felt sort of bad for my friend lugging around all his heavy and very expensive stuff as we went up the side of a cliff.
>>The people who attend the rallies are being spoon-fed dogma to guide their votes
I love how your worldview is so distorted, and that you so entirely lack fiscal conservative friends, that you are completely unaware of the amount of voter anger there was in America over our drunken-sailor spending habits in the last 10 years (it's not just anti-Obama, it's anti-Bush as well).
The only way your mind can deal with the cognitive dissonance is to invent the theory that these people *weren't* actually angry over the spending habits until "someone" told them to be. Lol.
>>The TP was created by the Koch brothers.
The Tea Party was a grassroots movement in response to both Bush and Obama increasing the size of the government, with I/R/D fiscal conservatives becoming disillusioned at their lack of good choices at the ballot box.
While Koch is the Soros of the right wing (why not rant about all the crazy shit Soros funds, eh?), he more capitalized on the grassroots movement than started it.
I think the Tea Party is crazy on some issues, like eliminating the Federal Reserve or moving back to the gold standard (as the Pauls want), but in general they were the only political force in America fighting for smaller government. Now Obama and Boehner are both talking cuts. Normally a budget increase in the federal government is about as permanent as these things come, so I call that a success for the Tea Party, regardless of how many people they get elected in 2012.
>>We have among the lowest taxes in the developed world in this country, and we have the infrastructure to prove it.
Infrastructure spending is a very small percentage of our budget. All of our transportation funding hovers around 2% or so. (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/)
The "lowest taxes" thing is just a Democrat talking point. We have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world (second only to Japan in the OECD - http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/corptaxrates_usvsoecd_state&fed-2011-20110117.pdf). We also don't provide universal health care through our national government, as many other OECD countries do, which means you get to add health care expenses our our "tax burden" to equalize the assessments.
We're taxed quite highly, actually.
The real problem is that spending has gone up 50% in the last 5 years, while revenue has fallen 20% in the same time period (though it is estimated to break even for next year).
>>Note that the USA collects the least tax revenue of any OECD country (as a % of GDP).
Because in most other OECD countries, health care is included in the tax burden and services of the government. Add our health care expenses to our taxes, and you'll see we're very heavily "taxed".
It's also important to point out that government expenses have risen 50% in the last 5 years, but revenues have dropped 20% in the same time period (though it is projected to be back at parity next year).
So when the Republicans say it's a spending problem, they're right. When Democrats say that we need to increase revenues/taxes, well, maybe a little. Certainly not by the 50% we'll need to balance the bipartisan drunken-sailor spending spree.
>>Part of the 10th Amendment states that duties of the federal government are the fed's job, not the states.
>>Utah may not decide that Mormon is the state religion.
This would be news to the founding fathers. 9 out of the 13 colonies had established religions. (http://www.kknfa.org/Religion_13Colonies.htm)
The first amendment applied to the Federal government only, not the states, and the 10th Amendment didn't overwrite this.
It wasn't until the mid-20th Century that the 14th amendment, in Everson vs. Board of Education, was ruled to prohibit establishment of churches at the state level.