The irony of you calling out another AC for baseless pronouncements is inherent in your claim that cancer can never be cured.
You might consider calling up the naked mole rats and informing them that they are impossible. They aren't alone; there are also other species that do not get cancer.
So, I propose that we continue research rather than just embracing fatalism.
Why do think they have a scale? The side who puts the most money on the scale wins! The judge could not care less what the person looks like, or even it is "person".
FYI: contrary to popular belief, rants tacitly alluding to the Citizens United ruling are *not* relevant when discussing all possible judicial decisions.
This particular case is a perfect example of a scenario where it is irrelevant.
if I was able to go back in time and kick my teenage self in the nuts 30 times to keep me from ever having children, I would do it in a heartbeat.
If you have time travel capability, I would put forth that you take a quick jaunt to the future first and obtain some Vasalgel (aka. RISUG), which is very likely to be both more effective and less painful than massive testicular trauma. That would make your trip into the past much more likely to be successful.
Oh, and grab some Vasalgel for the rest of us while you're there in the future, please...
I'm rolling my eyes because it's not worth my time to contact a manufacturer for warranty approval and send in the required documentation and dead bulb merely to get a $13 refund (more like $8 after postage for the warranty mailing). Oh, and then a 90 day wait for refund processing and then having to deal with a paper check. Finding the goddamn receipt is just additional effort for something that wasn't a worthwhile proposition in the first place.
I suppose everyone must judge what is worth their time. Also, some things are done on principle even if they don't make economic sense. This doesn't fit either of those scenarios for me, but YMMV.
The Cree bulbs have a 10 year warranty. There goes your concern about mortality.
I bought a lot of Cree bulbs (love the daylight color); however, I'm under no illusion that I will ever be able to collect on a warranty.
Seriously? Digging out a store receipt from 9 years ago, sending a bulb in for replacement via USPS at a cost of $5 for postage (by then)? I'm rolling my eyes here...
If you can genetically engineer cancer-killing T-cells, couldn't you just inject those into healthy patients (i.e. all the rest of us) as well, as a sort of immunization, just like you can get vaccination against influenza or tetanus?
Simply put, those T-cells wouldn't have the proper MHC. The body would recognize them as foreign, and the immune system would kill the injected T-cells.
That's one reason this works, but is so hard: they have to "load the weapon" by modifying a T-cell from the patient's own body. MHC is the same reason you can't just get an organ transplant from any random person... if it's not a match, the immune system will kill it.
People getting regular organ transplants take immunosuppressants, because even then the match isn't perfect. Obviously, it would be pointless to "transplant" immune cells to fight cancer, only to have to suppress... immune cells... in order to prevent the transplanted T-cells from being sniped by the immune system.
My weight touched that obese BMI of 30 but managed to get my BMI down to the low 20s by losing over 50lbs. In my case, I find that my weight problem was due to some very strange beliefs I had been keeping [...] When I wanted to lose weight, I would cut out fat and meat and go vegetarian. [...] I would lose weight but it would come back if there was a deadline or some stressful event.
This is how I interpreted your post: your "strange belief" was that vegetarianism would lead to permanent weight loss. Is that correct? This is interesting, if so.
If not, what were the "strange beliefs" you disabused yourself of in order to accomplish your goal?
Dude. I'm as libertarian as they come, but your anger is misplaced. USAA is a credit union: think "coop" vs. "typical for-profit entity".
Coops have membership requirements. So do credit unions. These can be almost anything... USAA was founded for military personnel and their families, which is why you don't qualify. Other credit unions have different requirements... I know one around here is for "residents of xyz county".
The reason USAA and many other credit unions are so awesome is that they are managed for the benefit of their members. Thus, they aren't set up to gouge you whenever possible or nickel and dime you with bullshit fees. So, the reason USAA is so great is not due to some sort of leech-like conspiracy against the taxpayers—you could probably find similarly great deals from a local credit union that you *do* qualify for. Don't have sour grapes.
I'm done with banks. Credit unions are just nicer to deal with because they aren't vociferously seeking profit.
No, they don't—we now live in a post-semantic era.
I found out the other day that "figuratively" is now an accepted definition for "literally". Post-semantic... how else can one describe a situation where $TERM == NOT $TERM? Furthermore, "figuratively" does not currently mean "literally", so the symmetry of equality is broken. This is just madness. You maniacs! You blew semantics up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
I need a link to this info. Not that I don't trust you. Just that I trust me.
Cute. You do realize that a cursory google search would have satisfied your curiosity more quickly than posting a semi-sarcastic "citation needed" reply, right?
Since you were lazy, I won't bother hyperlinking you to one of the plethora of confirmations. You can copy/paste the url for yourself: "http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8320/what-files-do-i-need-for-backing-up-my-wallet"
If that doesn't satisfy you, please just go ahead and type "bitcoin wallet backup" into google and decide for yourself whether you will believe one of the multitudinous links that describe in detail processes by which you can securely back up a bitcoin wallet data file.
BTW, you trust your own ignorance? Do you also believe movie plots where someone steals data on a disk and then the rest of the movie is spent fighting over it as if no one could conceive of making a copy of digital data?
And finally, yes, the guy was a moron for not having multiple backups of his wallet. Especially due to the value involved and the trivial size of the wallet file (measured in KB).
I would be quite out of luck if I had my retirement funds in bitcoin on one of those PATA drives
You do realize that, unlike cash, you can have as many copies of a bitcoin wallet as you desire, right? Your arguments along this line are specious, because you can trivially keep encrypted copies of your wallet on dropbox, burned on a cd, a USB stick, multiple hard drives, in GMail drafts, and so on.
I mean, your argument is equivalent to arguing against online banking because you might misplace the post-it note on which you wrote your password and therefore you might be locked out. Personally, to hedge against that kind of risk, I keep multiple copies of all that information in encrypted format, stored in multiple locations. I believe I could safely do the same thing with a bitcoin wallet data file.
Not that I would advocate having your retirement assets in bitcoin, if solely due to the volatility. I just wanted to set the record straight about this aspect of the technology.
You aren't thinking meta enough. What we "charge" our allies is effectively the same thing that happens to welfare recipients: they become dependent upon us, and therefore we can dictate their actions.
Our allies don't have to "waste" money on defense, we will take care of that for them. Their concomitant lack of militart might also means our allies don't have the power to effect (or significantly affect) international policy like we do.
This really isn't all that surprising. To reinforce this regime, we outspend on defense by an order of magnitude more than any of our allies, just to ensure they are completely demoralized should they have any inclination of getting uppity and trying to build up enough martial power to be able to throw their weight around.
Hell, the UK couldn't even mount an air campaign against Gaddafi without our logistical support, and the man wasn't even fighting back. Imagine what would happen if we didn't want the UK to interfere in Libya?
To top it all off we inject the hegemony of the petrodollar, thereby propping up our currency in the international realm and ensuring it becomes the de facto reserve currency of the world.
We're really quite adept at ruling the world. *That* is what we get, and *that* is why we don't charge them in currency—we just take their souls instead.
Whatever your complaints about your job, at least debugging your code doesn't involve stepping through assembly on a pencil and paper virtual machine.
That was how I wrote my first published game back in the 80's. I have no complaints.
Do you think the pencil and paper mechanics made any qualitative difference, good or bad, to the overall learning process?
Don't bother waiting for a response. It's only been about thirty years, so I imagine he won't be simulating the first input interrupt for another ten years or so.
Damn, I bet he *hates* when people write spinlocks. Must be infuriating...
Many of Jesus' contemporaries believed the second coming would be within their lifetimes.
To be fair, that's the most direct interpretation of this passage. Fundies don't like that one very much, because you have to go through gyrations to explain it away.
Legends like the Wandering Jew don't play well in modern churches, and only Elijah and Enoch (both OT) are cited as having been taken directly to heaven without dying (so that's out too).
What you describe can happen if the headers in the email appear to be forged. *That* can happen if your email is being routed strangely.
Here's one example: my organization uses hosted gmail for our domain email. However, our *institution* sold out to Microsoft. We were allowed to continue to use our hosted gmail. "Whew, dodged that bullet!", I thought, until email from other gmail users started being marked as "Person X may not have sent this email", and my Amazon.com order/shipping notifications started being sent to the spam folder.
What happened? Our institutional overlords required that our email be routed through MS' outlook.com servers. Thus all our inbound email appeared to have forged headers. GMail legitimately ignored my whitelist filter rules when it appeared that the field values for "from:", etc, were forged.
This may not reflect your situation, but I'm sure there are other weird scenarios where email to/from gmail can appear to be forged.
I don't think the reporter is blameless here. She had a duty of care to protect her sources and she was putatively negligent. If you change the story to "Reporter Loses Unencrypted Laptop Containing Names and Facts About Confidential Informants", then how does it sound?
The alternate scenario could have just as easily happened.
its your SOHO, so shun partners and service providers that cant step into the 21st century with you.
Excellent plan, but please tell me how best to shun the government and fire my customers. These are the entities that demand the overwhelming preponderance of my SOHO printing.
And no, I'm not driving to a Kinko's every time I have to print out a copy of some goddamn government form or print an address label for a fucking paper return I cannot submit electronically.
Seriously, a Brother BW duplex laser is like $300. Hell, turn it off when you aren't using it. Remember, you are being billed for energy, not power. If your business is being dragged down by 50 cents of energy per month for rare printing then perhaps you should reconsider whether your business is tenable.
My office hasn't drowned in a sea of paper merely because I have a printer. Instead, I don't have to gnash my teeth every time I get some goddamn "print and return" request from someone. My convenience is worth more than any dubious potential savings I might get by spending my time and gasoline to use a Kinko's instead of a cheap printer in my office.
I'm worried that my campfire is going to burn down all the forests and destroy the atmosphere.
Pshah! What a silly thing to be worried about.
I'm worried that my five gallon plastic bucket will drain the oceans by bailing them out, and in the process drown all the land. And then people will fight over handfuls of the only remaining dirt in the world, and captains of the remaining supertankers will become warlords, and some people will evolve gills within a hundred years or so.
I can barely sleep at night due to this imminent threat. I would bury the bucket at Yucca Mountain, but I'm worried that it isn't geologically stable for the time frames we need.
Sorry, you're just deluded about Krugman: "That’s not to say that high debt can’t cause problems — it certainly can. But these are problems of distribution and incentives, not the burden of debt as is commonly understood. And as Dean says, talking about leaving a burden to our children is especially nonsensical; what we are leaving behind is promises that some of our children will pay money to other children, which is a very different kettle of fish."
He's referring to defaulting, or at the very least, disingenuous repayment terms of government debt. If you need further clarification, then look to other guy who Krugman quoted/cheered in the article: "As a country we cannot impose huge debt burdens on our children. It is impossible, at least if we are referring to government debt. The reason is simple: at one point we will all be dead."
Either the debt burden is real, or it is arbitrary/optional by way of dishonest (non)repayment.
Well, per the Keynesian mouthpiece Krugman's comments in the NYT, our national debt never is and never will be an issue because the next generation can choose not to pay it back.
There are all sorts of ways they can technically avoid default while being dishonest. For example, they could pay back the debt precisely as they promised while simultaneously enacting a 100% tax rate on all federal debt instruments. They could also massively inflate the currency, so they pay you back with worthless scrip. They could engage in forced loans of all large savings accounts (this tactic invented in Revolutionary France in the late 18th century).
The point being that the crash is coming; it's inevitable at this point. Your stored wealth is going to be boiled away by a malfeasant federal government.
Absolutely true: fundamentalist Christianity is tied to sola scriptura.
Basically, there is no point arguing with a fundamentalist because all their responses/positions will come back to a Biblical citation or a statement of faith. Ultimately, their cite on the inerrancy of the Bible is self-referential. It's an incredibly strong, interlocked system & philosophy... unless you knock a hole in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible.
For anyone not well versed in fundamentalist Christianity, what parent and I refer to works something like this. Poke a single hole in the fundamentalist's belief in *any* aspect of the Bible, and they are likely to leave Christianity altogether—because the entire self-referential construct falls apart. Disprove some aspect of Genesis, then the Bible isn't absolutely inerrant, then the entire New Testament is in question, the virgin birth, the deity of Jesus, the remission of sin, the existence of sin that needs redemption at all, well... you get the picture.
It's really hard to argue with a fundie, because ultimately their beliefs are non-falsifiable. There is always the legitimate out of "God made it that way, for reasons we don't understand."
Do you honestly think that anyone advocating free enterprise supports these rent-seeking middlemen?
I think you will find that we are against tariffs *and* these fucking car dealers/real estate agents/funeral home directors/alcohol distributors/whoever else gets their goddamn business model made mandatory by the government. I mean, coercing someone to use your services by force of law is the antithesis of free enterprise.
So, were you deliberately trying to use a strawman fallacy to mischaracterize free enterprise supporters, or was your comment intended to be a satirical, "scummy politicians who enable crony capitalism are scum" implication? The latter I can certainly agree with.
You helped prove my point. The whole issue of unnecessary rent seeking middle men like car dealerships, and how they get their cozy little businesses locked in by law, passes you by without comment. Meanwhile, a nickel tariff on socks merits a treatise on the wonders of "free trade".
Ah, okay, then it's probably strawman. To illustrate your fallacy, I refer you to the cliched joke:
Hitler walks up to Stalin and says, "I will kill six million Jews and one clown!" Stalin says, "Why are you going to kill one clown?" Hitler turns to Himmler and says, "See? I told you no one cares about the Jews!"
You infer too much from the absence of specific commentary. I mean, god damn, no one likes middle men. Hm, except if they call themselves "union", then apparently those are good & righteous according to certain political bents.
Slashdot Mirror
The irony of you calling out another AC for baseless pronouncements is inherent in your claim that cancer can never be cured.
You might consider calling up the naked mole rats and informing them that they are impossible. They aren't alone; there are also other species that do not get cancer.
So, I propose that we continue research rather than just embracing fatalism.
Hey, justice is blind!
Why do think they have a scale? The side who puts the most money on the scale wins! The judge could not care less what the person looks like, or even it is "person".
FYI: contrary to popular belief, rants tacitly alluding to the Citizens United ruling are *not* relevant when discussing all possible judicial decisions.
This particular case is a perfect example of a scenario where it is irrelevant.
Face it, God hates fags.
Skin cancer is prove that God hates Scandinavians.
Current society is prove that God hates women.
Diabetes is prove that God hates chocolate.
Your comment is prove that God hates people.
I would join your insightful religion. God hates us all and is trying to damn us with ironic punishments!
if I was able to go back in time and kick my teenage self in the nuts 30 times to keep me from ever having children, I would do it in a heartbeat.
If you have time travel capability, I would put forth that you take a quick jaunt to the future first and obtain some Vasalgel (aka. RISUG), which is very likely to be both more effective and less painful than massive testicular trauma. That would make your trip into the past much more likely to be successful.
Oh, and grab some Vasalgel for the rest of us while you're there in the future, please...
I'm rolling my eyes because it's not worth my time to contact a manufacturer for warranty approval and send in the required documentation and dead bulb merely to get a $13 refund (more like $8 after postage for the warranty mailing). Oh, and then a 90 day wait for refund processing and then having to deal with a paper check. Finding the goddamn receipt is just additional effort for something that wasn't a worthwhile proposition in the first place.
I suppose everyone must judge what is worth their time. Also, some things are done on principle even if they don't make economic sense. This doesn't fit either of those scenarios for me, but YMMV.
The Cree bulbs have a 10 year warranty. There goes your concern about mortality.
I bought a lot of Cree bulbs (love the daylight color); however, I'm under no illusion that I will ever be able to collect on a warranty.
Seriously? Digging out a store receipt from 9 years ago, sending a bulb in for replacement via USPS at a cost of $5 for postage (by then)? I'm rolling my eyes here...
Mac McClelland wrote a great (if occasionally snide) piece last year on what it's like to work at an Amazon pick-warehouse. Definitely worth a read:
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
It's ironic that this Mother Jones article's ads are served by Amazon AWS. Actually, I will go so far as to say it is hypocritical.
If you can genetically engineer cancer-killing T-cells, couldn't you just inject those into healthy patients (i.e. all the rest of us) as well, as a sort of immunization, just like you can get vaccination against influenza or tetanus?
Simply put, those T-cells wouldn't have the proper MHC. The body would recognize them as foreign, and the immune system would kill the injected T-cells.
That's one reason this works, but is so hard: they have to "load the weapon" by modifying a T-cell from the patient's own body. MHC is the same reason you can't just get an organ transplant from any random person... if it's not a match, the immune system will kill it.
People getting regular organ transplants take immunosuppressants, because even then the match isn't perfect. Obviously, it would be pointless to "transplant" immune cells to fight cancer, only to have to suppress... immune cells... in order to prevent the transplanted T-cells from being sniped by the immune system.
My weight touched that obese BMI of 30 but managed to get my BMI down to the low 20s by losing over 50lbs. In my case, I find that my weight problem was due to some very strange beliefs I had been keeping [...] When I wanted to lose weight, I would cut out fat and meat and go vegetarian. [...] I would lose weight but it would come back if there was a deadline or some stressful event.
This is how I interpreted your post: your "strange belief" was that vegetarianism would lead to permanent weight loss. Is that correct? This is interesting, if so.
If not, what were the "strange beliefs" you disabused yourself of in order to accomplish your goal?
Dude. I'm as libertarian as they come, but your anger is misplaced. USAA is a credit union: think "coop" vs. "typical for-profit entity".
Coops have membership requirements. So do credit unions. These can be almost anything... USAA was founded for military personnel and their families, which is why you don't qualify. Other credit unions have different requirements... I know one around here is for "residents of xyz county".
The reason USAA and many other credit unions are so awesome is that they are managed for the benefit of their members. Thus, they aren't set up to gouge you whenever possible or nickel and dime you with bullshit fees. So, the reason USAA is so great is not due to some sort of leech-like conspiracy against the taxpayers—you could probably find similarly great deals from a local credit union that you *do* qualify for. Don't have sour grapes.
I'm done with banks. Credit unions are just nicer to deal with because they aren't vociferously seeking profit.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
Well, you save approximately 8750 seconds (approximately 2.5 hours) over 500 miles if you are going 95 mph instead of 65 mph.
So, I guess I really *do* need to pass that guy. Thanks for prompting me to do the math!
Words! They mean things!
No, they don't—we now live in a post-semantic era.
I found out the other day that "figuratively" is now an accepted definition for "literally". Post-semantic... how else can one describe a situation where $TERM == NOT $TERM? Furthermore, "figuratively" does not currently mean "literally", so the symmetry of equality is broken. This is just madness.
You maniacs! You blew semantics up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
I need a link to this info. Not that I don't trust you. Just that I trust me.
Cute. You do realize that a cursory google search would have satisfied your curiosity more quickly than posting a semi-sarcastic "citation needed" reply, right?
Since you were lazy, I won't bother hyperlinking you to one of the plethora of confirmations. You can copy/paste the url for yourself:
"http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8320/what-files-do-i-need-for-backing-up-my-wallet"
If that doesn't satisfy you, please just go ahead and type "bitcoin wallet backup" into google and decide for yourself whether you will believe one of the multitudinous links that describe in detail processes by which you can securely back up a bitcoin wallet data file.
BTW, you trust your own ignorance? Do you also believe movie plots where someone steals data on a disk and then the rest of the movie is spent fighting over it as if no one could conceive of making a copy of digital data?
And finally, yes, the guy was a moron for not having multiple backups of his wallet. Especially due to the value involved and the trivial size of the wallet file (measured in KB).
Cheers!
I would be quite out of luck if I had my retirement funds in bitcoin on one of those PATA drives
You do realize that, unlike cash, you can have as many copies of a bitcoin wallet as you desire, right? Your arguments along this line are specious, because you can trivially keep encrypted copies of your wallet on dropbox, burned on a cd, a USB stick, multiple hard drives, in GMail drafts, and so on.
I mean, your argument is equivalent to arguing against online banking because you might misplace the post-it note on which you wrote your password and therefore you might be locked out. Personally, to hedge against that kind of risk, I keep multiple copies of all that information in encrypted format, stored in multiple locations. I believe I could safely do the same thing with a bitcoin wallet data file.
Not that I would advocate having your retirement assets in bitcoin, if solely due to the volatility. I just wanted to set the record straight about this aspect of the technology.
You aren't thinking meta enough. What we "charge" our allies is effectively the same thing that happens to welfare recipients: they become dependent upon us, and therefore we can dictate their actions.
Our allies don't have to "waste" money on defense, we will take care of that for them. Their concomitant lack of militart might also means our allies don't have the power to effect (or significantly affect) international policy like we do.
This really isn't all that surprising. To reinforce this regime, we outspend on defense by an order of magnitude more than any of our allies, just to ensure they are completely demoralized should they have any inclination of getting uppity and trying to build up enough martial power to be able to throw their weight around.
Hell, the UK couldn't even mount an air campaign against Gaddafi without our logistical support, and the man wasn't even fighting back. Imagine what would happen if we didn't want the UK to interfere in Libya?
To top it all off we inject the hegemony of the petrodollar, thereby propping up our currency in the international realm and ensuring it becomes the de facto reserve currency of the world.
We're really quite adept at ruling the world. *That* is what we get, and *that* is why we don't charge them in currency—we just take their souls instead.
Whatever your complaints about your job, at least debugging your code doesn't involve stepping through assembly on a pencil and paper virtual machine.
That was how I wrote my first published game back in the 80's. I have no complaints.
Do you think the pencil and paper mechanics made any qualitative difference, good or bad, to the overall learning process?
Don't bother waiting for a response. It's only been about thirty years, so I imagine he won't be simulating the first input interrupt for another ten years or so.
Damn, I bet he *hates* when people write spinlocks. Must be infuriating...
Many of Jesus' contemporaries believed the second coming would be within their lifetimes.
To be fair, that's the most direct interpretation of this passage. Fundies don't like that one very much, because you have to go through gyrations to explain it away.
Legends like the Wandering Jew don't play well in modern churches, and only Elijah and Enoch (both OT) are cited as having been taken directly to heaven without dying (so that's out too).
What you describe can happen if the headers in the email appear to be forged. *That* can happen if your email is being routed strangely.
Here's one example: my organization uses hosted gmail for our domain email. However, our *institution* sold out to Microsoft. We were allowed to continue to use our hosted gmail. "Whew, dodged that bullet!", I thought, until email from other gmail users started being marked as "Person X may not have sent this email", and my Amazon.com order/shipping notifications started being sent to the spam folder.
What happened? Our institutional overlords required that our email be routed through MS' outlook.com servers. Thus all our inbound email appeared to have forged headers. GMail legitimately ignored my whitelist filter rules when it appeared that the field values for "from:", etc, were forged.
This may not reflect your situation, but I'm sure there are other weird scenarios where email to/from gmail can appear to be forged.
I don't think the reporter is blameless here. She had a duty of care to protect her sources and she was putatively negligent. If you change the story to "Reporter Loses Unencrypted Laptop Containing Names and Facts About Confidential Informants", then how does it sound?
The alternate scenario could have just as easily happened.
She was negligent.
its your SOHO, so shun partners and service providers that cant step into the 21st century with you.
Excellent plan, but please tell me how best to shun the government and fire my customers. These are the entities that demand the overwhelming preponderance of my SOHO printing.
And no, I'm not driving to a Kinko's every time I have to print out a copy of some goddamn government form or print an address label for a fucking paper return I cannot submit electronically.
Seriously, a Brother BW duplex laser is like $300. Hell, turn it off when you aren't using it. Remember, you are being billed for energy, not power. If your business is being dragged down by 50 cents of energy per month for rare printing then perhaps you should reconsider whether your business is tenable.
My office hasn't drowned in a sea of paper merely because I have a printer. Instead, I don't have to gnash my teeth every time I get some goddamn "print and return" request from someone. My convenience is worth more than any dubious potential savings I might get by spending my time and gasoline to use a Kinko's instead of a cheap printer in my office.
I'm worried that my campfire is going to burn down all the forests and destroy the atmosphere.
Pshah! What a silly thing to be worried about.
I'm worried that my five gallon plastic bucket will drain the oceans by bailing them out, and in the process drown all the land. And then people will fight over handfuls of the only remaining dirt in the world, and captains of the remaining supertankers will become warlords, and some people will evolve gills within a hundred years or so.
I can barely sleep at night due to this imminent threat. I would bury the bucket at Yucca Mountain, but I'm worried that it isn't geologically stable for the time frames we need.
Sorry, you're just deluded about Krugman:
"That’s not to say that high debt can’t cause problems — it certainly can. But these are problems of distribution and incentives, not the burden of debt as is commonly understood. And as Dean says, talking about leaving a burden to our children is especially nonsensical; what we are leaving behind is promises that some of our children will pay money to other children, which is a very different kettle of fish."
He's referring to defaulting, or at the very least, disingenuous repayment terms of government debt. If you need further clarification, then look to other guy who Krugman quoted/cheered in the article:
"As a country we cannot impose huge debt burdens on our children. It is impossible, at least if we are referring to government debt. The reason is simple: at one point we will all be dead."
Either the debt burden is real, or it is arbitrary/optional by way of dishonest (non)repayment.
Well, per the Keynesian mouthpiece Krugman's comments in the NYT, our national debt never is and never will be an issue because the next generation can choose not to pay it back.
There are all sorts of ways they can technically avoid default while being dishonest. For example, they could pay back the debt precisely as they promised while simultaneously enacting a 100% tax rate on all federal debt instruments. They could also massively inflate the currency, so they pay you back with worthless scrip. They could engage in forced loans of all large savings accounts (this tactic invented in Revolutionary France in the late 18th century).
The point being that the crash is coming; it's inevitable at this point. Your stored wealth is going to be boiled away by a malfeasant federal government.
Absolutely true: fundamentalist Christianity is tied to sola scriptura.
Basically, there is no point arguing with a fundamentalist because all their responses/positions will come back to a Biblical citation or a statement of faith. Ultimately, their cite on the inerrancy of the Bible is self-referential. It's an incredibly strong, interlocked system & philosophy... unless you knock a hole in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible.
For anyone not well versed in fundamentalist Christianity, what parent and I refer to works something like this. Poke a single hole in the fundamentalist's belief in *any* aspect of the Bible, and they are likely to leave Christianity altogether—because the entire self-referential construct falls apart. Disprove some aspect of Genesis, then the Bible isn't absolutely inerrant, then the entire New Testament is in question, the virgin birth, the deity of Jesus, the remission of sin, the existence of sin that needs redemption at all, well... you get the picture.
It's really hard to argue with a fundie, because ultimately their beliefs are non-falsifiable. There is always the legitimate out of "God made it that way, for reasons we don't understand."
Do you honestly think that anyone advocating free enterprise supports these rent-seeking middlemen?
I think you will find that we are against tariffs *and* these fucking car dealers/real estate agents/funeral home directors/alcohol distributors/whoever else gets their goddamn business model made mandatory by the government. I mean, coercing someone to use your services by force of law is the antithesis of free enterprise.
So, were you deliberately trying to use a strawman fallacy to mischaracterize free enterprise supporters, or was your comment intended to be a satirical, "scummy politicians who enable crony capitalism are scum" implication? The latter I can certainly agree with.
You helped prove my point. The whole issue of unnecessary rent seeking middle men like car dealerships, and how they get their cozy little businesses locked in by law, passes you by without comment. Meanwhile, a nickel tariff on socks merits a treatise on the wonders of "free trade".
Ah, okay, then it's probably strawman. To illustrate your fallacy, I refer you to the cliched joke:
Hitler walks up to Stalin and says, "I will kill six million Jews and one clown!"
Stalin says, "Why are you going to kill one clown?"
Hitler turns to Himmler and says, "See? I told you no one cares about the Jews!"
You infer too much from the absence of specific commentary. I mean, god damn, no one likes middle men. Hm, except if they call themselves "union", then apparently those are good & righteous according to certain political bents.