Re-read it. It doesn't actually say much you can verify without a lot more information.
For example "Jerry's right battery central headquarters here," is useless unless you know precisely where 'here' is. Apparently it's a magical place that not only contains a Nazi Artillery HQ, it also contains "Troops, panzers, batteries, engineers," an Engineer's HQ, Nazi HQ Front posts, and "extra guns." The guns seem to be British. A lot of the rest is just saying the unit sending the pigeon knows something.
Much of it doesn't make sense. In 1944 the Germans weren't blitzing in Normandy. "Hit Jerry's Right or Reserve Battery Here" is an incomplete thought. Did the unit sending the pigeon Hit the Germans already? Are they demanding someone else hit the German right because they're all about to die? Are they recommending somebody else hit the German right? Given that Artillery is kept to the rear, and reserves are (by definition) in a central position, how did a "Reserve battery" end up in a position where it could be hit by a unit that can also hit the German right?
Heck the list of things the Arty Observation Unit knows don't make much sense. Artillery Observers should be telling his Battery where this Electrical Engineers HQ is, with exact grid locations, so it can be killed. But the note just says they found the damn thing.
Biggest example: In the early says of the blogosphere lots of people did not have the tech-savvy necessary to start their own blogs. You needed to be able to buy your own domain-name, get a hosting service, install special blogging software, etc. Even if you had the expertise, remembering to maintain such a blog was not fool-proof. My first blog (detroitskeptic.com) currently points to a cyber-squatter because I forgot to tell the domain registrar when my email address changed, and my credit info expired.
Technorati was great, open, and non-corrupt; but it was only those three things to the small fraction of the human race that could actually do that stuff, but even in America that was under 10% of the population. Popular blogging platforms today (like Google's Wordpress) are fully in the control of a profit-seeking behemoth; but they also allow anyone who can master MS Word to have a blog.
Granted he admits these sites are great, he just wants them to focus on working together more. But he's missing a simple fact: the reason Facebook can afford to create a great site is they have revenue. They have revenue because they strategically screw anyone who finds a profitable niche in the Facebook-universe.
Obviously the folks with six-figures from undergrad have done something wrong, in many cases something very wrong, but it is possible.
It's actually really easy even if you go to a state school, as long as it's in another state. Ohio State is $25k. A year in the dorms is $10k. If your parents can't/won't pay, and are too rich to qualify for financial aid, you will end up with six figures in debt from Ohio State. If it takes you five years even a school with less unreasonable out-state rates it's gonna add up. Taking five or six years due to alcohol, frequent major-changes, etc. is not unheard of for college-age kids.
If you're going to one of Ohio's smaller liberal arts schools, which have no endowments for financial aid, and which charge $40kish, it's even easier.
So if you're 18, and you decide you want the Ohio Northern Experience, or the Oberlin Experience, and that when you've graduated money will take care of itself because you'll have that magical college degree...
That's a lot less doable now then when you did it in the early '90s. In Ohio full-time minimum wage during the summer (call it 12 weeks), plus half-time the other 40, earns les then $10k. Tuition at state schools starts at $4.5k per semester. If you get a $5k scholarship you have $6k to live on, all year. It has to cover taxes, car repair, food, gas, cell phone, parking, books, rent, and clothes. This will not work.
Granted change some assumptions (16 weeks of summer, slightly more then minimum wage, 25 hours during school) and you can get that $6k up a couple grand. But rent is gonna be $350 a month minimum ($4,200), gas is at least $100 ($5,400), a cell is at least $20 ($5,640). Books are a couple hundred (call it $6k, even). And you still don't have car insurance, a parking pass, or food. A couple grand might cover it. But God help you if your car isn't 100% reliable.
Keep in mind that when people say it's "impossible" to get through school without debt they are exaggerating. What they mean is that it was trivial for baby boomers to do it, but given that a) college costs have skyrocketed, b) minimum wage is down in real terms, and c) kids haven't magically become better planners/workers/etc. it's much more difficult for Millennials.
"Not thinking things through," and "not having a plan" is kinda the definition of being 18.
For the baby-boomers it was actually possible to be quite successful if you did both at 18. In fact if you ask most of them about the time they screwed up do to not having a plan they will tell you about something that happened much later, with eyes full of nostalgia, and swear up and down that they don't regret it. OTOH somebody who takes the not completely irrational decision to focus on their studies, and studies a non-lucrative subject because they're good at it, can easily end up with $50k in debt even if they only devote two years to the stupid plan.
1) You guys really worked the financial aid system. All the Ivies have excellent financial aid systems. They pride themselves on never losing a kid due to his inability to pay, and they've got the brand-name to charge scions of the Kennedy clan enough to cover their own education, plus a full scholarship for some other kid, plus the staff to to teach a bunch of 18-year-olds who suck at paperwork how to apply for said scholarships. They also have large endowments.
Paradoxically this means that kids who actually look for cheap options in schools tend to screw themselves. The place that only charges $8k a year cannot cut it's prices for you no matter how poor you are. And it can't can;t afford a guy whose entire job is to scour the student records for kids who qualify for the Left-Handed Redhead Scholarship.
2) This happened more then a decade ago.
3) You had really, really, really cushy jobs in college. Base cost for the Ivies is currently $30-$40k. That $30k does not include room and board, and if you're earning the cash yourselves you had to pay income tax on it. So you had to have a part-time job in the $50-$60k range.
SS benefits are based on the amount of money paid in, raising the amount taxed also raises benefits. The paragraph says that to bring SS into 75-year balance one would need to bust the cap on income taxed, but not increase benefits for people who paid more taxes. That's not benefit cut, by definition, because the everyone gets the same dollars they would have before.
It's remarkably intellectually dishonest that you not only define everyone getting the exact same benefits as a cut, but you also take it as given I will agree with your definition. It shows you spend a lot of time in the conservative bubble.
As for Obamacare, nobody has ever claimed it will solve Medicare's problems all by itself. It includes several pilot programs that are designed to find out whether we can actually save Medicare without cutting benefits (BTW, in terms of Medicare inflation would be a benefit-cut, since beneficiaries receive goods and services instead of cash).
On the pro side the Canadian government spends something like 2/3 what we do on benefits per capita, and gets more care. The Canadian government actually spends less per capita on health care then ours does. All this implies there's a hell of a lot of inefficiencies in the US System that could be wrung out without screwing people. On the con side there's the fact that damn near everybody has tried to cut US Health costs, but nobody has figured out a way that works for more then a couple years.
BTW, typical right-wing explanations for Canada's cheap health-care could explain some of the differences, but not all We're a little fatter, but they drink a lot more. We're actually less diverse -- almost 25% of Canadians are Francophones, and almost 20% are foreign-born; which means they needed to invent a special phrase for the people we call "minorities," the "visible minorities," who are another 16%; granted there's significant overlap between these groups, but still.
Did you actually read the report you linked to? To quote it:
Raising or eliminating the cap on wages that are subject to taxes could reduce the long-range deficit in the Social Security Trust Funds. For example, if the maximum taxable earnings amount had been raised in 2005 from $90,000 to $150,000—roughly the level needed to cover 90% of all earnings—it would have eliminated roughly 40% of the long-range shortfall in Social Security. If all earnings were subject to the payroll tax, but the base was retained for benefit calculations, the Social Security Trust Funds would remain solvent for the next 75 years.
Or perhaps you don't understand Social Security accounting. The accountants always project it will run out of money. This has been the case since it was created. They actually stop running the calculations at 75 years, so this says we'll be fine. Hell, everything is fine even if we have 50 years to plan because a) 50-year projections suck, therefore there's an excellent chance we're in the black, and b) even if the accountants perfectly predict the rise of the next great technology we still have 50 years to deal with it.
As for the issue of "junkies," and "spending," the problem with your argument is it does not actually exist. Your example of an out-of-control spending program (Social Security) is easily solved by taxes that would not break the economy. Given that you'd be a total moron to present anything but your only example of out-of-control spending that can't be fixed by easy taxes it follows that a) you're a moron or b) the "spending problem" lives entirely in your head.
BTW, in normal debate you'd be well-served by going to Medicare. That is a program that can't be fixed by simple tax hikes. In fact you'd have been much smarter to lead with it. SS is easily fixed by the simple tax hike I mentioned, and the rest of the budget is fine if we simply go back to Clinton-era tax rates. These tax rates may be higher then you'd prefer, but a) it's not that much higher and b) a JUNKY addicted to SPENDING needs more then slightly unreasonable taxes to support his HABIT.
Unfortunately for you this is not a normal debate. I actually know the Medicare issue. Good luck figuring out what a fee schedule is, and figuring out how you can prove that Accountable Care Organizations = benefit cuts.
I prefer option b) because I understand math. Inflation means every price goes up. That is the definition of inflation. Sales tax varies directly with prices. Salaries go up, too, albeit more slowly then consumer prices; which means more income tax revenue in dollar terms. Duties at ports go up. Payments on T-Bills, however, stay exactly the same. Which means that if your tax policy was providing enough money to cover the bonds prior to inflation it will be providing enough to cover them post-inflation. Granted you've got a lot of demands on that tax revenue because government costs are also sy-rocketing, but the Social Security Trust Fund just won't be one of those problems.
OTOH, option a) only really works in theory. In theory an average return on the stock market is better then anything else. In practice it is impossible to get an average return, and in a down year due to inflation you're not getting that mythical 9.4% a year. You'll probably lose money (historically stock prices do not rise during periods of severe inflation). You'll have to make up out of tax revenue or cut benefits. Neither one is a good idea when you also have to increase the defense budget 10% or watch the entire Army resign.
More importantly flooding the stock market with $2 Trillion controlled by politicians doesn't seem to be an ideal way to run a Social Security system.
You know it really is amazing how much anti-tax ideology has infested so-called economic thinkers.
There is a third option: raise taxes. You don;t even have to raise the rates for Social Security. Simply making the SS tax apply to income above $110,100 would solve the entire problem for Social Security. And yet, you, who make a pretty good show of knowing economic issues, restrict the options for solving Social Security to "You can inflate the currency, you can reduce benefits, or you can do a little of both."
Dude, taxes work. They raise money for the government.
If you actually read my posts you'll note that: a) The Fed Bank Rate does not exist in any country I was talking about because the Fed Bank is set by the Federal Reserve Board of the United States of America and b) I never said it would be painless, or cause no problems. I said high-inflation policies were an option that Italy, etc. could have pursued if they still controlled their own currencies.
Given that Greece is likely to fall to Fascism in a few years, and nobody has an actual plan to prevent Spain/Italy/etc. from going down the same path as Northern European mandated austerity guts those economies; I have to say that it would take a whole lotts of problems to make the pro-inflation options I mentioned worse then the anti-inflation policies Europe has actually adopted.
Let's look at three universes with slightly different SS Trust Funds and extreme inflation.
In universe a) the government buys stocks, bonds, etc. in private corporations to put in the trust fund. In universe b) the government buys Federal bonds, and c) they basically stash the cash under a mattress. What happens to the trust fund if the Feds can only pay their debts by causing massive inflation?
In universe a) many companies go out of business because massive inflation is bad for the economy. The trust fund is the least of our worries, but it's definitely one of them because inflation is really hard on investment portfolios. Not only will the next, sane, non-inflationary government have to deal with inflation, it will also have to find $hundreds of billions to restock the trust fund.
In universe b) the economy is still shot, but the trust fund is not a problem. It can pay exactly the amount it was designed to pay out, because the government bonds are still paying their 1% interest. The next government is gonna have problems with the trust fund being too small, because the $12,000 a year SS benefits it pays out are inadequate post-inflation, but it's not gonna have the problem of finding $hundreds of billions to pay those $12k benefits.
You probably knew this already, but Universe c) is most fucked up of all. It's basically universe b), except the inflation is hyperinflation because taking hundreds billions of dollars, letting them sit in a Federal Reserve account for 20 years, and then taking them back out is economically identical to printing hundreds of billions of dollars. I only bring it up for completeness sake.
You know why Mexico is hard on illegal immigrants? It's because an illegal immigrant can become legal in Mexico simply by spending a few hours filling out forms. If you are in Mexico illegally one of two things is true: a) you are too damn stupid to ask what Mexican immigration law is, or b) you are actually a criminal. It's not easy to immigrate to Mexico and get a job there if a) is true, so the Mexican legal system makes the understandable assumption that anyone there illegally is a criminal. That's a bit different from the US, where most illegals are perfectly normal, but can never be legalized.
Note that, in person, I would never bother correcting a person like you on this point. There is no point in disagreeing with someone who is smart enough to do the research and find out what Mexican immigration law is, but is so blind to reality that he doesn't ask "why would a nation of immigrants do that?"
BTW, your Indian friend isn't Indian if he's surprised at our citizenship system. India also used jus soli citizenship until 2004. I suspect he's not actually your friend, he's merely a brownish guy with an accent who chose not to argue with you when you brought up immigration.
The anti-Agenda 21ists believe that phrases like "more sustainable population," and "reduced population growth," are code for massive population reduction. They do not seem to understand that there's a difference between wanting DRCongo to stop growing it's population faster then it's ability to feed itself and demanding 45 million Congolese be sent to death camps.
You might be right about Greece, but the other PIGS countries probably would have been fine with 10% or so inflation for a few years. It wouldn't have been fun, but it wouldn't have been Catalonia-wants-to-break-up-the-country bad either. Even Greece probably could have survived better then this if they had not printed money to pay their bills. There's plenty of ways to be inflationary without causing hyper-inflation. Make the interest rates your banks pay negative, keep the deficit as high as it can go (15% interest on bonds is not fun, but if you control your own currency it is payable), etc.
The core problem is that the low-inflation policies that Northern Europe loves just do not suit economies dominated by inefficient small businesses and relatively weak state-structures. In Germany you can call six guys to a meeting in Berlin and hash out the economic policies of the textiles sector in an hour. In a country where textiles are family businesses this does not work. It never will. Even if you find six guys, and get a deal together, nobody has the power to enforce it.
You really do not understand how federal finances work.
Since the government defines what is money, it has a lot more flexibility then a normal person. For example, during the debt ceiling crisis last year everyone agreed that Obama could have solved it simply by issuing a platinum coin with an arbitrary face-value, which could then have been deposited in the Federal reserve. The money would have been perfectly legal. It would have been really bad economic policy for him to do so, and it probably would have killed his re-election chances, but he could have done it. John can't do that.
Moreover you're ignoring the fact that Social Security debt is debt the American people owe their grandmothers. You ain't gonna win re-election on a platform of "let's not pay grandma what she's owed," which means Federal debt is a lot more likely to get paid then that loser John's debt.
In other words, if any US Elected official decides to screw grandma by not paying those T-Bills the economy as a whole has almost certainly already collapsed and anything in that trust fund is worthless.
Do you know why your bank account has dollars it? Because the federal government says so. If the bank tries to screw you you can sue it in Federal Courts, and they will have to stop. You know why your dollar has value? Because the Federal government and all it's subordinate state governments demand Americans pay taxes in US Dollars. So Federal accounting has very little in common with the accounting you do as an individual.
In the extremely unlikely circumstances that the Social-Security-user-dominated-GOP and the Social-Security-worshipping Democrats in Congress ever decide to not pay those T-Bills owned by Social Security the US President will have very good reasons to work around those morons and pay the T-Bills anyway. Every one of his voters is either using Social Security or has a grandma. He has tools that will work. the legal right to declare a random platinum disk infinity dollars, deposit it in the Federal Reserve, and pay the T-Bills anyway. He's got the right to issue precious metal coins in any denomination he can think of, and it's literally unconstitutional to say he can't do whatever he wants to pay off that debt. The 14th Amendment says flat-out "The validity of the public debt of the United States... shall not be questioned."
The problem with this analogy is that ALL money, including that in your bank account, is an illusion created by the government. We go along with the illusion because a) money is incredibly useful, and b) if we choose to participate in some other government's made-up-money we will be unable to pay taxes to our current government, and the current government will throw us in a very real jail cell.
In the US, Obama has the right to make coins in precious metals himself, in whatever denominations he thinks necessary, so even if Congress and him decide to not fund T-Bill payments to Social Security with taxes he can fund them himself.
Moreover, do you think there is any chance (literally ANY CHANCE) that a political system controlled by a) the old-dude-dominated Republican Party, and b) lefty-progressive-commie-types who have near fanatical loyalty to the Social Security System as created by their favoritist President ever won't find a way to pay Social Security's bills? I cannot think of a scenario where either party (much less both) decides to both not fund those T-Bills through Congress, and a) also manages to pass a law preventing the platinum coin trick or b) convinces the President to tell all his voters "sorry your grandma's just gonna have to starve;" that does not also include the total collapse of the US Economy. And it's not like a SS Trust Fund full of Apple Stock would survive a total economic collapse either.
Despite your tangential concerns that somebody somewhere may believe that standing behind some specific type of tree will protect a person from being murdered, whereas standing behind any other type of tree will blow their spot when the tree calls out to the murderers that "there is a Jew behind me", I did not take this specific part of the hadith as of overarching importance.
My problem with your argument is not that you don't give this statement "overarching importance," it's that you ignore it completely. If a on ordinary person says "I hate people like that. I'll kill anyone like that who isn't doing X" the part of the statement that tells you whether this is a bone-chilling threat to "people like that" is X. If X is ridiculous it's obvious hyperbole, and not actually a threat.
The essence of the issue is that Hamas, a so-called democratically elected political entity, among other things, has as part of its charter a hadith that specifically calls for the hunting down and murder of Jews.
You prefer to avoid the issue and focus instead on a phrase at the end of that hadith that may or may not have some meaning beyond your ridicule of it.
I asked you for evidence that Hamas wanted to kill all Jews everywhere. You presented BS. If you present BS as your evidence we will talk about BS, and it will be your fault.
As for the "essence of the issue," I have three points. First, this is much more limited then the actual issue we were discussing. A dude named Rabinowitz who wants to kill his grandparent's for the insurance money counts as someone "hunting down and murdering" Jews. When you jumped into this thread you implicitly claimed Hamas has a plot to murder all Jews in Brooklyn by contradicting my claim that they do not have such a plot. You just admitted I was right to say that.
Second, even in after retreating to a much weaker version of the argument you still aren't very convincing. Even after you hacked that Hadith to make it worse it didn't say anything about "murder." It said "kill." If Hamas has legitimate reason to fight the Israeli Army (and I think the lack of a peace settlement justifies operations against military targets), then it has reason to hunt down and kill those Jews in the Israeli Army. Which happen to be something like 10% of the Israeli population.
Third, who gives a damn about their charter. The US Charter says that the British Crown should be driven from the continent, and in service of said charter we tried to conquer Canada a half-dozen times.The funniest bit is we expected to be greeted as liberators every damn time. The Declaration will never be amended, but I sincerely doubt we'll ever invade Canada again. Words matter more then actions for both the US and Hamas. And their actions condemn them.
BTW, I'm not holding Israel blameless. Hamas has power largely because Israel is unwilling or unable to stand up to the settler's lobby. Abas can't get anyone to follow him without a land-for-peace deal, but Israel can't/won't give up land, therefore Hamas wins elections. The Israelis seem to know this is what's going on, which explains how extremely un-hopeful they were that crushing Hamas in a ground invasion would actually work; but they don't trust Abas to stay a secular, non-murderous democrat. I suspect the only long-term solution is the so-called single-state solution.
Remember this isn't America. Just because we don't have a system where crime victims can say "pay up, or I'll testify;" that does not imply that other countries can't have that system. They wouldn't have to apply that system to all crimes (for example, it would probably be a bad idea in rape cases -- lots of chances for rich serial rapists to get away with it, and gold-diggers to legally blackmail people), but they could do it. It's their country, so they get to make the rules.
Apparently in Finland what's expected is that when a rightholder finds a violation he asks the violator to make it right by paying a penalty and agreeing not go to the media, because he'd look bad (Chisu, the artist in question, is not happy about this. At all.). If the violator doesn't agree to the deal the police do an investigation, which can involve taking a nine-year-old's Winnie the Pooh laptop. The next step is unclear because it hasn't happened yet.
BTW, don't get hung-up on the specific word "fine." In English a Fine is something you pay the government to deter you from breaking the law, but if Finnish law recognizes a class of crimes where the police and criminal courts collect penalties on behalf of private citizens they could easily translate the word for those penalties as "fine," for lack of a better alternative.
Google Scandinavia. The map includes Finland. Estonia is almost never included in the definition of Scandinavia, but it's President gave a speech declaring it to be in the region. Scandinavia is a political and cultural region, not a political one, so basically anyone who agrees with stereotypically Scandinavian cultural and political ideas claims to be Scandinavian. You might not agree with Finland's inclusion in the region, but you have to agree that plenty of people put it there.
And you really should be used to being conflated with other countries in summary of news articles. This happens to small countries all the time. No story about Guatemala is going to leave out the phrase "small Central American country." The problem here is that slashdot chose to link to a relatively uninformative summary, and not the original torrentfreak article.
Downloading for personal use won't be punished, but it may lead to claims for damages, if the copier knows or should have known that the source is illegal.
As in most places in the world, downloading is not a crime.
Has it ever occurred to you that assuming a translation of Finnish law in English is perfectly 100% accurate, and NONE of Finland's legal terms could possibly have different implications then their American English equivalent, is pretty silly?
For example, as an American I'd consider a fine a punishment no matter who got the cash. But apparently in Finnish legal thought fines are only punishments if they go to the government.
Finland is a sovereign state. They can set up their legal system however they want. In this case it clearly allows the police to go to someone's house and take their computers as part of an investigation into illegal downloading of songs because they just did that shit. No, as a non-Finnish speaker, I have no idea if that means illegal downloading's also officially criminal behavior because I don't know how to say "criminal behavior" in Finnish. But I do know that if Cleveland PD had that power I'd consider illegal downloading a very bad crime.
If you base your argument on taking the Gharqad tree paragraph literally, and anyone who takes said paragraph literally is a fool, then you've kinda proved my point for me. Hamas does not intend to kill all Jews everywhere. It has never said, implied or hinted that it will ever do so.
Note I've never said Hamas aren't evil. The guy I compared them to in one of these subthreads is Joseph Stalin. And I'm not some crazy anti-corporate activist who thinks that's a compliment. The OP's sin is analogous to accusing a rapist of murder. I don't defend the rapist because I like the guy, I do it because it's just not true that he's a murderer.
My problem with these threads (and pro-Israel people in general) is they betray terrible logic. You, for example, are trying to bring some other group that agrees with Hamas sometimes into a discussion of Hamas. That is amusing. Black September may have been an independent terror-group left of Fatah, or it may have been the left-wing of Fatah. Nobody seems to know. Hamas is so far to the right of Fatah that they have probably killed more Fatah members then Israelis, and the entire point of their group is to abolish Israel. I'm sure if I spent my time on Arab-language forums I'd be saying the same thing about the Palestinians, but I don't spend my time there, so the poor schmucks who post on their emotions I see are almost all defending Israel.
You do realize Israel has already crushed Hamas decisively militarily several times, most recently in 2006? Israel simply does not have the economy to KEEP Hamas crushed after they do the job once. It would take approximately 85,000 troops to maintain an occupation of Gaza, which would cost roughly $8.5 Billion a year, every year, forever.
You also apparently didn't read what I wrote before declaring it BS "Abbas crushed Hamas" means Hamas dies.
In other words your plan has been tried. It failed. My plan will not be tried, because the politics don't work; but if they did try it it might actually work.
Slashdot Mirror
Re-read it. It doesn't actually say much you can verify without a lot more information.
For example "Jerry's right battery central headquarters here," is useless unless you know precisely where 'here' is. Apparently it's a magical place that not only contains a Nazi Artillery HQ, it also contains "Troops, panzers, batteries, engineers," an Engineer's HQ, Nazi HQ Front posts, and "extra guns." The guns seem to be British. A lot of the rest is just saying the unit sending the pigeon knows something.
Much of it doesn't make sense. In 1944 the Germans weren't blitzing in Normandy. "Hit Jerry's Right or Reserve Battery Here" is an incomplete thought. Did the unit sending the pigeon Hit the Germans already? Are they demanding someone else hit the German right because they're all about to die? Are they recommending somebody else hit the German right? Given that Artillery is kept to the rear, and reserves are (by definition) in a central position, how did a "Reserve battery" end up in a position where it could be hit by a unit that can also hit the German right?
Heck the list of things the Arty Observation Unit knows don't make much sense. Artillery Observers should be telling his Battery where this Electrical Engineers HQ is, with exact grid locations, so it can be killed. But the note just says they found the damn thing.
Biggest example:
In the early says of the blogosphere lots of people did not have the tech-savvy necessary to start their own blogs. You needed to be able to buy your own domain-name, get a hosting service, install special blogging software, etc. Even if you had the expertise, remembering to maintain such a blog was not fool-proof. My first blog (detroitskeptic.com) currently points to a cyber-squatter because I forgot to tell the domain registrar when my email address changed, and my credit info expired.
Technorati was great, open, and non-corrupt; but it was only those three things to the small fraction of the human race that could actually do that stuff, but even in America that was under 10% of the population. Popular blogging platforms today (like Google's Wordpress) are fully in the control of a profit-seeking behemoth; but they also allow anyone who can master MS Word to have a blog.
Granted he admits these sites are great, he just wants them to focus on working together more. But he's missing a simple fact: the reason Facebook can afford to create a great site is they have revenue. They have revenue because they strategically screw anyone who finds a profitable niche in the Facebook-universe.
Obviously the folks with six-figures from undergrad have done something wrong, in many cases something very wrong, but it is possible.
It's actually really easy even if you go to a state school, as long as it's in another state. Ohio State is $25k. A year in the dorms is $10k. If your parents can't/won't pay, and are too rich to qualify for financial aid, you will end up with six figures in debt from Ohio State. If it takes you five years even a school with less unreasonable out-state rates it's gonna add up. Taking five or six years due to alcohol, frequent major-changes, etc. is not unheard of for college-age kids.
If you're going to one of Ohio's smaller liberal arts schools, which have no endowments for financial aid, and which charge $40kish, it's even easier.
So if you're 18, and you decide you want the Ohio Northern Experience, or the Oberlin Experience, and that when you've graduated money will take care of itself because you'll have that magical college degree...
That's a lot less doable now then when you did it in the early '90s. In Ohio full-time minimum wage during the summer (call it 12 weeks), plus half-time the other 40, earns les then $10k. Tuition at state schools starts at $4.5k per semester. If you get a $5k scholarship you have $6k to live on, all year. It has to cover taxes, car repair, food, gas, cell phone, parking, books, rent, and clothes. This will not work.
Granted change some assumptions (16 weeks of summer, slightly more then minimum wage, 25 hours during school) and you can get that $6k up a couple grand. But rent is gonna be $350 a month minimum ($4,200), gas is at least $100 ($5,400), a cell is at least $20 ($5,640). Books are a couple hundred (call it $6k, even). And you still don't have car insurance, a parking pass, or food. A couple grand might cover it. But God help you if your car isn't 100% reliable.
Keep in mind that when people say it's "impossible" to get through school without debt they are exaggerating. What they mean is that it was trivial for baby boomers to do it, but given that a) college costs have skyrocketed, b) minimum wage is down in real terms, and c) kids haven't magically become better planners/workers/etc. it's much more difficult for Millennials.
That's news to me.
I got a work history. Two years the same job. I still get a raise every time minimum wage goes up.
"Not thinking things through," and "not having a plan" is kinda the definition of being 18.
For the baby-boomers it was actually possible to be quite successful if you did both at 18. In fact if you ask most of them about the time they screwed up do to not having a plan they will tell you about something that happened much later, with eyes full of nostalgia, and swear up and down that they don't regret it. OTOH somebody who takes the not completely irrational decision to focus on their studies, and studies a non-lucrative subject because they're good at it, can easily end up with $50k in debt even if they only devote two years to the stupid plan.
There are a couple possibilities here.
1) You guys really worked the financial aid system. All the Ivies have excellent financial aid systems. They pride themselves on never losing a kid due to his inability to pay, and they've got the brand-name to charge scions of the Kennedy clan enough to cover their own education, plus a full scholarship for some other kid, plus the staff to to teach a bunch of 18-year-olds who suck at paperwork how to apply for said scholarships. They also have large endowments.
Paradoxically this means that kids who actually look for cheap options in schools tend to screw themselves. The place that only charges $8k a year cannot cut it's prices for you no matter how poor you are. And it can't can;t afford a guy whose entire job is to scour the student records for kids who qualify for the Left-Handed Redhead Scholarship.
2) This happened more then a decade ago.
3) You had really, really, really cushy jobs in college. Base cost for the Ivies is currently $30-$40k. That $30k does not include room and board, and if you're earning the cash yourselves you had to pay income tax on it. So you had to have a part-time job in the $50-$60k range.
SS benefits are based on the amount of money paid in, raising the amount taxed also raises benefits. The paragraph says that to bring SS into 75-year balance one would need to bust the cap on income taxed, but not increase benefits for people who paid more taxes. That's not benefit cut, by definition, because the everyone gets the same dollars they would have before.
It's remarkably intellectually dishonest that you not only define everyone getting the exact same benefits as a cut, but you also take it as given I will agree with your definition. It shows you spend a lot of time in the conservative bubble.
As for Obamacare, nobody has ever claimed it will solve Medicare's problems all by itself. It includes several pilot programs that are designed to find out whether we can actually save Medicare without cutting benefits (BTW, in terms of Medicare inflation would be a benefit-cut, since beneficiaries receive goods and services instead of cash).
On the pro side the Canadian government spends something like 2/3 what we do on benefits per capita, and gets more care. The Canadian government actually spends less per capita on health care then ours does. All this implies there's a hell of a lot of inefficiencies in the US System that could be wrung out without screwing people. On the con side there's the fact that damn near everybody has tried to cut US Health costs, but nobody has figured out a way that works for more then a couple years.
BTW, typical right-wing explanations for Canada's cheap health-care could explain some of the differences, but not all We're a little fatter, but they drink a lot more. We're actually less diverse -- almost 25% of Canadians are Francophones, and almost 20% are foreign-born; which means they needed to invent a special phrase for the people we call "minorities," the "visible minorities," who are another 16%; granted there's significant overlap between these groups, but still.
Did you actually read the report you linked to? To quote it:
Raising or eliminating the cap on wages that are subject to taxes could reduce the long-range
deficit in the Social Security Trust Funds. For example, if the maximum taxable earnings amount
had been raised in 2005 from $90,000 to $150,000—roughly the level needed to cover 90% of all
earnings—it would have eliminated roughly 40% of the long-range shortfall in Social Security. If
all earnings were subject to the payroll tax, but the base was retained for benefit calculations, the
Social Security Trust Funds would remain solvent for the next 75 years.
Or perhaps you don't understand Social Security accounting. The accountants always project it will run out of money. This has been the case since it was created. They actually stop running the calculations at 75 years, so this says we'll be fine. Hell, everything is fine even if we have 50 years to plan because a) 50-year projections suck, therefore there's an excellent chance we're in the black, and b) even if the accountants perfectly predict the rise of the next great technology we still have 50 years to deal with it.
As for the issue of "junkies," and "spending," the problem with your argument is it does not actually exist. Your example of an out-of-control spending program (Social Security) is easily solved by taxes that would not break the economy. Given that you'd be a total moron to present anything but your only example of out-of-control spending that can't be fixed by easy taxes it follows that a) you're a moron or b) the "spending problem" lives entirely in your head.
BTW, in normal debate you'd be well-served by going to Medicare. That is a program that can't be fixed by simple tax hikes. In fact you'd have been much smarter to lead with it. SS is easily fixed by the simple tax hike I mentioned, and the rest of the budget is fine if we simply go back to Clinton-era tax rates. These tax rates may be higher then you'd prefer, but a) it's not that much higher and b) a JUNKY addicted to SPENDING needs more then slightly unreasonable taxes to support his HABIT.
Unfortunately for you this is not a normal debate. I actually know the Medicare issue. Good luck figuring out what a fee schedule is, and figuring out how you can prove that Accountable Care Organizations = benefit cuts.
I prefer option b) because I understand math. Inflation means every price goes up. That is the definition of inflation. Sales tax varies directly with prices. Salaries go up, too, albeit more slowly then consumer prices; which means more income tax revenue in dollar terms. Duties at ports go up. Payments on T-Bills, however, stay exactly the same. Which means that if your tax policy was providing enough money to cover the bonds prior to inflation it will be providing enough to cover them post-inflation. Granted you've got a lot of demands on that tax revenue because government costs are also sy-rocketing, but the Social Security Trust Fund just won't be one of those problems.
OTOH, option a) only really works in theory. In theory an average return on the stock market is better then anything else. In practice it is impossible to get an average return, and in a down year due to inflation you're not getting that mythical 9.4% a year. You'll probably lose money (historically stock prices do not rise during periods of severe inflation). You'll have to make up out of tax revenue or cut benefits. Neither one is a good idea when you also have to increase the defense budget 10% or watch the entire Army resign.
More importantly flooding the stock market with $2 Trillion controlled by politicians doesn't seem to be an ideal way to run a Social Security system.
You know it really is amazing how much anti-tax ideology has infested so-called economic thinkers.
There is a third option: raise taxes. You don;t even have to raise the rates for Social Security. Simply making the SS tax apply to income above $110,100 would solve the entire problem for Social Security. And yet, you, who make a pretty good show of knowing economic issues, restrict the options for solving Social Security to "You can inflate the currency, you can reduce benefits, or you can do a little of both."
Dude, taxes work. They raise money for the government.
If you actually read my posts you'll note that: a) The Fed Bank Rate does not exist in any country I was talking about because the Fed Bank is set by the Federal Reserve Board of the United States of America and b) I never said it would be painless, or cause no problems. I said high-inflation policies were an option that Italy, etc. could have pursued if they still controlled their own currencies.
Given that Greece is likely to fall to Fascism in a few years, and nobody has an actual plan to prevent Spain/Italy/etc. from going down the same path as Northern European mandated austerity guts those economies; I have to say that it would take a whole lotts of problems to make the pro-inflation options I mentioned worse then the anti-inflation policies Europe has actually adopted.
Let's look at three universes with slightly different SS Trust Funds and extreme inflation.
In universe a) the government buys stocks, bonds, etc. in private corporations to put in the trust fund. In universe b) the government buys Federal bonds, and c) they basically stash the cash under a mattress. What happens to the trust fund if the Feds can only pay their debts by causing massive inflation?
In universe a) many companies go out of business because massive inflation is bad for the economy. The trust fund is the least of our worries, but it's definitely one of them because inflation is really hard on investment portfolios. Not only will the next, sane, non-inflationary government have to deal with inflation, it will also have to find $hundreds of billions to restock the trust fund.
In universe b) the economy is still shot, but the trust fund is not a problem. It can pay exactly the amount it was designed to pay out, because the government bonds are still paying their 1% interest. The next government is gonna have problems with the trust fund being too small, because the $12,000 a year SS benefits it pays out are inadequate post-inflation, but it's not gonna have the problem of finding $hundreds of billions to pay those $12k benefits.
You probably knew this already, but Universe c) is most fucked up of all. It's basically universe b), except the inflation is hyperinflation because taking hundreds billions of dollars, letting them sit in a Federal Reserve account for 20 years, and then taking them back out is economically identical to printing hundreds of billions of dollars. I only bring it up for completeness sake.
IMO universe b) is by far the best option.
You know why Mexico is hard on illegal immigrants? It's because an illegal immigrant can become legal in Mexico simply by spending a few hours filling out forms. If you are in Mexico illegally one of two things is true: a) you are too damn stupid to ask what Mexican immigration law is, or b) you are actually a criminal. It's not easy to immigrate to Mexico and get a job there if a) is true, so the Mexican legal system makes the understandable assumption that anyone there illegally is a criminal. That's a bit different from the US, where most illegals are perfectly normal, but can never be legalized.
Note that, in person, I would never bother correcting a person like you on this point. There is no point in disagreeing with someone who is smart enough to do the research and find out what Mexican immigration law is, but is so blind to reality that he doesn't ask "why would a nation of immigrants do that?"
BTW, your Indian friend isn't Indian if he's surprised at our citizenship system. India also used jus soli citizenship until 2004. I suspect he's not actually your friend, he's merely a brownish guy with an accent who chose not to argue with you when you brought up immigration.
The anti-Agenda 21ists believe that phrases like "more sustainable population," and "reduced population growth," are code for massive population reduction. They do not seem to understand that there's a difference between wanting DRCongo to stop growing it's population faster then it's ability to feed itself and demanding 45 million Congolese be sent to death camps.
Glenn Beck is one of them.
You might be right about Greece, but the other PIGS countries probably would have been fine with 10% or so inflation for a few years. It wouldn't have been fun, but it wouldn't have been Catalonia-wants-to-break-up-the-country bad either. Even Greece probably could have survived better then this if they had not printed money to pay their bills. There's plenty of ways to be inflationary without causing hyper-inflation. Make the interest rates your banks pay negative, keep the deficit as high as it can go (15% interest on bonds is not fun, but if you control your own currency it is payable), etc.
The core problem is that the low-inflation policies that Northern Europe loves just do not suit economies dominated by inefficient small businesses and relatively weak state-structures. In Germany you can call six guys to a meeting in Berlin and hash out the economic policies of the textiles sector in an hour. In a country where textiles are family businesses this does not work. It never will. Even if you find six guys, and get a deal together, nobody has the power to enforce it.
Dude,
You really do not understand how federal finances work.
Since the government defines what is money, it has a lot more flexibility then a normal person. For example, during the debt ceiling crisis last year everyone agreed that Obama could have solved it simply by issuing a platinum coin with an arbitrary face-value, which could then have been deposited in the Federal reserve. The money would have been perfectly legal. It would have been really bad economic policy for him to do so, and it probably would have killed his re-election chances, but he could have done it. John can't do that.
Moreover you're ignoring the fact that Social Security debt is debt the American people owe their grandmothers. You ain't gonna win re-election on a platform of "let's not pay grandma what she's owed," which means Federal debt is a lot more likely to get paid then that loser John's debt.
In other words, if any US Elected official decides to screw grandma by not paying those T-Bills the economy as a whole has almost certainly already collapsed and anything in that trust fund is worthless.
I really hate these analogies.
Do you know why your bank account has dollars it? Because the federal government says so. If the bank tries to screw you you can sue it in Federal Courts, and they will have to stop. You know why your dollar has value? Because the Federal government and all it's subordinate state governments demand Americans pay taxes in US Dollars. So Federal accounting has very little in common with the accounting you do as an individual.
In the extremely unlikely circumstances that the Social-Security-user-dominated-GOP and the Social-Security-worshipping Democrats in Congress ever decide to not pay those T-Bills owned by Social Security the US President will have very good reasons to work around those morons and pay the T-Bills anyway. Every one of his voters is either using Social Security or has a grandma. He has tools that will work. the legal right to declare a random platinum disk infinity dollars, deposit it in the Federal Reserve, and pay the T-Bills anyway. He's got the right to issue precious metal coins in any denomination he can think of, and it's literally unconstitutional to say he can't do whatever he wants to pay off that debt. The 14th Amendment says flat-out "The validity of the public debt of the United States... shall not be questioned."
The problem with this analogy is that ALL money, including that in your bank account, is an illusion created by the government. We go along with the illusion because a) money is incredibly useful, and b) if we choose to participate in some other government's made-up-money we will be unable to pay taxes to our current government, and the current government will throw us in a very real jail cell.
In the US, Obama has the right to make coins in precious metals himself, in whatever denominations he thinks necessary, so even if Congress and him decide to not fund T-Bill payments to Social Security with taxes he can fund them himself.
Moreover, do you think there is any chance (literally ANY CHANCE) that a political system controlled by a) the old-dude-dominated Republican Party, and b) lefty-progressive-commie-types who have near fanatical loyalty to the Social Security System as created by their favoritist President ever won't find a way to pay Social Security's bills? I cannot think of a scenario where either party (much less both) decides to both not fund those T-Bills through Congress, and a) also manages to pass a law preventing the platinum coin trick or b) convinces the President to tell all his voters "sorry your grandma's just gonna have to starve;" that does not also include the total collapse of the US Economy. And it's not like a SS Trust Fund full of Apple Stock would survive a total economic collapse either.
NicBenjamin,
Despite your tangential concerns that somebody somewhere may believe that standing behind some specific type of tree will protect a person from being murdered, whereas standing behind any other type of tree will blow their spot when the tree calls out to the murderers that "there is a Jew behind me", I did not take this specific part of the hadith as of overarching importance.
My problem with your argument is not that you don't give this statement "overarching importance," it's that you ignore it completely. If a on ordinary person says "I hate people like that. I'll kill anyone like that who isn't doing X" the part of the statement that tells you whether this is a bone-chilling threat to "people like that" is X. If X is ridiculous it's obvious hyperbole, and not actually a threat.
The essence of the issue is that Hamas, a so-called democratically elected political entity, among other things, has as part of its charter a hadith that specifically calls for the hunting down and murder of Jews.
You prefer to avoid the issue and focus instead on a phrase at the end of that hadith that may or may not have some meaning beyond your ridicule of it.
I asked you for evidence that Hamas wanted to kill all Jews everywhere. You presented BS. If you present BS as your evidence we will talk about BS, and it will be your fault.
As for the "essence of the issue," I have three points. First, this is much more limited then the actual issue we were discussing. A dude named Rabinowitz who wants to kill his grandparent's for the insurance money counts as someone "hunting down and murdering" Jews. When you jumped into this thread you implicitly claimed Hamas has a plot to murder all Jews in Brooklyn by contradicting my claim that they do not have such a plot. You just admitted I was right to say that.
Second, even in after retreating to a much weaker version of the argument you still aren't very convincing. Even after you hacked that Hadith to make it worse it didn't say anything about "murder." It said "kill." If Hamas has legitimate reason to fight the Israeli Army (and I think the lack of a peace settlement justifies operations against military targets), then it has reason to hunt down and kill those Jews in the Israeli Army. Which happen to be something like 10% of the Israeli population.
Third, who gives a damn about their charter. The US Charter says that the British Crown should be driven from the continent, and in service of said charter we tried to conquer Canada a half-dozen times.The funniest bit is we expected to be greeted as liberators every damn time. The Declaration will never be amended, but I sincerely doubt we'll ever invade Canada again. Words matter more then actions for both the US and Hamas. And their actions condemn them.
BTW, I'm not holding Israel blameless. Hamas has power largely because Israel is unwilling or unable to stand up to the settler's lobby. Abas can't get anyone to follow him without a land-for-peace deal, but Israel can't/won't give up land, therefore Hamas wins elections. The Israelis seem to know this is what's going on, which explains how extremely un-hopeful they were that crushing Hamas in a ground invasion would actually work; but they don't trust Abas to stay a secular, non-murderous democrat. I suspect the only long-term solution is the so-called single-state solution.
Remember this isn't America. Just because we don't have a system where crime victims can say "pay up, or I'll testify;" that does not imply that other countries can't have that system. They wouldn't have to apply that system to all crimes (for example, it would probably be a bad idea in rape cases -- lots of chances for rich serial rapists to get away with it, and gold-diggers to legally blackmail people), but they could do it. It's their country, so they get to make the rules.
Apparently in Finland what's expected is that when a rightholder finds a violation he asks the violator to make it right by paying a penalty and agreeing not go to the media, because he'd look bad (Chisu, the artist in question, is not happy about this. At all.). If the violator doesn't agree to the deal the police do an investigation, which can involve taking a nine-year-old's Winnie the Pooh laptop. The next step is unclear because it hasn't happened yet.
BTW, don't get hung-up on the specific word "fine." In English a Fine is something you pay the government to deter you from breaking the law, but if Finnish law recognizes a class of crimes where the police and criminal courts collect penalties on behalf of private citizens they could easily translate the word for those penalties as "fine," for lack of a better alternative.
Google Scandinavia. The map includes Finland. Estonia is almost never included in the definition of Scandinavia, but it's President gave a speech declaring it to be in the region. Scandinavia is a political and cultural region, not a political one, so basically anyone who agrees with stereotypically Scandinavian cultural and political ideas claims to be Scandinavian. You might not agree with Finland's inclusion in the region, but you have to agree that plenty of people put it there.
And you really should be used to being conflated with other countries in summary of news articles. This happens to small countries all the time. No story about Guatemala is going to leave out the phrase "small Central American country." The problem here is that slashdot chose to link to a relatively uninformative summary, and not the original torrentfreak article.
From your own link.
Downloading for personal use won't be punished, but it may lead to claims for damages, if the copier knows or should have known that the source is illegal.
As in most places in the world, downloading is not a crime.
Has it ever occurred to you that assuming a translation of Finnish law in English is perfectly 100% accurate, and NONE of Finland's legal terms could possibly have different implications then their American English equivalent, is pretty silly?
For example, as an American I'd consider a fine a punishment no matter who got the cash. But apparently in Finnish legal thought fines are only punishments if they go to the government.
Finland is a sovereign state. They can set up their legal system however they want. In this case it clearly allows the police to go to someone's house and take their computers as part of an investigation into illegal downloading of songs because they just did that shit. No, as a non-Finnish speaker, I have no idea if that means illegal downloading's also officially criminal behavior because I don't know how to say "criminal behavior" in Finnish. But I do know that if Cleveland PD had that power I'd consider illegal downloading a very bad crime.
Dude,
If you base your argument on taking the Gharqad tree paragraph literally, and anyone who takes said paragraph literally is a fool, then you've kinda proved my point for me. Hamas does not intend to kill all Jews everywhere. It has never said, implied or hinted that it will ever do so.
Note I've never said Hamas aren't evil. The guy I compared them to in one of these subthreads is Joseph Stalin. And I'm not some crazy anti-corporate activist who thinks that's a compliment. The OP's sin is analogous to accusing a rapist of murder. I don't defend the rapist because I like the guy, I do it because it's just not true that he's a murderer.
My problem with these threads (and pro-Israel people in general) is they betray terrible logic. You, for example, are trying to bring some other group that agrees with Hamas sometimes into a discussion of Hamas. That is amusing. Black September may have been an independent terror-group left of Fatah, or it may have been the left-wing of Fatah. Nobody seems to know. Hamas is so far to the right of Fatah that they have probably killed more Fatah members then Israelis, and the entire point of their group is to abolish Israel. I'm sure if I spent my time on Arab-language forums I'd be saying the same thing about the Palestinians, but I don't spend my time there, so the poor schmucks who post on their emotions I see are almost all defending Israel.
You do realize Israel has already crushed Hamas decisively militarily several times, most recently in 2006? Israel simply does not have the economy to KEEP Hamas crushed after they do the job once. It would take approximately 85,000 troops to maintain an occupation of Gaza, which would cost roughly $8.5 Billion a year, every year, forever.
You also apparently didn't read what I wrote before declaring it BS "Abbas crushed Hamas" means Hamas dies.
In other words your plan has been tried. It failed. My plan will not be tried, because the politics don't work; but if they did try it it might actually work.