he American taxpayer, quite rightly, doesn't want to pay for both. Many don't want to pay for either, frankly. Governments don't tax people to pay for wars any more.
Stick a $1 billion prize into an investment fund and hand it over to anyone who can get people on to Mars and back alive. Do same for moon base. Close NASA down. Billions saved and lots of highly motivated businesses and individuals will do their damnest to earn that cash.
Yes, and the Rothschilds as well....
"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing." William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England in 1694, then a privately owned bank.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild.
"The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests." The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863.
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of a pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this world would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain slaves of the Bankers and pay for the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits." Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920s, the second richest man in Britain.
"... our whole monetary system is dishonest, as it is debt-based... We did not vote for it. It grew upon us gradually but markedly since 1971 when the commodity-based system was abandoned." The Earl of Caithness, in a speech to the House of Lords, 1997. The problem with the monetary system is that it has institutionalised the corrupt practices and the inequality. Now, it's built in to every dollar, every pound, every euro, every yen.
1: The implications and consequences of the system are rarely spelled out. 2: Very few people ever think about the nature of what money actually is. 3: Even if they do, they rarely suspect that money could work any other way, with different implications and consequences. 4: The bankers and politicians are perfectly happy with this state of affairs.
Now, money is a series of digital 0's and 1's. Hmm. It's a commodity, just like oil or coffee. Once it was created all those thousands of years ago, it's nature has never changed despite the physical transformation over the years. As a commodity it's subject to exactly the same laws of supply and demand. Infinite supply (borrowing trillions) causes devaluation of the currency.
I agree that the monetary system needs to be changed. The existing system is particularly bad. For every dollar of money created, at least one dollar of debt is created. So it isn't just a case of having money or not having money as was the case in the past. It is a case of having money or having debt. The increasing supply of money to the rich simply increases the debt load on the poor.
Here's a thought experiment for you.
There is no money, we're at year 0.
The government borrows 100 dollars from the Fed. There is now 100 dollars in existence and 100 dollars worth of debt. The debt has an interest rate of 5%.
One year later, the $100 has to be paid back, with the interest. $105 dollars has to be paid back...
Only $100 was ever created, there is no additional $5. The additional $5 doesn't exist, it never did. It still has to be paid back though, it can never be. This is the nature of our national debts, they can never be paid under the existing system. More than that, we all have to work 5% harder in order to try to generate that extra 5% which never did and cannot exist.
People complain that capitalism is rapacious, destroying the planet, throwing millions to the poor house. Well there's the reason, the need to service all that debt... It's built into the monetary system. It requires never ending exponential growth of the economy just to stand still.
Reform that and several fundamental problems with our societies and economies will be solved.
You get what? 200 sheets from a cartridge costing £20? CPP of £0.10 Then of course, the ink dries up within a week, clogging the cartridges so you're likely to get even less than 200 sheets.
Does anyone with a brain still use Inkjets? Particularly when colour lasers only cost about £120.
I still write, though, because I have to do something, don't I? Join a party that most closely represents your views and get out campaigning. Even if it's just leafleting.
Partly, but mainly the fact that politicians have the power to create and spend what is basically unlimited money as part of the national debt... Which then hits the fractional reserve system and is multiplied etc etc. Big businesses would be insane not to latch on to this fountain of cash but in order to do that they have to persuade/corrupt the politicians or put previously persuaded or corrupted politicians into power. It's the perfect system to encourage corruption.
a friend who loan officer at a bank and he believes in the current system. Well, yeah but then, he gets to loan out the money up to 20? times and charge N% interest on it each time.
One of the reasons big businesses throw money at politicians is because in government they have essentially unlimited money to spend on pet projects... It comes back tenfold. And... That money is borrowed.
Without the ability to borrow/spend unlimited amounts of cash (8,9,10 trillion is essentially infinite as far as I'm concerned, or at least, it tends to infinity), politicians wouldn't be anything like as powerful and wouldn't be such obvious and attractive targets for big business.
There you go. Corruption, built into the very basis of our monetary system from the ground up. It took me several years to come to this conclusion, I don't really expect you to accept it.
Ok, so the first question is, how do you get light down to the lower levels? Answer, you don't, not without taking light from upper levels, or you just end up using more land area to reflect light. Generating it is...expensive... So that's a non starter. The next problem is land cost. Cities are expensive, there's a reason farms are in the middle of nowhere....
Instead, what about roof gardens. Simply top buildings with greenhouses on the flat roofs. They'd only be useful for expensive produce but might be workable.
Do we really need a whole beurocracy to make the various departments share information and cooperate with each other? Aren't they run by grownups? What do you mean need? They're politicians. You gave them the money. Need doesnt't come into it.
Why, only about a month ago, we were being told that Vista licenses were selling like hotcakes, with an astounding 40 million being sold in the first 100 days -- the fastest launch in history! OEMs are being sold Vista by the million because they have to take it. Many end users are demanding still XP from the OEMs or are re-installing XP once the get their machine. The OEMs are desperate to sell Vista on because they've already paid for it.
I'd have to say that Vista is the greatest gift MS could have possibly given to Linux, BSD, and the Mac. When longhorn cratered, they rushed out a cosmetic update, that is so utterly mediocre, and yet requires hardware upgrades for even its trivial improvements This is why I don't worry too much about (non governmentally enforced) monopolies, as bad as they are, human nature kicks in and they get complacent, lazy and greedy.
The address book supports LDAP, an open standard. LDAP is a corporate directory server protocol, not a synchronisation protocol. All this means is the iphone will be able to query the corporate directory while it's on the local LAN. It doesn't help with entries put into the phone's addressbook.
If there is hope, it lies in the proles. Yeah, he was wrong about that, largely due to his socialist background. No, the proles don't have the money or the time. In reality, the hope lies with the bourgeoisie. They are the ones who have both the money, the contacts and the time to effect political change. If you look at history, this is always where change comes from.
And the Calendar is what? The Contacts/addressbook is what? The Todo list is what format? The notebook is what format?
This is actually a big issue. It's physically easier for me to sync my two phones manually, that is, to manually write down and type in contact details between my addressbook, my business and personal phones.
Thankfully to the developers, there is OpenSync: http://www.opensync.org/ . Pain in the arse to set up at the moment but very much going in the right direction.
For many European governments, notably the Italian parliment and the pre-WWII French parliment, the coalition that governs the country is not unusual to be formed in the morning and by the afternoon of the same day will "collapse" and require a whole new coalition to form. Only if you insist that a coalition is formed. In Scotland for example, the SNP are governing with a minority government. They are unlikely to get all of their election promises passed, but then they don't have a mandate for that anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_government
My point here is that the two kinds of represenation are simply different, not better, I disagree, either your representative represent you or they don't. In a FPTP system in general they don't, so any legislation which is passed is not representative of the wishes of the majority of the people. In the UK for example, the Labour party won a clear majority in the parliament with only 34% of the popular vote. Any legislation passed by them does not have the backing of 66% of the population. That could never be called good governance no matter how strong the government itself is.
The Weimar Republic had pure proportional voting Proportional representation can be anything from the whole country being a district in which case you get hundreds of small parties, like Italy and Israel or, relatively small districts where perhaps 5-7 larger parties are able to gain seats. It can be tuned.
More than that though. It's the electoral system's job to provide representatives for the people, it isn't the electoral system's job to prevent a dictator gaining power, that's completely up to the politicians the people vote for.
You'ld think that 7 years of broken election promises by the Social Democrats under Schröder should have led to a decisive conservative victory, but it seems German voters are just as dumb as their American counterparts The difference? All of the German voters preferences are being represented. In America, maybe half. In Britain, about a third.
What else is there but anger and disillusionment? Why... Politics of course...
And this is how democracies are born. Not revolution, sanctions, "regime change" or "nation building", but a wealthy disillusioned middle class looking for more say in how they're governed.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA is a dead end.
Stick a $1 billion prize into an investment fund and hand it over to anyone who can get people on to Mars and back alive. Do same for moon base. Close NASA down. Billions saved and lots of highly motivated businesses and individuals will do their damnest to earn that cash.
Publish the date, time and ip address of every upload. No censorship.
1: The implications and consequences of the system are rarely spelled out.
2: Very few people ever think about the nature of what money actually is.
3: Even if they do, they rarely suspect that money could work any other way, with different implications and consequences.
4: The bankers and politicians are perfectly happy with this state of affairs.
I agree that the monetary system needs to be changed. The existing system is particularly bad. For every dollar of money created, at least one dollar of debt is created. So it isn't just a case of having money or not having money as was the case in the past. It is a case of having money or having debt. The increasing supply of money to the rich simply increases the debt load on the poor.
Here's a thought experiment for you.
There is no money, we're at year 0.
The government borrows 100 dollars from the Fed. There is now 100 dollars in existence and 100 dollars worth of debt. The debt has an interest rate of 5%.
One year later, the $100 has to be paid back, with the interest. $105 dollars has to be paid back...
Only $100 was ever created, there is no additional $5. The additional $5 doesn't exist, it never did. It still has to be paid back though, it can never be. This is the nature of our national debts, they can never be paid under the existing system. More than that, we all have to work 5% harder in order to try to generate that extra 5% which never did and cannot exist.
People complain that capitalism is rapacious, destroying the planet, throwing millions to the poor house. Well there's the reason, the need to service all that debt... It's built into the monetary system. It requires never ending exponential growth of the economy just to stand still.
Reform that and several fundamental problems with our societies and economies will be solved.
That's the nature of information...
I'd have thought that the shareholders would have figured that out by now. *shrug*
All peer to peer file stealing applications.
Oooh ooh. Go on mod me down. My karma is invincible. Mwhahaha!
You get what? 200 sheets from a cartridge costing £20? CPP of £0.10
Then of course, the ink dries up within a week, clogging the cartridges so you're likely to get even less than 200 sheets.
Does anyone with a brain still use Inkjets? Particularly when colour lasers only cost about £120.
One of the reasons big businesses throw money at politicians is because in government they have essentially unlimited money to spend on pet projects... It comes back tenfold. And... That money is borrowed.
Without the ability to borrow/spend unlimited amounts of cash (8,9,10 trillion is essentially infinite as far as I'm concerned, or at least, it tends to infinity), politicians wouldn't be anything like as powerful and wouldn't be such obvious and attractive targets for big business.
There you go. Corruption, built into the very basis of our monetary system from the ground up. It took me several years to come to this conclusion, I don't really expect you to accept it.
Ok, so the first question is, how do you get light down to the lower levels? Answer, you don't, not without taking light from upper levels, or you just end up using more land area to reflect light. Generating it is...expensive... So that's a non starter. The next problem is land cost. Cities are expensive, there's a reason farms are in the middle of nowhere....
Instead, what about roof gardens. Simply top buildings with greenhouses on the flat roofs. They'd only be useful for expensive produce but might be workable.
It seems I'm going to have to start boxshifting pc's and laptops with Linux preinstalled. Have you any idea how little fun that is?
There must be someone out there doing it already.
Y'know against support problems, non working applications? No?
Thought not.
And the Calendar is what? The Contacts/addressbook is what? The Todo list is what format? The notebook is what format?
This is actually a big issue. It's physically easier for me to sync my two phones manually, that is, to manually write down and type in contact details between my addressbook, my business and personal phones.
Thankfully to the developers, there is OpenSync: http://www.opensync.org/ . Pain in the arse to set up at the moment but very much going in the right direction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_government My point here is that the two kinds of represenation are simply different, not better, I disagree, either your representative represent you or they don't. In a FPTP system in general they don't, so any legislation which is passed is not representative of the wishes of the majority of the people. In the UK for example, the Labour party won a clear majority in the parliament with only 34% of the popular vote. Any legislation passed by them does not have the backing of 66% of the population. That could never be called good governance no matter how strong the government itself is.
More than that though. It's the electoral system's job to provide representatives for the people, it isn't the electoral system's job to prevent a dictator gaining power, that's completely up to the politicians the people vote for. You'ld think that 7 years of broken election promises by the Social Democrats under Schröder should have led to a decisive conservative victory, but it seems German voters are just as dumb as their American counterparts The difference? All of the German voters preferences are being represented. In America, maybe half. In Britain, about a third.
And this is how democracies are born. Not revolution, sanctions, "regime change" or "nation building", but a wealthy disillusioned middle class looking for more say in how they're governed.