The Wright brothers were masters of aerodynamics. I recall reading a book where one of the brothers, Orville I think, designed the currently used configuration of bicycle where the rider leans forward so his torso is horizontal to significantly reduce his aerodynamic footprint. The first time he road this bike, he destroyed the competition who all rode conventional upright sitting bicycles. Pretty soon they were selling these to all competitive bicyclists.
The true innovation in the Wright brothers made to flight was figuring out the design of a wing, that would provide lift. They even tested this in a wind tunnel, which they built: http://www.solarnavigator.net/inventors/wright_brothers_wind_tunnel.htm. An engine twice as powerful as the one they used wouldn't have lifted them off the ground without their innovation in wing design.
Did the robot like the cliche dinner and a movie? Did the robot order the most expensive thing on the menu and follow it with dessert? What type of movie did the robot want to see? Did robot invite the Bomb Squad in when it was dropped off?
Yes, but women have a limited number of eggs. A woman will still run out of eggs and be infertile after reaching age 50 (approximately). Unless there is an increase in the number of children born per women, there won't be a significant increase in population due to birth rate.
Sean Connery: I've got to ask you about the Penis Mightier.
Alex Trebek: What? No. No, no, that is The Pen is Mightier.
Sean Connery: Gussy it up however you want, Trebek. What matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis, man?
Alex Trebek: It's not a product, Mr. Connery.
Sean Connery: Because I've ordered devices like that before - wasted a pretty penny, I don't mind telling you. And if The Penis Mightier works, I'll order a dozen.
Alex Trebek: It's not a Penis Mightier, Mr. Connery. There's no such thing!
Nicholas Cage: Wait, wait, wait.. are you selling Penis Mightiers?
Alex Trebek: No! No, I'm not.
Sean Connery: Well, you're sitting on a gold mine, Trebek!
A better way to look at it is how long will you stick with the game.
I don't know specifics, but obviously, there is one price for the points necessary to buy all the content. Divide that price buy the monthly subscription. That will tell you how many months until the a la carte option breaks even. For instance, if the content can be unlocked for $100, and the monthly subscription is $15, six months costs you $90, and 7 costs $105. If you are likely to play for half a year, you are better off buying a la carte, only paying for additional when absolutely necessary. That way you know your total cost will never go over the $100. If you play for 3 years, your cost never goes over $100, but if you have a subscription, you pay $540 for the same amount of playing.
I assume you can buy the content in smaller amounts than the full thing. So say you buy the first few, and you get bored and quit, you probably aren't out much more than a few month's subscription. If you go piecemeal, you might even save yourself a few bucks of the total purchase price if you skip a few parts by the time you reach the end.
Think of the physical conditioning of using full body action to play a Diablo style combat game. I think that would be the motivation I'd need to lose the thirty pounds I've been meaning to drop.
Much of the growth of the economy since the 1980s was artificial. Economies have natural business cycles where things go well when we try new things, and some of those work out, but then we have to weed out the things that didn't. The longer we go between downturns, the worse the downturn will be when it arrives (this is kind of like earthquakes, the longer you go without, the bigger it will be when it comes). We haven't had a really good downturn since the 70s to early 80s. The dot-com boom and rise in productivity with computers did a lot to stave off recessions during Clinton's presidency, but it was all good timing for him that he just happened to be in office when the Internet blew-up. If Bush, Dole or Perot had been in office, or the Democrats had been running Congress, the same thing would have happened. Then, after the collapse and 9/11, we demanded that Congress and the Fed, recreate the conditions of the previous upturn and we got the housing bubble.
Now, we are in a situation where the Democrats and mainstream Republicans want to create a new bubble and do it all over again. The Tea Party wants to get us on a healthy path. In the short term, some people will lose their current job. However, it's mostly overpaid government bureaucrats, I saw an article a few months back that claimed that for every job that Chris Christie has cut in New Jersey, 2 non-government jobs have been created.
If we don't correct course, we are either going to go through a long slow spiral to obscurity like the Japanese have done the last decade and a half, or hit a wall and have a worse than Great Depression economic collapse. We've been digging ourselves in a bigger and bigger hole since the Great Depression, and we've been constantly saved by growing new businesses and innovation (technological and economic). But now our taxation, especially the payroll taxes and insurance costs (primarily caused by President Johnson's Medicare program and the lack of a few common sense laws) is going to prevent us from being saved from the big downturn, which is likely to make the last 10 years look like a hiccup.
I definitely think we should have coop utilities, including broadband in the US. The property owners or renters own the coop equally, and it runs the lines for water, sewage, electricity, and data. Electricity and data providers can sell their services to anybody in the coop, separating the right to control access to the customer from the incentive to prevent access to the customer to force higher prices. Once the coop has paid for the (new fiber optic) lines, the primary expenses are the salaries of the people who maintain the lines, electricity to run everything, and negotiated fees for transferring data from city to city.
This would also negate the need for net neutrality, because if the coop decided against it, it would presumably be done with the consent of the customers, who would be the same owners who would vote at the coop meeting.
Maybe people just need to adjust their expectations.
For instance, a typical American borrows the most they can afford to get the most house they can afford right now, which eats 40% of their income every month after you figure in insurance and taxes.
A much better option is renting something with a payment much lower that costs 10 or 15%, or buying a mobile home (should be do-able within a few months to a year), or something you can afford to pay off in 5-10 years. With the first option, you save the difference between what your rent cost and the 40% figure. With the last two options, after you have it paid off what you are buying, you save 40% of your income every month. If you have a home you want to buy better than what you are already living in, save until you can get what you want, or until the perfect house comes available and you can pay off the difference within a couple of years. Once you are content with your living situation (continuing to live in low cost rental or living in an property you own with no payments), save the 40%.
Once you have your housing costs covered except for insurance and taxes, you can easily live above the means of other people making the same salary, OR save all of what you could be spending on housing and be in retirement between your mid-40s to mid-50s depending on what income and lifestyle you are comfortable with and how secure you feel about your financial adviser's ability to maintain your nest egg.
Many who make over 250,000 are small business owners who have to pay payroll taxes, insurance and much higher taxes without the same tax deductions we get out of that money, significantly cutting into the difference in take home that you think is apparent in those numbers. Employ 2 or 3 people out of that money, and they are no better off than most of the rest of us.
I vote for the Republicans on economic and social policies. I'm white collar earning a little under 50k, so I'd probably benefit according to your comment.
I just don't see how I'd benefit on an economic level though. Would I have more money? Maybe, but so would everybody else like me, which would only serve to drive up the prices of the things everybody in my economic class would buy (houses in my price range, inexpensive cars, food, clothes, paying for education expenses, etc.).
My analysis of the health care reform is that the health care debate was that the government is going to take on an unaffordable liability (or pass it on to the states) and will basically use cost controls which will distort the market further encouraging monopolies, perhaps even giving rise to state run health care, instead of attacking market inefficiencies (eliminating different prices regardless of who pays (insurance company or patient), requirements that medical provider and insurance companies must publicly provide the prices you can expect to pay for a variety of services both before getting a policy and then before service is provided, requiring the insurance company to share cost savings with the patient for choosing the cheaper option, etc.) to provide customers a method to choose cheaper options.
Frankly, I would like to see payroll taxes like Social Security, unemployment, and medicare become optional. I think others would to a better job of recognizing they need to save their own money to cover situations those insurance programs cover if they realized they didn't have a safety net, and they could do a much better job of taking care of their own future needs than the government will. Since people would have more incentive to save, prices of thing I might want to buy now would probably drop, either leaving me more money to spend or save, and leaving all shoppers in a better position.
The government's history shows that every time a shortage happens concerning these programs, they will cut what you'll receive (changing when you become eligible, reducing payouts, etc.), essentially taking our money and reducing what we receive in exchange for what you've paid. The one exemption to this rule is for those in the unions who are the preferred beneficiaries of the Democrats, because of their political donations.
All of Democratic policy is to increase the amount of money that goes through the government coffers. Tell me, which do you think would be a less corrupt and wasteful government, one run on $500 billion or the one we have run on $3 trillion? I'll tell you, I have no doubt it's a lot easier to hide waste and corruption in the latter number than the former.
As for minimum wage, it (along with paper money) causes inflation, which is why we now have a significant price difference between us and the people performing our outsourced jobs in China and India, or what somebody in Mexico makes. If wages were set at a level comparable to the same job in China, Mexico or India (with comparably priced costs which would follow wages), we wouldn't have millions of Mexicans here illegally, or every item on a Walmart shelf having another country as the location of manufacture, or call center's and software shops run out of India.
I'd like to also say that my preferred economic ownership model more closely matches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism. I figure this is actually more capitalistic, since it provides more competition, encouraging a more efficient market, without large multinationals that can push everybody else around.
Wouldn't you be better of taking the cab both ways? By the time you figure the gas (driving yourself to the bar at night, reimbursing your friend for driving you to the bar the next morning, and driving home the next morning), your ticket, and time to take the extra trip to the bar in the morning, wouldn't the extra cost of taking the cab to the bar be worth it?
I don't get the idiots that would use the traceable network to get their porn. I don't think there are too many companies that track data accessed from the optical drive (4 GB) or an SD card reader (64 GB), or screen capture software to view what employees are working on. These people could easily carry the data to their machine by hand, access in a form that probably isn't tracked, keep it on their person to prevent it accidentally being discovered, and as long as they are discrete about making sure nobody else catches a glimpse of it, they would probably be in the clear.
At least he had to go through the effort to put the film in the slides, and get the projector and screen out. Heck, after he went to the effort of inserting the slides into the holders, getting the screen and machine would have seemed like a piece of cake. And he was limited by the number of projector rings he could carry, slides he could afford, and the amount of time he was willing to take to put them together.
But now he can hook up a camera directly to a TV, and start a slide show at your house without you being able to lock the door when he heads out to the car to lug the projector and screen into your house. His limit, if he has 4 64GB SD cards in his pocket of his camera is about a million photos if he's scaled them to fit the screen size. Fortunately with the advent of the computer and internet, he can load them up, caption them to his heart's content, and you can not look if you aren't interested, or you can scan the thumbnails, and enlarge the 5 or 10 you think are interesting and not spend hours looking at hundreds of pictures you don't care for.
Tell me, are the companies going to get sued by the owners? Surely an ethically acting company would win based on an argument that conducting business in an unethical manner might yield short term profits, it might lead to the medium term destruction of the company.
Put it another way, did Lehman Brothers maximize profits? Maybe for a few years, but in the end, their stupid business practices did just the opposite. Surely the law (or judgment) isn't written in such a way that a company must decide profit over ethics, just profit over a clearly unprofitable alternative assuming all other aspects of the decision are equal.
Just think what the south, which has the most die hard football fans in the country, will think when all of the black players (ie most of their teams) leave the state to play at a school that's in a state that doesn't have pro-slavery/discrimination laws. It wouldn't take long for the fans of the schools in the SEC (the deep south) to reject such laws from being passed in the first place.
How long do you think a southern state would take to legalize it? How long do you think it would take for people to leave the state as soon as a legislator proposed a bill to legalize it?
Do you think those state would want their sports programs to suffer from not getting elite athlete's to play for their schools? For other states to refuse to play those schools? For national organizations to refuse to allow schools in those states to play for future national titles, if they could manage the talent to play at a high level after they run off all of the elite athlete's? The SEC is considered the best college football conference, and the main schools affected would be Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Auburn, South Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi and Mississippi State. I think those states would think twice about making stupid slavery is legal laws if somebody would point out that they would be permanent second class citizens in sports.
Multinationals, by definition, would be dealing across state lines, and would fall under the interstate commerce clause.
Do you really think the small government folks that are showing up at the tea party events really want to get run over by the large corporations?
My 'shrink the feds' position isn't about anything that allows large companies to have more power over people. It has to do everything with the fact that most of the money in the budget has nothing to do with protecting us from large business. Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, the Bush drug program, etc. don't protect us from anything except our own frivolous spending, and aren't needed. If people made realistic assessments about how much money we need to save for retirement and emergencies, then the none of those programs would be necessary because we would all have the money we need to pay for those expenses in the bank. Specifically, we've deluded ourselves into thinking that 30% of our income is a reasonable amount of our income to attribute to buying a house. If you set that amount closer to 10-15% (and forced banks to use that as a reasonable limit for house buying purposes), and add the 20% of your paycheck the government takes to pay for those insurance programs, you would have 30% of your income to set aside. If you saved that money, and our government had reasonable levels of debt so as not to encourage inflation, you would never need the help of these government programs. If these programs were made voluntary, I would be much happier if I didn't have to pay for a dime in exchange for not expecting to ever collect a dime. (My income is below $50k, so don't think I'm currently so well off that I don't worry about my current financial situation. Unfortunately I didn't read Dave Ramsey's book until after I bought my current house.)
I saw an interesting article today about our government debt situation. Basically, pundits that compare our situation to the Euro debt situation and claim we are OK are ignoring the amount of debt that the states owe, and not just current debt, but future debt.
The small government folks are concerned about the government taxing our money, and wasting it by guaranteeing it to government contractors, the civil service unions in guaranteed pensions, and other spending that I never voted for or approved.
And that's the crux of the problem. Once upon a time, 40-80 years ago, this government setup these programs, and we the people who are living under them never got to say yes or no, and many of the programs will be bankrupt before we ever get any money back, much less what we put in plus interest. We should be turning these into optional insurance, and requiring them to stay afloat without bailouts.
Check out your local library. I've been using the library for about a year now. My library's selection is probably comparable to Netflix (I've recently watched several older movies like the Godfather series, and some WW2 era movies, the X-files series, soon going to watch the Farside), and if they don't have something, I've actually had pretty good success about requesting that they buy items I want and having them acquire them. My library actually has an Annex just for the older videos that they don't have on the shelves right now, and I have access to all of this material that I neither want to pay to watch one time nor want to store, I'm protected against my kids scratching disks.
Now, I live a 25 minute round trip from our library, but once a week, they send a Bookmobile (bus with shelves) all over the county, and I can request that they send my requested materials out on the local Bookmobile, which is a 6 mile round trip, which is closer than my nearest video store. I have had a couple of items that were so scratched I couldn't watch the whole thing, but I just requested a new copy and put a note in the old one so they could remove it from circulation. You're probably paying property taxes (even if you rent, the landlord is paying some of your rent in taxes) to support a library and this is a far better option than paying for the video store (I also get all items for 1 or 3 weeks depending on the item, and cheaper fees if I keep it too long), risking getting sued, or buying it myself.
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The Wright brothers were masters of aerodynamics. I recall reading a book where one of the brothers, Orville I think, designed the currently used configuration of bicycle where the rider leans forward so his torso is horizontal to significantly reduce his aerodynamic footprint. The first time he road this bike, he destroyed the competition who all rode conventional upright sitting bicycles. Pretty soon they were selling these to all competitive bicyclists.
The true innovation in the Wright brothers made to flight was figuring out the design of a wing, that would provide lift. They even tested this in a wind tunnel, which they built: http://www.solarnavigator.net/inventors/wright_brothers_wind_tunnel.htm. An engine twice as powerful as the one they used wouldn't have lifted them off the ground without their innovation in wing design.
Did the robot like the cliche dinner and a movie?
Did the robot order the most expensive thing on the menu and follow it with dessert?
What type of movie did the robot want to see?
Did robot invite the Bomb Squad in when it was dropped off?
Yes, but women have a limited number of eggs. A woman will still run out of eggs and be infertile after reaching age 50 (approximately). Unless there is an increase in the number of children born per women, there won't be a significant increase in population due to birth rate.
Not to mention it takes at least 9 months between backups.
Waiting lists are for people trying to adopt babies. People willing to adopt older children can do so quite easily.
Sean Connery: I've got to ask you about the Penis Mightier.
Alex Trebek: What? No. No, no, that is The Pen is Mightier.
Sean Connery: Gussy it up however you want, Trebek. What matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis, man?
Alex Trebek: It's not a product, Mr. Connery.
Sean Connery: Because I've ordered devices like that before - wasted a pretty penny, I don't mind telling you. And if The Penis Mightier works, I'll order a dozen.
Alex Trebek: It's not a Penis Mightier, Mr. Connery. There's no such thing!
Nicholas Cage: Wait, wait, wait.. are you selling Penis Mightiers?
Alex Trebek: No! No, I'm not.
Sean Connery: Well, you're sitting on a gold mine, Trebek!
A better way to look at it is how long will you stick with the game.
I don't know specifics, but obviously, there is one price for the points necessary to buy all the content. Divide that price buy the monthly subscription. That will tell you how many months until the a la carte option breaks even. For instance, if the content can be unlocked for $100, and the monthly subscription is $15, six months costs you $90, and 7 costs $105. If you are likely to play for half a year, you are better off buying a la carte, only paying for additional when absolutely necessary. That way you know your total cost will never go over the $100. If you play for 3 years, your cost never goes over $100, but if you have a subscription, you pay $540 for the same amount of playing.
I assume you can buy the content in smaller amounts than the full thing. So say you buy the first few, and you get bored and quit, you probably aren't out much more than a few month's subscription. If you go piecemeal, you might even save yourself a few bucks of the total purchase price if you skip a few parts by the time you reach the end.
Think of the physical conditioning of using full body action to play a Diablo style combat game. I think that would be the motivation I'd need to lose the thirty pounds I've been meaning to drop.
Tea party fan here.
Much of the growth of the economy since the 1980s was artificial. Economies have natural business cycles where things go well when we try new things, and some of those work out, but then we have to weed out the things that didn't. The longer we go between downturns, the worse the downturn will be when it arrives (this is kind of like earthquakes, the longer you go without, the bigger it will be when it comes). We haven't had a really good downturn since the 70s to early 80s. The dot-com boom and rise in productivity with computers did a lot to stave off recessions during Clinton's presidency, but it was all good timing for him that he just happened to be in office when the Internet blew-up. If Bush, Dole or Perot had been in office, or the Democrats had been running Congress, the same thing would have happened. Then, after the collapse and 9/11, we demanded that Congress and the Fed, recreate the conditions of the previous upturn and we got the housing bubble.
Now, we are in a situation where the Democrats and mainstream Republicans want to create a new bubble and do it all over again. The Tea Party wants to get us on a healthy path. In the short term, some people will lose their current job. However, it's mostly overpaid government bureaucrats, I saw an article a few months back that claimed that for every job that Chris Christie has cut in New Jersey, 2 non-government jobs have been created.
If we don't correct course, we are either going to go through a long slow spiral to obscurity like the Japanese have done the last decade and a half, or hit a wall and have a worse than Great Depression economic collapse. We've been digging ourselves in a bigger and bigger hole since the Great Depression, and we've been constantly saved by growing new businesses and innovation (technological and economic). But now our taxation, especially the payroll taxes and insurance costs (primarily caused by President Johnson's Medicare program and the lack of a few common sense laws) is going to prevent us from being saved from the big downturn, which is likely to make the last 10 years look like a hiccup.
GP was referring betting 100 against, and getting back the $1 betting against, assuming the bookmakers are playing both sides.
I have a checking account with a local Credit Union (Kansas) that pays 4% on the first 25000 in my checking account if I meet three conditions: Make 10 purchases with the account debit card, make a direct deposit, and take an electronic statement instead of having them mail me the paper copy. Check the Smart Checking section directly below the table. A quick search found one in Michigan with a lower limit.
I definitely think we should have coop utilities, including broadband in the US. The property owners or renters own the coop equally, and it runs the lines for water, sewage, electricity, and data. Electricity and data providers can sell their services to anybody in the coop, separating the right to control access to the customer from the incentive to prevent access to the customer to force higher prices. Once the coop has paid for the (new fiber optic) lines, the primary expenses are the salaries of the people who maintain the lines, electricity to run everything, and negotiated fees for transferring data from city to city.
This would also negate the need for net neutrality, because if the coop decided against it, it would presumably be done with the consent of the customers, who would be the same owners who would vote at the coop meeting.
According to Wikipedia's, there are 65 stars in 50 systems within 5 parsecs: Link.
Maybe people just need to adjust their expectations.
For instance, a typical American borrows the most they can afford to get the most house they can afford right now, which eats 40% of their income every month after you figure in insurance and taxes.
A much better option is renting something with a payment much lower that costs 10 or 15%, or buying a mobile home (should be do-able within a few months to a year), or something you can afford to pay off in 5-10 years. With the first option, you save the difference between what your rent cost and the 40% figure. With the last two options, after you have it paid off what you are buying, you save 40% of your income every month. If you have a home you want to buy better than what you are already living in, save until you can get what you want, or until the perfect house comes available and you can pay off the difference within a couple of years. Once you are content with your living situation (continuing to live in low cost rental or living in an property you own with no payments), save the 40%.
Once you have your housing costs covered except for insurance and taxes, you can easily live above the means of other people making the same salary, OR save all of what you could be spending on housing and be in retirement between your mid-40s to mid-50s depending on what income and lifestyle you are comfortable with and how secure you feel about your financial adviser's ability to maintain your nest egg.
Many who make over 250,000 are small business owners who have to pay payroll taxes, insurance and much higher taxes without the same tax deductions we get out of that money, significantly cutting into the difference in take home that you think is apparent in those numbers. Employ 2 or 3 people out of that money, and they are no better off than most of the rest of us.
I vote for the Republicans on economic and social policies. I'm white collar earning a little under 50k, so I'd probably benefit according to your comment.
I just don't see how I'd benefit on an economic level though. Would I have more money? Maybe, but so would everybody else like me, which would only serve to drive up the prices of the things everybody in my economic class would buy (houses in my price range, inexpensive cars, food, clothes, paying for education expenses, etc.).
My analysis of the health care reform is that the health care debate was that the government is going to take on an unaffordable liability (or pass it on to the states) and will basically use cost controls which will distort the market further encouraging monopolies, perhaps even giving rise to state run health care, instead of attacking market inefficiencies (eliminating different prices regardless of who pays (insurance company or patient), requirements that medical provider and insurance companies must publicly provide the prices you can expect to pay for a variety of services both before getting a policy and then before service is provided, requiring the insurance company to share cost savings with the patient for choosing the cheaper option, etc.) to provide customers a method to choose cheaper options.
Frankly, I would like to see payroll taxes like Social Security, unemployment, and medicare become optional. I think others would to a better job of recognizing they need to save their own money to cover situations those insurance programs cover if they realized they didn't have a safety net, and they could do a much better job of taking care of their own future needs than the government will. Since people would have more incentive to save, prices of thing I might want to buy now would probably drop, either leaving me more money to spend or save, and leaving all shoppers in a better position.
The government's history shows that every time a shortage happens concerning these programs, they will cut what you'll receive (changing when you become eligible, reducing payouts, etc.), essentially taking our money and reducing what we receive in exchange for what you've paid. The one exemption to this rule is for those in the unions who are the preferred beneficiaries of the Democrats, because of their political donations.
All of Democratic policy is to increase the amount of money that goes through the government coffers. Tell me, which do you think would be a less corrupt and wasteful government, one run on $500 billion or the one we have run on $3 trillion? I'll tell you, I have no doubt it's a lot easier to hide waste and corruption in the latter number than the former.
As for minimum wage, it (along with paper money) causes inflation, which is why we now have a significant price difference between us and the people performing our outsourced jobs in China and India, or what somebody in Mexico makes. If wages were set at a level comparable to the same job in China, Mexico or India (with comparably priced costs which would follow wages), we wouldn't have millions of Mexicans here illegally, or every item on a Walmart shelf having another country as the location of manufacture, or call center's and software shops run out of India.
I'd like to also say that my preferred economic ownership model more closely matches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism. I figure this is actually more capitalistic, since it provides more competition, encouraging a more efficient market, without large multinationals that can push everybody else around.
Thanks for reading.
Wouldn't you be better of taking the cab both ways? By the time you figure the gas (driving yourself to the bar at night, reimbursing your friend for driving you to the bar the next morning, and driving home the next morning), your ticket, and time to take the extra trip to the bar in the morning, wouldn't the extra cost of taking the cab to the bar be worth it?
I don't get the idiots that would use the traceable network to get their porn. I don't think there are too many companies that track data accessed from the optical drive (4 GB) or an SD card reader (64 GB), or screen capture software to view what employees are working on. These people could easily carry the data to their machine by hand, access in a form that probably isn't tracked, keep it on their person to prevent it accidentally being discovered, and as long as they are discrete about making sure nobody else catches a glimpse of it, they would probably be in the clear.
At least he had to go through the effort to put the film in the slides, and get the projector and screen out. Heck, after he went to the effort of inserting the slides into the holders, getting the screen and machine would have seemed like a piece of cake. And he was limited by the number of projector rings he could carry, slides he could afford, and the amount of time he was willing to take to put them together.
But now he can hook up a camera directly to a TV, and start a slide show at your house without you being able to lock the door when he heads out to the car to lug the projector and screen into your house. His limit, if he has 4 64GB SD cards in his pocket of his camera is about a million photos if he's scaled them to fit the screen size. Fortunately with the advent of the computer and internet, he can load them up, caption them to his heart's content, and you can not look if you aren't interested, or you can scan the thumbnails, and enlarge the 5 or 10 you think are interesting and not spend hours looking at hundreds of pictures you don't care for.
Tell me, are the companies going to get sued by the owners? Surely an ethically acting company would win based on an argument that conducting business in an unethical manner might yield short term profits, it might lead to the medium term destruction of the company.
Put it another way, did Lehman Brothers maximize profits? Maybe for a few years, but in the end, their stupid business practices did just the opposite. Surely the law (or judgment) isn't written in such a way that a company must decide profit over ethics, just profit over a clearly unprofitable alternative assuming all other aspects of the decision are equal.
Just think what the south, which has the most die hard football fans in the country, will think when all of the black players (ie most of their teams) leave the state to play at a school that's in a state that doesn't have pro-slavery/discrimination laws. It wouldn't take long for the fans of the schools in the SEC (the deep south) to reject such laws from being passed in the first place.
How long do you think a southern state would take to legalize it? How long do you think it would take for people to leave the state as soon as a legislator proposed a bill to legalize it?
Do you think those state would want their sports programs to suffer from not getting elite athlete's to play for their schools? For other states to refuse to play those schools? For national organizations to refuse to allow schools in those states to play for future national titles, if they could manage the talent to play at a high level after they run off all of the elite athlete's? The SEC is considered the best college football conference, and the main schools affected would be Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Auburn, South Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi and Mississippi State. I think those states would think twice about making stupid slavery is legal laws if somebody would point out that they would be permanent second class citizens in sports.
Multinationals, by definition, would be dealing across state lines, and would fall under the interstate commerce clause.
Do you really think the small government folks that are showing up at the tea party events really want to get run over by the large corporations?
My 'shrink the feds' position isn't about anything that allows large companies to have more power over people. It has to do everything with the fact that most of the money in the budget has nothing to do with protecting us from large business. Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, the Bush drug program, etc. don't protect us from anything except our own frivolous spending, and aren't needed. If people made realistic assessments about how much money we need to save for retirement and emergencies, then the none of those programs would be necessary because we would all have the money we need to pay for those expenses in the bank. Specifically, we've deluded ourselves into thinking that 30% of our income is a reasonable amount of our income to attribute to buying a house. If you set that amount closer to 10-15% (and forced banks to use that as a reasonable limit for house buying purposes), and add the 20% of your paycheck the government takes to pay for those insurance programs, you would have 30% of your income to set aside. If you saved that money, and our government had reasonable levels of debt so as not to encourage inflation, you would never need the help of these government programs. If these programs were made voluntary, I would be much happier if I didn't have to pay for a dime in exchange for not expecting to ever collect a dime. (My income is below $50k, so don't think I'm currently so well off that I don't worry about my current financial situation. Unfortunately I didn't read Dave Ramsey's book until after I bought my current house.)
I saw an interesting article today about our government debt situation. Basically, pundits that compare our situation to the Euro debt situation and claim we are OK are ignoring the amount of debt that the states owe, and not just current debt, but future debt.
The small government folks are concerned about the government taxing our money, and wasting it by guaranteeing it to government contractors, the civil service unions in guaranteed pensions, and other spending that I never voted for or approved.
And that's the crux of the problem. Once upon a time, 40-80 years ago, this government setup these programs, and we the people who are living under them never got to say yes or no, and many of the programs will be bankrupt before we ever get any money back, much less what we put in plus interest. We should be turning these into optional insurance, and requiring them to stay afloat without bailouts.
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Check out your local library. I've been using the library for about a year now. My library's selection is probably comparable to Netflix (I've recently watched several older movies like the Godfather series, and some WW2 era movies, the X-files series, soon going to watch the Farside), and if they don't have something, I've actually had pretty good success about requesting that they buy items I want and having them acquire them. My library actually has an Annex just for the older videos that they don't have on the shelves right now, and I have access to all of this material that I neither want to pay to watch one time nor want to store, I'm protected against my kids scratching disks.
Now, I live a 25 minute round trip from our library, but once a week, they send a Bookmobile (bus with shelves) all over the county, and I can request that they send my requested materials out on the local Bookmobile, which is a 6 mile round trip, which is closer than my nearest video store. I have had a couple of items that were so scratched I couldn't watch the whole thing, but I just requested a new copy and put a note in the old one so they could remove it from circulation. You're probably paying property taxes (even if you rent, the landlord is paying some of your rent in taxes) to support a library and this is a far better option than paying for the video store (I also get all items for 1 or 3 weeks depending on the item, and cheaper fees if I keep it too long), risking getting sued, or buying it myself.