He was my actual vote too. He was the most reasonable of the candidates; he was libertarian, but not to an extremist degree like many people in that party. And since I live in Arizona, it was a foregone conclusion that Romney would win my state, so there was no concern about needing to vote for the "lesser of two evils" and avoid what happened with Nader in 2000. So Johnson got my vote.
OTOH, I don't think a bunch of little countries here would be pretty, either.
The alternative to a single union is not "a bunch of little countries" (though that is one possible alternative). The more likely alternative is a small number of unions of states. There's no reason the seceding states can't form their own regional unions. That's exactly what they did back in 1861, and several other secession proposals have proposed regional unions (such as the proposed nation of Cascadia).
This is my position. I think these states should secede. Most of them are not really helping the union any, they're really just parasites, and they're ungrateful parasites at that. Let them go. I say we should encourage MS and AL to secede first. They can form their own little union. It'll be fun to see how they fare on their own. Maybe GA and SC will join them.
Ideally, I'd like to see the whole country break up into a small number of republics. The southeast should become one country, where the "American Taliban" will finally be able to erect their own theocracy, without that pesky First Amendment clause about religion. Anyone who wants to live that way can move there, and be surrounded by megachurches and crappy fast-food restaurants and jacked-up pickup trucks. The western states can form their own country, which will be the world's leader in technology. The northeast can form their own country, which will either be an important financial center, or mired in all kinds of business-unfriendly laws, or both. Anyhow, the people will get better representation since their votes won't be competing with 310M other people, but only roughly 1/3 of that, the US federal government won't have such an enormous amount of power at its disposal for evil deeds, and there won't be so much infighting like there is right now. How can we possibly make progress on, for instance, education quality, when we're constantly fighting over whether we should teach our kids basic science and math, or religious nonsense?
Exactly; the timing is rather suspicious. If you decide you have enough money to retire to your megayacht and escape the rat race, doing it right as your big product is about to be launched is a rather odd time to do so.
The naming thing is a total red herring. WTF does an Acrobat have to do with portable documents? WTF does something named "Excel" have to do with spreadsheets? I'll grant that "Powerpoint" is a pretty clever name, though MS had no hand in naming that, and "Word" is pretty obvious, but those are exceptions. WTF is a "Silverlight"? Names that make the program's function obvious are rare.
This is why, if you look at a modern KDE distro, and browse through the installed programs under K->Applications, each one will show the program's function (e.g. "Image Viewer"), and under that in smaller gray text, its actual name (e.g. "Gwenview"). Of course, this way of doing things has become unpopular, and now the Gnome and Unity designers think you need to just know the program's name somehow if you ever want to use it, even if someone else set the computer up for you. Over in Windows-land, it's not that different: there's a menu you can browse through, like with KDE, but you better know the name of the program you want, and its manufacturer too, because that's the only way you'll find it in the menu, since they don't believe in grouping programs by general function (internet, graphics, games, utilities, etc.) and then describing them by their general function. Of course, that's with Windows 7; I don't know how they're going to organize programs in Win8 so that unfamiliar users can find them.
Sure, if you don't mind being inside all the time. It's pretty hard to have a pedestrian-friendly city with regular -40 temperatures for half the year, however. Pedestrian-friendly cities need at least somewhat mild climates so that people don't suffer exposure when walking a few city blocks to the subway station, and also so that people actually want to live there and work there and make the city work.
Right, but have they done anything to improve the levees or build better ones? The levees used around NO look like a total joke compared to the ones the Dutch use.
Right, but those grants are pretty small compared to what it'd cost to really boost NYC's coastal defenses; I imagine the red state politicians would be screaming bloody murder if that much money went to that one city. I just don't think it's politically feasible in this country; look at how badly we handled New Orleans after Katrina. I don't think it's possible for us to focus our efforts that way; we're simply too dysfunctional as a nation.
Except that that's Federal money, and can't be spent on city infrastructure like that. City infrastructure is a local/municipal and/or state problem only. It doesn't matter if the city is of critical importance to the nation as a whole, it's not going to happen with the way the government is now.
Move where? Name one place that isn't prone to natural disasters or other major problems with holding tens of millions of people in one place. California: earthquakes. Gulf coast: cat-5 hurricanes. Midwest: tornadoes. Southwest desert: too little freshwater and too much heat. North Dakota: -40 in the winter.
Never heard about guinea fowl; sounds interesting. How about geese? I've heard those can be useful for making a lot of noise, and they're quite mean and will attack people.
That's because your houses are old and don't have sprinklers. Over here, no one has houses like that: not one single person, out of 310M. The only people with houses with walls like that are very wealthy, and have sprinklers, and such houses are all quite new.
I prefer the Mossberg 590 myself. The thumb-actuated safety is superior IMO to Remington's right-handed-only finger safety and the barrel shroud is a nice feature.
There's one big problem with your secret underground house idea: maybe you're OK with it, but most people actually like to have some kind of view from their home. Rich people (the ones who can afford secret underground houses) especially like them: that's why their homes have giant glass walls so they can see some ocean or other scenic vista from their living room. I think women tend to also like having some kind of view, so even if you're rich enough to afford a secret underground house with a shitty trailer on top, good luck finding a wife who wants to live there with you.
As for the tax assessor, people rich enough for this typically don't worry that much about property taxes, plus it's pretty hard to keep such a place a secret because the construction phase is almost impossible to hide.
Exactly, we're talking about home invaders here, not Special Ops forces. Anyone who makes a career out of home invasions generally isn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
Some other simple tools for dealing with home invasions in case you can't build a custom house with a 30-foot hallway entrance: 1) a good guard dog. You don't need a big dog here, just a little Chihuahua is fine, but you need a dog that knows who belongs and who doesn't, and starts barking any time someone new approaches the house. The key isn't to have a dog that can attack the invaders (sometimes, such dogs attack you or your kids), but to have a dog that'll alert you and wake you up if you're asleep. 2) a shotgun. 3) a family plan to retreat into a back bedroom, and then if any intruders come in, blast them. Never try to go find them, wait for them to come to you.
Right, and these commercial buildings are well-built and use very nice automatic sprinkler systems. That's the same standard these kind of houses are built to, not the typical shitty residential standards.
Anyone building a house with 8" thick concrete walls and a hurricane-proof design is not going to put a false ceiling over their sprinklers; they're going to use one builder who specializes in this home construction, who's highly competent, and won't make stupid mistakes like this. These aren't the kind of people who are going to hire some dumbass contractor off Craigslist to make some stupid changes, they're going to go back to the original builder for everything. And this kind of builder isn't the typical yahoo builder who slaps up shitty subdivision homes.
Anyone with enough money to build a house that nice should be able to afford some kind of monitoring service too which can open the doors remotely if they need to, in case the occupants are old enough for this to be a possible scenario.
How are these countries full of dirt-poor people going to educate themselves? They have no resources to do that. And westerners aren't much help; all they do is send in missionaries who teach them that homosexuals are demons and must be exterminated.
And how are they going to keep despots from running the countries? The people are all uneducated and dirt poor; what are they going to do about it?
Basically, the only way I see to fix it is for more advanced nations to invade and take over the place. However, that never works in practice, because more advanced nations only invade when there's resources to be plundered and profits to be made, and they never really do anything to fix the problems, mainly because the advanced nations are also run by despots who happen to be really good at lying to their people about the motivations for such incursions.
You're forgetting that, until relatively recently, there were tons of dirt-poor people in the US and there were no welfare programs; poor people just starved to death. Remember the dust bowl of the 30s? Or how things were in the 1800s? Millions of immigrants came here from Europe, and if they didn't succeed, they died. It was a pretty brutal life. We only were able to make all our citizens wealthy enough to not worry so much about food in recent years, and most of that was thanks to the post-WWII economic boom and later the economic effects of being the most powerful country in the world. African countries haven't struck the lottery like that; there's no way for them to make their citizens wealthy the way we do here.
The reasons are quite simple: blood coagulates shortly after being exposed to air. This causes it to gel up and plug the vein on the quill/nib, resulting in irregular line width, globs on the sheet, dry tip, etc.
What if you're a hemophiliac? Maybe their blood is better for use in pens.
Sorry, but you listed two different non-google ways of finding restaurants (and reviews), and they're both on the internet. How exactly do you find restaurants without the internet again? I'm actually old enough to remember the pre-internet days, and there were four ways that I remember: 1) yellow pages (which no one uses any more except old people, and which is what Google replaces), 2) word-of-mouth, and 3) serendipity (happening to see a place when you drive by), and 4) advertising (which they're still actually using in my area to advertise crappy restaurants, using unsolicited/bulk mailings and door hangars).
So the way I see it, these days, the only access to this "low level local information" that doesn't require the internet is relying on advertising (and the good places don't bother with advertising), using the phone book (which is also advertising, and fewer and fewer businesses are bothering to advertise in), or asking other locals. Hardly a good way to find a good place to eat.
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He was my actual vote too. He was the most reasonable of the candidates; he was libertarian, but not to an extremist degree like many people in that party. And since I live in Arizona, it was a foregone conclusion that Romney would win my state, so there was no concern about needing to vote for the "lesser of two evils" and avoid what happened with Nader in 2000. So Johnson got my vote.
OTOH, I don't think a bunch of little countries here would be pretty, either.
The alternative to a single union is not "a bunch of little countries" (though that is one possible alternative). The more likely alternative is a small number of unions of states. There's no reason the seceding states can't form their own regional unions. That's exactly what they did back in 1861, and several other secession proposals have proposed regional unions (such as the proposed nation of Cascadia).
This is my position. I think these states should secede. Most of them are not really helping the union any, they're really just parasites, and they're ungrateful parasites at that. Let them go. I say we should encourage MS and AL to secede first. They can form their own little union. It'll be fun to see how they fare on their own. Maybe GA and SC will join them.
Ideally, I'd like to see the whole country break up into a small number of republics. The southeast should become one country, where the "American Taliban" will finally be able to erect their own theocracy, without that pesky First Amendment clause about religion. Anyone who wants to live that way can move there, and be surrounded by megachurches and crappy fast-food restaurants and jacked-up pickup trucks. The western states can form their own country, which will be the world's leader in technology. The northeast can form their own country, which will either be an important financial center, or mired in all kinds of business-unfriendly laws, or both. Anyhow, the people will get better representation since their votes won't be competing with 310M other people, but only roughly 1/3 of that, the US federal government won't have such an enormous amount of power at its disposal for evil deeds, and there won't be so much infighting like there is right now. How can we possibly make progress on, for instance, education quality, when we're constantly fighting over whether we should teach our kids basic science and math, or religious nonsense?
Exactly; the timing is rather suspicious. If you decide you have enough money to retire to your megayacht and escape the rat race, doing it right as your big product is about to be launched is a rather odd time to do so.
The naming thing is a total red herring. WTF does an Acrobat have to do with portable documents? WTF does something named "Excel" have to do with spreadsheets? I'll grant that "Powerpoint" is a pretty clever name, though MS had no hand in naming that, and "Word" is pretty obvious, but those are exceptions. WTF is a "Silverlight"? Names that make the program's function obvious are rare.
This is why, if you look at a modern KDE distro, and browse through the installed programs under K->Applications, each one will show the program's function (e.g. "Image Viewer"), and under that in smaller gray text, its actual name (e.g. "Gwenview"). Of course, this way of doing things has become unpopular, and now the Gnome and Unity designers think you need to just know the program's name somehow if you ever want to use it, even if someone else set the computer up for you. Over in Windows-land, it's not that different: there's a menu you can browse through, like with KDE, but you better know the name of the program you want, and its manufacturer too, because that's the only way you'll find it in the menu, since they don't believe in grouping programs by general function (internet, graphics, games, utilities, etc.) and then describing them by their general function. Of course, that's with Windows 7; I don't know how they're going to organize programs in Win8 so that unfamiliar users can find them.
Sure, if you don't mind being inside all the time. It's pretty hard to have a pedestrian-friendly city with regular -40 temperatures for half the year, however. Pedestrian-friendly cities need at least somewhat mild climates so that people don't suffer exposure when walking a few city blocks to the subway station, and also so that people actually want to live there and work there and make the city work.
Right, but have they done anything to improve the levees or build better ones? The levees used around NO look like a total joke compared to the ones the Dutch use.
Right, but those grants are pretty small compared to what it'd cost to really boost NYC's coastal defenses; I imagine the red state politicians would be screaming bloody murder if that much money went to that one city. I just don't think it's politically feasible in this country; look at how badly we handled New Orleans after Katrina. I don't think it's possible for us to focus our efforts that way; we're simply too dysfunctional as a nation.
Except that that's Federal money, and can't be spent on city infrastructure like that. City infrastructure is a local/municipal and/or state problem only. It doesn't matter if the city is of critical importance to the nation as a whole, it's not going to happen with the way the government is now.
Move where? Name one place that isn't prone to natural disasters or other major problems with holding tens of millions of people in one place. California: earthquakes. Gulf coast: cat-5 hurricanes. Midwest: tornadoes. Southwest desert: too little freshwater and too much heat. North Dakota: -40 in the winter.
Never heard about guinea fowl; sounds interesting. How about geese? I've heard those can be useful for making a lot of noise, and they're quite mean and will attack people.
That's because your houses are old and don't have sprinklers. Over here, no one has houses like that: not one single person, out of 310M. The only people with houses with walls like that are very wealthy, and have sprinklers, and such houses are all quite new.
I prefer the Mossberg 590 myself. The thumb-actuated safety is superior IMO to Remington's right-handed-only finger safety and the barrel shroud is a nice feature.
There's one big problem with your secret underground house idea: maybe you're OK with it, but most people actually like to have some kind of view from their home. Rich people (the ones who can afford secret underground houses) especially like them: that's why their homes have giant glass walls so they can see some ocean or other scenic vista from their living room. I think women tend to also like having some kind of view, so even if you're rich enough to afford a secret underground house with a shitty trailer on top, good luck finding a wife who wants to live there with you.
As for the tax assessor, people rich enough for this typically don't worry that much about property taxes, plus it's pretty hard to keep such a place a secret because the construction phase is almost impossible to hide.
Exactly, we're talking about home invaders here, not Special Ops forces. Anyone who makes a career out of home invasions generally isn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
We're talking about houses with fortified concrete walls here. You'll need a bulldozer to breach them.
Some other simple tools for dealing with home invasions in case you can't build a custom house with a 30-foot hallway entrance:
1) a good guard dog. You don't need a big dog here, just a little Chihuahua is fine, but you need a dog that knows who belongs and who doesn't, and starts barking any time someone new approaches the house. The key isn't to have a dog that can attack the invaders (sometimes, such dogs attack you or your kids), but to have a dog that'll alert you and wake you up if you're asleep.
2) a shotgun.
3) a family plan to retreat into a back bedroom, and then if any intruders come in, blast them. Never try to go find them, wait for them to come to you.
Why wouldn't you just use electronic keys? Mechanical keys are so 19th Century.
Right, and these commercial buildings are well-built and use very nice automatic sprinkler systems. That's the same standard these kind of houses are built to, not the typical shitty residential standards.
Anyone building a house with 8" thick concrete walls and a hurricane-proof design is not going to put a false ceiling over their sprinklers; they're going to use one builder who specializes in this home construction, who's highly competent, and won't make stupid mistakes like this. These aren't the kind of people who are going to hire some dumbass contractor off Craigslist to make some stupid changes, they're going to go back to the original builder for everything. And this kind of builder isn't the typical yahoo builder who slaps up shitty subdivision homes.
Anyone with enough money to build a house that nice should be able to afford some kind of monitoring service too which can open the doors remotely if they need to, in case the occupants are old enough for this to be a possible scenario.
How are these countries full of dirt-poor people going to educate themselves? They have no resources to do that. And westerners aren't much help; all they do is send in missionaries who teach them that homosexuals are demons and must be exterminated.
And how are they going to keep despots from running the countries? The people are all uneducated and dirt poor; what are they going to do about it?
Basically, the only way I see to fix it is for more advanced nations to invade and take over the place. However, that never works in practice, because more advanced nations only invade when there's resources to be plundered and profits to be made, and they never really do anything to fix the problems, mainly because the advanced nations are also run by despots who happen to be really good at lying to their people about the motivations for such incursions.
You're forgetting that, until relatively recently, there were tons of dirt-poor people in the US and there were no welfare programs; poor people just starved to death. Remember the dust bowl of the 30s? Or how things were in the 1800s? Millions of immigrants came here from Europe, and if they didn't succeed, they died. It was a pretty brutal life. We only were able to make all our citizens wealthy enough to not worry so much about food in recent years, and most of that was thanks to the post-WWII economic boom and later the economic effects of being the most powerful country in the world. African countries haven't struck the lottery like that; there's no way for them to make their citizens wealthy the way we do here.
The reasons are quite simple: blood coagulates shortly after being exposed to air. This causes it to gel up and plug the vein on the quill/nib, resulting in irregular line width, globs on the sheet, dry tip, etc.
What if you're a hemophiliac? Maybe their blood is better for use in pens.
Sorry, but you listed two different non-google ways of finding restaurants (and reviews), and they're both on the internet. How exactly do you find restaurants without the internet again? I'm actually old enough to remember the pre-internet days, and there were four ways that I remember: 1) yellow pages (which no one uses any more except old people, and which is what Google replaces), 2) word-of-mouth, and 3) serendipity (happening to see a place when you drive by), and 4) advertising (which they're still actually using in my area to advertise crappy restaurants, using unsolicited/bulk mailings and door hangars).
So the way I see it, these days, the only access to this "low level local information" that doesn't require the internet is relying on advertising (and the good places don't bother with advertising), using the phone book (which is also advertising, and fewer and fewer businesses are bothering to advertise in), or asking other locals. Hardly a good way to find a good place to eat.