One way to look at P/E ratios is this: right now, I can buy T-Bills and get 5% interest. By taking absolutely zero risk, I can earn a 5% return: the "P/E" ratio of a T-Bill is essentially 20.
So when I invest in a stock, I would expect to take some risk in order to be rewarded with more than I would make with a T-Bill. For a stock whose P/E ratio is below 20, this means that if they were to pay 100% of their earnings as dividends and their stock never went anywhere, I would be paid more than if I bought treasury bills. And this makes sense: I'm taking some risk the company won't make any money or will sell more widgets or have the stock drop in value--and in exchange for this risk I'm getting the reward of a higher return than I would get with a zero-risk instrument.
For any stock whose P/E ratio is above 20, I would expect the value of the stock to go up: otherwise, why am I parking my money in something when I could make more money parking it in something that has no risk?
Now part of the problem with a bubble comes from the fact that over the years more and more value in stock investment comes from the speculative increase in the value in stock, and less and less comes from clipping coupons--that is, in getting the dividends from corporate earnings. Nothing is worse than the technology sector, which often has astronomical P/E ratios and yet do not pay any of their earnings in dividends: this creates a formula where investing in tech stocks is essentially speculative investing. That is, rather than taking reasonable risks, investing in many stocks is the equivalent to betting on horse racing.
So while the dot com bubble was pronounced, as far as I can tell there is nothing--no incentives by large software makers like Microsoft to become a blue-chip dividend-paying stock, no incentives for small companies to create a reasonable plan so they can start paying dividends to their shareholders, no incentives from investors who want to make the "big bucks" and see investing in stocks as being akin to playing craps--to prevent another tech bubble from forming.
... because people are just so ecologically minded and price conscience that they'll happily give up large SUVs for smaller and cheaper fuel-efficient cars.
So watch out, expensive and overpowered desktop and laptop computers; you're going to go the way of the SUV and the fuel-sucking trucks!
In France, they are also ruled by law--but you are guilty until proven innocent, and asking for a rit of Habeas Corpus there is going to get you laughed out of a magistrate's chambers. Does this illustrate any principle at all other than France is a separate country with it's own laws and it's own ways of interpreting and executing its laws?
Using an example from Australia to illustrate shortcomings in United States law is essentially a non-sequitur.
Excuse me while I get a little cranky, but what does the nation state of Australia have to do with a United States Executive Order, aside from providing the apparent proof that Chimpy McHitler is indeed so blasted evil that his evilness extends to other sovereign nation-states as well?
The types of activities that would cause you to fall under this order are enumerated further down, and are not all related to violent acts.
So... I guess since the terms 'act of violence' in section s1(a)(i) and 1(a)(ii) don't support the hypothesis that Chimpy McHitler is eeeeeveeel, they don't count?
The order gives the Secretary of the Treasury the right to immediately and without notice freeze all assets of anyone suspected of either directly or indirectly attempting to undermine the Iraqi government as well as anyone who has financial dealings, directly or indirectly, with such people.
No; the relevant section linked in the original article states:
Section 1(a)(i):... to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:... Section 1(a)(ii):... to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or... Section 1(a)(iii):... to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order. (ie., blocked because they are intent upon committing or supporting violence, as in section 1(a)(i) and 1(a)(ii) above.)
Sections 2 and 3 support the clauses set forth in section 1. (The "prohibitions set forth in this order" language in section 2, for example, refer to the text in section 1.)
It's not good enough for the purposes of this order to be engaged in transactions with people in Iraq--it also requires that the purpose of those transactions is to either directly or indirectly support violence in Iraq.
To suggest that this violates the fifth amendment is absurd: when a police officer, on arresting someone and discovering a gun in that person's belt buckle then removes the gun--is that a violation of the person's fifth amendment rights? Please...
Even reviewer Harvey Rosenfield, who is usually very kind to Apple, was quoted as saying 'some of them might be waking up now, wondering who they got in bed with.'"
Uh, in replacing the attribution you didn't replace the line which describes WHO Harvey Rosenfield is.
The guy is not a reviewer, nor has he been kind to Apple.
He is a lawyer, and the founder of the consumer advocacy group 'Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights' which has a habit of suing Apple on a regular basis.
Notice that in the letter to Apple he's setting up his latest run at being paid off by Apple's legal department for extortion protecting consumer rights by complaining about Apple's behavior at phone lock-in, something which is a common business practice in the United States. Disagree with Apple's business plans all you like, but is this a reason for a lawsuit to line Harvey's pockets?
Come on, Slashdot Editors--for Christ's sake, I found all this out in five seconds by an internet search of the guy's name!
What posturing is the FSF doing? I read the article & the FSF guy parsaid: 'Apple's released a proprietary & DRM-crippled phone - I wonder if it has GPLd software on it?'
Yeah, and I wonder when the spokes'droid stopped beating his wife.
Sorry, but such a statement is inflammatory on its surface and is borderline defamation as it suggests without evidence legal wrongdoing on the part of Apple. That is, the FSF is speaking something which is potentially (and designed to be) damaging to Apple, done knowing there is no evidence for such wrongdoing. That such borderline defamation got published sounds like borderline libel (borderline only in that it appears to skirt the legal limits by a hairs breadth), and doesn't do the FSF any damned good.
The problem that the FSF is trying to bring attention to is that with iPhone those users' freedoms aren't preserved. There is code covered by GPL or LGPL version 2 or previous inside the iPhone. One well known exemple is WebKit/KHTML.
Because ohmygod you cannot download the WebKit source code that is being used on the iPhone! Horrors of horrors Apple is just as evil as everyone here is saying...
Clearly Microsoft' hand has to be behind this one.
A music company is only in the business to sell music. Period. The only reason why a music company would be interested in making sure a distributor could support multiple devices (such as Apple's iTunes opening it's DRM technology so you can play iTunes bought music on a Zune) would be because the volume of music being sold through that distributor didn't justify the administrative overhead of dealing with Apple. As Apple is in third place, this isn't the case.
The only other issue I can think of is Apple's insistence upon fixed pricing--and if companies like Universal don't like that, they could always delay the rollout on iTunes until after CD sales have hit. So the problem is solvable under the current contract regime--and it would also help music stores, by causing people to go through music stores for the monster breakout hits.
No; there is no rational reason why Universal would make the noise they're making--unless they're trying to figure out how to crack the nut of breaking Apple's monopoly for their Redmond masters...
I fast forward--but for some ads I'll skip back and play the ad. The only reason why I don't like most advertising is because of ad saturation: after the first five hundred times I've seen an ad, the product is permanently burned into my brain--(*twitch* Ditech Mortgages *twitch*), and I don't need to see the ad anymore. Cute ads (the latest Apple Ads), ads for new movies, or for products I've never seen--I'll actually rewind the DVR and watch them.
Hell, with some of the tripe on TV nowadays sometimes the ads are the best part!
I don't know how it works in Canada, but in the United States, tribal soverenty is not soverenty on the level of a nation-state, but on the level of a state of the United States. That is, in the United States, the Zuni tribal lands are not treated as if they were Russia, with ambassadors and the sovereign right to manage their land in any way they wish, including raising an army and sending ambassadors to Washington D.C.; instead, the Zuni tribe are treated as if they were a state such as Arizona. Some of the "rights" we would assume an independent nation-state would have (such as the 'right' to raise an army) is suborned to the Federal Government. The Federal Government also has the right (enforced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs) to dictate the form of the internal tribal government--to assure, for example, that all members of a tribe have the right to vote for tribal leadership, regardless of the traditional ways of that tribe. (I vote every year in my tribal elections as a member of the Salinan Tribe.)
So at least in the United States a tribal government demanding a share in the radio spectrum revenue would be the equivalent of a state (such as Texas) demanding a share in that revenue. In other words, it's a non-starter.
Now if the cell companies wanted to place cell towers on tribal land, that becomes another issue entirely.
If Canada operates in the same way as the United States--and I believe they do, at least with respect to different levels of sovereignty enjoyed at different levels of government--then this is a non-starter as well. But if the tribe was smart, they'd negotiate a cut-rate deal on placing cell phone repeaters and towers on their land--assuming, of course, the land was located somewhere where adding a cell tower was financially advantageous to the cell companies.
Can't we just wrap the entire space in a large bubble of tin-foil? Like a super-gigantic tin-foil hat--that way, none of that electromagnetic stuff accidently violates their airspace...
Tom Wayne has amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books.
So he has a lot of excess stock that he is renting a warehouse to store. That is, because he's taken in more books than he has sold, he's now losing money storing a bunch of books.
But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they were full.
Oh, sure; they'd take that rare report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910--but how many copies of "Harry Potter" can a library reasonably take? I mean, what are they supposed to do? Rent a warehouse and store the books?
The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit for burning.
In other words, rather than pay the dumping fees to dump the excess stock in a landfill--excess stock no-one wants not because we're illiterate but because really, how many copies of "The Hunt for Red October" is a family supposed to own?--he burns them in an illegal bonfire.
The whole burning the books thing is a huge win/win: it taps into that underlying emotional current we have in America against book burning, while at the same time reduces the amount of money-loosing stock he has to carry without paying dumping charges to dump them at a landfill. And the real win: because he has tapped into that emotional current--
The idea of burning the books horrified Marcia Trayford, who paid $20 Sunday to carry away an armload of tomes on art, education and music.
"I've been trying to adopt as many books as I could," she said.
(Emphasis mine.) By tapping into that current he caused people like Marcia Trayford to "adopt" as many books as she could--books she would have otherwise not bought. Meaning rather than continue to pay for storage fees or landfill disposal charges, he made twenty bucks he wouldn't have made before.
So now the fascinating equation here will be: will he make money by having the occassional book burning--by causing people to "rescue" books from a book burning, even though the books themselves are in such wide circulation that you otherwise couldn't give them away (so the burning isn't classic censorship, but just property disposal)? Or would it be cheaper to just dump the books at a landfill?
My guess? P.T. Barnum was right--and the people coming in to "rescue" books that are not being censored but just disposed of will more than offset the cost to obtain a permit to burn private property for disposal purposes.
I hate to say this, but given the fact that the Commander In Chief is constitutionally responsible for things like dealing with the Iraq War (either waging or withdrawing, as your political leanings indicate), increasing or decreasing the federal government's footprint in things like military spending, the public safety net, drugs, energy and oil, foreign policy, government reform, immigration, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc., etc., isn't asking about technologically-specific issues sort of like arguing over the color of the china on the Titanic?
I mean, beyond setting policy which encourages economic growth, mindful to development issues such as environmental policy, who cares about a Presidential candidate's opinion about relatively minor stuff?
Hang on a damned second: wiretapping suspected terrorists hell-bent on blowing up civilians at home and abroad is the single most hateful act ever engaged in by the Bush Administration and is a complete infringement of our civil rights--but wiretapping individuals who are suspected of making an extra copy of the latest Rush album and gave it to a few of his friends is a worthy cause?
Am I the only who thinks Congress is out of it's friggin' gourd?
Here in Southern California property prices have gone up so much that springing a few grand for a roof-mounted solar panel system, even if it doesn't quite pay for itself for a few years, would be an easy thing to do. And with the amount of tree-hugging liberals here in Lala land, even if it doesn't pay for itself, the fact that you can claim to your friends that you're got solar panels would be enough to buy them. So economics by itself isn't a problem here.
There are two additional problems. First, in many municipalities (such as here in northern Glendale), there are restrictions on the equipment you are permitted to mount to the roof. Roof-mounted air conditioners are against the building code: they're considered an eye sore. If you're not permitted to mount a small box on your roof, you sure as hell aren't going to be allowed to mount a thousand square feet of solar panels to your roof.
The second problem is that many of the homes built throughout areas like Glendale were built in the 1930's--the roofs were constructed using 2x4 beams and simply will not support the additional static load. Many roofs on older homes are also not flat, but have a slight depression to them that would be exaggerated by adding additional static load. To add solar panels to my home, for example, I would pretty much have to rebuild the entire roof of my house, replacing the 2x4 beams with load-bearing trusses. Suddenly what was supposed to be a fairly simple multi-thousand dollar project has turned into a royal pain in the ass multi-tens of thousands project.
I understand why they want us to watch the ads; because if I'm not reminded every 15 minutes that Ditech has low mortgage rates and my erectile problems can be solved by using Cialis, I may start forgetting. And God knows we cannot allow people to forget that Ditech has low mortage rates and erectile problems can be solved using Cialis. Because if they ever need to refinance--something that apparently people do every weekend, by the rate of Ditech ads--they'll know they can refinance with Ditech. And God knows everyone on the planet has erectile problems that can be solved with Cialis, so if they should have erectile problems they can solve them by using Cialis.
Isn't the whole point of ads to sell me what I want? There is a ton of stuff out there I'd love to have if I knew about it--and refinancing through Ditech or having a hard penis using Cialis aren't it!
-- This message brought to you by the Mortgage Experts at Ditech and by the Erectile Dysfunction experts who make Cialis.
If you start sequestering CO2 on a massive scale, it could work to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere - but at the same time you will permanently remove Oxygen from the atmosphere as well!
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million, while O2 levels are measured in percentage points. The amount of oxygen that may get trapped by such a scheme is minute relative to the total amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
And the wiping out all the trees in the world talk sounds pretty bogus to me. Long before the trees are wiped out the price of wood would skyrocket to the point to either greatly restrict the use of paper or cause for the substitution of some other plant being used for paper, like hemp or reeds.
You forget the third alternative: making tree farming a much more profitable industry.
Of course it's easy to forget the third alternative: it requires admitting the fact that many trees we use are already farmed, rather than stripped from old growth forests in an unsustainable fashion.
In fact, thank the environmental movement for tree farms: by convincing the public that each time a tree is cut down from an old-growth forest God kills a kitten, it has made tree farming more profitable.
By your theory our eating potatoes will eventually cause potatoes to go extinct, and our eating corn and using corn for fuel will cause corn to go extinct. And for God's sake don't eat bread; we're quickly running out of wheat to make it with!
Trees that are used to make paper are farmed; that is, trees are planted and harvested in regular cycles on tracts of private land in order to provide the pulp and necessary for making paper.
We don't generally use old-growth trees and slow-growing trees for making paper; that timber, if cut, is too valuable for use as paper and winds up being used in construction. And environmentalism has increased the effective cost of using old-growth forests for wood products.
And while my comment about outlawing paper was intended to be humerous, the reality is this: post-consumer unbleached recycled pulp isn't white; turning it white requires a lot of bleaching, concentrating the various inks on the paper into a toxic sludge which has to go somewhere. So recycling isn't exactly the tree saving (do you stop eating potatoes to keep them from going extinct?) environmentally friendly (chlorine bleach anyone?) activity that it has been made out to be.
Perhaps we could save a step and farm trees, and bury them directly in the ground in order to lock their content of CO2 away, as we clear cut and plough under a tract of land in order to make space for more farmed trees. But the end result is the same: we're taking CO2 out of the atmosphere as we replace older farmed trees with saplings.
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One way to look at P/E ratios is this: right now, I can buy T-Bills and get 5% interest. By taking absolutely zero risk, I can earn a 5% return: the "P/E" ratio of a T-Bill is essentially 20.
So when I invest in a stock, I would expect to take some risk in order to be rewarded with more than I would make with a T-Bill. For a stock whose P/E ratio is below 20, this means that if they were to pay 100% of their earnings as dividends and their stock never went anywhere, I would be paid more than if I bought treasury bills. And this makes sense: I'm taking some risk the company won't make any money or will sell more widgets or have the stock drop in value--and in exchange for this risk I'm getting the reward of a higher return than I would get with a zero-risk instrument.
For any stock whose P/E ratio is above 20, I would expect the value of the stock to go up: otherwise, why am I parking my money in something when I could make more money parking it in something that has no risk?
Now part of the problem with a bubble comes from the fact that over the years more and more value in stock investment comes from the speculative increase in the value in stock, and less and less comes from clipping coupons--that is, in getting the dividends from corporate earnings. Nothing is worse than the technology sector, which often has astronomical P/E ratios and yet do not pay any of their earnings in dividends: this creates a formula where investing in tech stocks is essentially speculative investing. That is, rather than taking reasonable risks, investing in many stocks is the equivalent to betting on horse racing.
So while the dot com bubble was pronounced, as far as I can tell there is nothing--no incentives by large software makers like Microsoft to become a blue-chip dividend-paying stock, no incentives for small companies to create a reasonable plan so they can start paying dividends to their shareholders, no incentives from investors who want to make the "big bucks" and see investing in stocks as being akin to playing craps--to prevent another tech bubble from forming.
... because people are just so ecologically minded and price conscience that they'll happily give up large SUVs for smaller and cheaper fuel-efficient cars.
So watch out, expensive and overpowered desktop and laptop computers; you're going to go the way of the SUV and the fuel-sucking trucks!
In France, they are also ruled by law--but you are guilty until proven innocent, and asking for a rit of Habeas Corpus there is going to get you laughed out of a magistrate's chambers. Does this illustrate any principle at all other than France is a separate country with it's own laws and it's own ways of interpreting and executing its laws?
Using an example from Australia to illustrate shortcomings in United States law is essentially a non-sequitur.
Excuse me while I get a little cranky, but what does the nation state of Australia have to do with a United States Executive Order, aside from providing the apparent proof that Chimpy McHitler is indeed so blasted evil that his evilness extends to other sovereign nation-states as well?
Sections 2 and 3 support the clauses set forth in section 1. (The "prohibitions set forth in this order" language in section 2, for example, refer to the text in section 1.)
It's not good enough for the purposes of this order to be engaged in transactions with people in Iraq--it also requires that the purpose of those transactions is to either directly or indirectly support violence in Iraq.
To suggest that this violates the fifth amendment is absurd: when a police officer, on arresting someone and discovering a gun in that person's belt buckle then removes the gun--is that a violation of the person's fifth amendment rights? Please...
The guy is not a reviewer, nor has he been kind to Apple.
He is a lawyer, and the founder of the consumer advocacy group 'Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights' which has a habit of suing Apple on a regular basis.
Apple Issues Battery Program for IPhone
New 'iPhone' Policies Needed, Consumer Advocates Warn Apple, AT Questions Raised About Battery Replacement, Cancellation Practices in Letter to Apple CEO Jobs
older
Apple sued over faulty iPod Nanos
Latest iPod lawsuit weighs on Apple shares
Notice that in the letter to Apple he's setting up his latest run at being paid off by Apple's legal department for extortion protecting consumer rights by complaining about Apple's behavior at phone lock-in, something which is a common business practice in the United States. Disagree with Apple's business plans all you like, but is this a reason for a lawsuit to line Harvey's pockets?
Come on, Slashdot Editors--for Christ's sake, I found all this out in five seconds by an internet search of the guy's name!
Sorry, but such a statement is inflammatory on its surface and is borderline defamation as it suggests without evidence legal wrongdoing on the part of Apple. That is, the FSF is speaking something which is potentially (and designed to be) damaging to Apple, done knowing there is no evidence for such wrongdoing. That such borderline defamation got published sounds like borderline libel (borderline only in that it appears to skirt the legal limits by a hairs breadth), and doesn't do the FSF any damned good.
Oh, wait. My bad.
But does it do anyone any damned good if you "challenge" FUD with unfounded accusations borderlining on slander?
Clearly Microsoft' hand has to be behind this one.
A music company is only in the business to sell music. Period. The only reason why a music company would be interested in making sure a distributor could support multiple devices (such as Apple's iTunes opening it's DRM technology so you can play iTunes bought music on a Zune) would be because the volume of music being sold through that distributor didn't justify the administrative overhead of dealing with Apple. As Apple is in third place, this isn't the case.
The only other issue I can think of is Apple's insistence upon fixed pricing--and if companies like Universal don't like that, they could always delay the rollout on iTunes until after CD sales have hit. So the problem is solvable under the current contract regime--and it would also help music stores, by causing people to go through music stores for the monster breakout hits.
No; there is no rational reason why Universal would make the noise they're making--unless they're trying to figure out how to crack the nut of breaking Apple's monopoly for their Redmond masters...
If you outlaw blow jobs, then only outlaws will get blow jobs.
I fast forward--but for some ads I'll skip back and play the ad. The only reason why I don't like most advertising is because of ad saturation: after the first five hundred times I've seen an ad, the product is permanently burned into my brain--(*twitch* Ditech Mortgages *twitch*), and I don't need to see the ad anymore. Cute ads (the latest Apple Ads), ads for new movies, or for products I've never seen--I'll actually rewind the DVR and watch them.
Hell, with some of the tripe on TV nowadays sometimes the ads are the best part!
I don't know how it works in Canada, but in the United States, tribal soverenty is not soverenty on the level of a nation-state, but on the level of a state of the United States. That is, in the United States, the Zuni tribal lands are not treated as if they were Russia, with ambassadors and the sovereign right to manage their land in any way they wish, including raising an army and sending ambassadors to Washington D.C.; instead, the Zuni tribe are treated as if they were a state such as Arizona. Some of the "rights" we would assume an independent nation-state would have (such as the 'right' to raise an army) is suborned to the Federal Government. The Federal Government also has the right (enforced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs) to dictate the form of the internal tribal government--to assure, for example, that all members of a tribe have the right to vote for tribal leadership, regardless of the traditional ways of that tribe. (I vote every year in my tribal elections as a member of the Salinan Tribe.)
So at least in the United States a tribal government demanding a share in the radio spectrum revenue would be the equivalent of a state (such as Texas) demanding a share in that revenue. In other words, it's a non-starter.
Now if the cell companies wanted to place cell towers on tribal land, that becomes another issue entirely.
If Canada operates in the same way as the United States--and I believe they do, at least with respect to different levels of sovereignty enjoyed at different levels of government--then this is a non-starter as well. But if the tribe was smart, they'd negotiate a cut-rate deal on placing cell phone repeaters and towers on their land--assuming, of course, the land was located somewhere where adding a cell tower was financially advantageous to the cell companies.
Can't we just wrap the entire space in a large bubble of tin-foil? Like a super-gigantic tin-foil hat--that way, none of that electromagnetic stuff accidently violates their airspace...
Oh, sure; they'd take that rare report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910--but how many copies of "Harry Potter" can a library reasonably take? I mean, what are they supposed to do? Rent a warehouse and store the books?In other words, rather than pay the dumping fees to dump the excess stock in a landfill--excess stock no-one wants not because we're illiterate but because really, how many copies of "The Hunt for Red October" is a family supposed to own?--he burns them in an illegal bonfire.
The whole burning the books thing is a huge win/win: it taps into that underlying emotional current we have in America against book burning, while at the same time reduces the amount of money-loosing stock he has to carry without paying dumping charges to dump them at a landfill. And the real win: because he has tapped into that emotional current--
(Emphasis mine.) By tapping into that current he caused people like Marcia Trayford to "adopt" as many books as she could--books she would have otherwise not bought. Meaning rather than continue to pay for storage fees or landfill disposal charges, he made twenty bucks he wouldn't have made before.
So now the fascinating equation here will be: will he make money by having the occassional book burning--by causing people to "rescue" books from a book burning, even though the books themselves are in such wide circulation that you otherwise couldn't give them away (so the burning isn't classic censorship, but just property disposal)? Or would it be cheaper to just dump the books at a landfill?
My guess? P.T. Barnum was right--and the people coming in to "rescue" books that are not being censored but just disposed of will more than offset the cost to obtain a permit to burn private property for disposal purposes.
I hate to say this, but given the fact that the Commander In Chief is constitutionally responsible for things like dealing with the Iraq War (either waging or withdrawing, as your political leanings indicate), increasing or decreasing the federal government's footprint in things like military spending, the public safety net, drugs, energy and oil, foreign policy, government reform, immigration, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc., etc., isn't asking about technologically-specific issues sort of like arguing over the color of the china on the Titanic?
I mean, beyond setting policy which encourages economic growth, mindful to development issues such as environmental policy, who cares about a Presidential candidate's opinion about relatively minor stuff?
Hang on a damned second: wiretapping suspected terrorists hell-bent on blowing up civilians at home and abroad is the single most hateful act ever engaged in by the Bush Administration and is a complete infringement of our civil rights--but wiretapping individuals who are suspected of making an extra copy of the latest Rush album and gave it to a few of his friends is a worthy cause?
Am I the only who thinks Congress is out of it's friggin' gourd?
But without the dozens and dozens of LEDs aglow around my computer system at home, what would I use for a night light?
Here in Southern California property prices have gone up so much that springing a few grand for a roof-mounted solar panel system, even if it doesn't quite pay for itself for a few years, would be an easy thing to do. And with the amount of tree-hugging liberals here in Lala land, even if it doesn't pay for itself, the fact that you can claim to your friends that you're got solar panels would be enough to buy them. So economics by itself isn't a problem here.
There are two additional problems. First, in many municipalities (such as here in northern Glendale), there are restrictions on the equipment you are permitted to mount to the roof. Roof-mounted air conditioners are against the building code: they're considered an eye sore. If you're not permitted to mount a small box on your roof, you sure as hell aren't going to be allowed to mount a thousand square feet of solar panels to your roof.
The second problem is that many of the homes built throughout areas like Glendale were built in the 1930's--the roofs were constructed using 2x4 beams and simply will not support the additional static load. Many roofs on older homes are also not flat, but have a slight depression to them that would be exaggerated by adding additional static load. To add solar panels to my home, for example, I would pretty much have to rebuild the entire roof of my house, replacing the 2x4 beams with load-bearing trusses. Suddenly what was supposed to be a fairly simple multi-thousand dollar project has turned into a royal pain in the ass multi-tens of thousands project.
I understand why they want us to watch the ads; because if I'm not reminded every 15 minutes that Ditech has low mortgage rates and my erectile problems can be solved by using Cialis, I may start forgetting. And God knows we cannot allow people to forget that Ditech has low mortage rates and erectile problems can be solved using Cialis. Because if they ever need to refinance--something that apparently people do every weekend, by the rate of Ditech ads--they'll know they can refinance with Ditech. And God knows everyone on the planet has erectile problems that can be solved with Cialis, so if they should have erectile problems they can solve them by using Cialis.
Isn't the whole point of ads to sell me what I want? There is a ton of stuff out there I'd love to have if I knew about it--and refinancing through Ditech or having a hard penis using Cialis aren't it!
--
This message brought to you by the Mortgage Experts at Ditech and by the Erectile Dysfunction experts who make Cialis.
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million, while O2 levels are measured in percentage points. The amount of oxygen that may get trapped by such a scheme is minute relative to the total amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Of course it's easy to forget the third alternative: it requires admitting the fact that many trees we use are already farmed, rather than stripped from old growth forests in an unsustainable fashion.
In fact, thank the environmental movement for tree farms: by convincing the public that each time a tree is cut down from an old-growth forest God kills a kitten, it has made tree farming more profitable.
By your theory our eating potatoes will eventually cause potatoes to go extinct, and our eating corn and using corn for fuel will cause corn to go extinct. And for God's sake don't eat bread; we're quickly running out of wheat to make it with!
Trees that are used to make paper are farmed; that is, trees are planted and harvested in regular cycles on tracts of private land in order to provide the pulp and necessary for making paper.
We don't generally use old-growth trees and slow-growing trees for making paper; that timber, if cut, is too valuable for use as paper and winds up being used in construction. And environmentalism has increased the effective cost of using old-growth forests for wood products.
And while my comment about outlawing paper was intended to be humerous, the reality is this: post-consumer unbleached recycled pulp isn't white; turning it white requires a lot of bleaching, concentrating the various inks on the paper into a toxic sludge which has to go somewhere. So recycling isn't exactly the tree saving (do you stop eating potatoes to keep them from going extinct?) environmentally friendly (chlorine bleach anyone?) activity that it has been made out to be.
Perhaps we could save a step and farm trees, and bury them directly in the ground in order to lock their content of CO2 away, as we clear cut and plough under a tract of land in order to make space for more farmed trees. But the end result is the same: we're taking CO2 out of the atmosphere as we replace older farmed trees with saplings.