Maybe I've been reading too much politics news lately, but I'm just waiting for Microsoft to come out with a statement that people capable of evaluating Perl, PHP, and Python are biased in favor LAMP solutions.
Technically usury, the lending of money at interest, is forbidden under Islam, and so is doing receiving a loan at interest. This is called Riba in Islam and is to be avoided as Haram. Using a traditional credit card is against Islam because of this.
That said, al Qaeda terrorists adhere to the tradition of the Takfiris, rejectionist Muslims who believe that it's okay to kill other less pious Muslims and to live in sin to blend in with a populace to achieve their goals. This is why the 9/11 terrorists and the Madrid bombers looked like perfectly normal Westernized immigrants; standing out would prevent them from striking a blow to their enemies.
Given that conflict of interests, I really just can't predict one way or another whether a terrorist would have a credit card and whether or not they'd pay it down except for the purposes of avoiding bad (or no) credit, which can close doors that they need to be open.
That's like saying you shouldn't ever have to worry about firearm safety or safety on the road.
Whenever you use a powerful and dangerous tool, you should always use caution, and you should always be even more concerned when other people wield that same tool for their own interests in your presence. There is no larger and more dangerous tool than the government. Always be wary of men with power; they are still men after all.
Tarrifs are considered bad for global trade and peace because they tend to escalate and reinforce divides between nations. Corporate income taxes are absolutely necessary to prevent tax shelters. Otherwise, you could form a corporation which takes all your income and pays all your expenses.
The only reason the corporate tax code is complicated is because they've lobbied to make it so to allow them to get out of paying taxes. We need a tax code reset to eliminate loopholes, but it'll never happen.
It gets weirder than that. Hollywood exploits tax loopholes around the word to bring down the upfront investment in a movie to a fraction of its total costs. The linked article claims that even though Tomb Raider had a budget of $94 million that the studios only had to put up $7 million for it. Fortunately, the German government recently closed this same tax loophole that has fueled Uwe Boll's abysmal career.
Is it just me, or do you get the impression that the mob has easier to follow bookkeeping than a lot of corporate America today?
It's not a "ludacrious"[sic] statement. A simple Google search gives you leads to find the Bell System Memorial site which has a page on the very subject. There you can read fliers advertising the changes to allow you to buy your phone and see the old rates of between $1.00-3.25 per phone.
Next time, take the word of someone who is old enough to have actually been there. I'm also barely old enough to remember rented phones and the Bell System Property tag on them. My grandmother kept hers for years.
I see no problem with this. If you want to send out mass mailings, you pay for it. Someone has to.
I belong to a public mailing list right now (and have belonged to others before). The lists are free, are typically over 3/4 lurkers and 1/4 active posters, and never have more than 300 people subscribed to them at a time. I've corresponded with at least two AOL users from these lists, and both were really cool people who have just been using AOL since time immemorial.
Under this scheme we have two choices: 1) Ignore it and risk these users losing their messages as spam (which is the most likely choice). 2) Cut off all our AOL users. 3) Make someone eat the stick to pay for them to get messages.
It's not a thing that we should be "made to pay for." We're already paying our mail providers (either directly or through ad views), and we're doing no harm, but in your view we're equivalent to spammers. Just because you use the internet differently doesn't mean that everyone else who does things differently should be screwed.
Magnesium sulfate and potassium chloride only have those effects in extremely large doses. "Salt" when used by itself in a food label pretty much always means sodium chloride.
These salts are added to the purified water to prevent it from tasting bad and from doing damage to your body like distilled water will. You need a salt balance to prevent omosis from slurping up the water in your body into your cells until they rupture. Drinking too pure water is unhealthy and has all kinds of side effects. This is why sports drinks have lots of electrolytes in them to counter all the salt lost from sweating.
Also, nothing in the article you linked said anything about benzene (it was bromate that was the problem), and the article said that all the bottles were pulled. Did you even read your link or just paste the first thing in that Google turned up?
It's just like all other things, we'll play it off no matter what the study says. But I do have this one comment: don't drink diet soda folks, I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone.
Does she still drink any caffenated in varying does? I used to get migranes due to caffeine withdrawal. No more irregular doses of caffeine; no more problem.
I'm suspicious of the aspartame controversy. I haven't seen a single credible source back the theory, but there are sure a lot of people who want to sell you books on diet, vitamins, and herbs that love to rail against it. It has poor science written all over it.
It's non-ionizing radiation.... people have been putting these things by their heads for hours on a daily basis... show me one potential case of burn via cell signal.
Alternating magnetic fields aren't generally considered ionizing radiation either, but rat studies have shown that they can cause an iron-mediated peroxide reaction that causes DNA strand breakage in rat neurons.
Just because radio waves cannot directly break carbon bonds like UV radiation and higher doesn't necessarily mean that they're harmless. There's an entire field of study in how microwaves catalyze and otherwise alter chemical reactions. A lack of gross physical effects like burns does not mean that radio waves cannot be disturbing cellular chemistry in signficantly more subtle ways.
Testing arm skin isn't all that practical, who keeps a cell phone there?
Testing arm skin is very practical. The fact that no one uses a cell phone there doesn't mean that it's harder to extract tissue from the arm than the regular places or that it's harder to create a device to generate the radiation that doesn't burden the test subjects for an hour; all you do is strap an active cell phone on the arm.
The arm and the back are among the most popular places for taking tissue samples due to ease of access and lack of burden to the subject. Biologically speaking, skin on the arm and skin on the waist, hip, palm, or face are all equivalent for purposes of this experiment.
So, out of curiosity, when are you moving to Somalia to enjoy the benefits of a free market society since it's so much better than our non-free market society?
I like this idea; it would practically eliminate earmarks and secret tax loopholes. I hope it's practical without giving the executive branch an excessive amount of power to interpret the law (such as how to spend the budget and which programs to axe at will).
Don't even bother. The guy has mises.org as his webpage. The Ludwig Von Mises Institute is a free market fundmentalist think tank. They honestly think that the situation in Somalia is a good thing for the people. You honestly can't reach these people with common sense; they've moved beyond.
Go read through the site sometime; it's really a scary reality-distortion field they've got going there.
This will not last forever, and it's a fallacy to base national policy on the idea that it will. As soon as there's market for it, and the oil becomes more valuable than the savings on not have to properly dispose of it, then restraunts will be selling (or "recycling") their oil.
There is a lot more gasoline burned every day than fryer oil thrown out.
Among these conclusions is that competitive markets lead to efficient allocation of resources, in the sense that no other allocation of resources would make all the market participants better off.
Unfortunately, all of this math rests on one other easily dismissable myth: Homo econimus, the rational economic agent. Markets easily collapse into the most efficient state, if and only if the following premises are true:
Everyone has perfect knowledge of all transactions.
Everyone acts rationally instead of emotionally.
The market is actually competitive.
Markets exist for all goods.
Transaction costs are negligible.
Without an awareness of all of the partial pareto, pareto, and non-pareto transaction choices available and a rational decision to only go with partial pareto or better transactions, the marketplace does not acheive efficiency. Without rational actors, even the best of free markets will not achieve maximal efficiency (though they may fare better than alternatives).
I have long been a proponent of this idea, but it needs to expand beyond each bill and its amendments. If you've ever read a huge bill like the Patriot Act, you know that a lot of any bill is modifications to existing law.
We need to be able to see diffs on existing law in addition to diffs on the bill being passed. In addition, any amendments should show what was changed in the bill and existing law. The main problem with this idea is that it would rely on either natural language processing or interns (which could screw up or deliberately not flag certain changes).
I want this desperately, and if I ever win the lottery or something, I'm going to fund its creation.
SOoooooooooooooooo let me get this straight. Someone gets to pay LESS taxes? We are giving the goverment LESS money? Less money for the goverment to squander.
This overall sounds like a *GOOD* idea. Am I missing something here?
Yes, you're deeply missing something here. The government is still spending money. It's not spending $9 billion less money. It's just going straight into the deficit. That means that somebody will have to pay. Who is that somebody? We the people are.
Every bit of corporate welfare shifts the tax burden from a wealthy company to the average citizen. In other words, it's a regressive taxation scheme. You and I pay more money so that scam artists who don't actually provide anything useful to the country by their actions can bear less of their fair share.
Feel free to donate all your money to the goverment if that would make you feel better. Personaly I will keep mine. As after all, it is mine...
You are keeping less of your money so that some big company can keep more of theirs. It's that simple. Maybe you should look after your own interests a little more, hmm?
This really goes a long way toward making the fair tax seem even better.
...You know, for the all of two years it would take to start granting special sales tax reductions on certain products or to just make the handout more direct, like we do with farm subsides.
The beauty of the FairTax is its naive idea that the tax rate would remain universal. This was also the beauty of the income tax system before reality came crashing down on it. Politicians will find ways of handing out favors to campaign donors so long as there are campaign donors and no association between government spending and government revenues.
The only two things that could fix this are:
Clean Money Elections. That way Congress could actually have politicians who serve the people instead of special interest groups (of any political affiliation).
A balanced budget amendment that prevented deficit spending and made it clear to the public that $X corporate wellfare == $Y out of your pocket.
It doesn't matter how revenue is accumlated if there's an incentive to spend it unwisely and an ability to hide it from the people.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but you're obviously talking about getting the vegetable oils themselves for free. Bulk soybean oil (about the cheapest vegetable oil you can get) is a little over $2/gallon last time I checked.
I'm all for biodiesel, but let's use some realistic numbers.
Actually, if you'll read the article, you'll see that they're not even necessarily making oil. That's the outrage.
The coal can look and burn like regular coal. The IRS rule for transforming coal into synfuel--and getting the tax credit--requires only that the substance be chemically altered in some way. The alchemy that satisfies the IRS is a simple process: some plants spray newly mined coal with diesel fuel, pine-tar resin, limestone, acid or other substances--a practice that industry critics call "spray and pray." Other operators mix coal-mining waste with chemicals, coat it with latex and blend it with untreated coal to form briquettes. (For an earlier story on the scheme, see "The Great Energy Scam," TIME, Oct. 13, 2003.)
Once a few pioneers started reaping the tax credits, it wasn't long before plants using various techniques sprouted next to coal-burning power plants, which buy the so-called synfuel and use it as they would any other coal. Those synfuel operations were a far cry from the state-of-the-art plants that Congress had envisioned as performing a more radical transformation. Instead, they were flimsy facilities that could be easily dismantled and moved to other locations.
It's huge tax scam, and language buried in a budget bill has changed the rules to prevent the credit from expiring now that oil prices have risen to where it would theoretically be competitive.
Slashdot Mirror
So, instead people should kick the diet habit and just drink copious amounts of high fructose corn syrup?
I kid, of course.
Perhaps the Microsoft code does in 5 lines what the Open Source code does in 150.
.NET is a lot better, though...)
I take it you've never actually done any Win32 programming.
(I hear
Maybe I've been reading too much politics news lately, but I'm just waiting for Microsoft to come out with a statement that people capable of evaluating Perl, PHP, and Python are biased in favor LAMP solutions.
I need to do something about my cynicism.
Technically usury, the lending of money at interest, is forbidden under Islam, and so is doing receiving a loan at interest. This is called Riba in Islam and is to be avoided as Haram. Using a traditional credit card is against Islam because of this.
That said, al Qaeda terrorists adhere to the tradition of the Takfiris, rejectionist Muslims who believe that it's okay to kill other less pious Muslims and to live in sin to blend in with a populace to achieve their goals. This is why the 9/11 terrorists and the Madrid bombers looked like perfectly normal Westernized immigrants; standing out would prevent them from striking a blow to their enemies.
Given that conflict of interests, I really just can't predict one way or another whether a terrorist would have a credit card and whether or not they'd pay it down except for the purposes of avoiding bad (or no) credit, which can close doors that they need to be open.
You shouldn't have to. Thus our current problem.
That's like saying you shouldn't ever have to worry about firearm safety or safety on the road.
Whenever you use a powerful and dangerous tool, you should always use caution, and you should always be even more concerned when other people wield that same tool for their own interests in your presence. There is no larger and more dangerous tool than the government. Always be wary of men with power; they are still men after all.
Tarrifs are considered bad for global trade and peace because they tend to escalate and reinforce divides between nations. Corporate income taxes are absolutely necessary to prevent tax shelters. Otherwise, you could form a corporation which takes all your income and pays all your expenses.
The only reason the corporate tax code is complicated is because they've lobbied to make it so to allow them to get out of paying taxes. We need a tax code reset to eliminate loopholes, but it'll never happen.
It gets weirder than that. Hollywood exploits tax loopholes around the word to bring down the upfront investment in a movie to a fraction of its total costs. The linked article claims that even though Tomb Raider had a budget of $94 million that the studios only had to put up $7 million for it. Fortunately, the German government recently closed this same tax loophole that has fueled Uwe Boll's abysmal career.
Is it just me, or do you get the impression that the mob has easier to follow bookkeeping than a lot of corporate America today?
It's not a "ludacrious"[sic] statement. A simple Google search gives you leads to find the Bell System Memorial site which has a page on the very subject. There you can read fliers advertising the changes to allow you to buy your phone and see the old rates of between $1.00-3.25 per phone.
Next time, take the word of someone who is old enough to have actually been there. I'm also barely old enough to remember rented phones and the Bell System Property tag on them. My grandmother kept hers for years.
Oi, and people are worried about cell phone radiation.
Actually, I have driven nails with a screwdriver. You grab the metal part and use the handle to whack the nail in.
It's was either that or my shoe at the time.
I see no problem with this. If you want to send out mass mailings, you pay for it. Someone has to.
I belong to a public mailing list right now (and have belonged to others before). The lists are free, are typically over 3/4 lurkers and 1/4 active posters, and never have more than 300 people subscribed to them at a time. I've corresponded with at least two AOL users from these lists, and both were really cool people who have just been using AOL since time immemorial.
Under this scheme we have two choices:
1) Ignore it and risk these users losing their messages as spam (which is the most likely choice).
2) Cut off all our AOL users.
3) Make someone eat the stick to pay for them to get messages.
It's not a thing that we should be "made to pay for." We're already paying our mail providers (either directly or through ad views), and we're doing no harm, but in your view we're equivalent to spammers. Just because you use the internet differently doesn't mean that everyone else who does things differently should be screwed.
Magnesium sulfate and potassium chloride only have those effects in extremely large doses. "Salt" when used by itself in a food label pretty much always means sodium chloride.
These salts are added to the purified water to prevent it from tasting bad and from doing damage to your body like distilled water will. You need a salt balance to prevent omosis from slurping up the water in your body into your cells until they rupture. Drinking too pure water is unhealthy and has all kinds of side effects. This is why sports drinks have lots of electrolytes in them to counter all the salt lost from sweating.
Also, nothing in the article you linked said anything about benzene (it was bromate that was the problem), and the article said that all the bottles were pulled. Did you even read your link or just paste the first thing in that Google turned up?
It's just like all other things, we'll play it off no matter what the study says. But I do have this one comment: don't drink diet soda folks, I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone.
Does she still drink any caffenated in varying does? I used to get migranes due to caffeine withdrawal. No more irregular doses of caffeine; no more problem.
I'm suspicious of the aspartame controversy. I haven't seen a single credible source back the theory, but there are sure a lot of people who want to sell you books on diet, vitamins, and herbs that love to rail against it. It has poor science written all over it.
It's non-ionizing radiation.... people have been putting these things by their heads for hours on a daily basis... show me one potential case of burn via cell signal.
Alternating magnetic fields aren't generally considered ionizing radiation either, but rat studies have shown that they can cause an iron-mediated peroxide reaction that causes DNA strand breakage in rat neurons.
Just because radio waves cannot directly break carbon bonds like UV radiation and higher doesn't necessarily mean that they're harmless. There's an entire field of study in how microwaves catalyze and otherwise alter chemical reactions. A lack of gross physical effects like burns does not mean that radio waves cannot be disturbing cellular chemistry in signficantly more subtle ways.
Testing arm skin isn't all that practical, who keeps a cell phone there?
Testing arm skin is very practical. The fact that no one uses a cell phone there doesn't mean that it's harder to extract tissue from the arm than the regular places or that it's harder to create a device to generate the radiation that doesn't burden the test subjects for an hour; all you do is strap an active cell phone on the arm.
The arm and the back are among the most popular places for taking tissue samples due to ease of access and lack of burden to the subject. Biologically speaking, skin on the arm and skin on the waist, hip, palm, or face are all equivalent for purposes of this experiment.
So, out of curiosity, when are you moving to Somalia to enjoy the benefits of a free market society since it's so much better than our non-free market society?
I like this idea; it would practically eliminate earmarks and secret tax loopholes. I hope it's practical without giving the executive branch an excessive amount of power to interpret the law (such as how to spend the budget and which programs to axe at will).
The principle is certainly sound.
Don't even bother. The guy has mises.org as his webpage. The Ludwig Von Mises Institute is a free market fundmentalist think tank. They honestly think that the situation in Somalia is a good thing for the people. You honestly can't reach these people with common sense; they've moved beyond.
Go read through the site sometime; it's really a scary reality-distortion field they've got going there.
This will not last forever, and it's a fallacy to base national policy on the idea that it will. As soon as there's market for it, and the oil becomes more valuable than the savings on not have to properly dispose of it, then restraunts will be selling (or "recycling") their oil.
There is a lot more gasoline burned every day than fryer oil thrown out.
Unfortunately, all of this math rests on one other easily dismissable myth: Homo econimus, the rational economic agent. Markets easily collapse into the most efficient state, if and only if the following premises are true:
Without an awareness of all of the partial pareto, pareto, and non-pareto transaction choices available and a rational decision to only go with partial pareto or better transactions, the marketplace does not acheive efficiency. Without rational actors, even the best of free markets will not achieve maximal efficiency (though they may fare better than alternatives).
I have long been a proponent of this idea, but it needs to expand beyond each bill and its amendments. If you've ever read a huge bill like the Patriot Act, you know that a lot of any bill is modifications to existing law.
We need to be able to see diffs on existing law in addition to diffs on the bill being passed. In addition, any amendments should show what was changed in the bill and existing law. The main problem with this idea is that it would rely on either natural language processing or interns (which could screw up or deliberately not flag certain changes).
I want this desperately, and if I ever win the lottery or something, I'm going to fund its creation.
SOoooooooooooooooo let me get this straight. Someone gets to pay LESS taxes? We are giving the goverment LESS money? Less money for the goverment to squander.
This overall sounds like a *GOOD* idea. Am I missing something here?
Yes, you're deeply missing something here. The government is still spending money. It's not spending $9 billion less money. It's just going straight into the deficit. That means that somebody will have to pay. Who is that somebody? We the people are.
Every bit of corporate welfare shifts the tax burden from a wealthy company to the average citizen. In other words, it's a regressive taxation scheme. You and I pay more money so that scam artists who don't actually provide anything useful to the country by their actions can bear less of their fair share.
Feel free to donate all your money to the goverment if that would make you feel better. Personaly I will keep mine. As after all, it is mine...
You are keeping less of your money so that some big company can keep more of theirs. It's that simple. Maybe you should look after your own interests a little more, hmm?
The beauty of the FairTax is its naive idea that the tax rate would remain universal. This was also the beauty of the income tax system before reality came crashing down on it. Politicians will find ways of handing out favors to campaign donors so long as there are campaign donors and no association between government spending and government revenues.
The only two things that could fix this are:
It doesn't matter how revenue is accumlated if there's an incentive to spend it unwisely and an ability to hide it from the people.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but you're obviously talking about getting the vegetable oils themselves for free. Bulk soybean oil (about the cheapest vegetable oil you can get) is a little over $2/gallon last time I checked.
I'm all for biodiesel, but let's use some realistic numbers.
Actually, if you'll read the article, you'll see that they're not even necessarily making oil. That's the outrage.
It's huge tax scam, and language buried in a budget bill has changed the rules to prevent the credit from expiring now that oil prices have risen to where it would theoretically be competitive.