Also, 'current wait' is 4 months, yet if you ordered one today you wouldn't get it to 2016? That's a 12 month wait.
That has to do with the flux capacitors. If you order one today, they'll get around to making yours in 2016. Then they set the date back to when you ordered it and drive it 88MPH up the railroad tracks. Then it just has to wait 4 months for them to finish up the paperwork, and its yours.
Is there any way I can play dumb, and get some of these from a hacker? I never ever buy wireless keyboards (just what I don't need- a less reliable human input device), but I could really use some free USB chargers.
As Triumph would say, the correct answer is "Who gives a shit?"
Does anybody still buy dead-tree dictionaries? I don't see this being relevant outside of a few grandparents who might buy this "Junior Dictionary" for their grandkids in the mistaken belief that it isn't easier for the kiddos to just look words up online, where space is not a premium so there's no need to omit words.
Chinese will be our new overseers. They already hold a massive amount of our debt
The whole Chinese holding our debt thing is a bit of a myth. First off, they barely hold more than Japan (occasionally less). Secondly, they only hold about 1/18th of it. Thirdly, if anything the leverage all goes the other way; there are plenty of parties out there willing to buy US debt, but there aren't a lot (some would say any) equivalent alternatives for someone looking to buy safe government securities. IOW: China needs us way more than we need them.
You might not be excited about it, but Senator Cruz is ready to get to work! He's going to start by tasking NASA with finding where all those letters and numbers go when the teachers wipe them off the whiteboards, and if Obama is involved somehow.
prevent private companies from using SSNs for ID numbers, customer identification and credit granting
I'm not sure exactly what that would accomplish. The only reason its a Bad Thing(tm) when someone gets my SSN is precisely because that is the number everyone uses for credit granting. If they instead started using some other unique personal number for that purpose (lets call in UPN for the purposes of this discussion), then it would be the UPN I have to give out all over the place, and it would be the UPN that would be under constant thread of being stolen by identity thieves. The effects would be the same.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I'd rather hear Sesame Street Grover's ideas about taxes and government than Grover Norquist's. I'm certain that I'd find them more interesting than Norquist's one-dimensional, "taxes bad!"
Yeah. It would have made much more sense if his parents had named him after Cookie Monster.
No, I'm not misinterpreting it. I was quite aware of that part, but was ignoring it because no company with paid lawyers and stockholders would ever take that option. Its a Hobson's choice.
don't know what your cable/internet bill looks like, but I'm already paying "bullshit utility taxes" on mine.
Yes, because your cable company wants you to say that, so they pretend that they are passing on those costs directly to you, and call them out as bullshit line items on the bill. I guarantee you if those taxes disappeared tomorrow, you would not see your bill drop by that exact amount. A good economist could probably even give you a good estimate of how much (if any) it would be.
If the cable company was honestly passing the entire cost on to you, they wouldn't care enough about it to complain by putting it on the bill. They put that there precisely because if they can convince you to lower their taxes, they'd keep some of it and make themselves more money.
As for "service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today", I do not think that is correct.
My only service requests (and my parents) had been establishing new service when moving, and it was always excellent.
Another oldster here, and that was my experience as well. Ma Bell's service was excellent. Those phones they gave us could survive a gas explosion too, and still worked when the power was out.
What you did not have was a lot of choice. You had the phone they gave you (identical to all your neighbors), and as few features as they could legally get away with providing. I'm sure everyone having identical equipment down to the actual phones was a large part of how their service was so good. There were only so many things that could go wrong.
Also, if you had some kind of disagreement with them, too bad for you. Your only recourse would be appeal to those government regulatory bodies that people here love deriding. Perhaps it wasn't much, but it was slightly better than the alternative (nothing).
Most of what people complain about with "government"-run stuff is actually a feature of monopolies. A company's ultimate accountability to its customers is their ability to throw that company over entirely for someone else. But if you are going to have a monopoly anyway, not making it accountable to the people in any other meaningful way (eg: making it government run or regulating it) will only make a bad situation worse.
Well, to be honest, having lived in California the liberal bastion of taxing everything for the benefit of the government and just about nobody else, I would classify the alternative...
That's my point exactly. When posed with that ridiculous hypothetical, a typical anti-tax person would act like Kirk taking the Kobayashi Maru and try to find a way to weasel their way around the (again ridiculous) question. But the heart of that question is one of priorities, and reframing the question leaves that ultimate priority question unanswered. Grover realized this, and didn't want there to be any doubt in anyone's head about his priorities. Everyone's grandma dies.
FWIW, this was a Colbert interview. I'd suggest watching it if you haven't. Its chilling.
Valid US copyrights can be held by non-US citizens (eg: ex Beatle Paul McCartney owns quite a few). And I believe part of the law is that the website cannot check. The person whose content that is can then dispute it, it gets put back up, and a lawsuit against that person will have to ensue at that point.
Yes. I have no huge problem with providing links to opinion articles from ideologues. However, please label them as such, rather than just slipping it in as a "related article". Simply adding "from Grover Norquist" would be fine.
FWIW, Mr. Norquist is the guy who coined the phrase "shrink Government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub", and is famous for trying to get politicians to sign "no tax increases no matter what happens" pledges. He also once said in an interview that if it was a choice between everyone's grandmother being eaten by ants, and a tax increase for only the wealthiest 2%, "we console ourself with the fact that we have pictures". A joke answer to a joke question, but a pretty telling one.
So you know going in for sure and certain that he's going to be against the government involving itself in any way, and in particular against anything that might possibly raise a tax somewhere. It will really have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand outside of those two points. The only interesting part is how he gets there.
Playing devil's advocate, it's possible that it wasn't the North Koreans who '"got sloppy" and made direct connections, exposing their true IP addresses'. Another explanation would be that some other group is responsible and got clever, routing attacks via North Korea to shift the blame.
I'm old enough to remember that in a bygone era this was how legislation was made. You float a few trial balloons, and then see what happens politically to those who shoot them down. If the people who shoot that balloon down take enough crap, they won't be so quick to do it next time. If the idea is popular enough, eventually, some people in both parties will start signing onto the bills, and one will pass.
So if you care about this issue, play your part. If you don't, go ahead and say nasty things about both sides and go back to playing Call of Duty.
And "free markets" don't exist, ever - they are an imaginary construct much like "friction free inclined planes" in physics.
Exactly. Adam Smith, the guy who invented the term in the 1700's, argued that it was the job of Government to do its best to regulate markets to keep them as "free" as possible. Previously, government action mostly consisted of helping the rich and connected build and protect their market monopolies. Sound familiar?
Since we only have one exemplar to work from, we really can't claim to have any clue what the required parameters are for intelligent life. We don't really know the full requirements for life either, but at least there we have lots of specimens, and know it happens pretty much anywhere liquid water is available. So places that look roughly like Earth and can hold liquid water would be great places to start looking for life.
If there are other bodies we can visit in this solar system that have liquid water, those would be great places to go check (and we've done a bit of that).
Really? Want me to compare atrocity to atrocity? Because I can go on all day with RECENT killings, mass murders, homicides, war crimes, etc. You're talking to someone sitting an easy drive from the ruins of the Murrah Building. There's no reason that couldn't happen again tomorrow.
The real problem here is extremists. Period. When you start to think a dispute with another person is best solved by killing people, you become an instrument of evil, no matter where you sit yourself on Sunday morning.
Violence against "those people" (whoever "those people" happens to be in your mind) is simple human nature, and it has to be fought everywhere, if you don't want the place you live in to start looking like the miserable places where it is currently running rampant.
I'd argue that black people should be armed. I'm a white
...obviously you are. A black person would never make such a statement. Armed black people in this country quite commonly get shot on sight. Scaring white people is a really good way to get yourself killed, and there are few things people who know blacks only from TV crime shows find scarier than a black person brandishing a weapon. Black people get shot for making sudden movements during traffic stops just on the theory that they could have been going for guns. Sometimes they just get shot for getting into an argument with a white person, or for being large and doing something that was interpreted as aggressive, or asking a white person for directions, or....
That's the thing not a lot of people seem to get. At the end this is all about fear. White folks are scared of black folk, by default. They may chose to ignore this behavior, but black people don't have that luxury because ignoring it can (and does) get them killed.
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Also, 'current wait' is 4 months, yet if you ordered one today you wouldn't get it to 2016? That's a 12 month wait.
That has to do with the flux capacitors. If you order one today, they'll get around to making yours in 2016. Then they set the date back to when you ordered it and drive it 88MPH up the railroad tracks. Then it just has to wait 4 months for them to finish up the paperwork, and its yours.
Is there any way I can play dumb, and get some of these from a hacker? I never ever buy wireless keyboards (just what I don't need- a less reliable human input device), but I could really use some free USB chargers.
As Triumph would say, the correct answer is "Who gives a shit?"
Does anybody still buy dead-tree dictionaries? I don't see this being relevant outside of a few grandparents who might buy this "Junior Dictionary" for their grandkids in the mistaken belief that it isn't easier for the kiddos to just look words up online, where space is not a premium so there's no need to omit words.
Chinese will be our new overseers. They already hold a massive amount of our debt
The whole Chinese holding our debt thing is a bit of a myth. First off, they barely hold more than Japan (occasionally less). Secondly, they only hold about 1/18th of it. Thirdly, if anything the leverage all goes the other way; there are plenty of parties out there willing to buy US debt, but there aren't a lot (some would say any) equivalent alternatives for someone looking to buy safe government securities. IOW: China needs us way more than we need them.
Why do we not vote in midterms?
FTFY
You might not be excited about it, but Senator Cruz is ready to get to work! He's going to start by tasking NASA with finding where all those letters and numbers go when the teachers wipe them off the whiteboards, and if Obama is involved somehow.
prevent private companies from using SSNs for ID numbers, customer identification and credit granting
I'm not sure exactly what that would accomplish. The only reason its a Bad Thing(tm) when someone gets my SSN is precisely because that is the number everyone uses for credit granting. If they instead started using some other unique personal number for that purpose (lets call in UPN for the purposes of this discussion), then it would be the UPN I have to give out all over the place, and it would be the UPN that would be under constant thread of being stolen by identity thieves. The effects would be the same.
All of us should have the right to lobby our legislators and legislatures.
...and we do. Its right there in the First Ammendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So they're gonna search dict/words for ^.olt$, done and done?
Unfortunately, Chrysler already has the Colt, so for the next one GM will be forced to go with "Dolt".
From what I'm gathering, it had a rather strong resemblance to the end of the Blues Brothers.
I'd rather hear Sesame Street Grover's ideas about taxes and government than Grover Norquist's. I'm certain that I'd find them more interesting than Norquist's one-dimensional, "taxes bad!"
Yeah. It would have made much more sense if his parents had named him after Cookie Monster.
No, I'm not misinterpreting it. I was quite aware of that part, but was ignoring it because no company with paid lawyers and stockholders would ever take that option. Its a Hobson's choice.
don't know what your cable/internet bill looks like, but I'm already paying "bullshit utility taxes" on mine.
Yes, because your cable company wants you to say that, so they pretend that they are passing on those costs directly to you, and call them out as bullshit line items on the bill. I guarantee you if those taxes disappeared tomorrow, you would not see your bill drop by that exact amount. A good economist could probably even give you a good estimate of how much (if any) it would be.
If the cable company was honestly passing the entire cost on to you, they wouldn't care enough about it to complain by putting it on the bill. They put that there precisely because if they can convince you to lower their taxes, they'd keep some of it and make themselves more money.
As for "service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today", I do not think that is correct. My only service requests (and my parents) had been establishing new service when moving, and it was always excellent.
Another oldster here, and that was my experience as well. Ma Bell's service was excellent. Those phones they gave us could survive a gas explosion too, and still worked when the power was out.
What you did not have was a lot of choice. You had the phone they gave you (identical to all your neighbors), and as few features as they could legally get away with providing. I'm sure everyone having identical equipment down to the actual phones was a large part of how their service was so good. There were only so many things that could go wrong.
Also, if you had some kind of disagreement with them, too bad for you. Your only recourse would be appeal to those government regulatory bodies that people here love deriding. Perhaps it wasn't much, but it was slightly better than the alternative (nothing).
Most of what people complain about with "government"-run stuff is actually a feature of monopolies. A company's ultimate accountability to its customers is their ability to throw that company over entirely for someone else. But if you are going to have a monopoly anyway, not making it accountable to the people in any other meaningful way (eg: making it government run or regulating it) will only make a bad situation worse.
Well, to be honest, having lived in California the liberal bastion of taxing everything for the benefit of the government and just about nobody else, I would classify the alternative...
That's my point exactly. When posed with that ridiculous hypothetical, a typical anti-tax person would act like Kirk taking the Kobayashi Maru and try to find a way to weasel their way around the (again ridiculous) question. But the heart of that question is one of priorities, and reframing the question leaves that ultimate priority question unanswered. Grover realized this, and didn't want there to be any doubt in anyone's head about his priorities. Everyone's grandma dies.
FWIW, this was a Colbert interview. I'd suggest watching it if you haven't. Its chilling.
Valid US copyrights can be held by non-US citizens (eg: ex Beatle Paul McCartney owns quite a few). And I believe part of the law is that the website cannot check. The person whose content that is can then dispute it, it gets put back up, and a lawsuit against that person will have to ensue at that point.
Yes. I have no huge problem with providing links to opinion articles from ideologues. However, please label them as such, rather than just slipping it in as a "related article". Simply adding "from Grover Norquist" would be fine.
FWIW, Mr. Norquist is the guy who coined the phrase "shrink Government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub", and is famous for trying to get politicians to sign "no tax increases no matter what happens" pledges. He also once said in an interview that if it was a choice between everyone's grandmother being eaten by ants, and a tax increase for only the wealthiest 2%, "we console ourself with the fact that we have pictures". A joke answer to a joke question, but a pretty telling one.
So you know going in for sure and certain that he's going to be against the government involving itself in any way, and in particular against anything that might possibly raise a tax somewhere. It will really have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand outside of those two points. The only interesting part is how he gets there.
Playing devil's advocate, it's possible that it wasn't the North Koreans who '"got sloppy" and made direct connections, exposing their true IP addresses'. Another explanation would be that some other group is responsible and got clever, routing attacks via North Korea to shift the blame.
I blame Xenu
I'm old enough to remember that in a bygone era this was how legislation was made. You float a few trial balloons, and then see what happens politically to those who shoot them down. If the people who shoot that balloon down take enough crap, they won't be so quick to do it next time. If the idea is popular enough, eventually, some people in both parties will start signing onto the bills, and one will pass.
So if you care about this issue, play your part. If you don't, go ahead and say nasty things about both sides and go back to playing Call of Duty.
And "free markets" don't exist, ever - they are an imaginary construct much like "friction free inclined planes" in physics.
Exactly. Adam Smith, the guy who invented the term in the 1700's, argued that it was the job of Government to do its best to regulate markets to keep them as "free" as possible. Previously, government action mostly consisted of helping the rich and connected build and protect their market monopolies. Sound familiar?
Since we only have one exemplar to work from, we really can't claim to have any clue what the required parameters are for intelligent life. We don't really know the full requirements for life either, but at least there we have lots of specimens, and know it happens pretty much anywhere liquid water is available. So places that look roughly like Earth and can hold liquid water would be great places to start looking for life.
If there are other bodies we can visit in this solar system that have liquid water, those would be great places to go check (and we've done a bit of that).
Mine insists the book has it wrong, and I'm from Mercury. What does that mean?
No I am tired of that argument it might have been legit 20 years ago but history in the mean time has proven its horse shit.
Ahhh, to be young again and think that 20 years ago is "history".
Really? Want me to compare atrocity to atrocity? Because I can go on all day with RECENT killings, mass murders, homicides, war crimes, etc. You're talking to someone sitting an easy drive from the ruins of the Murrah Building. There's no reason that couldn't happen again tomorrow.
The real problem here is extremists. Period. When you start to think a dispute with another person is best solved by killing people, you become an instrument of evil, no matter where you sit yourself on Sunday morning.
Violence against "those people" (whoever "those people" happens to be in your mind) is simple human nature, and it has to be fought everywhere, if you don't want the place you live in to start looking like the miserable places where it is currently running rampant.
I'd argue that black people should be armed. I'm a white
...obviously you are. A black person would never make such a statement. Armed black people in this country quite commonly get shot on sight. Scaring white people is a really good way to get yourself killed, and there are few things people who know blacks only from TV crime shows find scarier than a black person brandishing a weapon. Black people get shot for making sudden movements during traffic stops just on the theory that they could have been going for guns. Sometimes they just get shot for getting into an argument with a white person, or for being large and doing something that was interpreted as aggressive, or asking a white person for directions, or....
That's the thing not a lot of people seem to get. At the end this is all about fear. White folks are scared of black folk, by default. They may chose to ignore this behavior, but black people don't have that luxury because ignoring it can (and does) get them killed.