Modern cars could easily be programmed to never exceed 80
And we could easily prevent you from committing a crime in the future by preemptively locking you up. That sort of thinking leads to all sorts of absurd rules and regulations in the name of "public safety". Do we want to live in a Fischer-Price nanny state or would we rather be treated like adults who can handle themselves responsibly unless we demonstrate otherwise through our actions?
I don't own a car or drive
And yet you gleefully propose onerous regulations on driving because even a miniscule improvement in your safety is worth endless amounts of inconvenience to those of us who must drive to work each day? Typical.
The baby boomers were the first ones who not only paid for their parents, but actually paid something toward their own retirement.
It's true that boomers paid for most of their parents' retirement. However, like their parents, they will not pay for even most of their own. In any case, it makes little difference because even a very generous actuarial analysis strongly suggests that the bulk of the baby boomers, living well into their seventies and early eighties due to medical advances, will render the system insolvent much sooner than most politicians are prepared to admit.
And the service on the t-bills is not because of the Social Security program.
The T-bills are held by the Treasury for social security because the government wants to borrow for spending other than payments made to current beneficiaries at rates lower than they could if those T-bills were instead auctioned with the rest on the open market. In my opinion, the government shouldn't be allowed to force Social Security to accept their IOUs in absolute preference to other alternative investments.
If they raised the cap on income on which SocSec tax is paid by 7-8 percent, it could become solvent indefinitely.
That is highly doubtful. It's very likely that wage growth will continue to fall short of cost of living inflation in the United States for the foreseeable future. So 4/5ths of the future beneficiaries would not be paying any additional social security taxes, because they already earn less than 100k per year, and the remaining 1/5th are mostly not high enough above 100k to make a significant additional contribution. That leaves the 1%, perhaps a few thousand households, to finance social security into the indefinite future? No, I remain incredulous.
Social Security is solvent to cover even the huge elephant traveling through the snake called the baby boomers, at least for the next 30 years.
Inflation is poised to become a serious issue going forward, especially in cost of living. Combine that with stagnant US wage growth, the sputtering "new normal" economy and the impending baby boom retirement and the rate of outflows could accelerate dramatically much sooner than 30 years from now. It would be a one-two punch of declining social security tax revenues, from fewer workers earning less, combined with more frequent COLA adjustments for baby boomer beneficiaries; the perfect storm. Your 30 year figure assumes the sort of stable growth economy that was normal in the decades following WWII, but if the first decade of the 21st century is anything to go by, those estimates are way too optimistic.
but you're not upset that General Electric is getting a 3.2 billion dollar tax rebate after paying zero taxes on their 14+ billion dollar profits.
On the contrary, the tax system in the United States, is frightfully wasteful and shot through with loopholes and special interest goodies. Personally, I favor the reforms proposed by the Fair Tax, although even a flat tax, eliminating all deductions and lowering the rates across the board, would be highly beneficial.
It's kind of upside-down, but those are the choices you've made.
They weren't my choices. I'm neither an accountant nor a tax attorney nor a member of any privileged minority group. I have nothing to gain from a convoluted and overly complex tax code. The GE tax dodge was made possible by political patronage and the utterly stupid tax system in this country. All I know is that every year the government takes lots of my money in taxes and provides comparatively very little to me in the way of services. When some Afghan official is caught in Yemen with $50 million is a suitcase it pisses me off because that's my tax money being handed out to corrupt and worthless foreign bureaucrats instead of remaining in my pocket where it b
Social Security has not added one nickel to our debt or deficit.
Wow, just wow. Do you actually believe that? The "trust fund" as you call it is mostly full of special T-Bills, essentially IOUs, that specify a promise, subject to conditions such as age or disability, to pay what amounts to a pension. The pension is paid in dollars and dollars are only convertible to real wealth (i.e. food, gas, clothing, shelter, etc) to the extent that someone else is willing to exchange them with you for that wealth. The United States government has promised so much to so many, not just social security recipients but foreign governments and investors as well, that many people are beginning to seriously question whether enough dollars exist to make good on all of those promises OR that those dollars will exchange into enough wealth to make those promises worth the paper they are printed on. In summary: you are wrong. Social Security represents a legal obligation of a promise to pay. It's a debt that must be paid. To suggest otherwise is to be either disingenous or stupid. It's true that Social Security is not the biggest contributor to public debt obligation, that dubious honor goes to Medicare, but it's a very comfortable second. Don't fool yourself into believing that other people will continue to trade things of real economic value to US citizens in exchange for worthless pieces of paper indefinitely. If it comes down to it, the Chinese and others will come here to collect from your children or their grandchildren; at gunpoint if necessary. History is replete with examples of what happens to civilizations that don't pay their debts and it isn't something that we want to repeat.
It isn't always easy to get budget for training or even time for proper coding practices. Companies, especially those that use technology but are not in the technology business, want fast results and they want them on the cheap. Many business people don't understand the value prevention until they are forced to shell out for a pound of cure.
Hmm...this sounds like something you would get from an outsourced project thrown together by overworked code splicers in Bangalore. It seems that some managers still see no difference between outsourced development and quality domestic work. What could possibly go wrong? Blind SQL injection? Answer: Epic Fail.
I will therefore get what I got when I retire without doing anything else to save money
Are you sure? Promising to pay is one thing, but actually paying out is something else. Remember that airline workers once thought that their pension promises were secure too, until smart lawyers figured out ways to burn those promises in bankruptcy court and the pensioners received 1/3 of promised payments from the Public Benefit Guaranty Corporation (where pension funds go to die). The only thing that guarantees your retirement is direct ownership of assets, not a promise from someone else to take care of you. Beware, your pension may not be as secure as you think it is. In the future, there will be far more people without pensions than people with. There is no way, politically, that the taxpayers are going to make up your full promised pension out of their own pockets and if you worked for a private company your pension is going to get burned in bankruptcy if it hasn't already. If I were you, I would put something else aside while you still have time, just in case.
The characters played by the returning actors will see much less time in the Hobbit than they did in LOTR, unless of course Peter bends the story to work more of them in (a distinct possibility). However, there are also substantial opportunities to introduce new actors and new characters. There is younger Bilbo, plus Thorin and his dwarven band, Bard of Laketown and many others. I'm looking forward to this next outing and I think, given his superb work on LOTR, Peter deserves the benefit of the doubt in this case.
And I don't disagree with shooting people that ask for bribes.
Bribes are rarely asked for directly. Instead, business is transacted faster or slower according to the amount of the bribe. If the business is transacted just about as fasts as it possibly can be, you know that the amount of your bribe was just about right. If your business takes forever to complete and you didn't offer a bribe, you know the reason for that too. There is a marketplace for bribes when different interests compete for the limited amount of time and resources a bottle-necked government agency or official has to offer. Who to bribe and in what amounts comes with experience or through hiring someone with that experience to advise you.
I'm alright screw everyone else is a destructive unenlightened attitude.
F**ck enlightenment, that doesn't put food on my family's table. The world is a destructive and unenlightened place and your foreign competition is playing hardball, so take what you can get and make no apologies. That's what I do and I have no regrets.
The language was worded so as to cause Gadhafi to be pushed out of power. That is how the "big game" works in diplomacy, nobody ever says precisely what they want to do, they use code words instead because that is how pleasant fictions, like international law, are preserved. Gadhafi, on the other hand, speaks bluntly as a barbarian would and so that is how the world treats him.
Does SEC, or anyone in the U.S. for that matter, have jurisdiction over supposedly illegal acts outside of the country?
Apparently, if the companies or subsidiaries responsible are owned by a US corporation, yes.
Shouldn't the Chinese slap them with, say, imprisonment of responsible persons?
Chinese do what they like in China, but imprisoning foreigners, especially executives, looks bad and is bad for business. It's hard to convince foreigners to invest in your country if you lock them when the set foot on your soil after all.
You're familiar with the expression, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you"? It applies here too. Most of us here on Slashdot have jobs and can feed our families because international business exists and chooses to operate here in the United States. We cannot afford to be unfriendly to businesses that we desperately need to stay here and create jobs. So they bribed some Korean officials? Who gives a flying f**ck, that's how they do business outside the United States. If that helps to keep my job here in the United States then frankly, I couldn't care less what goes on in Korea. Like many government agencies set up to protect the "little guy", the SEC has done more to prevent the best investment opportunities from reaching the middle class over the last seventy seven odd years than just about anyone else. The rich are able to make real investments while the rest of us are basically stuck handing our profits over to mutual fund managers in our 401k's because that is what keeps us "safe" from having losses (and gains) and safe from ever having a real retirement. The only real hope for the little guy is to somehow amass enough wealth to become a High Net Worth Individual at which point the real investment opportunities become available.
People were killing each other in the US in 1861 and no one had the right to intervene
At the time nobody much wanted to. War can be quite profitable, especially when you can sell supplies to both sides.
Going there for humanitarian reasons is a bunch of BS, call it what it is, removing somebody that was hated by us from power to impose a friendly government.
Obama and others have said precisely that. Gadhafi has to go. The humanitarian part is that we get him out by force before we have another pol-pot style killing fields on our hands. I don't think that the coalition currently bombing Libya has been coy about their objectives. They want Gadhafi out, that much has been made abundantly clear.
I actually have no problem with that but of course that doesn't sell well, it's the hypocrisy of the situation that gets to my bones.
What hypocrisy? The world gave Gadhafi an ultimatum and we followed through when he dared to call our bluff. Now the cards are on the table for everyone to see and Gadhafi has clearly lost.
It's not the place of outsiders with no vested interest to interfere
Ahhh, but the United States and Europe certainly do have a vested interest there. Libya, like many other Arab countries, has oil that is vital to the continued functioning of the global economy. The Arab league has also had quite enough of Gadhafi and his pan-Arabic socialist bullcrap; it undermines their authority and it's bad for business. This is what happens when a dictator makes too many enemies and not enough friends. The world has had enough of Gadhafi and it would be in just about everyone's best interests to see Gadhafi hanging at the end of a rope. He is a relic of the past that nobody needs and nobody wants.
Some of us have tens or even hundreds of thousands of rounds stored and available for use or trade; enough to cover our own foreseeable lifetimes and probably those of our children as well. Brass can be reloaded, primers made and bullets cast and eventually armed and self-sufficient communities will form from the ruins of post fossil fuel civilization to support necessary industries. I'm not concerned about the supply of ammunition or guns running out. If these items can be made and maintained in primitive conditions in backwater villages in Pakistan, as they are today, then the same can be done by knowledgeable survivalists.
The real "dumb fuck" is the one who refuses to make use of the tools available for survival; including guns. There may come a day, in the not too distant future, where society as we know it collapses. The signs are all around for those who care to look: peak oil, climate change, political unrest, skyrocketing food prices, endless wars etc. Indeed the pace of history is quickening towards an inescapable climax and when things get truly desperate there will be looting, robbing, raping and killing. In such cases, the only thing standing between those horrors and your loved ones may be you and your guns. If you want to survive then you'll have to be prepared and being prepared includes owning guns and knowing how to use them. Then again, failure of less fit members to survive might not be such a bad thing for our species.
Gadhafi has other traits which make him undesirable. For example, he is unstable and capricious and frequently makes wild policy changes on a whim; not the best sort of climate for long term foreign investments (like oil infrastructure). No, even if you are willing to overlook his past, it would be better to do business with someone else, whoever that might be, once Gadhafi is gone. Gadhafi is bad for business.
B-52s are no longer used for "carpet bombing" with dumb bombs (ala Vietnam). A B-52 can carry a very large load of satellite and laser guided JDAMs or other stand off weapons and deliver them in small batches as needed over a long period of time. This ability of the B-52 to remain on station for many hours at a time, providing air support where it's needed, has been a major asset to US commanders in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite it's age, having first entered service in 1955, the B-52 has proven itself to be a durable, reliable and remarkably upgradable platform that has evolved over the years to meet the changing needs of our military. One shouldn't assume that missions flown in prior years by B-52s are still the same missions that are flown today.
Actually one of the most fun uses of the beam functionality back in the palm pilot days was to beam porn to the display model printers (many of which accepted infrared beams from PDAs) at the big electronics stores or trade shows and then quietly disappear into the crowd.
it's a declaration of war, of which we have plenty right now. This is a civil war.
Gadhafi has long been our enemy. He has American and British blood on his hands from the Berlin discotheque bombing and the PanAm Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie. The Libyan air force has never been a match for the United States and we should hesitate to use this opportunity to destroy Gadhafi's third rate military. After all, the Libyans are still using equipment that the Russians and others have long since consigned to museums.
Ghaddafi keeps his revolutionary guard well-paid,
Money is no good if you aren't alive to spend it.
and his military is more than he needs to maintain control.
Not after we're done wrecking it. Libya is mostly open desert. The African campaigns in WWII demonstrated amply that fighting across the Libyan deserts is a war of maneuver over large distances with little or no cover. Gadhafi has over extended his ground forces going after the rebels in the east. Air strikes now would catch his military out in the open. There will be burned out Libyan vehicles and wrecked equipment littering the deserts while US and allied planes fly overhead with impunity.
it's very difficult to convince the world that the no-fly action has nothing to do with the price of oil.
So don't. Oil is a part of every modern war. It's a strategic resource and everyone knows it so call a duck a duck. Furthermore, the United States and Europe need oil to fuel our economies and way of life. If the Libyan government, after Gadhafi is gone, is grateful and willing to sell to us then I say, "lets make a deal".
Well, with no air defenses and no air force Gadhafi would be powerless to prevent US Air Force B-52s, from knocking out every tank, vehicle and artillery piece caught out in the open. There is no way that a third rate military power, especially not Libya which has good flying weather and lots of flat terrain, can win in open battle against the United States Navy and Air Forces. It wouldn't remove Gadhafi from power directly, but it would completely wreck his ground forces, rendering him vulnerable to rebel counter-attacks. The rebels are begging us to even the odds and Gadhafi has been a thorn in our collective sides for decades now. We shouldn't miss this opportunity to give Gadhafi a black eye.
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Modern cars could easily be programmed to never exceed 80
And we could easily prevent you from committing a crime in the future by preemptively locking you up. That sort of thinking leads to all sorts of absurd rules and regulations in the name of "public safety". Do we want to live in a Fischer-Price nanny state or would we rather be treated like adults who can handle themselves responsibly unless we demonstrate otherwise through our actions?
I don't own a car or drive
And yet you gleefully propose onerous regulations on driving because even a miniscule improvement in your safety is worth endless amounts of inconvenience to those of us who must drive to work each day? Typical.
The baby boomers were the first ones who not only paid for their parents, but actually paid something toward their own retirement.
It's true that boomers paid for most of their parents' retirement. However, like their parents, they will not pay for even most of their own. In any case, it makes little difference because even a very generous actuarial analysis strongly suggests that the bulk of the baby boomers, living well into their seventies and early eighties due to medical advances, will render the system insolvent much sooner than most politicians are prepared to admit.
And the service on the t-bills is not because of the Social Security program.
The T-bills are held by the Treasury for social security because the government wants to borrow for spending other than payments made to current beneficiaries at rates lower than they could if those T-bills were instead auctioned with the rest on the open market. In my opinion, the government shouldn't be allowed to force Social Security to accept their IOUs in absolute preference to other alternative investments.
If they raised the cap on income on which SocSec tax is paid by 7-8 percent, it could become solvent indefinitely.
That is highly doubtful. It's very likely that wage growth will continue to fall short of cost of living inflation in the United States for the foreseeable future. So 4/5ths of the future beneficiaries would not be paying any additional social security taxes, because they already earn less than 100k per year, and the remaining 1/5th are mostly not high enough above 100k to make a significant additional contribution. That leaves the 1%, perhaps a few thousand households, to finance social security into the indefinite future? No, I remain incredulous.
Social Security is solvent to cover even the huge elephant traveling through the snake called the baby boomers, at least for the next 30 years.
Inflation is poised to become a serious issue going forward, especially in cost of living. Combine that with stagnant US wage growth, the sputtering "new normal" economy and the impending baby boom retirement and the rate of outflows could accelerate dramatically much sooner than 30 years from now. It would be a one-two punch of declining social security tax revenues, from fewer workers earning less, combined with more frequent COLA adjustments for baby boomer beneficiaries; the perfect storm. Your 30 year figure assumes the sort of stable growth economy that was normal in the decades following WWII, but if the first decade of the 21st century is anything to go by, those estimates are way too optimistic.
but you're not upset that General Electric is getting a 3.2 billion dollar tax rebate after paying zero taxes on their 14+ billion dollar profits.
On the contrary, the tax system in the United States, is frightfully wasteful and shot through with loopholes and special interest goodies. Personally, I favor the reforms proposed by the Fair Tax, although even a flat tax, eliminating all deductions and lowering the rates across the board, would be highly beneficial.
It's kind of upside-down, but those are the choices you've made.
They weren't my choices. I'm neither an accountant nor a tax attorney nor a member of any privileged minority group. I have nothing to gain from a convoluted and overly complex tax code. The GE tax dodge was made possible by political patronage and the utterly stupid tax system in this country. All I know is that every year the government takes lots of my money in taxes and provides comparatively very little to me in the way of services. When some Afghan official is caught in Yemen with $50 million is a suitcase it pisses me off because that's my tax money being handed out to corrupt and worthless foreign bureaucrats instead of remaining in my pocket where it b
Social Security has not added one nickel to our debt or deficit.
Wow, just wow. Do you actually believe that? The "trust fund" as you call it is mostly full of special T-Bills, essentially IOUs, that specify a promise, subject to conditions such as age or disability, to pay what amounts to a pension. The pension is paid in dollars and dollars are only convertible to real wealth (i.e. food, gas, clothing, shelter, etc) to the extent that someone else is willing to exchange them with you for that wealth. The United States government has promised so much to so many, not just social security recipients but foreign governments and investors as well, that many people are beginning to seriously question whether enough dollars exist to make good on all of those promises OR that those dollars will exchange into enough wealth to make those promises worth the paper they are printed on. In summary: you are wrong. Social Security represents a legal obligation of a promise to pay. It's a debt that must be paid. To suggest otherwise is to be either disingenous or stupid. It's true that Social Security is not the biggest contributor to public debt obligation, that dubious honor goes to Medicare, but it's a very comfortable second. Don't fool yourself into believing that other people will continue to trade things of real economic value to US citizens in exchange for worthless pieces of paper indefinitely. If it comes down to it, the Chinese and others will come here to collect from your children or their grandchildren; at gunpoint if necessary. History is replete with examples of what happens to civilizations that don't pay their debts and it isn't something that we want to repeat.
It isn't always easy to get budget for training or even time for proper coding practices. Companies, especially those that use technology but are not in the technology business, want fast results and they want them on the cheap. Many business people don't understand the value prevention until they are forced to shell out for a pound of cure.
The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.
- Paul Muad'dib
Hmm...this sounds like something you would get from an outsourced project thrown together by overworked code splicers in Bangalore. It seems that some managers still see no difference between outsourced development and quality domestic work. What could possibly go wrong? Blind SQL injection? Answer: Epic Fail.
I will therefore get what I got when I retire without doing anything else to save money
Are you sure? Promising to pay is one thing, but actually paying out is something else. Remember that airline workers once thought that their pension promises were secure too, until smart lawyers figured out ways to burn those promises in bankruptcy court and the pensioners received 1/3 of promised payments from the Public Benefit Guaranty Corporation (where pension funds go to die). The only thing that guarantees your retirement is direct ownership of assets, not a promise from someone else to take care of you. Beware, your pension may not be as secure as you think it is. In the future, there will be far more people without pensions than people with. There is no way, politically, that the taxpayers are going to make up your full promised pension out of their own pockets and if you worked for a private company your pension is going to get burned in bankruptcy if it hasn't already. If I were you, I would put something else aside while you still have time, just in case.
I'm inclined to agree. Let both sides go all in and lets see the river, then we can get on with the showdown.
The characters played by the returning actors will see much less time in the Hobbit than they did in LOTR, unless of course Peter bends the story to work more of them in (a distinct possibility). However, there are also substantial opportunities to introduce new actors and new characters. There is younger Bilbo, plus Thorin and his dwarven band, Bard of Laketown and many others. I'm looking forward to this next outing and I think, given his superb work on LOTR, Peter deserves the benefit of the doubt in this case.
And I don't disagree with shooting people that ask for bribes.
Bribes are rarely asked for directly. Instead, business is transacted faster or slower according to the amount of the bribe. If the business is transacted just about as fasts as it possibly can be, you know that the amount of your bribe was just about right. If your business takes forever to complete and you didn't offer a bribe, you know the reason for that too. There is a marketplace for bribes when different interests compete for the limited amount of time and resources a bottle-necked government agency or official has to offer. Who to bribe and in what amounts comes with experience or through hiring someone with that experience to advise you.
I'm alright screw everyone else is a destructive unenlightened attitude.
F**ck enlightenment, that doesn't put food on my family's table. The world is a destructive and unenlightened place and your foreign competition is playing hardball, so take what you can get and make no apologies. That's what I do and I have no regrets.
The language was worded so as to cause Gadhafi to be pushed out of power. That is how the "big game" works in diplomacy, nobody ever says precisely what they want to do, they use code words instead because that is how pleasant fictions, like international law, are preserved. Gadhafi, on the other hand, speaks bluntly as a barbarian would and so that is how the world treats him.
Yeah very noble vested interests.
In case you hadn't noticed, the real world is an ignoble place.
Does SEC, or anyone in the U.S. for that matter, have jurisdiction over supposedly illegal acts outside of the country?
Apparently, if the companies or subsidiaries responsible are owned by a US corporation, yes.
Shouldn't the Chinese slap them with, say, imprisonment of responsible persons?
Chinese do what they like in China, but imprisoning foreigners, especially executives, looks bad and is bad for business. It's hard to convince foreigners to invest in your country if you lock them when the set foot on your soil after all.
You're familiar with the expression, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you"? It applies here too. Most of us here on Slashdot have jobs and can feed our families because international business exists and chooses to operate here in the United States. We cannot afford to be unfriendly to businesses that we desperately need to stay here and create jobs. So they bribed some Korean officials? Who gives a flying f**ck, that's how they do business outside the United States. If that helps to keep my job here in the United States then frankly, I couldn't care less what goes on in Korea. Like many government agencies set up to protect the "little guy", the SEC has done more to prevent the best investment opportunities from reaching the middle class over the last seventy seven odd years than just about anyone else. The rich are able to make real investments while the rest of us are basically stuck handing our profits over to mutual fund managers in our 401k's because that is what keeps us "safe" from having losses (and gains) and safe from ever having a real retirement. The only real hope for the little guy is to somehow amass enough wealth to become a High Net Worth Individual at which point the real investment opportunities become available.
Amen. Sometimes I wonder if the "peace at any price" crowd actually lives on the same planet; they are in desperate need of a reality check here.
People were killing each other in the US in 1861 and no one had the right to intervene
At the time nobody much wanted to. War can be quite profitable, especially when you can sell supplies to both sides.
Going there for humanitarian reasons is a bunch of BS, call it what it is, removing somebody that was hated by us from power to impose a friendly government.
Obama and others have said precisely that. Gadhafi has to go. The humanitarian part is that we get him out by force before we have another pol-pot style killing fields on our hands. I don't think that the coalition currently bombing Libya has been coy about their objectives. They want Gadhafi out, that much has been made abundantly clear.
I actually have no problem with that but of course that doesn't sell well, it's the hypocrisy of the situation that gets to my bones.
What hypocrisy? The world gave Gadhafi an ultimatum and we followed through when he dared to call our bluff. Now the cards are on the table for everyone to see and Gadhafi has clearly lost.
It's not the place of outsiders with no vested interest to interfere
Ahhh, but the United States and Europe certainly do have a vested interest there. Libya, like many other Arab countries, has oil that is vital to the continued functioning of the global economy. The Arab league has also had quite enough of Gadhafi and his pan-Arabic socialist bullcrap; it undermines their authority and it's bad for business. This is what happens when a dictator makes too many enemies and not enough friends. The world has had enough of Gadhafi and it would be in just about everyone's best interests to see Gadhafi hanging at the end of a rope. He is a relic of the past that nobody needs and nobody wants.
Some of us have tens or even hundreds of thousands of rounds stored and available for use or trade; enough to cover our own foreseeable lifetimes and probably those of our children as well. Brass can be reloaded, primers made and bullets cast and eventually armed and self-sufficient communities will form from the ruins of post fossil fuel civilization to support necessary industries. I'm not concerned about the supply of ammunition or guns running out. If these items can be made and maintained in primitive conditions in backwater villages in Pakistan, as they are today, then the same can be done by knowledgeable survivalists.
The real "dumb fuck" is the one who refuses to make use of the tools available for survival; including guns. There may come a day, in the not too distant future, where society as we know it collapses. The signs are all around for those who care to look: peak oil, climate change, political unrest, skyrocketing food prices, endless wars etc. Indeed the pace of history is quickening towards an inescapable climax and when things get truly desperate there will be looting, robbing, raping and killing. In such cases, the only thing standing between those horrors and your loved ones may be you and your guns. If you want to survive then you'll have to be prepared and being prepared includes owning guns and knowing how to use them. Then again, failure of less fit members to survive might not be such a bad thing for our species.
Gadhafi has other traits which make him undesirable. For example, he is unstable and capricious and frequently makes wild policy changes on a whim; not the best sort of climate for long term foreign investments (like oil infrastructure). No, even if you are willing to overlook his past, it would be better to do business with someone else, whoever that might be, once Gadhafi is gone. Gadhafi is bad for business.
B-52s are no longer used for "carpet bombing" with dumb bombs (ala Vietnam). A B-52 can carry a very large load of satellite and laser guided JDAMs or other stand off weapons and deliver them in small batches as needed over a long period of time. This ability of the B-52 to remain on station for many hours at a time, providing air support where it's needed, has been a major asset to US commanders in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite it's age, having first entered service in 1955, the B-52 has proven itself to be a durable, reliable and remarkably upgradable platform that has evolved over the years to meet the changing needs of our military. One shouldn't assume that missions flown in prior years by B-52s are still the same missions that are flown today.
Actually one of the most fun uses of the beam functionality back in the palm pilot days was to beam porn to the display model printers (many of which accepted infrared beams from PDAs) at the big electronics stores or trade shows and then quietly disappear into the crowd.
it's a declaration of war, of which we have plenty right now. This is a civil war.
Gadhafi has long been our enemy. He has American and British blood on his hands from the Berlin discotheque bombing and the PanAm Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie. The Libyan air force has never been a match for the United States and we should hesitate to use this opportunity to destroy Gadhafi's third rate military. After all, the Libyans are still using equipment that the Russians and others have long since consigned to museums.
Ghaddafi keeps his revolutionary guard well-paid,
Money is no good if you aren't alive to spend it.
and his military is more than he needs to maintain control.
Not after we're done wrecking it. Libya is mostly open desert. The African campaigns in WWII demonstrated amply that fighting across the Libyan deserts is a war of maneuver over large distances with little or no cover. Gadhafi has over extended his ground forces going after the rebels in the east. Air strikes now would catch his military out in the open. There will be burned out Libyan vehicles and wrecked equipment littering the deserts while US and allied planes fly overhead with impunity.
it's very difficult to convince the world that the no-fly action has nothing to do with the price of oil.
So don't. Oil is a part of every modern war. It's a strategic resource and everyone knows it so call a duck a duck. Furthermore, the United States and Europe need oil to fuel our economies and way of life. If the Libyan government, after Gadhafi is gone, is grateful and willing to sell to us then I say, "lets make a deal".
Well, with no air defenses and no air force Gadhafi would be powerless to prevent US Air Force B-52s, from knocking out every tank, vehicle and artillery piece caught out in the open. There is no way that a third rate military power, especially not Libya which has good flying weather and lots of flat terrain, can win in open battle against the United States Navy and Air Forces. It wouldn't remove Gadhafi from power directly, but it would completely wreck his ground forces, rendering him vulnerable to rebel counter-attacks. The rebels are begging us to even the odds and Gadhafi has been a thorn in our collective sides for decades now. We shouldn't miss this opportunity to give Gadhafi a black eye.