"Settled" implies that some people found some nice land and decided to live there. Unfortunatley, there were people there before the Spanish arrived - and the Spanish called themselves conquistadors. There was nothing settling about it.
My state taxes my state tax refunds. They treat it as additional income, which is then taxed in the next tax year.
That doesn't make much sense to me, since a refund is a return to you of money you over-paid.
The simple answer is that you just adjust your W-4 and have less withheld. Plan it so you always pay a little. Then, if you are correct that you are, indeed, taxed on the returned money, then you'll have nothing to pay tax on. Plus you get your money for the whole year.
It's a pretty simple thing to do, even if payroll hates it. Make a spreadsheet to estimate your income and all the tax deductible things that will happen (mortgage interest, student loan interest, etc). Then using current tax tables, figure out your tax. Divide it by the number of pay periods you have and tell your HR people that you want to set your deductions so that you pay that much. Often, you have to overstate the deductions (I'm single, no kids, an I use 5) then have an additional "fixed" amount taken out as well.
If they can't calculate it, then try to estimate by making a change and seeing how it impacts your next paycheck.
I personally find it a "fun" game to see if I can get my state and federal taxes to cancel out.
But, by the mere fact that you can get out of paying a tax on your return by not having a return makes me think something is being misunderstood by you or your accountant.
There are lots of factors that will probably make this decision for you:
- what do you want to spend your time teaching? Every class minute you spend teaching vi or emacs is a minute you're not teaching the programming. Every assignment you assign to practice vi and emacs is an assignment that can't focus as much on the programming
- what does the college expect someone who passes your class to know? Are they expected to know how to use an IDE for the class that has yours as a pre-req?
- which gives more value to your students? while learning an archaic text editor might be handy, learning to make the most of an IDE might serve them better - knowing how to set breakpoints, watches, stepping through code, etc.
I would suggest you pick the method that will let your students spend more time and energy learning to write good code -- and let them use the system that serves them best.
Re:If you're self-employed, you're not laid off.
on
Budgeting for Layoffs?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I had an engineering professor who once said that engineering was making decisions without all the information. If you have all the information then you're just doing technician work.
Saving/Investing is, in that sense, a bit like engineering. You do your best to make a good decision with incomplete information. There's no way to know what will happen in the future, so you make the best decisions you can and try to recognize the various risks and account for them somehow.
Another quote I like: Making predictions is a tricky business, especially when they're concerning the future.
Well, here's hoping you get back home safe and can have kids if you want them.
Sharia sucks. It's sad that the weird irony is that there wasn't much sharia in Iraq under Saddam, but a pretty signficant chance that most of Iraq will be under it when we leave. It's even sadder that there are plenty of Christian fundamentalists here that would love to see the US under a "Christian" form of Sharia.
The problem is that when you raise a cell phone up high enough, it winds up being visible to way too may cells and causes excessive interference.
So... to wreak havoc on communications, all a "terrorist" needs to do is tie a bunch of cheap cellphones to helium_filled balloons, dial 911, and let go? Sounds like the system is inherently weak and needs to be redesigned a bit. Why can't the towers talk to each other and tell each other which phones they're handling? Why does being visible to multiple towers HAVE to be a problem?
Personally, I hope the service providers charge high fees for WiFi acess - that will limit usage and keep some sanity in the skies.
The airlines are already doing everything they can to make the trip as excruciating as possible. And you're saying that a nice avenue of "escape" like the internet should be as highly priced as possible? Wi-fi is no the same as voip. And frankly, I'd rather have the dude wedged in next to me surfing the internet than trying to talk to me.
He has a lot of general consumer advice, but he often talks about investments and saving for retirement.
In general: 1) save in your company 401k/403B, etc up to the point where your company matches 2) then save to the max you can in a ROTH IRA 3) then save more in your company 401K since it's pre-tax 4) invest additional money in something like mutual funds. Pick ones with no-loads. You'll probably do well with an indexed fund like an S&P500. He often recommends vangaurd and tiaa-cref. BUT never invest in something you don't understand, no matter how good it sounds 5) retirement savings is always a higher priority than saving for kids education. There are tons of ways for a kid to get an education paid for. There are few ways to fund your retirement. 6) use a credit union if possible - lower fees, better service, with few downsides 7) pay off all your credit cards and don't keep balances on them. Consider if you already have $5,000 in credit card debt at 17%, every dollar you put in is "earning" the same as a 17% investment
For specific advice about stocks and such, you probably need a "more advanced" source of info. But, Clark is a good start and his advice is probably good enough to cover most people's needs - since few have savings and most have lots of debt - and stocks are the last thing they need to be thinking about.
He has a pretty good book, I think called Clark Smart.
If you're self-employed, you really should be looking into doing a SEP to save for retirement. The big benefit is that money you put in your SEP is pre-tax. You can usually put away quite a bit more than you can in a normal IRA. It's also a pretty simple form.
Avoid the simple-IRA, because it's not simple and the SEP is usually a better deal.
Roth IRAs are a great way to save your post-tax income for retirement since once you retire, all the returns remain untaxed.
Both of these are better than doing just CDs unless you need the money for retirement.
Where we have tangible results from our defense programs, we have only weighing debt and spiraling spending from our social programs.
Funny... you never hear about multi-billion dollar emergency appropriations to feed our starving children. Yet we get them on a fairly regular basis to fund this insane war in Iraq. I know you're there taking bullets and IED's, but you shouldn't even be there.
As for ballooning debt, it's been happening quite badly under this administration. Partly because of huge tax-cuts for people and corporations who can afford to live without them, huge expenditures on an unnecessary war, and economic policies that have lead to a weakening of the dollar on the international markets. It's hardly because of social welfare programs.
Your in some delusion to think terrorism is impossible or improbable. It's inevitable without the very measures we have employed since September 12th that you are fighting so hard to undo.
No. I'm not saying terrorism is impossible or improbable. I'm saying that I'm willing to face that threat without cowering in fear or by giving up all my essential liberties. I THOUGHT that was what America stood for when I joined the Army. But apparently that was just a myth.
Finally, there's a huge difference between conducting intelligence operations against an enemy on the battlefield (I was a 98G/Arabic) and spying on every American citizen. I'd hope that someone like you, who's sworn an oath to defend the constitution would understand that. It makes me even sadder that you don't.
Give me liberty or give me death, but don't try to convince me to cower in of Osama.
If we could impeach Clinton for a perfectly legal sex act, then we can impeach Bush for being an dangerous idiot.
I hate what Bush is doing about as much as one can. But let's be honest in our arguments. Clinton was not impeached for having oral sex in the White House. He was impeached for lying about it in a grand jury.
I have to admit that this Republican party just amazes me. Reagan used to joke that the scariest words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm hear to help you." The same party that lives by that joke now simply rolls over every time the government steps up its intrusion into our lives. Government keeping records on people's conversations and comings and goings used to be anathema. Now they consider anyone who challenges such things as being in league with the terrorists. This party, who doesn't trust the government to educate children, feed the poor, and build roads somehow as no problem trusting this government to collect every bit of information about each person's life and not abuse it.
Do the terrorists really scare the Republicans and conservatives so much?
We've gone from a country that once celebrated "give me liberty or give me death" to one that now cowers with "oh great government, please protect me from those scary terrorists and liberals."
If the data is on an encrypted disk, does the thief really have the data if they steal the encrypted disk?
Yes. Because the thief may be able to decrypt the data because they also copied down the password/key that was on a post-it note hidden under the keyboard of the computer. Or they might exploit a flaw in the encryption. Or they manage to socially-engineer access to the key needed to decrypt the data. Or they might have installed a key-logger to get the key and then came back a week later to get the drives too.
The intake vent was on the bottom, and the little spacing feet are only about 1/4 inch tall. So, if a piece of paper slide under there, it didn't take much to pull it up and block the intake vents. It probably would have been better to use a smaller fan and have the vents on the back or sides.
The cool part was that they used a 12V fan, but actually had it hooked up to the 5V rail to make it run quieter.
I used to work at a school as a sysadmin where a vast majority of the machines were Tektronix X-terminals. We had Sun Sparcs and linux boxes on the back-end running FVWM.
From an admin point of view, it couldn't be beat. They rarely had problems. When they did, it was usually because paper got sucked up underneath and blocked the air intake. But even when there were problems, you just swapped out the pizza-box. And talk about quiet.
We only had one die - someone spilled cuppa-soup next to it and it got sucked up inside. Yuck.
This approach is great any any environment where you want consistent software settings, etc. We had 2 application servers. Want to install/upgrade applications? Just put them in 2 places, and everyone has it.
We also had a few "power" machines with the heavy duty-aps. Just SSH over, point your terminal to your screen (a script handled this by default), and you had all the power you need.
I had a lot of lazy days back then. Then we started turning them all into windows boxes... and I had a lot more work. It was sad.
I would hope that windows via thin-client would be as nice as it was with unix... but it sounds like the costs are just as bad.
I think it's lexan. Whatever the Nalgene bottles are made of. It could be polycarbonate.
Lexan probably has some risk, but I'm sure the risk I take in my commute is much much higher than bigger breasts. Heck, the beer and hotwings I'm a regular consumer of is more likely to kill me anyway.
And as for chromosome damage risk, I don't have to worry about kids - got'em snipped.
Anyway, something's going to kill you eventually. I stive to make it something I enjoy!
"We've become a country of fearful whining crybabies, and it's pretty pathetic." - No, not all of us are liberals.
I'm not talking about the liberals. They're whimpy and ineffective. But at least they are not lashing out in their fear at every little boogey man that's presented to them. Just in one day of listening to right-wing radio, I heard about how the illegal immegrants are out to get us, how Iraqi insurgents are out to get us, how the Iranians are out to get us, and oh yeah, and the liberals are out to get us (not sure how, when they're not in power). It must be hard to live with all that fear all the time - too bad the only way you seem to cope with it is by sending young men and women off to other countries to die while killing other young men and women.
> You're just another stupid slashtroll, who whores karma... > Why is your life so empty and pathetic that you have nothing better to do > than make up things to be pissed off about?
I could care less about Karma. Take it all away if you like. I mean, my life is so meaningless and pointless that not even karma can save me. I think I'll kill myself now. Oh wait... I actually have a life.
> What's pretty sad is that all you have to do to get +5 these days is insult > the US and Bush.
Wow, you must live a pretty sheltered life if your idea of a travesty is easy-to-get karma on this silly website. I'll tell you what I find pretty sad:
- secret prisons being run by our country - torture being done by Americans in those prisons - rendition by our government of people to be tortured in other places - my country geing taken to war on a whim and manufactured "intelligence" - tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis being killed by our country - illegal NSA programs to secretly spy on Americans in America (google for USSID 18) - warrantless searches of Americans homes, papers, and e-mails (check ammendment 4... of the constitution)
Those are just a few of the things I find very sad and troubling. I used to love this country - I even gave four years of my life to defend it. It make me sick to see what is being done to this country and to our freedoms. Not by a handful of radical muslims hiding in the desert... but by the president and his party the controls the congress.
I'm fortunate that my company provides free tea and coffee. I don't drink much coffee, but I'm a tea-fiend. I have a liter lexan (Nalgene) bottle and I put 1 "english breakfast" and 1 "earl grey" tea bag in, and pour in about 1/5 liter of boiling water (out of the coffee pot - it has a bypass spigot).
Let that sit for a couple minutes, put in a spoon of sugar, fill to 4/5ths full with water and top with ice. A great refreshing caffeinated drink. The sugar's not necessary, but it's a small amount and gives it just the right flavor.
It's pretty sad. We've gone from a president who said after an attack, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" to one who wants to nuke another country in a first-strike out of fear that they might attack us. We've become a country of fearful whining crybabies, and it's pretty pathetic.
And what's even more ironic is that while the parent poster is worried about the "hidden imam" coming back to initiate armageddon, we already have a wonder-boy in the white house trying to do the same thing.
If they're already in a sandy place, they probably will just use big fans like they do on movie sets. It doesn't have to be a huge sandstorm. Just a vigorous one in the area immediately around the person in the suit.
If it's not already sandy, they can probably put piles of sand in front of the fan.
Going back to my original comment, I was simply advising that before looking to PVs as a panacea for all our energy problems that we need to look at their cost "from dust to dust". It's something that's too often not done in our economy.
I wasn't arguing against using PVs, or even that they are a bad idea. I am, however, arguing against blindly jumping on the bandwagon of using a technology without exploring all the system costs incurred by that technology.
Pollution from manufacturing and pollution from energy conversion are two completely different things.
Only symantically. Pollution and waste are pollution and waste. It doesn't matter much where or when in the process it's produced. It's like saying loan origination fees and interest payments are two completely different things. While in a technical sense, they are. But in a real, systemic, sense, they are a cost of borrowing money. Getting a lower interest rate on your loan may appear at first glance to be a good thing, but it may not be if you have to pay a higher origination fee. In the end, you have to analyze the NPV of both options to see which is best.
And in the case of energy solutions, that's exactly what I'm arguing for. Let's try new technologies, including PV, but let's also make sure we do a thorough analysis of the end-to-end costs before saying one is unequivically the best way to go.
I'm not challening PV. I'm challenging the mindest of scurrying from one energy system to another without looking at all the consequences. So, in that context, my bringing up hydrogen cars is perfectly in aligment with what I orignally said. You just didn't understand that.
It's common for people to get bogged down in the details and not see the big picture. It's probably the biggest failing of the human race.
I'm sure the USPS gets it to the congressional screening office. Once there however, thanks to the anthrax scare, it's likely to be vaporized in the x-ray machine, or at best, delayed for several weeks - long after the bill you're writing about has been voted on.
For the entire duration of your time playing at Rob's house, Rob still owns every monopoly dollar; for the entire duration of your time playing WoW, blizzard owns your gold. You don't take your monopoly dollars home with you, nor your WoW lewt.
You never own 'your' game money. As such, you can't be taxed on it.
What you say actually applies to real money too.
People trade "real money" for WOW gold because they believe that it has some value for them within WOW.
People trade their labor for "real money" because they believe that it has some value for them within the real world.
Think about it... most of "your" money is just a bunch of bits in a computer - just like WOW money. The cash that's in your pocket doesn't belong to you either - it belongs to the government - just like WOW money belongs to WOW.
The only reason either of them have value is because you and other people believe it does. As soon as people lose "faith" in the value of a dollar or WOW gold, it loses its value - because it has little, if any, intrinsic value.
What if your character acquires a bunch of gold and then gets it stolen? Are you liable for your total gain? Or what you had at 12:59PM on December 31st? And if taht, what if you just go bury the gold somewhere and go get it again after midnight?
And what happens if your character acquires a bunch of gold and then your computer crashes, you lose your passwords, and you can no longer log into your WOW account? Do you still pay taxes on that virtual money you can't get access to any more?
It seems to me the only way this can be done logically is to have taxes assessed when the virtual money is exchanged for real money.
I like the country example. If I send $10,000 to a foreign country start and run a business, I'm only going to be taxed (locally) on the money I try to bring back. Any money that's generated in-country and stays there is pretty much off-limits to the IRS.
Otherwise, we end up going down the road that everything you own that appreciates is immediately subject to taxes. After watching Antique Road Show, this could be a huge mess for people and the IRS.
Actually this points out why the whole idea of taxing income is silly. Tax transactions, not the accumulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Settled? You do mean colonized, don't you?
"Settled" implies that some people found some nice land and decided to live there. Unfortunatley, there were people there before the Spanish arrived - and the Spanish called themselves conquistadors. There was nothing settling about it.
My state taxes my state tax refunds. They treat it as additional income, which is then taxed in the next tax year.
That doesn't make much sense to me, since a refund is a return to you of money you over-paid.
The simple answer is that you just adjust your W-4 and have less withheld. Plan it so you always pay a little. Then, if you are correct that you are, indeed, taxed on the returned money, then you'll have nothing to pay tax on. Plus you get your money for the whole year.
It's a pretty simple thing to do, even if payroll hates it. Make a spreadsheet to estimate your income and all the tax deductible things that will happen (mortgage interest, student loan interest, etc). Then using current tax tables, figure out your tax. Divide it by the number of pay periods you have and tell your HR people that you want to set your deductions so that you pay that much. Often, you have to overstate the deductions (I'm single, no kids, an I use 5) then have an additional "fixed" amount taken out as well.
If they can't calculate it, then try to estimate by making a change and seeing how it impacts your next paycheck.
I personally find it a "fun" game to see if I can get my state and federal taxes to cancel out.
But, by the mere fact that you can get out of paying a tax on your return by not having a return makes me think something is being misunderstood by you or your accountant.
There are lots of factors that will probably make this decision for you:
- what do you want to spend your time teaching? Every class minute you spend teaching vi or emacs is a minute you're not teaching the programming. Every assignment you assign to practice vi and emacs is an assignment that can't focus as much on the programming
- what does the college expect someone who passes your class to know? Are they expected to know how to use an IDE for the class that has yours as a pre-req?
- which gives more value to your students? while learning an archaic text editor might be handy, learning to make the most of an IDE might serve them better - knowing how to set breakpoints, watches, stepping through code, etc.
I would suggest you pick the method that will let your students spend more time and energy learning to write good code -- and let them use the system that serves them best.
I had an engineering professor who once said that engineering was making decisions without all the information. If you have all the information then you're just doing technician work.
Saving/Investing is, in that sense, a bit like engineering. You do your best to make a good decision with incomplete information. There's no way to know what will happen in the future, so you make the best decisions you can and try to recognize the various risks and account for them somehow.
Another quote I like: Making predictions is a tricky business, especially when they're concerning the future.
Well, here's hoping you get back home safe and can have kids if you want them.
Sharia sucks. It's sad that the weird irony is that there wasn't much sharia in Iraq under Saddam, but a pretty signficant chance that most of Iraq will be under it when we leave. It's even sadder that there are plenty of Christian fundamentalists here that would love to see the US under a "Christian" form of Sharia.
The problem is that when you raise a cell phone up high enough, it winds up being visible to way too may cells and causes excessive interference.
So... to wreak havoc on communications, all a "terrorist" needs to do is tie a bunch of cheap cellphones to helium_filled balloons, dial 911, and let go? Sounds like the system is inherently weak and needs to be redesigned a bit. Why can't the towers talk to each other and tell each other which phones they're handling? Why does being visible to multiple towers HAVE to be a problem?
Personally, I hope the service providers charge high fees for WiFi acess - that will limit usage and keep some sanity in the skies.
The airlines are already doing everything they can to make the trip as excruciating as possible. And you're saying that a nice avenue of "escape" like the internet should be as highly priced as possible? Wi-fi is no the same as voip. And frankly, I'd rather have the dude wedged in next to me surfing the internet than trying to talk to me.
I've learned a lot by listening to Clark Howard: http://clarkhoward.com/
He has a lot of general consumer advice, but he often talks about investments and saving for retirement.
In general:
1) save in your company 401k/403B, etc up to the point where your company matches
2) then save to the max you can in a ROTH IRA
3) then save more in your company 401K since it's pre-tax
4) invest additional money in something like mutual funds. Pick ones with no-loads. You'll probably do well with an indexed fund like an S&P500. He often recommends vangaurd and tiaa-cref. BUT never invest in something you don't understand, no matter how good it sounds
5) retirement savings is always a higher priority than saving for kids education. There are tons of ways for a kid to get an education paid for. There are few ways to fund your retirement.
6) use a credit union if possible - lower fees, better service, with few downsides
7) pay off all your credit cards and don't keep balances on them. Consider if you already have $5,000 in credit card debt at 17%, every dollar you put in is "earning" the same as a 17% investment
For specific advice about stocks and such, you probably need a "more advanced" source of info. But, Clark is a good start and his advice is probably good enough to cover most people's needs - since few have savings and most have lots of debt - and stocks are the last thing they need to be thinking about.
He has a pretty good book, I think called Clark Smart.
If you're self-employed, you really should be looking into doing a SEP to save for retirement. The big benefit is that money you put in your SEP is pre-tax. You can usually put away quite a bit more than you can in a normal IRA. It's also a pretty simple form.
Avoid the simple-IRA, because it's not simple and the SEP is usually a better deal.
Roth IRAs are a great way to save your post-tax income for retirement since once you retire, all the returns remain untaxed.
Both of these are better than doing just CDs unless you need the money for retirement.
Where we have tangible results from our defense programs, we have only weighing debt and spiraling spending from our social programs.
Funny... you never hear about multi-billion dollar emergency appropriations to feed our starving children. Yet we get them on a fairly regular basis to fund this insane war in Iraq. I know you're there taking bullets and IED's, but you shouldn't even be there.
As for ballooning debt, it's been happening quite badly under this administration. Partly because of huge tax-cuts for people and corporations who can afford to live without them, huge expenditures on an unnecessary war, and economic policies that have lead to a weakening of the dollar on the international markets. It's hardly because of social welfare programs.
Your in some delusion to think terrorism is impossible or improbable. It's inevitable without the very measures we have employed since September 12th that you are fighting so hard to undo.
No. I'm not saying terrorism is impossible or improbable. I'm saying that I'm willing to face that threat without cowering in fear or by giving up all my essential liberties. I THOUGHT that was what America stood for when I joined the Army. But apparently that was just a myth.
Finally, there's a huge difference between conducting intelligence operations against an enemy on the battlefield (I was a 98G/Arabic) and spying on every American citizen. I'd hope that someone like you, who's sworn an oath to defend the constitution would understand that. It makes me even sadder that you don't.
Give me liberty or give me death, but don't try to convince me to cower in of Osama.
If we could impeach Clinton for a perfectly legal sex act, then we can impeach Bush for being an dangerous idiot.
I hate what Bush is doing about as much as one can. But let's be honest in our arguments. Clinton was not impeached for having oral sex in the White House. He was impeached for lying about it in a grand jury.
I have to admit that this Republican party just amazes me. Reagan used to joke that the scariest words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm hear to help you." The same party that lives by that joke now simply rolls over every time the government steps up its intrusion into our lives. Government keeping records on people's conversations and comings and goings used to be anathema. Now they consider anyone who challenges such things as being in league with the terrorists. This party, who doesn't trust the government to educate children, feed the poor, and build roads somehow as no problem trusting this government to collect every bit of information about each person's life and not abuse it.
Do the terrorists really scare the Republicans and conservatives so much?
We've gone from a country that once celebrated "give me liberty or give me death" to one that now cowers with "oh great government, please protect me from those scary terrorists and liberals."
If the data is on an encrypted disk, does the thief really have the data if they steal the encrypted disk?
Yes. Because the thief may be able to decrypt the data because they also copied down the password/key that was on a post-it note hidden under the keyboard of the computer. Or they might exploit a flaw in the encryption. Or they manage to socially-engineer access to the key needed to decrypt the data. Or they might have installed a key-logger to get the key and then came back a week later to get the drives too.
I like the pun...
The intake vent was on the bottom, and the little spacing feet are only about 1/4 inch tall. So, if a piece of paper slide under there, it didn't take much to pull it up and block the intake vents. It probably would have been better to use a smaller fan and have the vents on the back or sides.
The cool part was that they used a 12V fan, but actually had it hooked up to the 5V rail to make it run quieter.
I used to work at a school as a sysadmin where a vast majority of the machines were Tektronix X-terminals. We had Sun Sparcs and linux boxes on the back-end running FVWM.
From an admin point of view, it couldn't be beat. They rarely had problems. When they did, it was usually because paper got sucked up underneath and blocked the air intake. But even when there were problems, you just swapped out the pizza-box. And talk about quiet.
We only had one die - someone spilled cuppa-soup next to it and it got sucked up inside. Yuck.
This approach is great any any environment where you want consistent software settings, etc. We had 2 application servers. Want to install/upgrade applications? Just put them in 2 places, and everyone has it.
We also had a few "power" machines with the heavy duty-aps. Just SSH over, point your terminal to your screen (a script handled this by default), and you had all the power you need.
I had a lot of lazy days back then. Then we started turning them all into windows boxes... and I had a lot more work. It was sad.
I would hope that windows via thin-client would be as nice as it was with unix... but it sounds like the costs are just as bad.
Good luck.
I think it's lexan. Whatever the Nalgene bottles are made of. It could be polycarbonate.
Lexan probably has some risk, but I'm sure the risk I take in my commute is much much higher than bigger breasts. Heck, the beer and hotwings I'm a regular consumer of is more likely to kill me anyway.
And as for chromosome damage risk, I don't have to worry about kids - got'em snipped.
Anyway, something's going to kill you eventually. I stive to make it something I enjoy!
But how do you get iced tea? Is it a matter of waiting to add the ice?
"We've become a country of fearful whining crybabies, and it's pretty pathetic." - No, not all of us are liberals.
I'm not talking about the liberals. They're whimpy and ineffective. But at least they are not lashing out in their fear at every little boogey man that's presented to them. Just in one day of listening to right-wing radio, I heard about how the illegal immegrants are out to get us, how Iraqi insurgents are out to get us, how the Iranians are out to get us, and oh yeah, and the liberals are out to get us (not sure how, when they're not in power). It must be hard to live with all that fear all the time - too bad the only way you seem to cope with it is by sending young men and women off to other countries to die while killing other young men and women.
> You're just another stupid slashtroll, who whores karma...
> Why is your life so empty and pathetic that you have nothing better to do
> than make up things to be pissed off about?
I could care less about Karma. Take it all away if you like. I mean, my life is so meaningless and pointless that not even karma can save me. I think I'll kill myself now. Oh wait... I actually have a life.
> What's pretty sad is that all you have to do to get +5 these days is insult
> the US and Bush.
Wow, you must live a pretty sheltered life if your idea of a travesty is easy-to-get karma on this silly website. I'll tell you what I find pretty sad:
- secret prisons being run by our country
- torture being done by Americans in those prisons
- rendition by our government of people to be tortured in other places
- my country geing taken to war on a whim and manufactured "intelligence"
- tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis being killed by our country
- illegal NSA programs to secretly spy on Americans in America (google for USSID 18)
- warrantless searches of Americans homes, papers, and e-mails (check ammendment 4... of the constitution)
Those are just a few of the things I find very sad and troubling. I used to love this country - I even gave four years of my life to defend it. It make me sick to see what is being done to this country and to our freedoms. Not by a handful of radical muslims hiding in the desert... but by the president and his party the controls the congress.
Anyway, you're an AC and probably won't see this.
I'm fortunate that my company provides free tea and coffee. I don't drink much coffee, but I'm a tea-fiend. I have a liter lexan (Nalgene) bottle and I put 1 "english breakfast" and 1 "earl grey" tea bag in, and pour in about 1/5 liter of boiling water (out of the coffee pot - it has a bypass spigot).
Let that sit for a couple minutes, put in a spoon of sugar, fill to 4/5ths full with water and top with ice. A great refreshing caffeinated drink. The sugar's not necessary, but it's a small amount and gives it just the right flavor.
I save tons on the soda I would normally buy.
It's pretty sad. We've gone from a president who said after an attack, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" to one who wants to nuke another country in a first-strike out of fear that they might attack us. We've become a country of fearful whining crybabies, and it's pretty pathetic.
And what's even more ironic is that while the parent poster is worried about the "hidden imam" coming back to initiate armageddon, we already have a wonder-boy in the white house trying to do the same thing.
If they're already in a sandy place, they probably will just use big fans like they do on movie sets. It doesn't have to be a huge sandstorm. Just a vigorous one in the area immediately around the person in the suit.
If it's not already sandy, they can probably put piles of sand in front of the fan.
Going back to my original comment, I was simply advising that before looking to PVs as a panacea for all our energy problems that we need to look at their cost "from dust to dust". It's something that's too often not done in our economy.
I wasn't arguing against using PVs, or even that they are a bad idea. I am, however, arguing against blindly jumping on the bandwagon of using a technology without exploring all the system costs incurred by that technology.
Pollution from manufacturing and pollution from energy conversion are two completely different things.
Only symantically. Pollution and waste are pollution and waste. It doesn't matter much where or when in the process it's produced. It's like saying loan origination fees and interest payments are two completely different things. While in a technical sense, they are. But in a real, systemic, sense, they are a cost of borrowing money. Getting a lower interest rate on your loan may appear at first glance to be a good thing, but it may not be if you have to pay a higher origination fee. In the end, you have to analyze the NPV of both options to see which is best.
And in the case of energy solutions, that's exactly what I'm arguing for. Let's try new technologies, including PV, but let's also make sure we do a thorough analysis of the end-to-end costs before saying one is unequivically the best way to go.
I'm not challening PV. I'm challenging the mindest of scurrying from one energy system to another without looking at all the consequences. So, in that context, my bringing up hydrogen cars is perfectly in aligment with what I orignally said. You just didn't understand that.
It's common for people to get bogged down in the details and not see the big picture. It's probably the biggest failing of the human race.
I'm sure the USPS gets it to the congressional screening office. Once there however, thanks to the anthrax scare, it's likely to be vaporized in the x-ray machine, or at best, delayed for several weeks - long after the bill you're writing about has been voted on.
My Rep's web page implies the opposite: he suggests that your snail mail may be substantially delayed due to increased mail "security".
That's because he/she really doesn't want to hear from you.
1. Send an e-mail because a letter in the mail will be slow
2. Send a letter by mail because we'll ignore an e-mail
It's a win-win because they've effectively stopped two channels of communication.
For the entire duration of your time playing at Rob's house, Rob still owns every monopoly dollar; for the entire duration of your time playing WoW, blizzard owns your gold. You don't take your monopoly dollars home with you, nor your WoW lewt.
You never own 'your' game money. As such, you can't be taxed on it.
What you say actually applies to real money too.
People trade "real money" for WOW gold because they believe that it has some value for them within WOW.
People trade their labor for "real money" because they believe that it has some value for them within the real world.
Think about it... most of "your" money is just a bunch of bits in a computer - just like WOW money. The cash that's in your pocket doesn't belong to you either - it belongs to the government - just like WOW money belongs to WOW.
The only reason either of them have value is because you and other people believe it does. As soon as people lose "faith" in the value of a dollar or WOW gold, it loses its value - because it has little, if any, intrinsic value.
Do you ever own your "real" money either?
And is it FMV as of a certain time? Cumulative?
What if your character acquires a bunch of gold and then gets it stolen? Are you liable for your total gain? Or what you had at 12:59PM on December 31st? And if taht, what if you just go bury the gold somewhere and go get it again after midnight?
And what happens if your character acquires a bunch of gold and then your computer crashes, you lose your passwords, and you can no longer log into your WOW account? Do you still pay taxes on that virtual money you can't get access to any more?
It seems to me the only way this can be done logically is to have taxes assessed when the virtual money is exchanged for real money.
I like the country example. If I send $10,000 to a foreign country start and run a business, I'm only going to be taxed (locally) on the money I try to bring back. Any money that's generated in-country and stays there is pretty much off-limits to the IRS.
Otherwise, we end up going down the road that everything you own that appreciates is immediately subject to taxes. After watching Antique Road Show, this could be a huge mess for people and the IRS.
Actually this points out why the whole idea of taxing income is silly. Tax transactions, not the accumulation.