Yes, that is what I meant by "completely devalued." Thank you for confirming your reading comprehension to be of the average level for the republican redneck retard fringe.
Hate to be the devil's advocate here, but the bailouts also saved pension and mutual funds.
Oh? So you consider a 40-50% drop in value, followed by another 15% drop over the next two years, to be "saved" pension and mutual funds?
I suppose in counter to "completely devalued", perhaps - but not ALL financial and bank stocks were going to die. The number of companies that would actually have gone into complete failure is far less than you think: the vast majority of the "bailout" money just lined the pockets of people who would have maybe had to face the consequences of their actions, get their incompetent asses fired, and live without their golden parachutes otherwise.
NASA is not just essential to space exploration, but a constant source of improvement and innovation that you fail to consider as it works its way into facets of life on earth.
maybe in the future newer tech will make gaining escape velocity more cost effective
Force =Mass times Acceleration. Acceleration must be at least greater than 9.81 meters per second squared near the earth's surface. Even a "giant beanstalk" (aka "space elevator") must supply force at its high point in some fashion to counteract the pull of lifting an object from earth's surface (see also: "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction").
This is not a "tech" problem. This is physics. Even with superheated steam propulsion powered by a nuclear micropile, Force Still Equals Mass Times Acceleration and we still have to design VEHICLES that can survive the acceleration stresses of launch and reentry.
and the space shuttle is like your uncle's old smoking oldsmobile 98 with the dents all down one side, (send it in the junk yard) it was nice a couple of decades ago but it is now showing its age...
What, precisely, is your point? The space shuttle is a marvel. Did we ever get "monthly launches" from them? No. And why not? Because the original fleet was supposed to be a DOZEN or more, until the Republicans chopped the fuck out of the budget; NASA barely got four at any time, and almost didn't get the budget for Endeavour to replace Challenger.
To steal your analogy: the Space Shuttle is like my car. I drive a 14 year old sports car. It's got a couple dents from the redneck fuckwits around here who can't be bothered to put their shopping carts up. It's got some spots where I've hand-repaired some of the interior, a few patches on the seats where the fabric got frayed. But you know what? The engine still gives a nice satisfying growl because I treat it right and my maintenance is on time, I still get 28 mpg, and I plan to be driving it for another 4-5 years.
I'll take a good, solidly running, well maintained 15-year-old car any day over an already rusty shitbucket like the Chinese are building, or worse yet, the 40 year old Yugo that is the Russian Soyuz system.
No, try again. As the poster above you points out: the Bush Bailout cost more in one year - nay, in ONE LUMP SUM PROGRAM - than NASA's entire budget for the entirety of its existence.
And what did the Bush Bailout get us? Pretty much nothing except a bunch of Republican fat-cats lining their pockets after claiming their businesses were "too big to fail."
NASA is not a reflection of "government." NASA is a reflection of what happens when you give an agency - ANY agency, whether public or private - an order to do grand things on a shoestring budget and then start hacking away at the budget even further.
The final three planned moon missions were all canceled by Nixon and the Republicans, who had their hate on for the space program because it had been put in place by JFK (Nixon had an especially heavy hate on for any remnants of that administration, as he had lost to JFK previously). This behavior has continued more or less apace every time the Republicans held either the Presidency or at least one house of Congress.
As has once been said: NASA is an agency with an undeniable problem. The problem is not the will to do what they are assigned to do. It is not the capacity and intellect to get the job done. No, the problem is that it is an agency assigned to tasks that require a 10-15 year program to set up and accomplish, while being overseen and funded by a bunch of assholes who are generally replaced on a 2-year cycle and who are perpetually looking to be seen as "cutting government waste" and wanting instant gratification. For god's sake, we build in a 10% overage "just in case" fund for every construction project, but Congress won't do the same for NASA's programs!
You want to see NASA do well? Give them a task, assign realistic funding (and a percentage for overruns when they happen, because something unexpected always happens) for the task, lock the funding in place so that future Congresses can't touch it, and GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY.
- Illegal price-fixing and collusion - Illegal acts such as using "investigators" who are not licensed nor monitored and who then commit more illegal acts on order of their employers - The defrauding of the artists to whom they owe royalties. This has been discussed ad nauseum in the categories of RIAA and Hollywood accounting scandals. - Outright theft of property, when they retroactively and alternatively try to redefine musical and theatrical works as either "works of the artist" or "works for hire" according to the arbitrary principle of Whichever Will Fuck The Artist Over More.
They are an organized criminal enterprise. Nothing more.
They don't read anywhere else, or have any UI or UX pros on their staff, so chances are... yeah, they're going to be Myspace 3.0 in short order. Which is sad, because most of us left Ghettospace to get away from all the "virtual bling" fuckwittery.
Uhm... if anything, Capital Gains is UNEARNED income, therefore it should be taxed at a higher rate than earned (e.g. worked for) income if we want to encourage people to work.
Right-wing buffoonery, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
"The wealthiest 1 percent of the population earn 19 percent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab." - It does NOT address how much of their income as a percentage they pay in total taxes - by which I mean income tax, property tax, and the various regressive taxation schemes (sometimes called "fees", sometimes not) cooked up by Republicans in recent decades.
The rest of that piece of toilet paper you linked to is similarly dishonest, so I see little need to go through it. Try a real economic analysis rather than right-wing crockery next time.
A good start would be to have people in shithole, arid areas of the world stop having 12 kids per family (plus all the illegitimates).
A nice followup would be to eliminate a lot of the hyperprocessed crap that's eaten in the "developed world", stop wasting corn making HFCS, etc.
Unfortunately, what these really require is a political solution because it's predominantly a political problem. In the US, HFCS production is high because of government subsidies, mostly because Republican legislators are beholden to Iowa/Midwestern corn conglomerates that also lobby to keep import tariffs on sugar high. The import tariffs limit incoming sugar, the corn subsidies ensure that southern-grown sugarcane can't compete pricewise with body-damaging HFCS.
In europe, it's not much different. Common Agricultural Policy subsidies make it so that certain crops are impossible to grow, even though they'd be better environmentally and economically otherwise.
Obama is making a larger poor class and a smaller middle and upper class.
Under Clinton, the middle class grew and the poor shrank. Under Bush, the middle class got fucked. Whose policies are better again?
example: His health care reform. Forcing everyone to have insurance helps the insurance companies. Many small business are going to opt to pay the fine rather then cover health care. The fine is cheaper. The people will go to the government for their health care. Who pays for the health care then? The government does say the uninformed. Who pays for the government? All the citizens do. In other words in choosing the public option, you are choosing to pay for your own health care. Many will say the public option should be there. Well by forcing things, the government enacted a public option without calling it that. Also what about all the non citizen who get free health care now? Last I checked I have not seen a hospital turn people away. When they do not pay, those costs are turned over to those who can afford to pay. Why do you think the cost of health care keeps going up so much? There are many people who go to the hospital and do not pay. Stop treating people who are not citizens of this country who do not pay. Health care costs may actually drop then.
Spoken like someone who hasn't actually read up on anything. The biggest change is not the requirement of coverage - a REPUBLICAN idea first put into place by Romney. The biggest change is the number of abuses the current turds running what I call the "death care" industry can no longer get away with. No charging people an assload of money for a kid with a congenital condition. No dropping people because they developed a serious condition. No turning people away because they have a preexisting condition or requiring years of "no coverage for anything related" when these are the sort of ass turds who can make a missing toenail "related" to a need for corrective heart surgery.
The stimulus bills. The billions spent, sorry borrowed, created what again? A whole lot of not much. And he wants to do it again. Many people point at how much debt that GW Bush made. They over look that Obama spent more in three years than Bush did in eight. Bush added to the debt. Obama doubled it. Not a good thing.
Most of that debt is actually Shrub's debt. Obama stopped holding the cost of Bush's wars off the books, so 8 years of war debt all finally showed up on the balance sheets at once. Much of the rest of it was the spending crap from Bush's final year - remember, Obama took office in January and less than a month later these assholes handed him Bush's final budget, expected him to sign it, and then tried to hold it over his head.
The "poor" pay a larger percentage of income in "fees" and base regressive taxes (like sales tax) than the rich do. The middle class pay a larger percentage of income in fees, base regressive taxes, and income tax than the rich do.
The rich pay the least percentage of income in taxes, period.
This unequal, fucked up system brought to you by Republicans, the Party of Class Warfare (remember the "war on poverty"? Rich vs Poor).
Republicans have always been the party of class warfare - the rich beating up on the poor. Every time the Republicans get into power they want "tax cuts" that they say will "spur economic growth." NEVER in history has this actually worked as they claim it did - voodoo economics was terrible.
Paul Ryan and the Republican liars scream about Reagan "cutting taxes"... they always forget that Reagan RAISED taxes again in 1983 and 1986 when the Democrats in congress demanded it, because it was evident that keeping taxes low just increased the deficit and the debt.
At current number (including all the treaties and other crap within) the world's strongest man couldn't carry it.
Of course that's because our law, thanks to the Republicans, is so fucking byzantine that even the government themselves can't tell us how many federal felonies are possible - let alone state felonies and misdemeanors of all levels.
All it takes is one good judge to declare that crap unconscionable and unenforcable. ESPECIALLY since it's blatantly a try to protect their asses after setting off multiple class-action suits that are already on the books in which the only possible outcome is Sony getting their asses handed to them in court.
I was presuming they were using a more standard chip, similar to those that typically output DVI and would accept any old DVI-to-VGA converter with no trouble (DVI being the same, except for form factor, in pinouts when running in full digital mode).
They regularly used crap like this to make defendants appear guilty in courtrooms. Take a tour of historic courthouses in the "colonies" (what we Yanks call "New England" today) and you can see where in many cases there are still the marks on the floor from where the cages were originally screwed in over the defendant's station, where the poor soul would be made to stand up all day long during court proceedings, not even offered a chair to rest his feet while the corrupt Limey judge decided whether to hang him or toss him into prison for life.
This is because the US justice system was cooked up by a bunch of people who were used to the way the British PRACTICE, not the way those assholes preach.
In practice, the British system at the time was "tell us everything now. No lawyer in your defence. And when you go to trial you'll be in a cage and made to look as guilty as possible visually." They were used to being abused. So they made damn sure that the people had the RIGHT not to talk to the abusive, corrupt fucks called "police" that are still abusive corrupt fucks today.
The sad part is that in the US, people usually aren't smart enough to keep their damn traps shut, and the police have come up with all sorts of "right up to the line and we'll fudge it and lie about it if we have to" tactics to get around that darn 5th amendment anyways. See previous comment: police are a bunch of corrupt, abusive fucks.
The real problem is, the longer copyright terms get, the more works are lost for good.
Don't believe me? Think about how many books "under copyright" may be lost simply because nobody preserves a copy. Think about how many films are lost merely because the original source, moldering under "copyright protection", went bad in the can down in the vaults of some MafiAA member and either is unreadable, or perished in a vault fire (early nitrate stock is NOTORIOUS for being susceptible to both).
We almost lost an amazing amount of black gospel music before a few concerned citizens stepped in; we STILL risk losing a large amount of it due to MafiAA meddling.
And that doesn't even discuss the loss of computer programs for formats and computers that won't expire copyright for decades, but are functionally already dead - the guy who built this is having a devil of a time finding software to test it with, merely because disk packs weren't maintained and SGI apparently wiped most of their archives. Or the various game consoles, or early home computers where most software was stored on highly volatile and quickly-degrading floppy disks...
Slashdot Mirror
a flying saucer with limitless zero-point fuel (which could ascend as slowly as the pilot liked)
Also known as a Bullshit Device because you cannot get it without finding some magical Unobtanium that breaks the laws of physics.
Yes, that is what I meant by "completely devalued." Thank you for confirming your reading comprehension to be of the average level for the republican redneck retard fringe.
Hate to be the devil's advocate here, but the bailouts also saved pension and mutual funds.
Oh? So you consider a 40-50% drop in value, followed by another 15% drop over the next two years, to be "saved" pension and mutual funds?
I suppose in counter to "completely devalued", perhaps - but not ALL financial and bank stocks were going to die. The number of companies that would actually have gone into complete failure is far less than you think: the vast majority of the "bailout" money just lined the pockets of people who would have maybe had to face the consequences of their actions, get their incompetent asses fired, and live without their golden parachutes otherwise.
You really are a fucking moron, aren't you?
NASA is not just essential to space exploration, but a constant source of improvement and innovation that you fail to consider as it works its way into facets of life on earth.
maybe in the future newer tech will make gaining escape velocity more cost effective
Force =Mass times Acceleration. Acceleration must be at least greater than 9.81 meters per second squared near the earth's surface. Even a "giant beanstalk" (aka "space elevator") must supply force at its high point in some fashion to counteract the pull of lifting an object from earth's surface (see also: "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction").
This is not a "tech" problem. This is physics. Even with superheated steam propulsion powered by a nuclear micropile, Force Still Equals Mass Times Acceleration and we still have to design VEHICLES that can survive the acceleration stresses of launch and reentry.
and the space shuttle is like your uncle's old smoking oldsmobile 98 with the dents all down one side, (send it in the junk yard) it was nice a couple of decades ago but it is now showing its age...
What, precisely, is your point? The space shuttle is a marvel. Did we ever get "monthly launches" from them? No. And why not? Because the original fleet was supposed to be a DOZEN or more, until the Republicans chopped the fuck out of the budget; NASA barely got four at any time, and almost didn't get the budget for Endeavour to replace Challenger.
To steal your analogy: the Space Shuttle is like my car. I drive a 14 year old sports car. It's got a couple dents from the redneck fuckwits around here who can't be bothered to put their shopping carts up. It's got some spots where I've hand-repaired some of the interior, a few patches on the seats where the fabric got frayed. But you know what? The engine still gives a nice satisfying growl because I treat it right and my maintenance is on time, I still get 28 mpg, and I plan to be driving it for another 4-5 years.
I'll take a good, solidly running, well maintained 15-year-old car any day over an already rusty shitbucket like the Chinese are building, or worse yet, the 40 year old Yugo that is the Russian Soyuz system.
No, try again. As the poster above you points out: the Bush Bailout cost more in one year - nay, in ONE LUMP SUM PROGRAM - than NASA's entire budget for the entirety of its existence.
And what did the Bush Bailout get us? Pretty much nothing except a bunch of Republican fat-cats lining their pockets after claiming their businesses were "too big to fail."
NASA is not a reflection of "government." NASA is a reflection of what happens when you give an agency - ANY agency, whether public or private - an order to do grand things on a shoestring budget and then start hacking away at the budget even further.
The final three planned moon missions were all canceled by Nixon and the Republicans, who had their hate on for the space program because it had been put in place by JFK (Nixon had an especially heavy hate on for any remnants of that administration, as he had lost to JFK previously). This behavior has continued more or less apace every time the Republicans held either the Presidency or at least one house of Congress.
As has once been said: NASA is an agency with an undeniable problem. The problem is not the will to do what they are assigned to do. It is not the capacity and intellect to get the job done. No, the problem is that it is an agency assigned to tasks that require a 10-15 year program to set up and accomplish, while being overseen and funded by a bunch of assholes who are generally replaced on a 2-year cycle and who are perpetually looking to be seen as "cutting government waste" and wanting instant gratification. For god's sake, we build in a 10% overage "just in case" fund for every construction project, but Congress won't do the same for NASA's programs!
You want to see NASA do well? Give them a task, assign realistic funding (and a percentage for overruns when they happen, because something unexpected always happens) for the task, lock the funding in place so that future Congresses can't touch it, and GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY.
Uhm, no.
The MafiAA, as we call it, are engaged in:
- Illegal price-fixing and collusion
- Illegal acts such as using "investigators" who are not licensed nor monitored and who then commit more illegal acts on order of their employers
- The defrauding of the artists to whom they owe royalties. This has been discussed ad nauseum in the categories of RIAA and Hollywood accounting scandals.
- Outright theft of property, when they retroactively and alternatively try to redefine musical and theatrical works as either "works of the artist" or "works for hire" according to the arbitrary principle of Whichever Will Fuck The Artist Over More.
They are an organized criminal enterprise. Nothing more.
They don't read anywhere else, or have any UI or UX pros on their staff, so chances are... yeah, they're going to be Myspace 3.0 in short order. Which is sad, because most of us left Ghettospace to get away from all the "virtual bling" fuckwittery.
Funny. If you ask them to name the virus supposedly serving up something, they also hang up.
Uhm... if anything, Capital Gains is UNEARNED income, therefore it should be taxed at a higher rate than earned (e.g. worked for) income if we want to encourage people to work.
Or do you disagree?
Right-wing buffoonery, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
"The wealthiest 1 percent of the population earn 19 percent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab." - It does NOT address how much of their income as a percentage they pay in total taxes - by which I mean income tax, property tax, and the various regressive taxation schemes (sometimes called "fees", sometimes not) cooked up by Republicans in recent decades.
The rest of that piece of toilet paper you linked to is similarly dishonest, so I see little need to go through it. Try a real economic analysis rather than right-wing crockery next time.
A good start would be to have people in shithole, arid areas of the world stop having 12 kids per family (plus all the illegitimates).
A nice followup would be to eliminate a lot of the hyperprocessed crap that's eaten in the "developed world", stop wasting corn making HFCS, etc.
Unfortunately, what these really require is a political solution because it's predominantly a political problem. In the US, HFCS production is high because of government subsidies, mostly because Republican legislators are beholden to Iowa/Midwestern corn conglomerates that also lobby to keep import tariffs on sugar high. The import tariffs limit incoming sugar, the corn subsidies ensure that southern-grown sugarcane can't compete pricewise with body-damaging HFCS.
In europe, it's not much different. Common Agricultural Policy subsidies make it so that certain crops are impossible to grow, even though they'd be better environmentally and economically otherwise.
Welcome to life.
Wow. You have ZERO thinking skills.
Obama is making a larger poor class and a smaller middle and upper class.
Under Clinton, the middle class grew and the poor shrank. Under Bush, the middle class got fucked. Whose policies are better again?
example: His health care reform. Forcing everyone to have insurance helps the insurance companies. Many small business are going to opt to pay the fine rather then cover health care. The fine is cheaper. The people will go to the government for their health care. Who pays for the health care then? The government does say the uninformed. Who pays for the government? All the citizens do. In other words in choosing the public option, you are choosing to pay for your own health care. Many will say the public option should be there. Well by forcing things, the government enacted a public option without calling it that. Also what about all the non citizen who get free health care now? Last I checked I have not seen a hospital turn people away. When they do not pay, those costs are turned over to those who can afford to pay. Why do you think the cost of health care keeps going up so much? There are many people who go to the hospital and do not pay. Stop treating people who are not citizens of this country who do not pay. Health care costs may actually drop then.
Spoken like someone who hasn't actually read up on anything. The biggest change is not the requirement of coverage - a REPUBLICAN idea first put into place by Romney. The biggest change is the number of abuses the current turds running what I call the "death care" industry can no longer get away with. No charging people an assload of money for a kid with a congenital condition. No dropping people because they developed a serious condition. No turning people away because they have a preexisting condition or requiring years of "no coverage for anything related" when these are the sort of ass turds who can make a missing toenail "related" to a need for corrective heart surgery.
The stimulus bills. The billions spent, sorry borrowed, created what again? A whole lot of not much. And he wants to do it again. Many people point at how much debt that GW Bush made. They over look that Obama spent more in three years than Bush did in eight. Bush added to the debt. Obama doubled it. Not a good thing.
Most of that debt is actually Shrub's debt. Obama stopped holding the cost of Bush's wars off the books, so 8 years of war debt all finally showed up on the balance sheets at once. Much of the rest of it was the spending crap from Bush's final year - remember, Obama took office in January and less than a month later these assholes handed him Bush's final budget, expected him to sign it, and then tried to hold it over his head.
Garbage.
The "poor" pay a larger percentage of income in "fees" and base regressive taxes (like sales tax) than the rich do.
The middle class pay a larger percentage of income in fees, base regressive taxes, and income tax than the rich do.
The rich pay the least percentage of income in taxes, period.
This unequal, fucked up system brought to you by Republicans, the Party of Class Warfare (remember the "war on poverty"? Rich vs Poor).
Precisely.
Republicans have always been the party of class warfare - the rich beating up on the poor. Every time the Republicans get into power they want "tax cuts" that they say will "spur economic growth." NEVER in history has this actually worked as they claim it did - voodoo economics was terrible.
Paul Ryan and the Republican liars scream about Reagan "cutting taxes"... they always forget that Reagan RAISED taxes again in 1983 and 1986 when the Democrats in congress demanded it, because it was evident that keeping taxes low just increased the deficit and the debt.
At current number (including all the treaties and other crap within) the world's strongest man couldn't carry it.
Of course that's because our law, thanks to the Republicans, is so fucking byzantine that even the government themselves can't tell us how many federal felonies are possible - let alone state felonies and misdemeanors of all levels.
Here you go: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4097602514885833865
What we SHOULD do is throw out any laws that were passed by the Republican corporate whores and yes, revote all the fucking things.
Hire the Israelis to do security RIGHT. Run it like they do on El Al.
You'll have the drunken rightwing retards from the Republican party begging for the TSA back in no time.
All it takes is one good judge to declare that crap unconscionable and unenforcable. ESPECIALLY since it's blatantly a try to protect their asses after setting off multiple class-action suits that are already on the books in which the only possible outcome is Sony getting their asses handed to them in court.
And this is why Obamacare was actually a GOOD thing, because it makes "preexisting condition" blockage like that ILLEGAL.
That makes a difference.
I was presuming they were using a more standard chip, similar to those that typically output DVI and would accept any old DVI-to-VGA converter with no trouble (DVI being the same, except for form factor, in pinouts when running in full digital mode).
No. The british legal system really were a bunch of corrupt fucking assholes.
They regularly used crap like this to make defendants appear guilty in courtrooms. Take a tour of historic courthouses in the "colonies" (what we Yanks call "New England" today) and you can see where in many cases there are still the marks on the floor from where the cages were originally screwed in over the defendant's station, where the poor soul would be made to stand up all day long during court proceedings, not even offered a chair to rest his feet while the corrupt Limey judge decided whether to hang him or toss him into prison for life.
Why not just point people to these?
http://www.amazon.com/HDMI-VGA-HD15-Male-Cable/dp/B001OLCHJ6
Or convince a few suppliers to donate some at-cost?
This is because the US justice system was cooked up by a bunch of people who were used to the way the British PRACTICE, not the way those assholes preach.
In practice, the British system at the time was "tell us everything now. No lawyer in your defence. And when you go to trial you'll be in a cage and made to look as guilty as possible visually." They were used to being abused. So they made damn sure that the people had the RIGHT not to talk to the abusive, corrupt fucks called "police" that are still abusive corrupt fucks today.
The sad part is that in the US, people usually aren't smart enough to keep their damn traps shut, and the police have come up with all sorts of "right up to the line and we'll fudge it and lie about it if we have to" tactics to get around that darn 5th amendment anyways. See previous comment: police are a bunch of corrupt, abusive fucks.
Don't forget Do Not Adjust Your Set and At Last The 1948 Show...
The real problem is, the longer copyright terms get, the more works are lost for good.
Don't believe me? Think about how many books "under copyright" may be lost simply because nobody preserves a copy. Think about how many films are lost merely because the original source, moldering under "copyright protection", went bad in the can down in the vaults of some MafiAA member and either is unreadable, or perished in a vault fire (early nitrate stock is NOTORIOUS for being susceptible to both).
We almost lost an amazing amount of black gospel music before a few concerned citizens stepped in; we STILL risk losing a large amount of it due to MafiAA meddling.
And that doesn't even discuss the loss of computer programs for formats and computers that won't expire copyright for decades, but are functionally already dead - the guy who built this is having a devil of a time finding software to test it with, merely because disk packs weren't maintained and SGI apparently wiped most of their archives. Or the various game consoles, or early home computers where most software was stored on highly volatile and quickly-degrading floppy disks...