Grandparent: Between State tax, Federal tax, Social Secirity tax, Town tax, Property tax, and sales tax I pay something like 45 - 50% of my income in tax
Parent: Unless you're quite wealthy, no, you don't.
You sure about that? Maybe not 50% of total income, but certainly 50% of taxable income is pretty easy to hit.
I just did some quick calculations based on federal, state, and local tax rates (Junction City, Oregon) for a homeowner making about $18,000 a year... here's what I came up with:
Based on year 2001 figures:
11,000 Taxable (Adj. Gross) Income - About $18,000 gross depending on deductions, no kids
Federal Income Tax 715 + 3850 *.15: 1292.5 Soc. Security OASDI 11000 *.062: 682 Medicare HI 11000 *.0145: 159.5 (Total Fed Taxes: 2134) (Remaining after fed. Taxes: 8866) Oregon Inc. Tax (8866) *.09 - 147: 650.94 Gas Tax.40/gal * 7.5 gal * 52 weeks: 156 State and Local Property Tax, $199,000 home: 2160 Phone taxes: 50
Total taxes: 5150.94 (47% of taxable, of 29% gross)
Sorry about the formatting.... lameness filter had to be beaten with an ECODE tag. The last number in the each line is the total in dollars.
This is just the big stuff that everyone knows. I didn't even count in taxes such as vehicle registration, use fees (Northwest Forest Recreation Pass, anyone?), etc. I also did not count taxes that your employer pays that result in lower income, such as various payroll taxes. I did not factor in the local transit tax, the required workman's comp insurance split equally between employer and employee, etc. Oregon doesn't have an income tax (most places in Oregon don't, anyway.)
I don't know about you, but $5000 gone from an $18,000 income kinda hurts. If you are self-employed, keep in mind that many taxes (social security, etc) double because you pay the employer share as well as the employee share.
People are discovering that when you buy any product that is subject to "activation", you haven't really bought anything.
Companies are discovering that people will routinely and casually avoid paying for their products or for the use of their services whenever it is easy to avoid such payment.
Similarly, people routinely and casually avoid stopping at stop signs and using their turn signals.
I don't know about the rest of you, but talking to a state machine for a driver would get rather old after a while.
I'll drive myself, thanks.
Re:Why you stick a hard drive in the freezer....
on
Creative Data Loss
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· Score: 1
In my observation, stiction is mainly an issue with middle-aged drives (4-5 yrs or older) that have run for several years but were then allowed to sit idle for several months. I suspect once our current HDs are middle-aged, and are therefore in machines not running 24/7 anymore, we'll see some stiction in what are now "modern" HDs too.
Yeah, you're probably right. Though it should be noted that I've got drives that are 12-15 years old that run just fine. (SCSI drives... Apple IIgs.) It probably depends a lot on manufacturing. The IBM deathstars won't be around for that long:)
Re:Why you stick a hard drive in the freezer....
on
Creative Data Loss
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· Score: 1
Yeah, it seems that IBM deathstars have this problem, and a few others.
I should have checked before I said that modern drives shouldn't have this problem.
*I* have never had stiction.:)
Why you stick a hard drive in the freezer....
on
Creative Data Loss
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· Score: 3, Informative
Sheesh I feel old, all you kids here on Slashdot don't even know about stiction.
This really isn't a problem on modern drives, but in the past it would happen. Something that would work to unstick the drive head was to stick the drive into the freezer. This would (presumably by a slight contraction of the platters) allow the drive to spin up. Once the drive was warmed up and spinning, you could then proceed to back up as much of the data as possible before the drive failed.
Now, it's highly unlikely that the person mentioned in the FA had a drive that was suffering from stiction. Modern drives rarely have this problem.
There is plenty of evidence that the Republican party got many votes it didn't win (and in some cases many more votes than voters). I really doubt that the Democrats were the ones giving more votes to Republicans.
Doesn't mean the Democrats weren't giving more votes to the Democrats, though.
Seriously, do you think the fraud is one-sided, or do you think, perhaps, that the media is reporting it one-sided?
I would say that the law of mediocrity applies, and the same amount of fraud is going on on both sides.
The images WHERE [sic] there, now they are not... They have been removed from the index...
Well this begs proof. I never did a google search for those images before, so I couldn't tell you if they were ever there.
While it may be true that google is censoring the images (maybe due to a court directive?), why should I believe that they were ever there, based on an article on Slashdot (a site whose posts are often biased or just plain wrong) of all places?
Is it even possible to shoot an accurate shot at a target with an assault weapon?
Depends on what you mean by 'assault weapon'... if you take the old definition that only included fully-automatic weapons that have been heavily-regulated since 1935, yeah it's possible, but not easy.
If you take the new definition that includes a whole set of semiautomatic weapons that look a certain way or have specific names (even though they are functionally no different than many semiautomatic hunting and target rifles), then yes, it's easy to take an accurate shot.
You *need* health coverage.
Why? I'm a healthy young adult. It's a waste of money. Maybe when I'm 45 it'll be useful, but that's almost 2 decades away. Rather than wasting several hundreds of dollars per year while only receiving an annual checkup that doesn't cost much more than a single payment, wouldn't it be smarter to invest the money?
What my original complaint was asking is: Why do people like you think I'm not smart enough to determine for myself if I need health insurance at all, let alone who should provide it?
Who the hell is even talking about forcing you to invest in one thing or another? Or is that a thinly-veiled way of saying that you want to destroy Social Security and thus ruin the lives of countless elderly who barely get by on that?
I'm saying I should be allowed to opt out some portion of social security payments and choose where those funds go instead of into the social security 'trust' fund.
I'm not advocating eliminating social security. Though, interestingly enough (and this is why it will never happen) privatizing social security would prevent the government from raiding the 'trust' fund, wouldn't it?
As a final note on social security, if over the last 100 years most americans had held onto the idea that families should take care of themselves (parents care for the children until it's time for the children to take care of them, etc), and operated more like my family, social security would be hardly useful to most people. In my family, we take care of our elderly, and we treat our close personal friends as members of the family. We don't need the government filling that role. Been this way for hundreds of years, and we see no need to change.
In the event that someone does not have such a blessing, I agree that they should have the minimums they need for an acceptable life.
He's cut veterans's benefits, and refuses to give full health benefits to the National Guard...
I was in the Army. I'll point out a couple of things. (1) When I was in, at least, reservists and guardsmen received the same health care as anyone else when they were on Federal active duty (in Iraq or otherwise). (2) If they become disabled on Federal duty they receive all normal VA benefits that any regular army person would receive. (3) As I understand it, most of the 'cuts' to VA services were actually increases of copayments of drugs (from $2.00 to $7.00 per 30 days supply), and increases in copayments for veterans who have no service-connected disabilities but are choosing the VA as their heath care provider.
What are we doing in Iraq in the first place?
Couple reasons: (1) Saddam was a dickhead. (2) someone thought he had WMD programs, including John Kerry who was on the Senate intelligence committee. (3) UN Res. 1441. (4) Oil. (5) "He tried to kill my dad"
My uncle almost lost his life in his unarmored Humvee
I didn't have an armored HMMWV. That would have violated the entire concept of the 10th Mountain Division Field Artillery's idea of "Fast and Light".
because Dubya refuses to swallow his pride and ask for help from the world at large to bring peace, not destruction, to Iraq.
He did. A lot of them refused. There are still over 30 supplying money and even troops.
Instead, he refuses, and I now anxiously await the draft so that
Republicans are not conservatives, and Kerry is not a liberal.
I never said I voted as a party-line Republican. Quite often there is a Libertarian mark on my ballot, and even a Democrat or two.
I'm going to assume you voted for Bush... why?
John Kerry's entire campaign message was essentially "I'm going to do everything Bush is doing, except I am going to raise taxes on those making $200,000 or more and try to force you to get health insurance. Things will be different because I'm John Kerry."
Essentially, there wasn't much of a choice on policy. My vote was specifically to the benefit of the Republican Party. I dislike virtually every local politician who is a Democrat.
You're also only a conservative when it's convenient to you - you don't want to help people, unless it's your father-in-law and grandfather-in-law, in which case you think they're entitled to keep the same job despite changing business conditions.
Business conditions that were changed by outside entities and out-of-state special interest groups' influence. I don't like stupid laws that put people out of work. (That link is a.pdf, just so you know). But, you're wrong about me:
I give to private charities all the time. When I was in the Army, I contributed large sums of money to CFC organizations. Community problems are community problems, not Federal problems. Do you think that the Federal government can end homelessness? I don't. I think a local community is in a much better position to deal with its problems. One of the best organizations in my area for feeding people who cannot afford to eat is a private charity... and the director is a Republican, I might add.
Ah, but the election is over, I want to go back to arguing the KDE/GNOME and vi/emacs debates.
I still don't get why liberal means pussy, yet conservative doesn't mean poorly educated white trash.
Probably because some of us who consider ourselves 'conservative' (i.e. me) have multiple college degrees with near 4.0 grade point averages. Not poorly educated, not white trash. Come to think of it, none of the other conservatives I know are 'poorly educated' or 'white trash.'
I know some homeless dope-smoking liberal college dropouts who won't get jobs, however. I won't use those to describe everyone who calls themselves liberal, though, because I also know plenty liberals who understand that it's better to earn what you have rather than have it handed to you, and therefore have nice homes, college educations that got them good jobs, and other amenities that they can enjoy.
Anyway, I like target shooting, the ability to keep my hard-earned money, and being able to choose for myself whether or not I need health insurance and where I want to invest my retirement dollars. What I don't understand is why so many people have a problem with this.
To me, 'liberal' is quite often near-synonymous with with this definition: Someone who wants to tell me where to spend my money, how to spend my money, where to work, how to work, how much to work, what I can and cannot own, and what I can and cannot do with my property.
Oh, you mentioned 'logging' in your post. I don't know where you are from, but here in Oregon I've personally witnessed a few big burly loggers in tears begging one of our Senators (you guess which one) to oppose unbalanced and extreme anti-logging legislation that put them out of work and threatened to put their children out of work and destroy the economic basis of their entire communities.
We've got hundreds of ex-loggers here attending retraining programs at local colleges, and if you ask them, most would rather be out cutting old trees and planting new ones than learning how to code HTML and/or fix cars or airplanes.
On a personal note, my wife's grandfather was a millworker. It's shut down two of three lines and laid hundreds of people off. Her father was also a millworker, that mill is now closed.
... Consider that all economic bills must originate in the House...
Eh? Since when?
Section. 7.
Clause 1: All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.
Tax/revenue bills are not "economic" or "spending" bills. Obviously YOU do not have a Ph.D in politics, either, nor ever read the Constitution.
The most distinct difference is the acknowledgement of the Pope's authority, the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and admiration of Mary/Saints.
Technically, you mean:
Acknowledging the pope as the Vicar of Christ.
Transubstantiation (the Eucharist is God) as opposed to consubstantiation (God is with the Eucharist).
The Communion of Saints (that the dead Saints can intercede with God on your behalf).
The Assumption of Mary (that Mary died sinless and still a virgin).
FWIW, my wife is a Catholic and I am a protestant. I won't convert because I tend to disagree with all of the above. That is, the pope is a man, and a leader, but not the infallible Vicar of Christ; God is with the Communion, there is no hocus-pocus transformation; the only person that can intercede with God the Father is God the Son, non-divine dead people can't listen to me talk; finally if you really think that Joseph and Mary didn't do the nasty after putting baby Jesus to bed well... you're nuts.
I beg to differ. What someone *thinks* about their situation and what their actions are as a result of that thinking is what makes someone "poor."
Back when I made only $8,000 in one year (immediately after leaving the Army), I still wasn't "poor" by any definition that should matter. I had a place to live, a job that had flexible hours, friends, and enough money to have a little fun.
What I didn't have was... cable TV, High-speed internet, an expensive car, expensive meals, a giant aparment, or a lot of stuff. I lived within my means and was perfectly happy.
Now, I could have made other choices and had a lot of nice stuff, or f***ed around and had a couple kids or whatnot. But I didn't make those choices, and was able to live on a small income.
What the definition of "poor" should be is when you are unable to live within your community with enough food, shelter, and other necessary things based on a minimum income necessary to sustain that without buying frivolous shit like cable TV.
For an example of some of the "poor" I know: I know an unmarried couple with a child who are receiving government assistance for food and rent payments. Why is it that they have a 56" HDTV, cable TV, a new truck, and other nice things that they make payments on every month, but taxpayers are buying their food and paying their rent? And don't accuse me of making this up, one of these people is a childhood friend of my wife.
I'll give another, personal, embarrassing story about someone who is "poor." I've got some relatives (aunt and uncle) who have been "poor" all of their lives, living in the Los Angeles area, receiving gov't assistance, raising my drug dealing cousins, rented all of their lives in low-income neighborhoods. Three times they have received inheritances in the tens of thousands of dollars. Rather than choose to improve their situation the first two times, they squandered the money on trips across the country, bought a little impractical and expensive sports car, but continued to rent their living space.
The third, rather large, inheritance, they finally decided to buy a house and improve their situation. They bought a house (outright, with cash) close to remaining living family (near my parents), and between that and moving costs managed to spend all of the money on something that could have improved their situation. Both of them got jobs.
In less than sixty days, they decided that they "missed their friends" (without attempting to make new ones) and they packed up and moved back to Los Angeles. They sold the house they had bought and owned outright at a loss, and between that and further moving costs and first+last+deposit on a new house to rent, have managed to lose all of the money. But hey, they've got a several-year old expensive sports car that they can barely afford the insurance on.
So, after inheriting hundreds of thousands of dollars, they are right back where they started: "poor." Somehow, I have a really hard time feeling sorry for these "poor" (even though they are my relatives) and those like them. Nobody who makes choices like that should be entitled to any form of government assistance whatsoever. But they will, once they can show the next year's tax forms where they have minimum wage incomes and no inheritance money.
... but would happily send all the poor folks who serve as our military off to die in the desert.
I was in the Army, and I never considered myself "poor" before, during, or after my service, and I know plenty of other current soldiers who do not feel poor now.
Someone I know just volunteered to go back. I've thought about it, but a disability prevents me from being useful in my former position.
Do not donate via the CFC and mail the EFF a check directly.
You've obviously never worked for the Federal Government.
It is customary to engage in the use of peer pressure to ensure that every person in an organization donates to the CFC.
The boss gets up and says something like: "It's CFC time again. I'm going to make a promise to you all... if everyone in this Office (or unit/organization/etc.) donates to the CFC, everyone will get pizza for lunch on Thursday, and a day off next Friday. Now, who wants to sign up right now?"
You didn't want to be the person stopping everyone from getting pizza and a day off.
While I think the methodology and concept behind eHarmony is solid, the execution needs a lot of work. Instead, you'd probably be better off in DreamMates or American Singles.
Any time I've tried to point this out, I've been shouted down by hysterical people (such as relex) squawking that because it may be possible to generate two messages with the same MD5 hash, SHA-1 is automatically broken. Um, no. They're two totally different algorithms. Use some common sense, people. I'm as cautious as the next person but screaming about how "all hash algos are insecure" is hyperbole at its worst.
Additionally, because they are totally different, it is unlikely that one could find two messages that cause collisions in both algorithms at the same time, a message digest composed simply of hashes from both algorithms would probably still be secure.
Risk of homicide not involving a firearm (20,308 in 2000) is about 70% of the number of all firearms deaths (29,000 accident, homicide, suicide, police shootings, etc) combined.
I may have misread my source for this. I'll stand by all the others, however.
There are hundreds of firearms made for the sole purpose of something called "target shooting"... you know, where you demonstrate precision control of muscles and breathing, where keen eyesight and good dexterity are a must, where one might need to correct for immediate conditions.
By your reasoning, there is no reason to ever engage in a sport like archery (bows and arrows were also originally made to kill or injure), fencing (ditto), javelin throwing (ditto), martial arts (violence, injury, etc.), or any other perfectly respectable sport, and people should stay away from the equipment used in such sports.
Personally, your chances of being injured or killed by a firearm are a lot less than your chances of being injured or killed by a passenger vehicle.
The death rate from firearms in the U.S. is only twice the death rate from HIV/AIDS. (I imagine that once you rule out gang/drug violence and suicide, it gets a lot more even.) You should also vow to never have sex.
Matter of fact, you should also avoid one other major college experience, too: alcohol. Responsible, (in 2000) for 3 times as many deaths in the United States than firearms. (Not counting alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes.)
Risk of homicide not involving a firearm (20,308 in 2000) is about 70% of the number of all firearms deaths (29,000 accident, homicide, suicide, police shootings, etc) combined.
Your chance of dying from a gun: (assuming population is 275,000,000) 0.0105%
Your chance of dying from someone bent on killing you without a gun:.0070%
Not much in either case. Get a life and stop worrying so much.
The idea of affermitive action is that all other things being equal (ie if given qualifications, people skills, etc, you'd probibly have to resort to coin tossing), you give the job to the person who is in the minority group.
I don't know where your affirmative action experience comes from, but the institution I work at has a policy of ensuring that members of all different minorities and disadvantaged groups (racial minorities, women, disabled, etc.) are properly encouraged to apply for positions.
This means that: Advertisments for job openings are placed where members of those groups are likely to see them, and stressing along with such ads that said institution is an equal-opportunity/affirmative action employer.
Once the pool of applicants is in, hopefully heavily biased toward the above said groups, it is more likely that the institution will find a qualified member from one of those groups to fill the position.
The percentage of situations where it comes down to say... an african-american candidate and a european-american candidate (let's use all the hyphenated-american terms when we can) with exactly the same qualifications is rather low, certainly less than 1% of all situations.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent: Unless you're quite wealthy, no, you don't.
You sure about that? Maybe not 50% of total income, but certainly 50% of taxable income is pretty easy to hit.
I just did some quick calculations based on federal, state, and local tax rates (Junction City, Oregon) for a homeowner making about $18,000 a year... here's what I came up with:
Based on year 2001 figures:
11,000 Taxable (Adj. Gross) Income - About $18,000 gross depending on deductions, no kidsSorry about the formatting.... lameness filter had to be beaten with an ECODE tag. The last number in the each line is the total in dollars.
This is just the big stuff that everyone knows. I didn't even count in taxes such as vehicle registration, use fees (Northwest Forest Recreation Pass, anyone?), etc. I also did not count taxes that your employer pays that result in lower income, such as various payroll taxes. I did not factor in the local transit tax, the required workman's comp insurance split equally between employer and employee, etc. Oregon doesn't have an income tax (most places in Oregon don't, anyway.)
I don't know about you, but $5000 gone from an $18,000 income kinda hurts. If you are self-employed, keep in mind that many taxes (social security, etc) double because you pay the employer share as well as the employee share.
People are discovering that when you buy any product that is subject to "activation", you haven't really bought anything.
Companies are discovering that people will routinely and casually avoid paying for their products or for the use of their services whenever it is easy to avoid such payment.
Similarly, people routinely and casually avoid stopping at stop signs and using their turn signals.
Wow, a girl...on /. talking about internet porn...
You might want to rethink that...
Slashdot, where men are men and the women are too.
It was called a Johnny Cab, right?
I don't know about the rest of you, but talking to a state machine for a driver would get rather old after a while.
I'll drive myself, thanks.
In my observation, stiction is mainly an issue with middle-aged drives (4-5 yrs or older) that have run for several years but were then allowed to sit idle for several months. I suspect once our current HDs are middle-aged, and are therefore in machines not running 24/7 anymore, we'll see some stiction in what are now "modern" HDs too.
:)
Yeah, you're probably right. Though it should be noted that I've got drives that are 12-15 years old that run just fine. (SCSI drives... Apple IIgs.) It probably depends a lot on manufacturing. The IBM deathstars won't be around for that long
Yeah, it seems that IBM deathstars have this problem, and a few others.
:)
I should have checked before I said that modern drives shouldn't have this problem.
*I* have never had stiction.
Sheesh I feel old, all you kids here on Slashdot don't even know about stiction.
This really isn't a problem on modern drives, but in the past it would happen. Something that would work to unstick the drive head was to stick the drive into the freezer. This would (presumably by a slight contraction of the platters) allow the drive to spin up. Once the drive was warmed up and spinning, you could then proceed to back up as much of the data as possible before the drive failed.
Now, it's highly unlikely that the person mentioned in the FA had a drive that was suffering from stiction. Modern drives rarely have this problem.
More info here. (Warning: PDF)
There is plenty of evidence that the Republican party got many votes it didn't win (and in some cases many more votes than voters). I really doubt that the Democrats were the ones giving more votes to Republicans.
Doesn't mean the Democrats weren't giving more votes to the Democrats, though.
Seriously, do you think the fraud is one-sided, or do you think, perhaps, that the media is reporting it one-sided?
I would say that the law of mediocrity applies, and the same amount of fraud is going on on both sides.
Too bad I'm only averaging 350 K/sec over FTP. It takes about 30 minutes to download a disc. :(
The images WHERE [sic] there, now they are not... They have been removed from the index...
Well this begs proof. I never did a google search for those images before, so I couldn't tell you if they were ever there.
While it may be true that google is censoring the images (maybe due to a court directive?), why should I believe that they were ever there, based on an article on Slashdot (a site whose posts are often biased or just plain wrong) of all places?
Is it even possible to shoot an accurate shot at a target with an assault weapon?
Depends on what you mean by 'assault weapon'... if you take the old definition that only included fully-automatic weapons that have been heavily-regulated since 1935, yeah it's possible, but not easy.
If you take the new definition that includes a whole set of semiautomatic weapons that look a certain way or have specific names (even though they are functionally no different than many semiautomatic hunting and target rifles), then yes, it's easy to take an accurate shot.
You *need* health coverage.
Why? I'm a healthy young adult. It's a waste of money. Maybe when I'm 45 it'll be useful, but that's almost 2 decades away. Rather than wasting several hundreds of dollars per year while only receiving an annual checkup that doesn't cost much more than a single payment, wouldn't it be smarter to invest the money?
What my original complaint was asking is: Why do people like you think I'm not smart enough to determine for myself if I need health insurance at all, let alone who should provide it?
Who the hell is even talking about forcing you to invest in one thing or another? Or is that a thinly-veiled way of saying that you want to destroy Social Security and thus ruin the lives of countless elderly who barely get by on that?
I'm saying I should be allowed to opt out some portion of social security payments and choose where those funds go instead of into the social security 'trust' fund.
I'm not advocating eliminating social security. Though, interestingly enough (and this is why it will never happen) privatizing social security would prevent the government from raiding the 'trust' fund, wouldn't it?
As a final note on social security, if over the last 100 years most americans had held onto the idea that families should take care of themselves (parents care for the children until it's time for the children to take care of them, etc), and operated more like my family, social security would be hardly useful to most people. In my family, we take care of our elderly, and we treat our close personal friends as members of the family. We don't need the government filling that role. Been this way for hundreds of years, and we see no need to change.
In the event that someone does not have such a blessing, I agree that they should have the minimums they need for an acceptable life.
He's cut veterans's benefits, and refuses to give full health benefits to the National Guard...
I was in the Army. I'll point out a couple of things. (1) When I was in, at least, reservists and guardsmen received the same health care as anyone else when they were on Federal active duty (in Iraq or otherwise). (2) If they become disabled on Federal duty they receive all normal VA benefits that any regular army person would receive. (3) As I understand it, most of the 'cuts' to VA services were actually increases of copayments of drugs (from $2.00 to $7.00 per 30 days supply), and increases in copayments for veterans who have no service-connected disabilities but are choosing the VA as their heath care provider.
What are we doing in Iraq in the first place?
Couple reasons: (1) Saddam was a dickhead. (2) someone thought he had WMD programs, including John Kerry who was on the Senate intelligence committee. (3) UN Res. 1441. (4) Oil. (5) "He tried to kill my dad"
My uncle almost lost his life in his unarmored Humvee
I didn't have an armored HMMWV. That would have violated the entire concept of the 10th Mountain Division Field Artillery's idea of "Fast and Light".
because Dubya refuses to swallow his pride and ask for help from the world at large to bring peace, not destruction, to Iraq.
He did. A lot of them refused. There are still over 30 supplying money and even troops.
Instead, he refuses, and I now anxiously await the draft so that
Republicans are not conservatives, and Kerry is not a liberal.
.pdf, just so you know). But, you're wrong about me:
I never said I voted as a party-line Republican. Quite often there is a Libertarian mark on my ballot, and even a Democrat or two.
I'm going to assume you voted for Bush... why?
John Kerry's entire campaign message was essentially "I'm going to do everything Bush is doing, except I am going to raise taxes on those making $200,000 or more and try to force you to get health insurance. Things will be different because I'm John Kerry."
Essentially, there wasn't much of a choice on policy. My vote was specifically to the benefit of the Republican Party. I dislike virtually every local politician who is a Democrat.
You're also only a conservative when it's convenient to you - you don't want to help people, unless it's your father-in-law and grandfather-in-law, in which case you think they're entitled to keep the same job despite changing business conditions.
Business conditions that were changed by outside entities and out-of-state special interest groups' influence. I don't like stupid laws that put people out of work. (That link is a
I give to private charities all the time. When I was in the Army, I contributed large sums of money to CFC organizations. Community problems are community problems, not Federal problems. Do you think that the Federal government can end homelessness? I don't. I think a local community is in a much better position to deal with its problems. One of the best organizations in my area for feeding people who cannot afford to eat is a private charity... and the director is a Republican, I might add.
Ah, but the election is over, I want to go back to arguing the KDE/GNOME and vi/emacs debates.
I like KDE and vi.
I still don't get why liberal means pussy, yet conservative doesn't mean poorly educated white trash.
Probably because some of us who consider ourselves 'conservative' (i.e. me) have multiple college degrees with near 4.0 grade point averages. Not poorly educated, not white trash. Come to think of it, none of the other conservatives I know are 'poorly educated' or 'white trash.'
I know some homeless dope-smoking liberal college dropouts who won't get jobs, however. I won't use those to describe everyone who calls themselves liberal, though, because I also know plenty liberals who understand that it's better to earn what you have rather than have it handed to you, and therefore have nice homes, college educations that got them good jobs, and other amenities that they can enjoy.
Anyway, I like target shooting, the ability to keep my hard-earned money, and being able to choose for myself whether or not I need health insurance and where I want to invest my retirement dollars. What I don't understand is why so many people have a problem with this.
To me, 'liberal' is quite often near-synonymous with with this definition: Someone who wants to tell me where to spend my money, how to spend my money, where to work, how to work, how much to work, what I can and cannot own, and what I can and cannot do with my property.
Oh, you mentioned 'logging' in your post. I don't know where you are from, but here in Oregon I've personally witnessed a few big burly loggers in tears begging one of our Senators (you guess which one) to oppose unbalanced and extreme anti-logging legislation that put them out of work and threatened to put their children out of work and destroy the economic basis of their entire communities.
We've got hundreds of ex-loggers here attending retraining programs at local colleges, and if you ask them, most would rather be out cutting old trees and planting new ones than learning how to code HTML and/or fix cars or airplanes.
On a personal note, my wife's grandfather was a millworker. It's shut down two of three lines and laid hundreds of people off. Her father was also a millworker, that mill is now closed.
Can you guess how I vote?
Eh? Since when?
Tax/revenue bills are not "economic" or "spending" bills. Obviously YOU do not have a Ph.D in politics, either, nor ever read the Constitution.
Raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour for all persons over 18, $7.50 for ages 16-17, and $5 for 14-15 year olds.
For every hour of labor sent overseas, force the company to pay $10 to the government for the person who doesn't get the job.
Now *that* will create jobs in America.
Oh yeah? What stops a company from packing up and taking their whole operation, corp. hq and all, overseas?
The most distinct difference is the acknowledgement of the Pope's authority, the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and admiration of Mary/Saints.
Technically, you mean:
Acknowledging the pope as the Vicar of Christ.
Transubstantiation (the Eucharist is God) as opposed to consubstantiation (God is with the Eucharist).
The Communion of Saints (that the dead Saints can intercede with God on your behalf).
The Assumption of Mary (that Mary died sinless and still a virgin).
FWIW, my wife is a Catholic and I am a protestant. I won't convert because I tend to disagree with all of the above. That is, the pope is a man, and a leader, but not the infallible Vicar of Christ; God is with the Communion, there is no hocus-pocus transformation; the only person that can intercede with God the Father is God the Son, non-divine dead people can't listen to me talk; finally if you really think that Joseph and Mary didn't do the nasty after putting baby Jesus to bed well... you're nuts.
Just my $.02
What you think doesn't matter.
I beg to differ. What someone *thinks* about their situation and what their actions are as a result of that thinking is what makes someone "poor."
Back when I made only $8,000 in one year (immediately after leaving the Army), I still wasn't "poor" by any definition that should matter. I had a place to live, a job that had flexible hours, friends, and enough money to have a little fun.
What I didn't have was... cable TV, High-speed internet, an expensive car, expensive meals, a giant aparment, or a lot of stuff. I lived within my means and was perfectly happy.
Now, I could have made other choices and had a lot of nice stuff, or f***ed around and had a couple kids or whatnot. But I didn't make those choices, and was able to live on a small income.
What the definition of "poor" should be is when you are unable to live within your community with enough food, shelter, and other necessary things based on a minimum income necessary to sustain that without buying frivolous shit like cable TV.
For an example of some of the "poor" I know: I know an unmarried couple with a child who are receiving government assistance for food and rent payments. Why is it that they have a 56" HDTV, cable TV, a new truck, and other nice things that they make payments on every month, but taxpayers are buying their food and paying their rent? And don't accuse me of making this up, one of these people is a childhood friend of my wife.
I'll give another, personal, embarrassing story about someone who is "poor." I've got some relatives (aunt and uncle) who have been "poor" all of their lives, living in the Los Angeles area, receiving gov't assistance, raising my drug dealing cousins, rented all of their lives in low-income neighborhoods. Three times they have received inheritances in the tens of thousands of dollars. Rather than choose to improve their situation the first two times, they squandered the money on trips across the country, bought a little impractical and expensive sports car, but continued to rent their living space.
The third, rather large, inheritance, they finally decided to buy a house and improve their situation. They bought a house (outright, with cash) close to remaining living family (near my parents), and between that and moving costs managed to spend all of the money on something that could have improved their situation. Both of them got jobs.
In less than sixty days, they decided that they "missed their friends" (without attempting to make new ones) and they packed up and moved back to Los Angeles. They sold the house they had bought and owned outright at a loss, and between that and further moving costs and first+last+deposit on a new house to rent, have managed to lose all of the money. But hey, they've got a several-year old expensive sports car that they can barely afford the insurance on.
So, after inheriting hundreds of thousands of dollars, they are right back where they started: "poor." Somehow, I have a really hard time feeling sorry for these "poor" (even though they are my relatives) and those like them. Nobody who makes choices like that should be entitled to any form of government assistance whatsoever. But they will, once they can show the next year's tax forms where they have minimum wage incomes and no inheritance money.
... but would happily send all the poor folks who serve as our military off to die in the desert.
I was in the Army, and I never considered myself "poor" before, during, or after my service, and I know plenty of other current soldiers who do not feel poor now.
Someone I know just volunteered to go back. I've thought about it, but a disability prevents me from being useful in my former position.
Stop insulting us.
Indeed! How does "R-Texas ... a libertarian" work? Should that nor be "L-Texas", or does the index of senators only support 2 parties?
Clearly you know nothing about Republican internal politics. Many Republicans have a strong libertarian leaning. Evidence here.
Do not donate via the CFC and mail the EFF a check directly.
You've obviously never worked for the Federal Government.
It is customary to engage in the use of peer pressure to ensure that every person in an organization donates to the CFC.
The boss gets up and says something like: "It's CFC time again. I'm going to make a promise to you all... if everyone in this Office (or
unit/organization/etc.) donates to the CFC, everyone will get pizza for lunch on Thursday, and a day off next Friday. Now, who wants to sign up right now?"
You didn't want to be the person stopping everyone from getting pizza and a day off.
While I think the methodology and concept behind eHarmony is solid, the execution needs a lot of work. Instead, you'd probably be better off in DreamMates or American Singles.
American Singles???
Any time I've tried to point this out, I've been shouted down by hysterical people (such as relex) squawking that because it may be possible to generate two messages with the same MD5 hash, SHA-1 is automatically broken. Um, no. They're two totally different algorithms. Use some common sense, people. I'm as cautious as the next person but screaming about how "all hash algos are insecure" is hyperbole at its worst.
Additionally, because they are totally different, it is unlikely that one could find two messages that cause collisions in both algorithms at the same time, a message digest composed simply of hashes from both algorithms would probably still be secure.
This is how it seems to me, at least.
Risk of homicide not involving a firearm (20,308 in 2000) is about 70% of the number of all firearms deaths (29,000 accident, homicide, suicide, police shootings, etc) combined.
I may have misread my source for this. I'll stand by all the others, however.
Remember, a firearm is built to injure or kill people, nothing else.
.0070%
Then what, exactly, is this?
There are hundreds of firearms made for the sole purpose of something called "target shooting"... you know, where you demonstrate precision control of muscles and breathing, where keen eyesight and good dexterity are a must, where one might need to correct for immediate conditions.
By your reasoning, there is no reason to ever engage in a sport like archery (bows and arrows were also originally made to kill or injure), fencing (ditto), javelin throwing (ditto), martial arts (violence, injury, etc.), or any other perfectly respectable sport, and people should stay away from the equipment used in such sports.
Personally, your chances of being injured or killed by a firearm are a lot less than your chances of being injured or killed by a passenger vehicle.
The death rate from firearms in the U.S. is only twice the death rate from HIV/AIDS. (I imagine that once you rule out gang/drug violence and suicide, it gets a lot more even.) You should also vow to never have sex.
Matter of fact, you should also avoid one other major college experience, too: alcohol. Responsible, (in 2000) for 3 times as many deaths in the United States than firearms. (Not counting alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes.)
Risk of homicide not involving a firearm (20,308 in 2000) is about 70% of the number of all firearms deaths (29,000 accident, homicide, suicide, police shootings, etc) combined.
Your chance of dying from a gun: (assuming population is 275,000,000) 0.0105%
Your chance of dying from someone bent on killing you without a gun:
Not much in either case. Get a life and stop worrying so much.
The idea of affermitive action is that all other things being equal (ie if given qualifications, people skills, etc, you'd probibly have to resort to coin tossing), you give the job to the person who is in the minority group.
I don't know where your affirmative action experience comes from, but the institution I work at has a policy of ensuring that members of all different minorities and disadvantaged groups (racial minorities, women, disabled, etc.) are properly encouraged to apply for positions.
This means that: Advertisments for job openings are placed where members of those groups are likely to see them, and stressing along with such ads that said institution is an equal-opportunity/affirmative action employer.
Once the pool of applicants is in, hopefully heavily biased toward the above said groups, it is more likely that the institution will find a qualified member from one of those groups to fill the position.
The percentage of situations where it comes down to say... an african-american candidate and a european-american candidate (let's use all the hyphenated-american terms when we can) with exactly the same qualifications is rather low, certainly less than 1% of all situations.
Final employment decisions are made by committee.