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User: toadlife

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Comments · 2,343

  1. Re:Disgraced Republican Candidate for Governor on HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs · · Score: 2

    Actually our current fiscal mess can be traced to four main factors, two of which are the result of conservative ideology, not liberal ideology.

    1) Our referendum system: The people routinely vote via referendum for things that cost money, but refuse to vote for the taxes to pay for those things.

    2) Proposition 13: basically prevents lawmakers from paying for the things that people vote for using referendums

    3) "Three-Strikes" law: Our prison system is filled with people doing life sentences for things like stealing a slice of pizza, or getting in a bar fight and breaking someone's nose.

    4) Energy deregulation by Pete Wilson in the 90s. It cost CA $40 billion and we've essentially never recovered from it. See the Enron documentary "The Smartest People in the Room".

  2. Re:Disgraced Republican Candidate for Governor on HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My favorite part of that campaign was when Whitman went on and on about how '30 years ago everything was great in California', forgetting that 30 years ago was during the tail-end of her opponent's first two terms as CA governor.

  3. Re:WTF on From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader · · Score: 1

    Uggh. Mary Landrieu.

  4. Re:WTF on From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader · · Score: 1

    Nothing more to add, (agree to disagree) but just FYI...

    I got some of my numbers from here. You can make your own charts on the fly. Really cool.

  5. Re:Why is it news on From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader · · Score: 1

    a well thought out radical solution.

    Not necessary.

    Medicare for all. Leave the existing private insurers to cover the remaining 20%.

    Yes, that's a bit oversimplified, but given we already have the core infrastructure for a single payer system in place, it would be insane not to use it.

  6. Re:WTF on From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader · · Score: 1

    I'm not talking about spending, not tax burden as percentage of GDP.

    You said money going to the government. If you were talking about spending, you should have said so.

    Our spending compared to GDP is higher right now than it was in recent history because of three factors:
    1) Expansion of Medcare (part D)
    2) Two (+) Unfunded Wars
    3) Economic contraction from the great recession

    Through almost all of the eighties, spending as a percentage of GDP was above 35%, which is not significantly higher than it is now. In the seventies, it was in the low to mid thirties and our debt as a percentage of GDP was going down. IN terms of debt, the big difference between the seventies and eighties, was that revenues were slashed.

    (although the claim that it is "historically low" and that ridiculous chart are laughable, as they will be historically high as soon as the Bush tax cuts expire),

    The claim and that chart represent facts. Just because you don't like the facts doesn't mean you get to discount them in your argument. As for the burden being historically high, it needs to be historically high in order to pay for our government and pay down out debts.

    We live in a time when people seem to think that "distribution of wealth" is something that governments are suddenly capable of doing when history has REPEATEDLY shown otherwise

    Absolutely nonsense. One of government core function is to redistribute wealth. The middle class of the U.S. was entirely built upon the forced redistribution of wealth by the government through highly progressive tax rates and labor friendly laws.

  7. Re:WTF on From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader · · Score: 2

    and 40% of our GDP is going to the government.

    Which government are you talking about? Total federal taxes as a percentage of GDP were around 14.9% between 2009-2010. If you add in local and state the average goes up to around 23%. This is historically low.

    Federal taxes alone averaged 18.5% of GDP during the Reagan administration.

    This is the problem I have with the majority Tea Partiers. They operate under a different set of facts which invariably have no basis in reality.

  8. Re:WTF on From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader · · Score: 2

    Congressmen got huge kick-backs for their home state if they changed to supporting the bill.

    Care to name one? The famous kickback to the one from Nebraska (Nelson I think?) was removed in the final version of the bill that passed.

  9. Re:then why didn't they write it on Judge to Oracle: A High Schooler Could Write rangeCheck · · Score: 1

    The issue of wheel reinvention comes to mind.

  10. Re:Wrong on Ron Paul Effectively Ending Presidential Campaign · · Score: 1

    Another anti-Keynesian arguing against a made-up version of Keynesian economics.

    First, spending was not in any way out of control when Reagan entered office. The debt as a percentage of GDP went down while Carter was in office. Wage and price controls implemented by Nixon caused stagflation.

    Second, I'm referring to the huge deficit spending that continued to go on after stagflation was defeated by Volcker's polices. Keynesian economic theory requires that the government reduce debt by raising taxes and/or cutting spending during times of economic expansion. Reagan ushered in an era of perpetual deficit spending that only had a small break after George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both raised taxes and cut spending in the early 90s.

  11. Re:Wrong on Ron Paul Effectively Ending Presidential Campaign · · Score: 2

    Keynesian economics was working perfectly for the United States until Reagan's puppet-masters entered office and effectively put an end to the practice of it.

  12. Re:No more hours of downtime on Microsoft Redesigns chkdsk For Windows 8, Improves NTFS Health Model · · Score: 1

    NTFS has been a journaled file system since the release of Windows 2000 in late 1999, which was before the first journaled filesystem support was merged into the Linux kernel.

  13. Re:No more hours of downtime on Microsoft Redesigns chkdsk For Windows 8, Improves NTFS Health Model · · Score: 2

    Google released a study that showed SMART to be almost useless.

    It wasn't a big surprise to me, as among the hundreds of drive failures I've dealt with in my 13 years experience supporting desktops and laptops, a SMART alert was involved only once or twice.

  14. Re:does it surprise you? on Universities Hold Transcripts Hostage Over Loans · · Score: 1

    Yale and Harvard, to take two, are both 'non-profit' and yet they are arguably extremely rich.

    True they are rich, but they use that wealth to help students instead of shareholders. Because of extreme cuts to education funding, non-profits like Harvard and Yale are now cheaper than some California public schools for many people.

  15. Re:does it surprise you? on Universities Hold Transcripts Hostage Over Loans · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd guess that those other places don't allow for-profit institutions to access government subsidies.

  16. Re:Typical Apple on Apple Security Blunder Exposes Lion Login Passwords In Clear Text · · Score: 1

    Lighten up Shirley. It was meant as a joke.

  17. Typical Apple on Apple Security Blunder Exposes Lion Login Passwords In Clear Text · · Score: 5, Funny

    Copying features from Microsoft products again.

  18. Re:An easy fix. on Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage · · Score: 2

    While those are some good hits and the manliness of those gents cannot be questioned, the hits seen in the higher levels of American football are much nastier because of the tendency for players to lead with their heads. The padding and in particular, the helmet, gives the players a false sense of security and leads them to literally "sacrifice their bodies" while making hits.

    Some fun examples:

    Helmet to helmet contact: (the guy that got the worst of this hit was out multiple games with a concussion)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGvHFeI6Xdo

    Even non helmet-to-helmet ("clean") hits can have devastating results. This kid was knocked out cold and was out for one or two games:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9ZRBp4_WR4

  19. Re:does it finally support photoshop (PSD) layers? on Gimp 2.8 Finally Released · · Score: 1

    Former coworker of mine who does web and graphic design for a living just commented on this exact subject in regards to GIMP a few weeks ago. He is a die-hard open source advocate, but he cannot use GIMP due to it's lack of support for PSD layers.

  20. Re:Two basic steps on Microsoft Says Two Basic Security Steps Might Have Stopped Conficker · · Score: 1

    lol.

    "Show me the examples! And no, the examples that I can think of don't count!!"

  21. Re:Two basic steps on Microsoft Says Two Basic Security Steps Might Have Stopped Conficker · · Score: 4, Informative

    Microsoft gets to say, "hey we patched that before it was a problem". That's an unusual position for them to be in.

    It's actually not an unusual position for them to be in at all. The vast majority of major Windows worms exploited vulnerabilities that had long been patched.

  22. Re:My wife has had the vaccination at least... on In Calif. Study, Most Kids With Whooping Cough Were Fully Vaccinated · · Score: 1

    I understand why the vaccinations are needed. We also made sure to get everyone flu shots every time she was pregnant. I just noting that the pertussis vaccination seems to be ineffective on my wife.

    I wonder if the increased number of children not being vaccinated is leading to a breakdown in the herd immunity that protects children for whom the vaccination doesn't work.

  23. My wife has had the vaccination at least... on In Calif. Study, Most Kids With Whooping Cough Were Fully Vaccinated · · Score: 1

    ...five times. Aside from having it when she was a child, during every one of her four pregnancies a test that suggested she still needed the vaccination and she was given it again.

    Surely the fifth time was the charm.

  24. Re:What software? on Man Builds 737 Simulator In a Garage · · Score: 1

    I haven't used a fight sim since X-Plane 5.4. At the time I was much more impressed with X-Plane than Flight Simulator despite X-Plane being behind in the eye candy department.

    I figured since X-Plane is supposedly built to be more of a simulator than a game it would be best for a simulator, but then I'm not really a flight sim expert.

  25. Re:What software? on Man Builds 737 Simulator In a Garage · · Score: 2

    Oops. Should have put the link. Here is his old site from 2004

    http://www.737simguy.com/OldSite/intro.htm