The worst school attack in American history happened in 1927 when a person who today we would call a Tea Partier (I prefer Teatard) blew up his local school because he thought that using tax money to educate the local schoolchildren was a violation of his liberty. Ponder that. Ponder the mentality of a person in 1927 would equate "schools" with "tyranny", then compare to people today who equate "health care" with "tyranny".
This is it. A fairly small number of loony Americans have untenable hard-ons for "guns" in a way that they don't for any other "arms". They don't get boners over knives, they don't get boners over hand grenades or throwing stars, they don't get boners over spears or mortars or sarin gas. Late at night, deep in their cellars full of ammo boxes and guns, they masturbate while dreaming about "guns" and cuddle up with them to sleep. Anything that is a "gun" counts but if it has a name other than "gun" then it doesn't count. Harpoons? They are like guns, but they aren't called "spear guns" so they don't count. BB guns? They aren't really "guns" but they have "gun" in the name so they count. People who think like that aren't terribly bright.
I was recently thinking that we could end the abortion debate if only we renamed the device used in the procedure a "fetus gun", suddenly all the right wingers would swing over and start defending the "fetus gun".
Because at Walmart you have to pass a background check.
You have a shortsighted view of this issue: imagine in a few years when 3D printers can print with a metal epoxy (like JB Weld) so that the gun can shoot 10,000 times MTBF instead of 3 times MTBF.
Who pretty much has that anyway? We don't register, license, or inspect guns in most places in America, certainly not anywhere I've lived (Alaska, New Hampshire, Vermont, Nevada, Wisconsin). When I got my first gun I asked, "so how do I register it?" and people laughed at me. "Register it? Why would you do that?"
The answer to "come up with some meaningful way to get people to lock up firearms" is insurance. If people had to buy insurance against mis-use of their firearms then that would be a 90% solution to the problem. Insurers would do inspections of homes and come up with rubrics by which to judge risk that a person would allow their gun to be used improperly. People who securely lock their guns would pay low rates, wackaloon rednecks with small cocks who wave guns around like it was the end times would pay high rates, perhaps high enough to be prohibitive.
Like having laws against child abuse, we don't let people "get their progeny killed". We here in Western Civilization consider that bad because it is a violation of individual rights -- you don't get to do just any fuck-all thing you want to your children, because your children are people not property. Only an asshat would suggest that as a good reason to let fucktards be negligent with guns.
It's nice you admit that xenobyte was wrong and xorsyst was right. Some commenters try to change the subject or do hand-waving to distract from the truth of a statement.
Well, the customer is in that state, the product will be used in that state, payment came from that state and delivery was made to that state; some people would say that the transaction "occurred in" that state. Would you rather states make it illegal to buy products from you? I mean, hey, if you claim you "receive no benefit from the state", then that must mean that you wouldn't mind if that state refused you access to its market, since you wouldn't be deprived of any "benefit".
Think about it this way: obeying the sales tax law of a region is the price of admission to the regional market. Take it or leave it and nobody will think less of you either way.
In my opinion that is totally reasonable but an even better way would be to do away with sales taxes and simply increase income taxes to make up the difference.
Banning a lucky or plucky player is one thing but prosecuting him for a crime is a much different thing. I think banning is reasonable in most cases ('right to refuse service') but prosecutions should only happen when crimes are committed.
This bill passed with little fanfare; you didn't see Republicans hopping mad about it the way you saw them last year when another revenue bill was proposed. Why? What is the difference?
The bill blocked by Republicans raised tax revenue from ultra-high incomes above $1,000,000 -- not "millionaires", but people who *earn a million dollars in one year*, meaning super-zillionaires. Today's bill, on the other hand, raised revenue mostly from "poor" people, if "poor" means "people who earn less than a million dollars in one year".
The Senators above, 21 Republicans and 1 Democrat, voted AGAINST the zillionaire-tax bill and FOR today's tax bill. They hypocrites of the first order, who practically shut down and bankrupted the entire government so that super-zillionaires wouldn't have to pay up, but quietly agreed to squeezing you and me out of a few more pennies.
Share this with your friends in those states so these hypocrites can be voted out of office.
Chiropractic care isn't bogus when used for what it was designed to do
Chiropractic was designed to be the universal cure for all disease. That makes it nonsense.
Chiropractic today is often applied to bone and joint problems which is the most plausible application -- however, anything your chiropractor can do can also be done by a legitimate doctor/physical therapist. You know, when you're thirsty you don't have to get pure water from a homeopath, and when your knee hurts you don't have to get articulation from a chiropractor.
The statement "What was being done at the compound was not illegal" is completely retarded as well as irrelevant. All that matters is that government agents decided to arrest someone and that person evaded arrest. In civil society we don't allow people to evade arrest. If you are innocent, tell it to a judge. You certainly aren't allowed to hole up and shoot at agents when they come to arrest you. Give me a break. People who defend the Waco cult are ridiculous.
It doesn't make wages less valuable; wages stay the same. At the end of the day "the economy" is "all the work done", so "a dollar" is "a unit of work". So work and dollars are sort of naturally pegged to one another and wages rise when dollar value falls.
Inflation certainly raise the value of savings. It lowers the value of savings, that's pretty much the definition of inflation. Hence people with more savings and who do less work are more harmed by inflation and so oppose inflationary policy. That's my thesis.
The income gap is unrelated to inflation but it's a big problem. And it is not at all independent of government policy, it is mostly dependent on government policy.
If you're a young man you'll probably live to see the worldwide population nearly stop growing. That's what we expect today, anyway. It's an enormous problem when populations stop growing, but it's also an enormous problem to have an enormous population. It's all really enormous.
Yeah I heard that Intelligence Squared program. Steve Forbes wasn't very convincing. He said "A foot is twelve inches and that should never change. We need consistent measures so why do we allow the value of a dollar to change?" And I thought, uh, if a foot is twelve inches then a dollar is one hundred cents, you disingenuous asshole. Inflation doesn't mean that a dollar loses its mathematical soundness, like suddenly a dollar is ninety-eight cents. To say that a dollar should be pegged to an amount of gold is to say that we should use gold instead of dollars, which is fine, but the dollar then is redundant. To me it is obvious that a dollar is not an amount of gold, it is a different thing, so its value shouldn't be pegged to gold. Would he suggest pegging the price of gold to the price of a Big Mac? The price of his salary to the price of celery? Why would we do that, that would be nonsense.
The reason Steve Forbes is pissed off about inflation is because inflation is good for people who work and bad for people who don't work, and Steve Forbes doesn't work. Like most ultra-rich people very little of his income is payment for "working", for making something. When inflation rises wages rise because they have to, but "savings" (what I charitably call Forbes' billions) loses value so Steve gets less rich. Boo hoo hoo.
Middle class people also have savings, ten thousand times smaller than Steve's, but even a middle class person derives most of his income from wages, compensation for work. In an inflation economy, people in debt get ahead, people who work keep apace, and people who coast on riches fall behind. And that is bad for Steve, so Steve opposes it.
Fuck that guy. Also I have a personal anecdote: when he ran for President he came to my school and ended up promising a keg to my fraternity. We never got that keg! Fuck that guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yes, the wonders of childhood memories and the silliness of an adult thinking they are complete.
Just so you don't say something so ridiculous as "No one even thought about coming into school and shooting up the place" again, here is a list of school shootings from the 1980s when you were growing up.
The worst school attack in American history happened in 1927 when a person who today we would call a Tea Partier (I prefer Teatard) blew up his local school because he thought that using tax money to educate the local schoolchildren was a violation of his liberty. Ponder that. Ponder the mentality of a person in 1927 would equate "schools" with "tyranny", then compare to people today who equate "health care" with "tyranny".
Mod parent +5 Informative
This is it. A fairly small number of loony Americans have untenable hard-ons for "guns" in a way that they don't for any other "arms". They don't get boners over knives, they don't get boners over hand grenades or throwing stars, they don't get boners over spears or mortars or sarin gas. Late at night, deep in their cellars full of ammo boxes and guns, they masturbate while dreaming about "guns" and cuddle up with them to sleep. Anything that is a "gun" counts but if it has a name other than "gun" then it doesn't count. Harpoons? They are like guns, but they aren't called "spear guns" so they don't count. BB guns? They aren't really "guns" but they have "gun" in the name so they count. People who think like that aren't terribly bright.
I was recently thinking that we could end the abortion debate if only we renamed the device used in the procedure a "fetus gun", suddenly all the right wingers would swing over and start defending the "fetus gun".
Just about as good as laws against making pressure cooker bombs in your kitchen, I suppose. We have those laws, you know.
Because at Walmart you have to pass a background check.
You have a shortsighted view of this issue: imagine in a few years when 3D printers can print with a metal epoxy (like JB Weld) so that the gun can shoot 10,000 times MTBF instead of 3 times MTBF.
Who pretty much has that anyway? We don't register, license, or inspect guns in most places in America, certainly not anywhere I've lived (Alaska, New Hampshire, Vermont, Nevada, Wisconsin). When I got my first gun I asked, "so how do I register it?" and people laughed at me. "Register it? Why would you do that?"
The answer to "come up with some meaningful way to get people to lock up firearms" is insurance. If people had to buy insurance against mis-use of their firearms then that would be a 90% solution to the problem. Insurers would do inspections of homes and come up with rubrics by which to judge risk that a person would allow their gun to be used improperly. People who securely lock their guns would pay low rates, wackaloon rednecks with small cocks who wave guns around like it was the end times would pay high rates, perhaps high enough to be prohibitive.
Like having laws against child abuse, we don't let people "get their progeny killed". We here in Western Civilization consider that bad because it is a violation of individual rights -- you don't get to do just any fuck-all thing you want to your children, because your children are people not property. Only an asshat would suggest that as a good reason to let fucktards be negligent with guns.
Do you reject the entire premise of economics, that if the cost of something is higher then fewer people will buy the thing?
If the difficulty of suicide is higher, fewer people will commit suicide. This is obvious and people who say otherwise are clowns.
It's nice you admit that xenobyte was wrong and xorsyst was right. Some commenters try to change the subject or do hand-waving to distract from the truth of a statement.
Beauty... beholder... she definitely doesn't get my dick hard but she probably would if I were 67 and still wanted to have crazy sex.
Agreed, great interview. The person who came to my mind was The Most Interesting Man In The World.
John, please come to my house for dinner some time.
Well, the customer is in that state, the product will be used in that state, payment came from that state and delivery was made to that state; some people would say that the transaction "occurred in" that state. Would you rather states make it illegal to buy products from you? I mean, hey, if you claim you "receive no benefit from the state", then that must mean that you wouldn't mind if that state refused you access to its market, since you wouldn't be deprived of any "benefit".
Think about it this way: obeying the sales tax law of a region is the price of admission to the regional market. Take it or leave it and nobody will think less of you either way.
In my opinion that is totally reasonable but an even better way would be to do away with sales taxes and simply increase income taxes to make up the difference.
Banning a lucky or plucky player is one thing but prosecuting him for a crime is a much different thing. I think banning is reasonable in most cases ('right to refuse service') but prosecutions should only happen when crimes are committed.
Alexander (R-TN)
Blunt (R-MO)
Boozman (R-AR)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coats (R-IN)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Johnson (R-WI)
McCain (R-AZ)
Moran (R-KS)
Portman (R-OH)
Pryor (D-AR)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Wicker (R-MS)
This bill passed with little fanfare; you didn't see Republicans hopping mad about it the way you saw them last year when another revenue bill was proposed. Why? What is the difference?
The bill blocked by Republicans raised tax revenue from ultra-high incomes above $1,000,000 -- not "millionaires", but people who *earn a million dollars in one year*, meaning super-zillionaires. Today's bill, on the other hand, raised revenue mostly from "poor" people, if "poor" means "people who earn less than a million dollars in one year".
The Senators above, 21 Republicans and 1 Democrat, voted AGAINST the zillionaire-tax bill and FOR today's tax bill. They hypocrites of the first order, who practically shut down and bankrupted the entire government so that super-zillionaires wouldn't have to pay up, but quietly agreed to squeezing you and me out of a few more pennies.
Share this with your friends in those states so these hypocrites can be voted out of office.
"Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013"
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=113&session=1&vote=00113
"Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012"
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=112&session=2&vote=00065
"Why on earth do you engage in such a foolish and counter-productive method?"
Because it is really, really effective when he's talking to the rest of his 14-year-old friends.
"Nor is it the company' obligation to collect and pay that sales tax."
Do you mean ethically or legally? The whole point of the article is that it is the company's legal obligation to collect the tax.
"don't give me any lip about the $1M threshold, your corner convenience store easily has gross receipts 2-3x that"
Yeah and the corner convenience store collects taxes.
Do you mean 'direct' democracy? A republic is, of course, a democracy; the US is certainly a democracy; and I learned all that in public school.
Log lady?
We do have unlegislated social pressure to help the truth float to the surface. And when that fails, we have laws and courts.
This is known as the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
Chiropractic care isn't bogus when used for what it was designed to do
Chiropractic was designed to be the universal cure for all disease. That makes it nonsense.
Chiropractic today is often applied to bone and joint problems which is the most plausible application -- however, anything your chiropractor can do can also be done by a legitimate doctor/physical therapist. You know, when you're thirsty you don't have to get pure water from a homeopath, and when your knee hurts you don't have to get articulation from a chiropractor.
Mod parent +5, Insightful.
The statement "What was being done at the compound was not illegal" is completely retarded as well as irrelevant. All that matters is that government agents decided to arrest someone and that person evaded arrest. In civil society we don't allow people to evade arrest. If you are innocent, tell it to a judge. You certainly aren't allowed to hole up and shoot at agents when they come to arrest you. Give me a break. People who defend the Waco cult are ridiculous.
Steve knows that a gold standard would be a huge deflationary spiral, and ultra-rich folks win even bigger with deflation.
It doesn't make wages less valuable; wages stay the same. At the end of the day "the economy" is "all the work done", so "a dollar" is "a unit of work". So work and dollars are sort of naturally pegged to one another and wages rise when dollar value falls.
Inflation certainly raise the value of savings. It lowers the value of savings, that's pretty much the definition of inflation. Hence people with more savings and who do less work are more harmed by inflation and so oppose inflationary policy. That's my thesis.
The income gap is unrelated to inflation but it's a big problem. And it is not at all independent of government policy, it is mostly dependent on government policy.
If you're a young man you'll probably live to see the worldwide population nearly stop growing. That's what we expect today, anyway. It's an enormous problem when populations stop growing, but it's also an enormous problem to have an enormous population. It's all really enormous.
Yeah I heard that Intelligence Squared program. Steve Forbes wasn't very convincing. He said "A foot is twelve inches and that should never change. We need consistent measures so why do we allow the value of a dollar to change?" And I thought, uh, if a foot is twelve inches then a dollar is one hundred cents, you disingenuous asshole. Inflation doesn't mean that a dollar loses its mathematical soundness, like suddenly a dollar is ninety-eight cents. To say that a dollar should be pegged to an amount of gold is to say that we should use gold instead of dollars, which is fine, but the dollar then is redundant. To me it is obvious that a dollar is not an amount of gold, it is a different thing, so its value shouldn't be pegged to gold. Would he suggest pegging the price of gold to the price of a Big Mac? The price of his salary to the price of celery? Why would we do that, that would be nonsense.
The reason Steve Forbes is pissed off about inflation is because inflation is good for people who work and bad for people who don't work, and Steve Forbes doesn't work. Like most ultra-rich people very little of his income is payment for "working", for making something. When inflation rises wages rise because they have to, but "savings" (what I charitably call Forbes' billions) loses value so Steve gets less rich. Boo hoo hoo.
Middle class people also have savings, ten thousand times smaller than Steve's, but even a middle class person derives most of his income from wages, compensation for work. In an inflation economy, people in debt get ahead, people who work keep apace, and people who coast on riches fall behind. And that is bad for Steve, so Steve opposes it.
Fuck that guy. Also I have a personal anecdote: when he ran for President he came to my school and ended up promising a keg to my fraternity. We never got that keg! Fuck that guy.