What happens when you want to lift something that masses 27 metric tons? A Delta can't do it. And a lot of pieces aren't built to be easily disassembled/reassembled in space. Like the habitat modules.
NERVA, or the new P&W engine, for that matter, are not sufficient. We need a specific impulse in the thousands of seconds, at least, to reach the outer system in reasonable times.
Hmm, they extrapolated from approximately 1000 households to a population of ~24 million.
Let's assume 10 people per household. The Iraqi birthrate isn't really high enough to justify that, but let's assume it anyway. Under that assumption, they counted around 40 deaths in the last year and a half.
40 deaths is considered statistically significant enough to generalize over an entire population?!?
If you were open to worship the emperors, you could worship whatever.
Yah, that's real religious freedom, all right! If you'll worship their false God (as you perceive the Emperor), then you can also worship your own true God. Emperor worship never even caught on in Rome (the Romans could see, better than anyone else, that the Emperor was just some bozo who had control of the Army) - it was practiced, as a matter of survival, all over the Empire, but few took it seriously.
The eastern empire survived, with (orthodox) christianism, true. But why did the eastern empire fall? Because, when Byzantium (orthodox) asked for help, they refused to convert to Roman Catholicism. Both didn't cooperate, due to minimal religious differences. Christians again
Umm, Orthodox Christianity, as a separate entity, really came along somewhere between three and seven centuries after the fall of Rome.
I suspect that the sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders in the 13th century had more to do with the final fall of Constantinople than a religious issue did. Which sacking was not on religious grounds, but because "that's where the money is".
While Christianity played a major part in European history, one must be careful to distinguish between the use of Christianity as an excuse for the actions of rulers, and Christianity as a CAUSE of the actions of rulers. The balance of power between the Patriarchs, the Pope, and secular rulers was unstable, at best, and dominance shifted from time to time. As for instance, the Avignon Papacy, when the French King managed to impose his own Pope on the Roman Church. For a while. Then there were two Popes, for a while. Then three, for a short while, then back to one.
The Church deserves a great deal of the credit for earning the blame of so many, as they are inclined to give themselves rather more credit than they strictly deserve in international affairs during the medieval period. More often, it was the avarice of the secular rulers which deserved the credit for the atrocities committed in the name of Christ.
This is not to suggest that the Church didn't deserve any blame for atrocities in the name of Christ. The various Inquisitions served admirably to fatten Church coffers, and so were given a free rein. (Though the most notorious of the Inquisistions, the Spanish, acted more on behalf of the King of Spain than the Pope, no matter what Monty Python had to say on the subject).
Established Churches have been more the rule than the exception throughout history. The Persian Empire was a notable exception, and the Roman Empire up to the point where an Emperor declared himself to be a God.
Note that the "separation of Church and State" really took off the very first time we have a country where NO rellgion was the majority religion. Yes, we were almost all Christians, but the Church had splintered centuries earlier into many of the same fragments we have now - Baptist and Anabaptist, Catholic and Lutheran, Anglican, Orthodox, "etc, etc, etc" (as Yul Brynner was wont to say). Since then, most of those branches have split again (notable exceptions - the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, though it can be argued that the Orthodox Church split when the Russian rulers decided to pay more attention to the Patriarch in Moskva than to the one in Constantinople).
Only reason we have "freedom of Religion" now is that there was no majority sect in the early USA. Likely enough, if we'd been mostly Anglican, that would be the State Religion now (and paid as much attention as the State Religions elsewhere - not much).
Umm, no. They say that since 1980, the numbers are a bit off:
The researchers around Sami K. Solanki stress the fact that solar activity has remained on a roughly constant (high) level since about 1980 - apart from the variations due to the 11-year cycle - while the global temperature has experienced a strong further increase during that time. On the other hand, the rather similar trends of solar activity and terrestrial temperature during the last centuries (with the notable exception of the last 20 years) indicates that the relation between the Sun and climate remains a challenge for further research.
Lots of problems with ANY system. Don't know that we would fix them by mailing people Voter Cards.
After all, if the Voter Cards weren't mailed out properly, we'd disenfranchise people. Which would be a bad thing. Or of the Voter lost his card, he'd be disenfranchised. Again, a bad thing. Or if you were, by a mischance, not issued a Voter Card because your name matched that of a felon, we'd disenfranchise people. A bad thing.
We have Voter Rolls here. When you vote, you go to your precinct, and present them with proof you are who you say you are (except in States where that has been deemed illegal), and sign the List to show that you voted. It is countesigned/initialed by the person handling the voter rolls. Where I vote, we have two people, one of whom verifies my ID, the other of whom checks the Voter Rolls for my name. Then you vote. No Voter Card needed.
So, your turn. Demonstrate how Voter Cards would prevent any disenfranchisment of Voters. And how they'd insure that only the named person could actually vote. Or, for that matter, how they prevent me from getting a fake ID and axquiring more than one of them.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
Lincoln's election on an abolitionist platform was the cause of the civil war -- in other words, the effect of his election was the secession of southern states, which led to the civil war; the emancipation proclamation came during the civil war; the effect of the union's victory was to make the writ apply in the south
Lincoln didn't run on an abolitionist platform, though it was commonly believed that he would abolish slavery, hence the secession. One article of the Republican Platform of 1860 (#8?) seemed to call for abolition of slavery, but the remainder of the Platform made it clear that the Republicans were working to keep slavery out of NEW states, not remove it from old States.
Have you read the Emancipation Proclamation? It didn't free the slaves in the Union (and there were some slave states still in the Union), it freed them in the Confederacy. Slaves within the Union (the non-secesh States) were not freed until the 13th Amendment, after the war.
The Civil War, its causes and effects, is one of my favorite pieces of history. It did more to shape the modern USA than any other similar period in history, with the possible exception of WW2.
Re:what about freedom to bear arms?
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Unfortunately, in the US, it seems there are far too many punks with firearms, and not enough responsible adults.
Actually, almost all of us are responsible adults. Otherwise the murder rate would be in the tens of millions (Hell, there was someone on the highway this AM that I would have been delighted to remove from the gene pool, if I were so inclined), rather than less than 16,000 (not all those murders are firearms related, but most are). Likewise, it might be useful to keep in mind that there are approximately 200 firearms for every violent crime committed. Not all violent crimes involve guns, of course, so the ratio is probably higher, but I don't really feel like checking the numbers.
Also, if you eliminate the murders over drugs, I think you'll find that our murder rates are not especially higher than European ones. Which would tend to support the opinion that the War on Drugs is the problem, rather than the firearms.
It is certainly true that the Legions wanted more money all the time. Generally, however, the group you are describing here is the Praetorian Guard, who were, theoretically, the Emperor's Bodyguard, and not part of the Army per se.
Christianity wasn't an issue. If it had been part and parcel of the problem, the Eastern Empire would have fallen when the Western Empire did, instead of 1000 years later. They were, after all, just as Christian as the Western Empire. Don't blame all the ills of the world on Christianity. Certainly some vile things were done in its name, but the fall of the Empire wasn't one of them.
former very religiously open roman empire
This would be the Empire that deified several Emperors, and required their subjects to worship said Emperors? Seems to me that that was part of the Empire's problems with the Jews - they wouldn't worship the Emperors.
Really? In the USA, the government doesn't come around and confiscate your voter's card from your widow. They do that in Europe?
Seriously, in the USA, with 50 different States, replacing a dead man isn't terribly hard. Basic technique - find someone who died in a state different than the one he was born in. Not hard to do, we're a moderately mobile people. Get some fake ID made, and request a copy of his birth certificate from the issuing State. Go elsewhere with that perfectly legal, valid birth ceritificate, and use that to get REAL, LEGAL ID in that name, with your picture attached. Then register to vote somewhere convenient to you. Shazam! You now can vote twice, and the odds are good you'll never be caught out, as long as you don't do anything else illegal (if the cops ever have a reason to do an ID search on you, coming up with two names would be embarrassing, to say the least, so you want to stay off the cops' radar if you play this sort of game).
If they're dead, they won't show up to vote. This, by the way, was the favorite method of stuffing ballot boxes by the Democrats in Chicago for many years.
Not that I believe that it is still happening, in spite of the fact that one of the people Gore brought to Florida to help him with his recounts was the son of the Chicago Mayor most notorious for that sort of thing. Interestingly enough, the son was also Mayor of Chicago. What a coincidence!
My point was that you described something that wasn't even comparable. Let's try another one. If I lose $3,000,000 per year in income, it'll affect the tax base more than if you lose $1 in income. Therefore, the taxes you pay are not very important, really.
in the states it should be close too
Let's see, we'll trot over to the IRS web site, and see what it has to say.
Corporate Income Taxes amount to ~20% of Individual Income Taxes, on average. Varies by year, of course, but not too much.
Since their statistics don't break at the $80K point, we'll look at the people making more than $100K. They amount to 8.33% of tax returns filed for 2002 (latest year I saw statistics on, but I didn't look too hard, since any recent year would do). Those 8.3% of people paid in 61.9% of all personal income taxes that year.
Now, since none of those people are in the $50k-80k range, and they collectively paid over 60% of the taxes, it looks like it would be really hard for the $50k-80k group to pay 80% of the taxes. But, just to make sure, we'll check the $50K-100K group. Hmm, 20.3% of returns, and 24.0% of taxes paid. Since this group is a superset of the group you mentioned as paying 80% of the taxes, it is reasonable to infer that the tz payments by the group you specified would be rather less than 24%.
So, it looks rather like the top 8.3% of wage earners pay more over twice as much in taxes as the next 20.3%....
My understanding of US paper voting is this (based on how it works in Europe):
You vote on a specially printed ballot with security features.
So, they don't have printing presses in Europe? People counterfeit money all the time - if they can do something as complex as money, a ballot is a cinch.
Your vote goes into a locked ballot box which the local polling workers can't open.
The ballot box is taken to be opened and counted.
All of these steps are done in front of representatives of opposing candidates.
Do the observers travel with the ballot box to where it is counted? If not, that would be the best time for fiddling with the results.
So its difficult to see where the swap would occur without the candidates representative seeing it. Ballot stuffing use to be possible, until they started counting the voters through the door, ballot box distruction was possible, but now they're metal boxes individually numbered and tracked with a signature trail.
How do you handle the Graveyard voting? You know, someone comes along and represents himself as Joe Blow, votes, then goes to the next precinct, and repeats the process with a different name. Faking ID isn't hard, really - kids do it all the time to get beer.
So paper trail elections seem pretty damn good to me.
I have nothing against them, myself. I don't think they provide BETTER security against fraud than electronic means. It just requires different precautions against the slightly different types of fraud allowed by the medium.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
Umm, no. Most States (not all, by any means) have Press Shield Laws, which protect them from such things.
It is sometimes debatable whether a Shield Law protects a journalist from other laws. "accessory after the fact" is a criminal offense in most States (that means you had knowledge of a crime only after it was committed, then acted to protect the criminal), but journalists frequently successfully use Shield Laws to protect themselves from such charges.
Re:what about freedom to bear arms?
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
Are you?
Yes, I am. With the obvious exception of Switzerland, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is quite restricted in Europe.
Hint: Right to Keep and Bear Arms has nothing to do with Executions, of lack of same. Note that Switzerland doesn't do executions, but does allow people to pretty much freely own firearms.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
that they abolished it 140 years ago, leading to a civil war
Read more history before you babble. The Civil War was the cause, not the effect.
(like where?)
Well, according to my National Geographic article on Modern Slavery, examples include Sudan, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Italy....
The National Geographic was expansive in its definition of slavery, to include people who were effectively slaves, if not legally. Thus, they also included a couple of notorious cases recently in the USA where illegal immigrants were effectively enslaved.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
That's for instance how most religions work: They require preaching to the unbelieving, and they cite eternal damnation if you don't follow their advise.
Umm, no. That's how evangelical religions work. Some of them, anyway. Most religions are NOT evangelical. Only two I can think of off the top of my head are Christinity and Islam, and in both those case, different sects have differing levels of evangelicalism.
Note also that you will tend to find that evnagelical religions don't actually threaten hellfire and damnation to unbelievers. They save that for True Believers, and not often even then.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
Anyone know what the 52 questions were? I notice in the related articles that the USA was 22 because a couple of journalists were arrested at pro-Bush rallies. When was this, and who were they, and what became of the cases?
How are you then going to prove that you voted for who you say you voted for?
Hmm, just out of curiousity, how would you prove that you voted for who you say you voted for with a paper ballot? Not like they let you take a copy of your ballot home with you, or the orginal ballots have names inscribed on them, is it?
I haven't used a paper ballot in nearly 20 years. But seems to me that they didn't have serial numbers that were cross-indexed with the voter rolls then, so switching ballots out wouldn't have been all that hard if someone had wanted to.
Frankly, the added security of paper ballots isn't really there. All it does is add an alternative method of doing a recount. Which would be useful in conjunction with electronic voting, but when you eliminate the electronic voting, you're still back to only one way to count the ballots.
5.8 pounds per ballot? Not likely. hey, I can make shit up too. I choose to live in reality instead. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree since you clearly insist on believing whatever's convenient enough to let you dismiss anything and everything you don't like hearing.
Can't handle that division stuff to well, can you? 5.8 ballots per pound is more correct. that's about 2.75 ounces per ballot, for those who can handle the math. About three times as heavy as a First Class Stamp will move through the system. When you consider the size of a ballot, plus the envelope for returning it, plus the envelope for delivering it, I don't find that too out to lunch.
I haven't dismissed anything. I have merely looked at the evidence. Of which there is very little. Let's see:
1) ~58,000 ballots are not accounted for.
2) USPS Inspectorate says they couldn't be lost by accident. Note that he doesn't really know, but he thinks it couldn't happen that way. Given that a few years ago the USPS found an 18-wheeler parked under a bridge up north packed with mail that hadn't been delivered for 18 years, I wonder.
3) The Election Commissioner doesn't know anything about it. Or claims not to. I have no reason to doubt her, but we must consider the possibility. NOTE: New Orleans had a local election just after Ivan passed by. The Election Commissioner (she's not called that, but that's what she does) totally screwed the election up - didn't deliver voting machines on time, things like that. She blamed the storm, even though the election held the same day six miles away had no problems. So I have recent experience of the effects of a less thancompetent Elections Commissioner on an election.
That's about it, really. Police say no evidence of wrongdoing. Noone has come forward to admit to anything, even incompetence. No leads reported. No political Parties implicated. Nada, zilch, zip.
You, on the other hand, seem to believe that this must, by definition, be a Republican plot. As you believe that everything that happens is a Republican plot. Your evidence that this is so, if you please. And evidence is what I want to see, not suggestions that this could only be a Republican plot because the County is 2/3 Dem. It's just as likely (given that it is a plot) that the voters being disnfranchised were the 1/3 Republicans in the County, pending some actual information.
Interestingly, it would be pretty easy to get the information. The Election Commissioner has to have a list of people who have requested Absentee Ballots, and a list of those to whom Absentee Ballots were sent (otherwise, how could she know that 58,000 were missing, and 2000 were sent?). Cross-check the lists against Party affiliations, and look for patterns, and voila, you suddenly have an "indication of criminal wrongdoing", if say, the Republican ballots were sent, and the Democrat ballots were not sent. Or vice versa.
Did you ever notice that almost every Dean Delegate was a Party Hack? There are a big chunk of Dem Delegates that are NOT chosen by the Primaries (Dem Congresscritters are delegates, by dfinition, as an example). THOSE delegates gave Dean his big lead going into the Primaries. Then the people actually voted, and they preferred Kerry to Dean.
There's that nasty little statistic that people making 50k-100k a year (professionals and tradesmen) make up about 80% of the tax contributions
Yah, lucky it's not actually true. Unless people making 50-80k acount for the entire top 20% of American incomes. Hint: they don't, they fall into the second quintile, mostly.
This supposed "corprate tax" doesn't really make much of a difference. Lets say the net income of all americans dropped by 500/year, thats going to affect tax revenue more then if GM/IBM/Ford/Coke/Pepsi dropped thier net profits by 500 million each.
Hmm, so if ~150 million Americans lost $500 per year in income ($75,000,000,000), then it would affect the economy more than if five companies lost $500,000,000 in income each ($2,500,000,000). This isn't really much of a surprise, as it represents a factor 30 difference in tax base.
On the other hand, if the amount cut from the total of American salaries were the same as the amount the businesses lost, then the tax revenus loss from the businesses would be much greater (Corporate taxes are at a higher rate than personal taxes, for all of us but the top couple percent.)
West Texas drawl (replace all "you" with a you'all so "you do have the power turned on eh?" becomes "ya'all do have the power the turn").
I wish the Yankees among us could learn proper use of "y'all". It is the PLURAL of "you".
You do NOT say "Y'all" to a single person.
No more than you use "yermominem" to a group. "How's yermominem?" is only used to address a single person....
Note for those who have never lived in N'Awlins: "yermominem" is how we say "your Mom and them". It is normally used in an inquiry into the health and well-being of one's family....
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when you want to lift something that masses 27 metric tons? A Delta can't do it. And a lot of pieces aren't built to be easily disassembled/reassembled in space. Like the habitat modules.
NERVA, or the new P&W engine, for that matter, are not sufficient. We need a specific impulse in the thousands of seconds, at least, to reach the outer system in reasonable times.
Let's assume 10 people per household. The Iraqi birthrate isn't really high enough to justify that, but let's assume it anyway. Under that assumption, they counted around 40 deaths in the last year and a half. 40 deaths is considered statistically significant enough to generalize over an entire population?!?
Somehow, I have a hard time buying that.
Yah, that's real religious freedom, all right! If you'll worship their false God (as you perceive the Emperor), then you can also worship your own true God. Emperor worship never even caught on in Rome (the Romans could see, better than anyone else, that the Emperor was just some bozo who had control of the Army) - it was practiced, as a matter of survival, all over the Empire, but few took it seriously.
The eastern empire survived, with (orthodox) christianism, true. But why did the eastern empire fall? Because, when Byzantium (orthodox) asked for help, they refused to convert to Roman Catholicism. Both didn't cooperate, due to minimal religious differences. Christians again
Umm, Orthodox Christianity, as a separate entity, really came along somewhere between three and seven centuries after the fall of Rome.
I suspect that the sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders in the 13th century had more to do with the final fall of Constantinople than a religious issue did. Which sacking was not on religious grounds, but because "that's where the money is".
While Christianity played a major part in European history, one must be careful to distinguish between the use of Christianity as an excuse for the actions of rulers, and Christianity as a CAUSE of the actions of rulers. The balance of power between the Patriarchs, the Pope, and secular rulers was unstable, at best, and dominance shifted from time to time. As for instance, the Avignon Papacy, when the French King managed to impose his own Pope on the Roman Church. For a while. Then there were two Popes, for a while. Then three, for a short while, then back to one.
The Church deserves a great deal of the credit for earning the blame of so many, as they are inclined to give themselves rather more credit than they strictly deserve in international affairs during the medieval period. More often, it was the avarice of the secular rulers which deserved the credit for the atrocities committed in the name of Christ.
This is not to suggest that the Church didn't deserve any blame for atrocities in the name of Christ. The various Inquisitions served admirably to fatten Church coffers, and so were given a free rein. (Though the most notorious of the Inquisistions, the Spanish, acted more on behalf of the King of Spain than the Pope, no matter what Monty Python had to say on the subject).
Established Churches have been more the rule than the exception throughout history. The Persian Empire was a notable exception, and the Roman Empire up to the point where an Emperor declared himself to be a God.
Note that the "separation of Church and State" really took off the very first time we have a country where NO rellgion was the majority religion. Yes, we were almost all Christians, but the Church had splintered centuries earlier into many of the same fragments we have now - Baptist and Anabaptist, Catholic and Lutheran, Anglican, Orthodox, "etc, etc, etc" (as Yul Brynner was wont to say). Since then, most of those branches have split again (notable exceptions - the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, though it can be argued that the Orthodox Church split when the Russian rulers decided to pay more attention to the Patriarch in Moskva than to the one in Constantinople).
Only reason we have "freedom of Religion" now is that there was no majority sect in the early USA. Likely enough, if we'd been mostly Anglican, that would be the State Religion now (and paid as much attention as the State Religions elsewhere - not much).
The researchers around Sami K. Solanki stress the fact that solar activity has remained on a roughly constant (high) level since about 1980 - apart from the variations due to the 11-year cycle - while the global temperature has experienced a strong further increase during that time. On the other hand, the rather similar trends of solar activity and terrestrial temperature during the last centuries (with the notable exception of the last 20 years) indicates that the relation between the Sun and climate remains a challenge for further research.
After all, if the Voter Cards weren't mailed out properly, we'd disenfranchise people. Which would be a bad thing. Or of the Voter lost his card, he'd be disenfranchised. Again, a bad thing. Or if you were, by a mischance, not issued a Voter Card because your name matched that of a felon, we'd disenfranchise people. A bad thing.
We have Voter Rolls here. When you vote, you go to your precinct, and present them with proof you are who you say you are (except in States where that has been deemed illegal), and sign the List to show that you voted. It is countesigned/initialed by the person handling the voter rolls. Where I vote, we have two people, one of whom verifies my ID, the other of whom checks the Voter Rolls for my name. Then you vote. No Voter Card needed.
So, your turn. Demonstrate how Voter Cards would prevent any disenfranchisment of Voters. And how they'd insure that only the named person could actually vote. Or, for that matter, how they prevent me from getting a fake ID and axquiring more than one of them.
Lincoln didn't run on an abolitionist platform, though it was commonly believed that he would abolish slavery, hence the secession. One article of the Republican Platform of 1860 (#8?) seemed to call for abolition of slavery, but the remainder of the Platform made it clear that the Republicans were working to keep slavery out of NEW states, not remove it from old States.
Have you read the Emancipation Proclamation? It didn't free the slaves in the Union (and there were some slave states still in the Union), it freed them in the Confederacy. Slaves within the Union (the non-secesh States) were not freed until the 13th Amendment, after the war.
The Civil War, its causes and effects, is one of my favorite pieces of history. It did more to shape the modern USA than any other similar period in history, with the possible exception of WW2.
Actually, almost all of us are responsible adults. Otherwise the murder rate would be in the tens of millions (Hell, there was someone on the highway this AM that I would have been delighted to remove from the gene pool, if I were so inclined), rather than less than 16,000 (not all those murders are firearms related, but most are). Likewise, it might be useful to keep in mind that there are approximately 200 firearms for every violent crime committed. Not all violent crimes involve guns, of course, so the ratio is probably higher, but I don't really feel like checking the numbers.
Also, if you eliminate the murders over drugs, I think you'll find that our murder rates are not especially higher than European ones. Which would tend to support the opinion that the War on Drugs is the problem, rather than the firearms.
That said, we don't do it that way over here...
Christianity wasn't an issue. If it had been part and parcel of the problem, the Eastern Empire would have fallen when the Western Empire did, instead of 1000 years later. They were, after all, just as Christian as the Western Empire. Don't blame all the ills of the world on Christianity. Certainly some vile things were done in its name, but the fall of the Empire wasn't one of them.
former very religiously open roman empire
This would be the Empire that deified several Emperors, and required their subjects to worship said Emperors? Seems to me that that was part of the Empire's problems with the Jews - they wouldn't worship the Emperors.
Seriously, in the USA, with 50 different States, replacing a dead man isn't terribly hard. Basic technique - find someone who died in a state different than the one he was born in. Not hard to do, we're a moderately mobile people. Get some fake ID made, and request a copy of his birth certificate from the issuing State. Go elsewhere with that perfectly legal, valid birth ceritificate, and use that to get REAL, LEGAL ID in that name, with your picture attached. Then register to vote somewhere convenient to you. Shazam! You now can vote twice, and the odds are good you'll never be caught out, as long as you don't do anything else illegal (if the cops ever have a reason to do an ID search on you, coming up with two names would be embarrassing, to say the least, so you want to stay off the cops' radar if you play this sort of game).
Nitpicking - this is true of all orbits. A synchronous orbit is one where the orbital period matches the rotational period of the central body.
You calculated is correctly, mind you, and seem to have a clear understanding of the issue. Except for that one little part of your explanation.
Not that I believe that it is still happening, in spite of the fact that one of the people Gore brought to Florida to help him with his recounts was the son of the Chicago Mayor most notorious for that sort of thing. Interestingly enough, the son was also Mayor of Chicago. What a coincidence!
My point was that you described something that wasn't even comparable. Let's try another one. If I lose $3,000,000 per year in income, it'll affect the tax base more than if you lose $1 in income. Therefore, the taxes you pay are not very important, really.
in the states it should be close too
Let's see, we'll trot over to the IRS web site, and see what it has to say.
Corporate Income Taxes amount to ~20% of Individual Income Taxes, on average. Varies by year, of course, but not too much.
Since their statistics don't break at the $80K point, we'll look at the people making more than $100K. They amount to 8.33% of tax returns filed for 2002 (latest year I saw statistics on, but I didn't look too hard, since any recent year would do). Those 8.3% of people paid in 61.9% of all personal income taxes that year.
Now, since none of those people are in the $50k-80k range, and they collectively paid over 60% of the taxes, it looks like it would be really hard for the $50k-80k group to pay 80% of the taxes. But, just to make sure, we'll check the $50K-100K group. Hmm, 20.3% of returns, and 24.0% of taxes paid. Since this group is a superset of the group you mentioned as paying 80% of the taxes, it is reasonable to infer that the tz payments by the group you specified would be rather less than 24%.
So, it looks rather like the top 8.3% of wage earners pay more over twice as much in taxes as the next 20.3%....
You vote on a specially printed ballot with security features.
So, they don't have printing presses in Europe? People counterfeit money all the time - if they can do something as complex as money, a ballot is a cinch.
Your vote goes into a locked ballot box which the local polling workers can't open.
The ballot box is taken to be opened and counted.
All of these steps are done in front of representatives of opposing candidates.
Do the observers travel with the ballot box to where it is counted? If not, that would be the best time for fiddling with the results.
So its difficult to see where the swap would occur without the candidates representative seeing it. Ballot stuffing use to be possible, until they started counting the voters through the door, ballot box distruction was possible, but now they're metal boxes individually numbered and tracked with a signature trail.
How do you handle the Graveyard voting? You know, someone comes along and represents himself as Joe Blow, votes, then goes to the next precinct, and repeats the process with a different name. Faking ID isn't hard, really - kids do it all the time to get beer.
So paper trail elections seem pretty damn good to me.
I have nothing against them, myself. I don't think they provide BETTER security against fraud than electronic means. It just requires different precautions against the slightly different types of fraud allowed by the medium.
It is sometimes debatable whether a Shield Law protects a journalist from other laws. "accessory after the fact" is a criminal offense in most States (that means you had knowledge of a crime only after it was committed, then acted to protect the criminal), but journalists frequently successfully use Shield Laws to protect themselves from such charges.
Yes, I am. With the obvious exception of Switzerland, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is quite restricted in Europe.
Hint: Right to Keep and Bear Arms has nothing to do with Executions, of lack of same. Note that Switzerland doesn't do executions, but does allow people to pretty much freely own firearms.
Read more history before you babble. The Civil War was the cause, not the effect.
(like where?)
Well, according to my National Geographic article on Modern Slavery, examples include Sudan, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Italy....
The National Geographic was expansive in its definition of slavery, to include people who were effectively slaves, if not legally. Thus, they also included a couple of notorious cases recently in the USA where illegal immigrants were effectively enslaved.
Umm, no. That's how evangelical religions work. Some of them, anyway. Most religions are NOT evangelical. Only two I can think of off the top of my head are Christinity and Islam, and in both those case, different sects have differing levels of evangelicalism.
Note also that you will tend to find that evnagelical religions don't actually threaten hellfire and damnation to unbelievers. They save that for True Believers, and not often even then.
Anyone know what the 52 questions were? I notice in the related articles that the USA was 22 because a couple of journalists were arrested at pro-Bush rallies. When was this, and who were they, and what became of the cases?
Hmm, just out of curiousity, how would you prove that you voted for who you say you voted for with a paper ballot? Not like they let you take a copy of your ballot home with you, or the orginal ballots have names inscribed on them, is it?
I haven't used a paper ballot in nearly 20 years. But seems to me that they didn't have serial numbers that were cross-indexed with the voter rolls then, so switching ballots out wouldn't have been all that hard if someone had wanted to.
Frankly, the added security of paper ballots isn't really there. All it does is add an alternative method of doing a recount. Which would be useful in conjunction with electronic voting, but when you eliminate the electronic voting, you're still back to only one way to count the ballots.
Can't handle that division stuff to well, can you? 5.8 ballots per pound is more correct. that's about 2.75 ounces per ballot, for those who can handle the math. About three times as heavy as a First Class Stamp will move through the system. When you consider the size of a ballot, plus the envelope for returning it, plus the envelope for delivering it, I don't find that too out to lunch.
I haven't dismissed anything. I have merely looked at the evidence. Of which there is very little. Let's see:
1) ~58,000 ballots are not accounted for.
2) USPS Inspectorate says they couldn't be lost by accident. Note that he doesn't really know, but he thinks it couldn't happen that way. Given that a few years ago the USPS found an 18-wheeler parked under a bridge up north packed with mail that hadn't been delivered for 18 years, I wonder.
3) The Election Commissioner doesn't know anything about it. Or claims not to. I have no reason to doubt her, but we must consider the possibility. NOTE: New Orleans had a local election just after Ivan passed by. The Election Commissioner (she's not called that, but that's what she does) totally screwed the election up - didn't deliver voting machines on time, things like that. She blamed the storm, even though the election held the same day six miles away had no problems. So I have recent experience of the effects of a less thancompetent Elections Commissioner on an election.
That's about it, really. Police say no evidence of wrongdoing. Noone has come forward to admit to anything, even incompetence. No leads reported. No political Parties implicated. Nada, zilch, zip.
You, on the other hand, seem to believe that this must, by definition, be a Republican plot. As you believe that everything that happens is a Republican plot. Your evidence that this is so, if you please. And evidence is what I want to see, not suggestions that this could only be a Republican plot because the County is 2/3 Dem. It's just as likely (given that it is a plot) that the voters being disnfranchised were the 1/3 Republicans in the County, pending some actual information.
Interestingly, it would be pretty easy to get the information. The Election Commissioner has to have a list of people who have requested Absentee Ballots, and a list of those to whom Absentee Ballots were sent (otherwise, how could she know that 58,000 were missing, and 2000 were sent?). Cross-check the lists against Party affiliations, and look for patterns, and voila, you suddenly have an "indication of criminal wrongdoing", if say, the Republican ballots were sent, and the Democrat ballots were not sent. Or vice versa.
Did you ever notice that almost every Dean Delegate was a Party Hack? There are a big chunk of Dem Delegates that are NOT chosen by the Primaries (Dem Congresscritters are delegates, by dfinition, as an example). THOSE delegates gave Dean his big lead going into the Primaries. Then the people actually voted, and they preferred Kerry to Dean.
Yah, lucky it's not actually true. Unless people making 50-80k acount for the entire top 20% of American incomes. Hint: they don't, they fall into the second quintile, mostly.
This supposed "corprate tax" doesn't really make much of a difference. Lets say the net income of all americans dropped by 500/year, thats going to affect tax revenue more then if GM/IBM/Ford/Coke/Pepsi dropped thier net profits by 500 million each.
Hmm, so if ~150 million Americans lost $500 per year in income ($75,000,000,000), then it would affect the economy more than if five companies lost $500,000,000 in income each ($2,500,000,000). This isn't really much of a surprise, as it represents a factor 30 difference in tax base.
On the other hand, if the amount cut from the total of American salaries were the same as the amount the businesses lost, then the tax revenus loss from the businesses would be much greater (Corporate taxes are at a higher rate than personal taxes, for all of us but the top couple percent.)
I wish the Yankees among us could learn proper use of "y'all". It is the PLURAL of "you".
You do NOT say "Y'all" to a single person.
No more than you use "yermominem" to a group. "How's yermominem?" is only used to address a single person....
Note for those who have never lived in N'Awlins: "yermominem" is how we say "your Mom and them". It is normally used in an inquiry into the health and well-being of one's family....