The line item veto was introduced because the Republicans kept tacking stupid amendments on to necessary legislation so they could dare Clinton to veto it
Short memory. During the 80s it was the Republicans who wanted the line item veto to keep Congressional Democrats from doing exactly the same thing.
it is more often the result of a system that is designed to reward the spender and punish the saver. The tax laws and fiscal policies of this nation make saving relatively unattractive for even the most determined savers among us
Excellent point. If inflation is 3% and a CD earns 3.5%, you'll actually lose money because taxes will make the effective return less than inflation. This is one of many reasons why we need something like the FairTax. At the very least, capital gains taxes should be indexed for inflation.
Are you doing what's best for society? No. If you were unwilling to work as long, other people would have been hired to fill your places when you're not at work. Both you and them would have been paid more
Re:Nope- no companies hiring that can afford to ca
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
But if our debt to income ratio (currently 50%! Nationwide we spend $150 for every $100 we earn!)
Source? That seems implausibly high. The median income is something like $35k, I find it difficult to believe that the median spending is $50k.
the promise of the American Dream up through my granparent's time was that each generation would have it better than the one before. That disappeared before I was born, I think
Absolutely false. Think about everything you take for granted today that were completely unknown 30 years ago.
It's only 25% of the population that have any luxury at all.
See above. To make this claim you have to define "luxury" to exclude stuff like cable TV and Internet access and other products that weren't available at *any* price for previous generations. Our standard of living *is* increasing, it's just that many people's expectations are rising even faster.
Yes. In many ways we're moving in the wrong direction, but we have quite a ways to go before we reach the level of the tyrants in Beijing.
And you Americans complain that the Chinese govt censors, but google does the same thing under the name of the DMCA.
No, that is not remotely close to the same thing. The DMCA sucks, but I can say that the DMCA sucks without being hauled away and shot by government stormtroopers.
I always thought the unit circle was an easier way to remember how the functions behaved than the opposite/adjacent ratios. In addition to being closer to the "true" definition, it makes identities like sin(-x)=-sin(x) obvious and easily handles arguments less than 0 or greater than pi/2.
From the way it rewinds a little after you stop fast forwarding
Of course, that's only necessary because they caved to advertisers and removed the 30-second skip. With my EyeTV I hit skip 4-6 times, get back to the show, and hit the 7-second back button 1-3 times.
Well IMHO, the US now has more debt than it can absorb
Not really. The debt to GDP ratio, isn't that bad, and it's well under the European average. Still, that doesn't excuse the irresponsible spending spree that we've gotten from alleged "fiscal conservatives" in Congress and the White House.
How did we ever get into this mess, where your company provides your health insurance?
Because of (surprise) government interference. During WW2, wage controls were imposed limiting how much companies could pay employees. Of course markets route around those kind of regulations, and employers started offering "free" health insurance as a means of competing for employees.
You're absolutely right; there's no reason your employer should provide your health insurance, any more than they should provide you with a car. Unfortunately there's not an easy way to get there from here, now that so many people believe "somebody else" should pay for their health care.
You don't care (did you RTFA?) that the microtransmitter in the Astrodome was blocked by the local authorities, led by Gov. Blanco (a Democrat) and Mayor Nagin (also a Democrat).
Well, the Astrodome is in Houston, so I doubt Nagin and Blanco have much say there (which is fortunate). However, both of them have in fact displayed mind-boggling incompetence, which the original poster chose to ignore because that would interfere with his "everything bad that happens is Bush's fault" worldview.
See my earlier comment about denial... it's easy to convince yourself that you can beat the game, but the odds are very, very slim that you'll even break even
Once again, this is not the case with poker. Smart players will make money on average. Of course they can still easily go broke by playing at stakes too high for their skill or bankroll.
It's a clever way to get right leaning thinkers herding towards alternative renewable energy. Any time you make it a "fight the libruls fer your rights!" issue you're sure to get the conservative wingnuts on your side.
Hey, some of us conservative wingnuts have always been in favor of alternate energy. Especially nuclear, but the greens hate that for mostly incoherent reasons. In addition to the environmental improvements, it will be great to be able to tell the various tyrants in the Middle East to go pound sand.
You can set Firefox to use error pages instead of error dialogs
Thank you, I didn't know that was possible. For anyone else who wants to enable this, go to about:config and set the "browser.xul.error_pages.enabled" setting to true.
Because the demand for gasoline is very inelastic in the short term. If the supply drops by 10%, the price has to rise much more than 10% for demand to fall enough to reach equilibrium.
Corporations using government guns to impose their desires on consumers is not "capitalism" by any stretch of the imagination. In the absence of unbalanced copyright and patent laws, competitors who are not hostile to their customers would prevail.
It is time to stop capitalism and corporatism now.
Well, you sound determined to stick to your conspiracy theories in the absence of any evidence, which is fine. All I can say is that my experiences online are virtually identical to live games. If they're cheating, they're being very subtle about it, so maybe it increases my effective rake from 5% to 5.25%, which is still better than brick and mortar casinos.
Wow, an actual deathist. You guys are scary. Actually you're just sad; those like Leon Kass with actual power are scary.
curing a disease is one thing. fixing a natural process is another.
Cancer is a very natural process. So are malaria, dysentery, and thousands of other conditions that have killed billions of people. I eagerly await your pronoucements as to which diseases are "unnatural" and should be cured, versus those that are "natural" and should be welcomed.
wow. WOW. did you spend time THINKING about what you just said?
Funny, I was just going to ask you the same thing.
you know what? keep pining for your parents, there's a difference between missing them and needing them. and if you still need them, they didn't do their job right. you just blew my mind with that one.
Cartman, what the hell are you talking about? My statement was that many people would be happier if their parents (or friends, spouses, children) hadn't died. "Missing" vs "needing" is irrelevant; in both cases the person in question would be happier if the dead people were still alive and healthy. Are you actually going to dispute that point, or just continue with inane personal attacks? (For the record, my parents are alive and well. Maybe you have issues with *your* parents, I really don't care).
one of the problems of being human is that we LEARN PATTERNS, and unlearning them is difficult.
Wow. So you'd rather kill people than try to teach them new ideas. Such humanitarianism.
Don't think so. First problem is you would never know who the house player is, or if there is one, and it could change constantly as players come and go. You would never have that many hands to analyze.
Doesn't matter. You wouldn't have to prove that any specific person is a house shill, just that the results of *your* hands are statistically worse than would be expected. In my KK vs AA example, it doesn't matter which player beats you with the aces; if you get a large enough sample to show that it's happening more often than it statistically should, that would be strong evidence that the house is cheating.
If you did spot some trend your chances of making a case out of would be somewhere between slim and none. You start complaining you just look like a loser with a case of sour grapes.
Yes, posting "OMFG I lost with AA to 87 this site is teh suck!" makes you look like an idiot. But if you provide a database of your history of a million hands, and show that of the 20,000 hands where you had a higher pair vs an opponents lower pair, the lower pair ended up winning 25% of the time instead of the 20% that would be expected, that would get some attention.
Reading your opponents is not a part of online poker. Reading your opponents is not a part of online poker, you cannot see or hear your opponents. There is no feeling going on, online poker is 100% purely statistics.
Wrong. You can't see your opponents' facial expressions, but you can see their betting patterns, which are usually much more informative. If I have a good but not great hand and somebody bets, I'm much more interested in how he's played in the past than whether he's looking at me or off into space. If he's a conservative player, I'll probably fold, if he's an agressive player I'll call or raise.
And collusion is a big problem, if you think being good can magically make you able to beat people who have more information than you, then you are deluding yourself, plain and simple.
At least in Hold'em, knowing a couple of extra cards is not an overwhelming advantage. Sure, between two otherwise equal players the guy with extra information has an edge, but a good player will beat mediocre colluders.
every so often hitting a button that says house wants to win this hand, and letting an algorithm pick any random undealt card that would make that so would be nearly impossible to detect.
Not in the long term. It might take many thousands of hands, but eventually someone would notice that (for example) when they start with a pair of kings, somebody else has a pair of aces just slightly more often than would be expected by chance.
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While the moderation of this comment is technically correct, it indicates the need for a new rating of "-1 Too Informative".
The line item veto was introduced because the Republicans kept tacking stupid amendments on to necessary legislation so they could dare Clinton to veto it
Short memory. During the 80s it was the Republicans who wanted the line item veto to keep Congressional Democrats from doing exactly the same thing.
it is more often the result of a system that is designed to reward the spender and punish the saver. The tax laws and fiscal policies of this nation make saving relatively unattractive for even the most determined savers among us
Excellent point. If inflation is 3% and a CD earns 3.5%, you'll actually lose money because taxes will make the effective return less than inflation. This is one of many reasons why we need something like the FairTax. At the very least, capital gains taxes should be indexed for inflation.
Are you doing what's best for society? No. If you were unwilling to work as long, other people would have been hired to fill your places when you're not at work. Both you and them would have been paid more
Incorrect. This is the lump of labor fallacy.
But if our debt to income ratio (currently 50%! Nationwide we spend $150 for every $100 we earn!)
Source? That seems implausibly high. The median income is something like $35k, I find it difficult to believe that the median spending is $50k.
the promise of the American Dream up through my granparent's time was that each generation would have it better than the one before. That disappeared before I was born, I think
Absolutely false. Think about everything you take for granted today that were completely unknown 30 years ago.
It's only 25% of the population that have any luxury at all.
See above. To make this claim you have to define "luxury" to exclude stuff like cable TV and Internet access and other products that weren't available at *any* price for previous generations. Our standard of living *is* increasing, it's just that many people's expectations are rising even faster.
Do you think the US is any different than China?
Yes. In many ways we're moving in the wrong direction, but we have quite a ways to go before we reach the level of the tyrants in Beijing.
And you Americans complain that the Chinese govt censors, but google does the same thing under the name of the DMCA.
No, that is not remotely close to the same thing. The DMCA sucks, but I can say that the DMCA sucks without being hauled away and shot by government stormtroopers.
I always thought the unit circle was an easier way to remember how the functions behaved than the opposite/adjacent ratios. In addition to being closer to the "true" definition, it makes identities like sin(-x)=-sin(x) obvious and easily handles arguments less than 0 or greater than pi/2.
Have Apple PCs ever been ahead in performance?
Yes, for several years the PPC604 and G3 were faster than x86 by quite a bit. That came to a screeching halt with the G4's stagnation
From the way it rewinds a little after you stop fast forwarding
Of course, that's only necessary because they caved to advertisers and removed the 30-second skip. With my EyeTV I hit skip 4-6 times, get back to the show, and hit the 7-second back button 1-3 times.
Well IMHO, the US now has more debt than it can absorb
Not really. The debt to GDP ratio, isn't that bad, and it's well under the European average. Still, that doesn't excuse the irresponsible spending spree that we've gotten from alleged "fiscal conservatives" in Congress and the White House.
How did we ever get into this mess, where your company provides your health insurance?
Because of (surprise) government interference. During WW2, wage controls were imposed limiting how much companies could pay employees. Of course markets route around those kind of regulations, and employers started offering "free" health insurance as a means of competing for employees.
You're absolutely right; there's no reason your employer should provide your health insurance, any more than they should provide you with a car. Unfortunately there's not an easy way to get there from here, now that so many people believe "somebody else" should pay for their health care.
You don't care (did you RTFA?) that the microtransmitter in the Astrodome was blocked by the local authorities, led by Gov. Blanco (a Democrat) and Mayor Nagin (also a Democrat).
Well, the Astrodome is in Houston, so I doubt Nagin and Blanco have much say there (which is fortunate). However, both of them have in fact displayed mind-boggling incompetence, which the original poster chose to ignore because that would interfere with his "everything bad that happens is Bush's fault" worldview.
See my earlier comment about denial... it's easy to convince yourself that you can beat the game, but the odds are very, very slim that you'll even break even
Once again, this is not the case with poker. Smart players will make money on average. Of course they can still easily go broke by playing at stakes too high for their skill or bankroll.
I took a math class.
So did this guy. As many others pointed out, you really can win at poker because you're not playing against the house, but against other players.
The most important part of the game is learning the big tells that your opponents are broadcasting
No, it isn't. Tells are occasionally useful but playing a solid game is far more important.
It's a clever way to get right leaning thinkers herding towards alternative renewable energy. Any time you make it a "fight the libruls fer your rights!" issue you're sure to get the conservative wingnuts on your side.
Hey, some of us conservative wingnuts have always been in favor of alternate energy. Especially nuclear, but the greens hate that for mostly incoherent reasons. In addition to the environmental improvements, it will be great to be able to tell the various tyrants in the Middle East to go pound sand.
No, but you have to pick your mouse up with any decent sized screen.
Not if the mouse acceleration settings are good.
You can set Firefox to use error pages instead of error dialogs
Thank you, I didn't know that was possible. For anyone else who wants to enable this, go to about:config and set the "browser.xul.error_pages.enabled" setting to true.
Why are pump prices so volatile?
Because the demand for gasoline is very inelastic in the short term. If the supply drops by 10%, the price has to rise much more than 10% for demand to fall enough to reach equilibrium.
This is the insanity of capitalism
Corporations using government guns to impose their desires on consumers is not "capitalism" by any stretch of the imagination. In the absence of unbalanced copyright and patent laws, competitors who are not hostile to their customers would prevail.
It is time to stop capitalism and corporatism now.
Half right...
Well, you sound determined to stick to your conspiracy theories in the absence of any evidence, which is fine. All I can say is that my experiences online are virtually identical to live games. If they're cheating, they're being very subtle about it, so maybe it increases my effective rake from 5% to 5.25%, which is still better than brick and mortar casinos.
Wow, an actual deathist. You guys are scary. Actually you're just sad; those like Leon Kass with actual power are scary.
curing a disease is one thing. fixing a natural process is another.
Cancer is a very natural process. So are malaria, dysentery, and thousands of other conditions that have killed billions of people. I eagerly await your pronoucements as to which diseases are "unnatural" and should be cured, versus those that are "natural" and should be welcomed.
wow. WOW. did you spend time THINKING about what you just said?
Funny, I was just going to ask you the same thing.
you know what? keep pining for your parents, there's a difference between missing them and needing them. and if you still need them, they didn't do their job right. you just blew my mind with that one.
Cartman, what the hell are you talking about? My statement was that many people would be happier if their parents (or friends, spouses, children) hadn't died. "Missing" vs "needing" is irrelevant; in both cases the person in question would be happier if the dead people were still alive and healthy. Are you actually going to dispute that point, or just continue with inane personal attacks? (For the record, my parents are alive and well. Maybe you have issues with *your* parents, I really don't care).
one of the problems of being human is that we LEARN PATTERNS, and unlearning them is difficult.
Wow. So you'd rather kill people than try to teach them new ideas. Such humanitarianism.
Don't think so. First problem is you would never know who the house player is, or if there is one, and it could change constantly as players come and go. You would never have that many hands to analyze.
Doesn't matter. You wouldn't have to prove that any specific person is a house shill, just that the results of *your* hands are statistically worse than would be expected. In my KK vs AA example, it doesn't matter which player beats you with the aces; if you get a large enough sample to show that it's happening more often than it statistically should, that would be strong evidence that the house is cheating.
If you did spot some trend your chances of making a case out of would be somewhere between slim and none. You start complaining you just look like a loser with a case of sour grapes.
Yes, posting "OMFG I lost with AA to 87 this site is teh suck!" makes you look like an idiot. But if you provide a database of your history of a million hands, and show that of the 20,000 hands where you had a higher pair vs an opponents lower pair, the lower pair ended up winning 25% of the time instead of the 20% that would be expected, that would get some attention.
Reading your opponents is not a part of online poker. Reading your opponents is not a part of online poker, you cannot see or hear your opponents. There is no feeling going on, online poker is 100% purely statistics.
Wrong. You can't see your opponents' facial expressions, but you can see their betting patterns, which are usually much more informative. If I have a good but not great hand and somebody bets, I'm much more interested in how he's played in the past than whether he's looking at me or off into space. If he's a conservative player, I'll probably fold, if he's an agressive player I'll call or raise.
And collusion is a big problem, if you think being good can magically make you able to beat people who have more information than you, then you are deluding yourself, plain and simple.
At least in Hold'em, knowing a couple of extra cards is not an overwhelming advantage. Sure, between two otherwise equal players the guy with extra information has an edge, but a good player will beat mediocre colluders.
every so often hitting a button that says house wants to win this hand, and letting an algorithm pick any random undealt card that would make that so would be nearly impossible to detect.
Not in the long term. It might take many thousands of hands, but eventually someone would notice that (for example) when they start with a pair of kings, somebody else has a pair of aces just slightly more often than would be expected by chance.