We have found the conspiracy...and it's a bunch of conservatives!
Ummm, if you read a bit more into the summary, it seems that the Ron Paul libertarians were complaining about anti-Ron Paul people countering their UP-voting Ron Paul articles. "Waaaa, those nasty people are organizing to counter our organized abuse of the system."
Sounds like a "conspiracy" on both sides. It wouldn't surprise me that pure lefties were doing it, too.
Also true, but nevertheless, it is still faith, a belief in things not proved, that they ultimately come to.
The Big Bang has not been proven as the source of the universe, yet many scientists believe it happened.
Evolution has not been proven as the origin of life, yet many scientists believe it is.
Ptolemy believed in a geocentric universe; Copernicus in a heliocentric one. Both were beliefs in things not proved, and thus faith, yet both are considered great scientists of their times -- just wrong.
Aristotle believed there were five elements. John Dalton imagined atoms as small spheres with tiny hooks. Pons and Fleischer believed fusion took place at room temperature. All beliefs that were clearly not proven.
The fact that something is believed through faith does not mean it is wrong, just that it hasn't been proved. Some things cannot be proved (like the big bang as THE method through which the universe came into existence), some things cannot be proved until technology catches up with the human thought process (like subatomic particles -- long hypothesized, eventually measured.)
The point being, to dismiss religion as "fake stuff all based on faith" is to point a finger at science, too. It was "faith" that the locks on the file cabinets at Los Alamos were secure; Feynman came along and disproved it.
No, religion, the kind that gets people to not just believe irrationally but to act irrationally is the biggest curse mankind has ever suffered.
To lump all religious belief into "irrational" is both insulting and inflammatory, the kind of inflammatory that creates the kind of reaction that you clearly denounce. "Come see the violence inherent in the system" spoken by someone who has just walked up and slugged a cop is dishonest debate.
Aliens would substantiate the theory of evolution, which uses as an implicit premise that God doesn't really exist, it was just all random chance, we're all just a bunch of molecules, blah blah blah.
I love it when non-Christians attempt to explain Christian beliefs. You are absurdly wrong.
First, the existence of aliens would neither support nor visciate the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution deals with changes in existing species, not the formation of life. Simply put, if God created us, he could certainly create other life on other planets.
The real issue with the existence of intelligent non-human life on other planets is based on the Genesis story of creation, where God molded Man in His image and gave him dominion over the other species. Now, if an alien shows up, and he's intelligent, then this means one of several things:
Genesis is wrong. This is what the atheists will spout.
God created other beings but didn't bother telling us.
The phrase "in His image" isn't a literal "we physically look like God", it is a description of our spiritual creation.
Out of the three, the latter two are actually compatible, and are what many Christians will assume, were an alien to come knocking on the door. A few sects will be in trouble because of their literalism (yes, we really do look like God, "in His image"), but the biggest issue will be the people who will waste a lot of time jumping up and down claiming that the alien proves that God doesn't exist yada yada yada...
ASCII back when there was 'just' ASCII, was an 8 space tab.
ASCII when there was just ASCII had a tab character which was commonly interpreted as "tab to the next multiple of 8 column". If you were in column 4, a tab would not look like 8 spaces, it would look like 4 spaces.
On the keypunch I used, TAB meant "advance to the next tab column as indicated on your drum card." For FORTRAN, that meant the first tab skipped to column 2 (line number), the next tab to column 6 (continuation), the next to 7, a few every four spaces, and then off to column 72 (card number).
Every reasonable typewriter I used had tab stop settings so you could define what columns a tab took you to.
If your envirenment or prefers a different standard, either adopt it or be prepared to cause problems.
Thus was created "indent", which converts code from all those other people's atrocious formatting styles into your preferred on and back.
I'm sure the ultimate reason the IRS chooses to mass withhold (ie, make it the default) is that if they didn't, nobody would save for taxes and 98% of the country would be looking to setup a payment plan because they couldn't afford to pay an entire year's taxes at once.
The IRS doesn't care about that. They instituted withholding for three reasons: 1) it is harder to cheat the system when you know "The Man" is always watching, 2) you tend to overlook how much is being taken out of your pocket, or even that it is happening, when it happens automatically and before you get the money, and 3) cash flow. The gov gets to use your money before you are required to pay it to them. They win, you lose.
[raises hand] I've run the numbers using the "Fair Tax" proposal and current taxation and I lose big time. I doubt that I'm unique. I AM one of those who Obama pledged would not pay additional taxes under his reign.
They would be getting a nearly 24% raise in pay since they wouldn't be paying any taxes out of their paycheck, no income, no social security, nothing.
That's YOUR hypothesis, but real life will be very different. The "Fair Tax" is a federal income tax. It will not replace state or local income taxes. It will not replace state or local sales taxes. It will not replace SSI -- it can't afford to, since SSI is so deep in the hole that cutting SSI is impossible. And you imagine that everyone's income will go up, when the truth is it will stay the same. Employers aren't stupid, they know you work for what you get after taxes, if they can cut wages they will.
The rebuttal to that point is several pages, but needless to say you are misinformed.
It's simple math. Twenty nine is 29% of 100, but nobody expresses sales taxes in that way. It's always the percentage charged on the value of what you buy. When you express it the way that all sales taxes in the US are expressed, it becomes a 41% tax. A $71 item requires a 41% additional charge in taxes. It's dishonest to express it any other way.
You're 41% number is off,...
Twenty nine dollars in tax on a seventy one dollar purchase is 40.845%. I rounded up.
... and I would hope that if/when the bill was up for debate that pre-tax accounts would be reimbursed.
EVERY AMERICAN would have to tell the IRS about EVERY DOLLAR they have, if they want to avoid a 41% tax on that money that has already been taxed. Not just every dollar, but every item of value that was bought with post-tax money. You think the Patriot Act was bad? How much stock do you own, how many cars, a house? Any collectable coins or stamps? Keep any money in a cookie jar where the wife doesn't know about it? Guns? Stereo? You do realize, don't you, if you sell any of that stuff after the "Fair Tax" goes into effect, you will have to pay the tax when you use the money to buy something else. If I buy a $1000 gold coin today and sell it for $1000 after the "fair tax" goes into effect that $1000 is really only $710. If you think that every collectable item is going to appreciate by 41% on the day the "fair tax" passes, you're nuts.
I'd rather the IRS be watching Wal-Mart than watching me.
Then I assume you'll be declining your "rebate" check that low-income people will get to help offset the regressive nature of the "Fair" tax, yes?
Unless you're buying a new house there would be no taxes to worry about. Just buy a used house, that is the huge mortgage deduction you want.
What are you, nuts? I bought a used house. That wasn't the "deduction" I'm talking about. Oh, right. The day the Fair Tax passes, every person will automatically make 24% more money every month and the value of used houses will drop by 24%. What a wonderful magical universe you "fair tax" people live in.
Also deductions are already calculated based on your income and given as part of your monthly prebate check.
Wait a minute. You just said the IRS doesn't get involved with everyone, just businesses, under the "fair tax". Now you admit that every person in the country has to be registered to get a "prebate" (welfare) check every month. And you think the IRS will shrink when this goes through?
And just how does the IRS know your "income" so it can send you the correct amount? You'll still be filing "tax returns", just with a different name. You'll still be required to keep receipts for anything that is deducted from your income, and the feds will still have a playground creating new deductions to cater to specific voting blocks. The check comes every month? You better file every month to keep the IRS up to date.
I have to say that your other "facts" should be called into question. Moving the tax collection from the 300,000,000 individuals to the few hundred thousand point of sale places would cut the IRS down to 1/1000th of it's current requirement,
But the "fair tax" doesn't do that. The "fair tax" includes sending people a check every year as a means of making up for deductions they now have and making the tax more progressive. The idea is that instead of getting the "standard deduction" you get now, you get $X back, assuming you spent $Y and paid something in taxes. That means the IRS still has to deal with every person it deals with now. Every damn one of them, PLUS all the businesses that suddenly become subject to collecting this "Fair Tax" and have all the additional forms to deal with.
Can you IMAGINE the squealing that would take place if the "Fair Tax" did NOT keep as many people out of the tax system as there are today? How do you keep those who aren't making enough to pay taxes today from having to pay a POS based "Fair Tax"? You can't. You MUST implement a refund, or what most people would call "free money", or just welfare.
I'm one of those who are hardly considered rich, and this "Fair Tax" pretty much screws me as far as how much I would have to pay each year. Remember the Obama promise not to raise taxes on people making below $250k? Kiss that good bye with any "fair tax".
You could solve the problem you just described with a simple cost-of-living deduction.
How do you provide a "cost-of-living" deduction on a tax system paid at time of sale?
Do you give each person a "proof of income" card that they show, so that they get taxed at the cash register a different rate than everyone else? A card with punches so they get the first $10,000 in purchases tax-free?
No, you create a massive government department that gives money to people because they didn't make more than a certain level. It wouldn't matter how much they spent. Some call that welfare. You'd call it "fair tax". I'd call it "the IRS" and rife with possibilities for social adjustments, just like what we have now.
It has created an industry that cheats the downtrodden out of their money with products like refund anticipation loans.
What has created that industry is the desire of those who are getting refunds to get them NOW instead of waiting three weeks. It has nothing to do with the tax system, other than some people get refunds.
And YOU just proposed the same payout system in your first paragraph. The only way to "deduct" or counteract tax payments is to... send people a check every year based on either documented deductions or a flat-rate deduction system. And then you'll have the same people who can't wait three weeks to get their deduction checks standing in line at the high-rate loan offices anticipating their "refund" early.
Unfortunately, we appear to be moving towards the same third-world system as the US has, where you have to pay for all your healthcare in cash up front.
I call bullshit. As a user of the current healthcare system in the US, I can tell you that I have NEVER had to pay for all of my healthcare, either up front or after it was over.
During my most recent major medical event, not only did I not pay a DIME for any of the services, I was paid for the milage I spent driving to and from my doctor's office. Medication, doctor's visits, surgery, all covered.
The trivial amounts I've had to pay for co-pays on other services (five or ten dollars or so) have never been in advance, and cash has never been required. And you cannot possibly claim that five dollars was paying for all of the service I got.
The British system is not being "decentralized" because of nit-wit politicians, it's being decentralized because the politicians are realizing the fact that greymarket doctors were a booming market and that better healthcare could be had for less government money by opening the market.
Stuff like this is why a program like the "Fair Tax" won't ever pass.
The "Fair Tax" won't pass because so many people would be harmed by it, and so many people would object to being lied to.
The "Fair Tax" proponents don't tell you the actual rate, they tell you the final percentage of your bill that is taxes. The typical example I hear is "a $71 dollar shirt would cost $100, a 29% tax." The truth is, 29/71*100 is a 41% tax. (Nobody expresses existing sales taxes as "of the whole" numbers, it's always "of the item".)
The second reason it is unfair is because it punishes people who have saved money. I have two kinds of accounts -- post- and pre-tax. The day the "Fair Tax" goes into effect, every dollar in a post-tax account goes down 41% in value. (I could have bought the $71 shirt for $71 yesterday, today it costs $100.) Every dollar in my pocket yesterday, which is post-tax money, will be taxed again. Every dollar in my pre-tax accounts goes down 41%, too. That money was put away with the promise that I could withdraw it when I'm old and have no income, thus most likely paying no tax on it.
Want to hear the biggest lie the Fair Tax people spew? "It will do away with the IRS." Someone has to be in charge of collecting and processing the "Fair Tax", and even if it isn't CALLED the IRS it will still have the same function. It will be a massive federal agency tasked with tracking down every ten year old who spends a buck on a piece of candy to make sure the taxes are paid.
They would all be out of work if something like the fair tax ever passed,
See? There will be so much paperwork and effort involved in dealing with the "Fair Tax" that nobody will be out of work. You can't get rid of the mortgage deductions because too many people want it. You can't get rid of charitable giving deductions ditto. At the end of the year, you'll have to find some way of figuring out how much you paid in "Fair Tax", which means keeping ALL your receipts, just so you can make those deductions. Businesses will have to add staff just to keep track of the new tax.
...so not only are we stuck paying income tax we have to pay for all those tax services and tax lawyers that go with it.
I have yet to pay for the services of a tax lawyer, and I use the software only because it makes "what if" questions easy. "How much more charity would I have to claim to get $10 more back?" Nobody forces me to pay anyone, nor am I forced to keep itemized lists of what I've bought and spent just so I can get my deductions.
If I had to choose between a mechanic who has worked on cars for 8 years or a mechanic who just got out of 8 years of schooling - I am going to pick the one I know can do it.
Here's the example of the number one thing wrong with the US higher education system: misunderstanding of the purpose of the "higher education system".
Universities are supposed to be places where people get a well-rounded education in a wide array of topics. That's why the undergraduate degrees tend to have liberal arts and science and social studies components to them. The result is supposed to be people who can look at the world and have some understanding of where we are and where we are going.
If you want a technical degree, go to a community college or trade school. You should not be looking to the Universities to provide well-trained mechanics.
The fact that tenure was listed as a fault is another sign of that same misunderstanding. Universities are also intended to further the arts through research. Tenure is a means of allowing faculty to relax a bit from having to deal with the daily grind and let them explore areas that aren't necessarily the most productive now -- but may become so. "Ok, you've shown you can produce papers and teach, now be inventive."
It's no different than Google's "free friday", or whatever company it was that gave employees work-time to do personal projects.
The composition of Earth's past atmosphere, its past temperature, its past ice extent, and so forth, are all likewise based on measurement.
In a very weasly-worded way, yes. Measurement of what? The past temperatures are not based on measurement of temperatures. The past ice extents are not measurements of past ice extents. Proxies are required, simply because there was nobody around, and no instruments around, to measure those quantities directly. That's where you have to start assuming this and assuming that and hypothesizing the rest.
For example, measurements of gas bubbles trapped in ice cores.
Tell you nothing about temperatures or ice extent, and only marginally about atmospheric content. CO2 is soluble in water, and is present in the current atmosphere. Why should we believe that CO2 in a gas bubble in ice (solid water) over tens of thousands of years wouldn't diffuse out or in? There are lots of things we look at on a short time scale and think are immutable, but change considerably over long times scales. Rocks, for one. Ice, for another. I've got one lonely frozen chicken breast in a plastic bag in the freezer which is now embedded in a layer of ice. The water in that solidly frozen chicken breast has diffused OUT of that solid block of chicken and reformed on the outside. But CO2, a gas at freezing temperatures, cannot diffuse out of ice?
Show me a bubble from last week, I'll accept the assumption that it is about the same composition that it was when it was formed. Show me one from 20,000 years ago, I'm a skeptic. And YOU have no experimental evidence to show that it hasn't changed or even what the real value is.
Oh, great -- you're a YEC (or at least listening to their propaganda) as well.
I need not listen to someone's propoganda to understand where the assumptions in a system are and that if those assumptions are wrong the result is wrong. I learned that way way back in geometry class where we spent a lot of time with Euclidean assumptions and very little with Rieman or others.
I do science on a daily basis. I have to deal with the assumptions that go into it and how they may be wrong. It's part of the job. Unless you are a global warming proponent, at which point "there is no debate".
Ah, so if walk up to a giant pool of lava, it's safe to assume that that rock wasn't the slightest bit warm a few minutes ago because I wasn't there to measure it?
Making things up, I see. I never said that. What I would say, if you asked me, and I thought you actually cared about the answer, is that it would be reasonable to ASSUME it was warm a few minutes ago, but proof would still require a measurement that wasn't made.
Then I would ask you, what do YOU assume about the temperature of that rock ten thousand years ago? Warmer, colder, or the same, and then what could you PROVE? Applying standard equations of heat transfer and thermal capacity to a pool of lava and assuming that it was warm a few minutes ago is much different than assuming it was warm ten thousand years ago.
To say "Either a person was there watching it or it didn't happen" is the epitome of absurdity.
Well, you're the only one saying that. You can't tell when or why it happened, or what its status was, but that "it happened" is a measurement you can make. A dinosaur existed. You can see the fossil. What was his normal body temperature? Ummm. Well, we think they were cold blooded, so they should have been somewhere around "room temperature". Ok, what was "room temperature"? Were you there to measure it? No.
What is more important is I'm saying is that if you cannot control the parameters of a system so that only one variable is changing at a time, you cannot prove causality. AGW advocates do NOT have the evidence to prove AGW simply because there is no system available to modify CO2 and see how the temperature changes.
You can measure all the CO2 you want but that doesn't prove we can do a damn thing about global warm
The same Earth that was used to "conduct these experiments" which showed us that dinosaurs used to roam the Earth, that huge asteroids have hit our planet in the past, and that our planet is 4 1/2 billion years old. All fake too, I suppose?
None of that was shown through experiments, it was all hypothesized based on measurements of one existing system.
"Dinosaurs used to roam the earth" is based on fossils. A measurement. There was no experiment -- no creation of a system with specific properties to test a hypothesis about how those properties produce the result. In fact, an experiment is impossible.
The 4.5 billion age is also a measurement. Radioactive decay of certain elements in certain rocks. It is based upon a significant assumption that is an elephant in the room that nobody mentions. What if the rate of decay is NOT a constant? We've been able to measure the rates of some things for what, about 50 years? Maybe 100. Might we be unable to measure a change that occurs over 100,000 years? Sure. If we're talking about elements with half-lives of millions of years, might we be off a bit when we've only known about radioactivity for a couple of hundred years and had 100 or fewer years to actually measure it?
Now, specifically for the 'experiment' that the report uses. Ten measurements, seven rising, three declining. Measurements of what? For the most part, temperatures, of course.
The ability to measure temperature came about in the early to mid 1600's, depending on who you claim invented the thermometer. That's 400 years ago. Regular measurements of earth temperatures on a large scale didn't happen until the satellite age, and then those measurements are not direct, they are all indirect. That means that the 'long term' data we have on temperature really only starts less than 100 years ago.
Does anyone else remember about fifteen years ago how the satellite remote sensing guys realized that their algorithms for calculating sea surface temps were wrong? Whoops.
So, it may be warmer this year than last. It may be colder this year than 100 years ago. It's nice that you claim you can tell where all the carbon comes from, but what if the change is not due to CO2 levels? It may be due to CO2, but unless we can create an experiment with a planet where we can change the CO2 and keep everything, including solar input, the same, causality eludes us.
Models are great, but models require a complete knowledge of the system being modeled, which we simply do not have. Models are tweaked on a daily basis to match the assumptions of the modeller, and to fit whatever is considered to be current valid data. An email about ten years ago from NCAR trumpeted the fact that modelers had changed one parameter in the "hockey stick" model and got a model that still fit the existing data and showed an even more significant upturn. This was, to them, proof of even more danger just around the corner, even though all it really was was a change to an empirical constant.
The same one used to show the effect of the Sun's gravity onto the Earth's rotation.
Nice try, but no. Gravitational effects can be measured by using weights and sensitive detectors. Those measurements can be conducted in controlled conditions where other, interfering effects can be removed. Such as electrical charges. One can make predictions about what one will observe under certain conditions, create those conditions, and then compare the results to the hypothesis. That's called "the scientific method". Other people can make other predictions and make measurements. That's part of the method, too.
In the case of the sun/earth gravitational system, it takes more than measuring where we are and where the sun is to reach an answer. You need to be able to CHANGE things without changing OTHER THINGS in order to be able to prove causation. The sun/earth system appears to be subject to the same theory of gravitation that has been studied experimentally, but that may only be due to the accuracy of the measurements. (Wasn't it Neptune that was discovered only because better measurements of Uranus' orbit showed a discrepancy? Or was it Neptune/Pluto?)
For example, how do you disprove that the sun/earth attraction is not due to a difference in electrical charge? Change the charge. Oops, can't quite do that in real life, but you can in the lab.
That's the point about AGW. In order to have more than correlation you need to be able to change one factor without changing anything else and see that the result changes ONLY based on that one factor.
For example. "CO2 levels are higher today and the earth is warmer" is "correlation". "We took a standard earth-like planet and changed only the level of CO2 and the planet warmed" is "causation". The latter is the experiment that I asked about. When did it happen?
You get the people who think the world isn't heating up. Show them the evidence, they still discount it.
And show them the faults in the system that collected the evidence, and the proponents deny that.
What I found most fascinating in the summary was the statement "it's been a scorcher for all of us" (or words to that effect), which is both untrue (we've had a few hot days here, mostly cool) and refers to WEATHER and not CLIMATE. So, when WEATHER supports the global warming argument, WEATHER is proof. When WEATHER doesn't support the global warming argument, we're told that "WEATHER ISN'T CLIMATE, YOU MOUTH BREATHING KNUCKLE DRAGGER."
You get the people who will acknowledge that the world is warming up, but insist humanity has nothing to do with it. Show them the evidence, they still discount it.
Which Earth was used to conduct these experiments that provided the evidence? Are we confusing "the scientific method" with "correlation" again?
But, as with so many other things, reasonable voices are drowned out by the extremists--
You mean the ones who keep shouting down anyone who dares question the science behind global warming, calling them mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers, even when some of those people doing the questioning are climate scientists? Yes, I agree. Reasonable voices are drowned out, on purpose.
No one's advocating immediate and drastic measures. You could ration gasoline and electricity.
As a user of both electricity and gasoline, I'd call that both drastic and, if it is done soon, immediate.
Cutting CO2 emissions back to 1970 levels (or whatever year it happens to be) is drastic. Invoking drastic taxes (euphemistically called "cap and trade") would be drastic by definition.
If there is "convincing evidence", there must have been a valid experiment to provide it. Which earth was used to change the levels of CO2 and leave all the other factors constant to measure the actual effect of CO2 on temperature?
Hell, if anything, that is being advocated may be too little too late.
Hell, anything that is being advocated may be meaningless and have no effect at all.
Eh? What exactly is harder in Ubuntu than it is on Windows?
Knowing whether a system that shuts itself off every few hours all by itself and has a 3G modem that just stops working after an hour or less is broken or not, and getting Dell to deal with the problem.
I have a system in a remote place now, bought with Win7 because that is all that Dell would sell it with, loaded with Ubuntu because that's the only distro I had with me at the time that pretended to deal with the 3G USB modem. That system turns itself off even though I've removed every APMD or other demon that I can think of that would be trying to "save power". The 3G modem loses connection after 15 minutes to a few hours and the device simply disappears from the system.
I have no idea if this is some "normal" behaviour I've just not found the right setting for in Ubuntu, but I know it would be broken in Win7 and SuSE and CentOS. It doesn't help that Ubuntu came as a "desktop-only" system (with no hint of that on the DVD) and has re-standardized itself into two runlevels (stop and go) and has all kinds of "managers" to do what used to be standard, simple things. (E.g., I want a system without X running. On everything else, change/etc/inittab so the initial runlevel is 3. On Ubuntu, go find this file over under/etc/something or other and comment out the lines that start up the x server, and make sure you don't bugger the if/else block they are in. Why do I want X not running? Because I don't want to have a monitor connected, and if X runs on Ubuntu and the monitor isn't there, the boot process stops with a warning about "low resolution display" or something like that. Sigh.)
What I DO know is that it would be a complete waste of time to call DELL to talk to them about it, since it isn't running Win7 like it was shipped with.
Of course, in Ubuntu this just isn't a problem because there's no games at all, but that's another issue entirely.
Really? This system runs Tux Racer and Frozen Bubble and a bunch of other games just fine.
As a very frequent flier; I'd rather they charge more for the extras and less for a ticket since I very rarely check bags (although when I do it's still free); and a lower ticket price is to my advantage.
But one does not lead to the other. You don't pay less when you say "no checked", you pay more when you DO check (for the cattle, anyway, us frequent fliers get checked bags for free.) If you think there is a price cut, try getting them to lower the price of your ticket when you don't check a bag. Nope. You pay X whether you check a bag or not. (In fact, at the United website, 'how many bags will you check' is a question not asked until check-in time, long after the price of the ticket has been established. There is no discount for not checking a bag.
While you may have some apocryphal evidence of how ticket prices have fluctuated over time, the real cause for the fluctuations is the varying prices charged for the same seats depending on contracts and availability. Buying a ticket two months in advance might get you one of the cheap tickets; two days gets you the full fare. The difference in price has nothing to do with unbundled services.
As someone who doesn't buy these services, I'm quite happy if they overcharge for them in order to subsidize cheaper prices for my tickets.
The point is that they DON'T.
Airlines piece-price services for two reasons. 1) Price it high enough, nobody will use it and they can stop providing it. 2) Remove the cost of that service from the base ticket so that the base ticket prices can be profitable -- not lower, just profitable.
Every time I buy a ticket from United, they offer to sell me 6 inches more legroom. That's despite knowing I already qualify for their premier seating. They offer to sell me a year's "baggage free" service, bypassing the regular checked baggage fees that I already don't have to pay. That's called "profiteering". The price of your ticket doesn't go down if I fall for the trick.
You can try comparing ticket prices from 1990 to now, but it really doesn't mean anything. There are so many changes to the service in the last 20 years that what it cost then in today's dollars isn't important. What is important is any hand-in-hand price reduction for tickets when the new fee services are introduced. That doesn't happen. Your ticket isn't $25 less because you didn't check a bag, it's the same. The only difference is that the airline coerced you into carrying your own bag for part of the flight. The amount of gate-check baggage has gone up considerably, so I suspect that this is one way the consumer has to ding the airline back at its own game.
And yellowcake? Really? After Bush lied to the American public about yellowcake in the State of the Union?
You need to keep up with the news. Bush didn't lie. Canada bought 550 tons of yellowcake from the post-Saddam Iraqi government. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/ It was there before they took over. Guess who was in charge?
Not to mention that yellowcake being sold would be an indication that he didn't know what he was doing when he bought it.
No, it's an indication that he hadn't done anything with it yet. He knew what he was doing when he bought it, and fortunately, he didn't get the chance.
He has no means to manufacture it and was selling it,
Yeah, right. Saddam was hanged in 2006. The sale of the yellowcake was in 2008. Somehow, from the grave, Saddam Hussein was selling yellowcake to Canada.
To be fair, it is a valid comment. We did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They had no WMD program. Thy had no active weapons. They had no means to make more. They had no effort expended to make more. But there were WMDs found. All US made. And all inoperable.
I don't believe that the scud missle is manufactured in the US. They seemed quite operable when Saddam was lobbing them at his neighbors. And the chemical rockets found by the US about day two of the invasion must have been operable, given the screams of the media (at the time, followed by complete silence) about how the army left them unprotected after finding them.
And the yellowcake that was eventually sold to Canada was NOT given to Saddam by the US. Having that much yellowcake uranium is a sign that yes, indeedy doo, there was a program of some sort.
Once cable television was going to represent the "democratization of media" with all sorts of public access and interactivity and localization. But once the cable business became monopolized...
Your first sentence is absolutely correct. You lost it at "monopolized". They aren't, so it can't be the reason.
The reason is "large scale" and "centralized". Comcast, for example, has to deal with hundreds if not thousands of local jurisdictions. It is trying to save money by reducing the number of different cable systems it has to look like. I.e., Comcast of Albany, Comcast of Salem, Comcast of Bend, Comcast of Eugene, Comcast of Canby, Comcast of Lebanon... they all have most of the same channel lineup, which makes it cheaper to advertise services ("Watch USA on channel 58...").
Now, I can't speak with authority for any of those cities, but for my own (Comcast of...) Comcast is NOT a monopoly; the franchise is non-exclusive.
But once the cable business became monopolized it became nothing but "Pay TV", where you pay for basically the same product you used to get for free.
For the vast majority of users, this is not true. They've always paid for the cable specific content. I don't recall any time when cable was free.
Perhaps you are thinking of things like 'Rock The Ring 453', the latest and greatest WWF (wrestling, not wildlife) spectacular. That has nothing to do with the centralization or (non) monopoly status of cable, it's a realization that people will pay for things they want to see and adaptation to that. Or the fact that Big Brother 12 24-hour content is now only available for money, when BB1 was free. (But not free on cable.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, if you read a bit more into the summary, it seems that the Ron Paul libertarians were complaining about anti-Ron Paul people countering their UP-voting Ron Paul articles. "Waaaa, those nasty people are organizing to counter our organized abuse of the system."
Sounds like a "conspiracy" on both sides. It wouldn't surprise me that pure lefties were doing it, too.
The Big Bang has not been proven as the source of the universe, yet many scientists believe it happened.
Evolution has not been proven as the origin of life, yet many scientists believe it is.
Ptolemy believed in a geocentric universe; Copernicus in a heliocentric one. Both were beliefs in things not proved, and thus faith, yet both are considered great scientists of their times -- just wrong.
Aristotle believed there were five elements. John Dalton imagined atoms as small spheres with tiny hooks. Pons and Fleischer believed fusion took place at room temperature. All beliefs that were clearly not proven.
The fact that something is believed through faith does not mean it is wrong, just that it hasn't been proved. Some things cannot be proved (like the big bang as THE method through which the universe came into existence), some things cannot be proved until technology catches up with the human thought process (like subatomic particles -- long hypothesized, eventually measured.)
The point being, to dismiss religion as "fake stuff all based on faith" is to point a finger at science, too. It was "faith" that the locks on the file cabinets at Los Alamos were secure; Feynman came along and disproved it.
No, religion, the kind that gets people to not just believe irrationally but to act irrationally is the biggest curse mankind has ever suffered.
To lump all religious belief into "irrational" is both insulting and inflammatory, the kind of inflammatory that creates the kind of reaction that you clearly denounce. "Come see the violence inherent in the system" spoken by someone who has just walked up and slugged a cop is dishonest debate.
I love it when non-Christians attempt to explain Christian beliefs. You are absurdly wrong.
First, the existence of aliens would neither support nor visciate the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution deals with changes in existing species, not the formation of life. Simply put, if God created us, he could certainly create other life on other planets.
The real issue with the existence of intelligent non-human life on other planets is based on the Genesis story of creation, where God molded Man in His image and gave him dominion over the other species. Now, if an alien shows up, and he's intelligent, then this means one of several things:
Out of the three, the latter two are actually compatible, and are what many Christians will assume, were an alien to come knocking on the door. A few sects will be in trouble because of their literalism (yes, we really do look like God, "in His image"), but the biggest issue will be the people who will waste a lot of time jumping up and down claiming that the alien proves that God doesn't exist yada yada yada ...
Quote: Indent only indents, it doesn't insert or delete newlines...
Incorrect.
if (foo) { a = x; } else { a = 5; }
is trivially converted to GNU format by "indent -gnu a.c", and becomes:
if (foo)
{
a = x;
}
else
{
a = 5;
}
Looks like some newlines have been inserted. And running that through K&R indent:
if (foo) {
a = x;
} else {
a = 5;
}
Newlines deleted.
ASCII when there was just ASCII had a tab character which was commonly interpreted as "tab to the next multiple of 8 column". If you were in column 4, a tab would not look like 8 spaces, it would look like 4 spaces.
On the keypunch I used, TAB meant "advance to the next tab column as indicated on your drum card." For FORTRAN, that meant the first tab skipped to column 2 (line number), the next tab to column 6 (continuation), the next to 7, a few every four spaces, and then off to column 72 (card number).
Every reasonable typewriter I used had tab stop settings so you could define what columns a tab took you to.
If your envirenment or prefers a different standard, either adopt it or be prepared to cause problems.
Thus was created "indent", which converts code from all those other people's atrocious formatting styles into your preferred on and back.
The IRS doesn't care about that. They instituted withholding for three reasons: 1) it is harder to cheat the system when you know "The Man" is always watching, 2) you tend to overlook how much is being taken out of your pocket, or even that it is happening, when it happens automatically and before you get the money, and 3) cash flow. The gov gets to use your money before you are required to pay it to them. They win, you lose.
[raises hand] I've run the numbers using the "Fair Tax" proposal and current taxation and I lose big time. I doubt that I'm unique. I AM one of those who Obama pledged would not pay additional taxes under his reign.
They would be getting a nearly 24% raise in pay since they wouldn't be paying any taxes out of their paycheck, no income, no social security, nothing.
That's YOUR hypothesis, but real life will be very different. The "Fair Tax" is a federal income tax. It will not replace state or local income taxes. It will not replace state or local sales taxes. It will not replace SSI -- it can't afford to, since SSI is so deep in the hole that cutting SSI is impossible. And you imagine that everyone's income will go up, when the truth is it will stay the same. Employers aren't stupid, they know you work for what you get after taxes, if they can cut wages they will.
The rebuttal to that point is several pages, but needless to say you are misinformed.
It's simple math. Twenty nine is 29% of 100, but nobody expresses sales taxes in that way. It's always the percentage charged on the value of what you buy. When you express it the way that all sales taxes in the US are expressed, it becomes a 41% tax. A $71 item requires a 41% additional charge in taxes. It's dishonest to express it any other way.
You're 41% number is off, ...
Twenty nine dollars in tax on a seventy one dollar purchase is 40.845%. I rounded up.
EVERY AMERICAN would have to tell the IRS about EVERY DOLLAR they have, if they want to avoid a 41% tax on that money that has already been taxed. Not just every dollar, but every item of value that was bought with post-tax money. You think the Patriot Act was bad? How much stock do you own, how many cars, a house? Any collectable coins or stamps? Keep any money in a cookie jar where the wife doesn't know about it? Guns? Stereo? You do realize, don't you, if you sell any of that stuff after the "Fair Tax" goes into effect, you will have to pay the tax when you use the money to buy something else. If I buy a $1000 gold coin today and sell it for $1000 after the "fair tax" goes into effect that $1000 is really only $710. If you think that every collectable item is going to appreciate by 41% on the day the "fair tax" passes, you're nuts.
I'd rather the IRS be watching Wal-Mart than watching me.
Then I assume you'll be declining your "rebate" check that low-income people will get to help offset the regressive nature of the "Fair" tax, yes?
Unless you're buying a new house there would be no taxes to worry about. Just buy a used house, that is the huge mortgage deduction you want.
What are you, nuts? I bought a used house. That wasn't the "deduction" I'm talking about. Oh, right. The day the Fair Tax passes, every person will automatically make 24% more money every month and the value of used houses will drop by 24%. What a wonderful magical universe you "fair tax" people live in.
Also deductions are already calculated based on your income and given as part of your monthly prebate check.
Wait a minute. You just said the IRS doesn't get involved with everyone, just businesses, under the "fair tax". Now you admit that every person in the country has to be registered to get a "prebate" (welfare) check every month. And you think the IRS will shrink when this goes through?
And just how does the IRS know your "income" so it can send you the correct amount? You'll still be filing "tax returns", just with a different name. You'll still be required to keep receipts for anything that is deducted from your income, and the feds will still have a playground creating new deductions to cater to specific voting blocks. The check comes every month? You better file every month to keep the IRS up to date.
But the "fair tax" doesn't do that. The "fair tax" includes sending people a check every year as a means of making up for deductions they now have and making the tax more progressive. The idea is that instead of getting the "standard deduction" you get now, you get $X back, assuming you spent $Y and paid something in taxes. That means the IRS still has to deal with every person it deals with now. Every damn one of them, PLUS all the businesses that suddenly become subject to collecting this "Fair Tax" and have all the additional forms to deal with.
Can you IMAGINE the squealing that would take place if the "Fair Tax" did NOT keep as many people out of the tax system as there are today? How do you keep those who aren't making enough to pay taxes today from having to pay a POS based "Fair Tax"? You can't. You MUST implement a refund, or what most people would call "free money", or just welfare.
I'm one of those who are hardly considered rich, and this "Fair Tax" pretty much screws me as far as how much I would have to pay each year. Remember the Obama promise not to raise taxes on people making below $250k? Kiss that good bye with any "fair tax".
How do you provide a "cost-of-living" deduction on a tax system paid at time of sale?
Do you give each person a "proof of income" card that they show, so that they get taxed at the cash register a different rate than everyone else? A card with punches so they get the first $10,000 in purchases tax-free?
No, you create a massive government department that gives money to people because they didn't make more than a certain level. It wouldn't matter how much they spent. Some call that welfare. You'd call it "fair tax". I'd call it "the IRS" and rife with possibilities for social adjustments, just like what we have now.
It has created an industry that cheats the downtrodden out of their money with products like refund anticipation loans.
What has created that industry is the desire of those who are getting refunds to get them NOW instead of waiting three weeks. It has nothing to do with the tax system, other than some people get refunds.
And YOU just proposed the same payout system in your first paragraph. The only way to "deduct" or counteract tax payments is to ... send people a check every year based on either documented deductions or a flat-rate deduction system. And then you'll have the same people who can't wait three weeks to get their deduction checks standing in line at the high-rate loan offices anticipating their "refund" early.
I call bullshit. As a user of the current healthcare system in the US, I can tell you that I have NEVER had to pay for all of my healthcare, either up front or after it was over.
During my most recent major medical event, not only did I not pay a DIME for any of the services, I was paid for the milage I spent driving to and from my doctor's office. Medication, doctor's visits, surgery, all covered.
The trivial amounts I've had to pay for co-pays on other services (five or ten dollars or so) have never been in advance, and cash has never been required. And you cannot possibly claim that five dollars was paying for all of the service I got.
The British system is not being "decentralized" because of nit-wit politicians, it's being decentralized because the politicians are realizing the fact that greymarket doctors were a booming market and that better healthcare could be had for less government money by opening the market.
The "Fair Tax" won't pass because so many people would be harmed by it, and so many people would object to being lied to.
The "Fair Tax" proponents don't tell you the actual rate, they tell you the final percentage of your bill that is taxes. The typical example I hear is "a $71 dollar shirt would cost $100, a 29% tax." The truth is, 29/71*100 is a 41% tax. (Nobody expresses existing sales taxes as "of the whole" numbers, it's always "of the item".)
The second reason it is unfair is because it punishes people who have saved money. I have two kinds of accounts -- post- and pre-tax. The day the "Fair Tax" goes into effect, every dollar in a post-tax account goes down 41% in value. (I could have bought the $71 shirt for $71 yesterday, today it costs $100.) Every dollar in my pocket yesterday, which is post-tax money, will be taxed again. Every dollar in my pre-tax accounts goes down 41%, too. That money was put away with the promise that I could withdraw it when I'm old and have no income, thus most likely paying no tax on it.
Want to hear the biggest lie the Fair Tax people spew? "It will do away with the IRS." Someone has to be in charge of collecting and processing the "Fair Tax", and even if it isn't CALLED the IRS it will still have the same function. It will be a massive federal agency tasked with tracking down every ten year old who spends a buck on a piece of candy to make sure the taxes are paid.
They would all be out of work if something like the fair tax ever passed,
See? There will be so much paperwork and effort involved in dealing with the "Fair Tax" that nobody will be out of work. You can't get rid of the mortgage deductions because too many people want it. You can't get rid of charitable giving deductions ditto. At the end of the year, you'll have to find some way of figuring out how much you paid in "Fair Tax", which means keeping ALL your receipts, just so you can make those deductions. Businesses will have to add staff just to keep track of the new tax.
I have yet to pay for the services of a tax lawyer, and I use the software only because it makes "what if" questions easy. "How much more charity would I have to claim to get $10 more back?" Nobody forces me to pay anyone, nor am I forced to keep itemized lists of what I've bought and spent just so I can get my deductions.
Here's the example of the number one thing wrong with the US higher education system: misunderstanding of the purpose of the "higher education system".
Universities are supposed to be places where people get a well-rounded education in a wide array of topics. That's why the undergraduate degrees tend to have liberal arts and science and social studies components to them. The result is supposed to be people who can look at the world and have some understanding of where we are and where we are going.
If you want a technical degree, go to a community college or trade school. You should not be looking to the Universities to provide well-trained mechanics.
The fact that tenure was listed as a fault is another sign of that same misunderstanding. Universities are also intended to further the arts through research. Tenure is a means of allowing faculty to relax a bit from having to deal with the daily grind and let them explore areas that aren't necessarily the most productive now -- but may become so. "Ok, you've shown you can produce papers and teach, now be inventive."
It's no different than Google's "free friday", or whatever company it was that gave employees work-time to do personal projects.
What's sadder is the level of debate when someone expects a citation for someone else's opinion.
In a very weasly-worded way, yes. Measurement of what? The past temperatures are not based on measurement of temperatures. The past ice extents are not measurements of past ice extents. Proxies are required, simply because there was nobody around, and no instruments around, to measure those quantities directly. That's where you have to start assuming this and assuming that and hypothesizing the rest.
For example, measurements of gas bubbles trapped in ice cores.
Tell you nothing about temperatures or ice extent, and only marginally about atmospheric content. CO2 is soluble in water, and is present in the current atmosphere. Why should we believe that CO2 in a gas bubble in ice (solid water) over tens of thousands of years wouldn't diffuse out or in? There are lots of things we look at on a short time scale and think are immutable, but change considerably over long times scales. Rocks, for one. Ice, for another. I've got one lonely frozen chicken breast in a plastic bag in the freezer which is now embedded in a layer of ice. The water in that solidly frozen chicken breast has diffused OUT of that solid block of chicken and reformed on the outside. But CO2, a gas at freezing temperatures, cannot diffuse out of ice?
Show me a bubble from last week, I'll accept the assumption that it is about the same composition that it was when it was formed. Show me one from 20,000 years ago, I'm a skeptic. And YOU have no experimental evidence to show that it hasn't changed or even what the real value is.
Oh, great -- you're a YEC (or at least listening to their propaganda) as well.
I need not listen to someone's propoganda to understand where the assumptions in a system are and that if those assumptions are wrong the result is wrong. I learned that way way back in geometry class where we spent a lot of time with Euclidean assumptions and very little with Rieman or others.
I do science on a daily basis. I have to deal with the assumptions that go into it and how they may be wrong. It's part of the job. Unless you are a global warming proponent, at which point "there is no debate".
Ah, so if walk up to a giant pool of lava, it's safe to assume that that rock wasn't the slightest bit warm a few minutes ago because I wasn't there to measure it?
Making things up, I see. I never said that. What I would say, if you asked me, and I thought you actually cared about the answer, is that it would be reasonable to ASSUME it was warm a few minutes ago, but proof would still require a measurement that wasn't made.
Then I would ask you, what do YOU assume about the temperature of that rock ten thousand years ago? Warmer, colder, or the same, and then what could you PROVE? Applying standard equations of heat transfer and thermal capacity to a pool of lava and assuming that it was warm a few minutes ago is much different than assuming it was warm ten thousand years ago.
To say "Either a person was there watching it or it didn't happen" is the epitome of absurdity.
Well, you're the only one saying that. You can't tell when or why it happened, or what its status was, but that "it happened" is a measurement you can make. A dinosaur existed. You can see the fossil. What was his normal body temperature? Ummm. Well, we think they were cold blooded, so they should have been somewhere around "room temperature". Ok, what was "room temperature"? Were you there to measure it? No.
What is more important is I'm saying is that if you cannot control the parameters of a system so that only one variable is changing at a time, you cannot prove causality. AGW advocates do NOT have the evidence to prove AGW simply because there is no system available to modify CO2 and see how the temperature changes.
You can measure all the CO2 you want but that doesn't prove we can do a damn thing about global warm
None of that was shown through experiments, it was all hypothesized based on measurements of one existing system.
"Dinosaurs used to roam the earth" is based on fossils. A measurement. There was no experiment -- no creation of a system with specific properties to test a hypothesis about how those properties produce the result. In fact, an experiment is impossible.
The 4.5 billion age is also a measurement. Radioactive decay of certain elements in certain rocks. It is based upon a significant assumption that is an elephant in the room that nobody mentions. What if the rate of decay is NOT a constant? We've been able to measure the rates of some things for what, about 50 years? Maybe 100. Might we be unable to measure a change that occurs over 100,000 years? Sure. If we're talking about elements with half-lives of millions of years, might we be off a bit when we've only known about radioactivity for a couple of hundred years and had 100 or fewer years to actually measure it?
Now, specifically for the 'experiment' that the report uses. Ten measurements, seven rising, three declining. Measurements of what? For the most part, temperatures, of course.
The ability to measure temperature came about in the early to mid 1600's, depending on who you claim invented the thermometer. That's 400 years ago. Regular measurements of earth temperatures on a large scale didn't happen until the satellite age, and then those measurements are not direct, they are all indirect. That means that the 'long term' data we have on temperature really only starts less than 100 years ago.
Does anyone else remember about fifteen years ago how the satellite remote sensing guys realized that their algorithms for calculating sea surface temps were wrong? Whoops.
So, it may be warmer this year than last. It may be colder this year than 100 years ago. It's nice that you claim you can tell where all the carbon comes from, but what if the change is not due to CO2 levels? It may be due to CO2, but unless we can create an experiment with a planet where we can change the CO2 and keep everything, including solar input, the same, causality eludes us.
Models are great, but models require a complete knowledge of the system being modeled, which we simply do not have. Models are tweaked on a daily basis to match the assumptions of the modeller, and to fit whatever is considered to be current valid data. An email about ten years ago from NCAR trumpeted the fact that modelers had changed one parameter in the "hockey stick" model and got a model that still fit the existing data and showed an even more significant upturn. This was, to them, proof of even more danger just around the corner, even though all it really was was a change to an empirical constant.
Are dinosaurs fake? Was Piltdown Man a fake?
Nice try, but no. Gravitational effects can be measured by using weights and sensitive detectors. Those measurements can be conducted in controlled conditions where other, interfering effects can be removed. Such as electrical charges. One can make predictions about what one will observe under certain conditions, create those conditions, and then compare the results to the hypothesis. That's called "the scientific method". Other people can make other predictions and make measurements. That's part of the method, too.
In the case of the sun/earth gravitational system, it takes more than measuring where we are and where the sun is to reach an answer. You need to be able to CHANGE things without changing OTHER THINGS in order to be able to prove causation. The sun/earth system appears to be subject to the same theory of gravitation that has been studied experimentally, but that may only be due to the accuracy of the measurements. (Wasn't it Neptune that was discovered only because better measurements of Uranus' orbit showed a discrepancy? Or was it Neptune/Pluto?)
For example, how do you disprove that the sun/earth attraction is not due to a difference in electrical charge? Change the charge. Oops, can't quite do that in real life, but you can in the lab.
That's the point about AGW. In order to have more than correlation you need to be able to change one factor without changing anything else and see that the result changes ONLY based on that one factor. For example. "CO2 levels are higher today and the earth is warmer" is "correlation". "We took a standard earth-like planet and changed only the level of CO2 and the planet warmed" is "causation". The latter is the experiment that I asked about. When did it happen?
And show them the faults in the system that collected the evidence, and the proponents deny that.
What I found most fascinating in the summary was the statement "it's been a scorcher for all of us" (or words to that effect), which is both untrue (we've had a few hot days here, mostly cool) and refers to WEATHER and not CLIMATE. So, when WEATHER supports the global warming argument, WEATHER is proof. When WEATHER doesn't support the global warming argument, we're told that "WEATHER ISN'T CLIMATE, YOU MOUTH BREATHING KNUCKLE DRAGGER."
You get the people who will acknowledge that the world is warming up, but insist humanity has nothing to do with it. Show them the evidence, they still discount it.
Which Earth was used to conduct these experiments that provided the evidence? Are we confusing "the scientific method" with "correlation" again?
But, as with so many other things, reasonable voices are drowned out by the extremists--
You mean the ones who keep shouting down anyone who dares question the science behind global warming, calling them mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers, even when some of those people doing the questioning are climate scientists? Yes, I agree. Reasonable voices are drowned out, on purpose.
As a user of both electricity and gasoline, I'd call that both drastic and, if it is done soon, immediate.
Cutting CO2 emissions back to 1970 levels (or whatever year it happens to be) is drastic. Invoking drastic taxes (euphemistically called "cap and trade") would be drastic by definition.
If there is "convincing evidence", there must have been a valid experiment to provide it. Which earth was used to change the levels of CO2 and leave all the other factors constant to measure the actual effect of CO2 on temperature?
Hell, if anything, that is being advocated may be too little too late.
Hell, anything that is being advocated may be meaningless and have no effect at all.
What is this "relationship" of which you speak? I am fascinated by this concept; please subscribe me to your newsletter.
or do you wish you had cooler friends?
What is this "friends" of which you speak? Do you cover this topic in your newsletter?
Knowing whether a system that shuts itself off every few hours all by itself and has a 3G modem that just stops working after an hour or less is broken or not, and getting Dell to deal with the problem.
I have a system in a remote place now, bought with Win7 because that is all that Dell would sell it with, loaded with Ubuntu because that's the only distro I had with me at the time that pretended to deal with the 3G USB modem. That system turns itself off even though I've removed every APMD or other demon that I can think of that would be trying to "save power". The 3G modem loses connection after 15 minutes to a few hours and the device simply disappears from the system.
I have no idea if this is some "normal" behaviour I've just not found the right setting for in Ubuntu, but I know it would be broken in Win7 and SuSE and CentOS. It doesn't help that Ubuntu came as a "desktop-only" system (with no hint of that on the DVD) and has re-standardized itself into two runlevels (stop and go) and has all kinds of "managers" to do what used to be standard, simple things. (E.g., I want a system without X running. On everything else, change /etc/inittab so the initial runlevel is 3. On Ubuntu, go find this file over under /etc/something or other and comment out the lines that start up the x server, and make sure you don't bugger the if/else block they are in. Why do I want X not running? Because I don't want to have a monitor connected, and if X runs on Ubuntu and the monitor isn't there, the boot process stops with a warning about "low resolution display" or something like that. Sigh.)
What I DO know is that it would be a complete waste of time to call DELL to talk to them about it, since it isn't running Win7 like it was shipped with.
Of course, in Ubuntu this just isn't a problem because there's no games at all, but that's another issue entirely.
Really? This system runs Tux Racer and Frozen Bubble and a bunch of other games just fine.
But one does not lead to the other. You don't pay less when you say "no checked", you pay more when you DO check (for the cattle, anyway, us frequent fliers get checked bags for free.) If you think there is a price cut, try getting them to lower the price of your ticket when you don't check a bag. Nope. You pay X whether you check a bag or not. (In fact, at the United website, 'how many bags will you check' is a question not asked until check-in time, long after the price of the ticket has been established. There is no discount for not checking a bag.
While you may have some apocryphal evidence of how ticket prices have fluctuated over time, the real cause for the fluctuations is the varying prices charged for the same seats depending on contracts and availability. Buying a ticket two months in advance might get you one of the cheap tickets; two days gets you the full fare. The difference in price has nothing to do with unbundled services.
The point is that they DON'T.
Airlines piece-price services for two reasons. 1) Price it high enough, nobody will use it and they can stop providing it. 2) Remove the cost of that service from the base ticket so that the base ticket prices can be profitable -- not lower, just profitable.
Every time I buy a ticket from United, they offer to sell me 6 inches more legroom. That's despite knowing I already qualify for their premier seating. They offer to sell me a year's "baggage free" service, bypassing the regular checked baggage fees that I already don't have to pay. That's called "profiteering". The price of your ticket doesn't go down if I fall for the trick.
You can try comparing ticket prices from 1990 to now, but it really doesn't mean anything. There are so many changes to the service in the last 20 years that what it cost then in today's dollars isn't important. What is important is any hand-in-hand price reduction for tickets when the new fee services are introduced. That doesn't happen. Your ticket isn't $25 less because you didn't check a bag, it's the same. The only difference is that the airline coerced you into carrying your own bag for part of the flight. The amount of gate-check baggage has gone up considerably, so I suspect that this is one way the consumer has to ding the airline back at its own game.
You need to keep up with the news. Bush didn't lie. Canada bought 550 tons of yellowcake from the post-Saddam Iraqi government. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/ It was there before they took over. Guess who was in charge?
Not to mention that yellowcake being sold would be an indication that he didn't know what he was doing when he bought it.
No, it's an indication that he hadn't done anything with it yet. He knew what he was doing when he bought it, and fortunately, he didn't get the chance.
He has no means to manufacture it and was selling it,
Yeah, right. Saddam was hanged in 2006. The sale of the yellowcake was in 2008. Somehow, from the grave, Saddam Hussein was selling yellowcake to Canada.
No, that would be a miracle.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...
Liar liar pants on fire.
I don't believe that the scud missle is manufactured in the US. They seemed quite operable when Saddam was lobbing them at his neighbors. And the chemical rockets found by the US about day two of the invasion must have been operable, given the screams of the media (at the time, followed by complete silence) about how the army left them unprotected after finding them.
And the yellowcake that was eventually sold to Canada was NOT given to Saddam by the US. Having that much yellowcake uranium is a sign that yes, indeedy doo, there was a program of some sort.
Your first sentence is absolutely correct. You lost it at "monopolized". They aren't, so it can't be the reason.
The reason is "large scale" and "centralized". Comcast, for example, has to deal with hundreds if not thousands of local jurisdictions. It is trying to save money by reducing the number of different cable systems it has to look like. I.e., Comcast of Albany, Comcast of Salem, Comcast of Bend, Comcast of Eugene, Comcast of Canby, Comcast of Lebanon ... they all have most of the same channel lineup, which makes it cheaper to advertise services ("Watch USA on channel 58...").
Now, I can't speak with authority for any of those cities, but for my own (Comcast of ...) Comcast is NOT a monopoly; the franchise is non-exclusive.
But once the cable business became monopolized it became nothing but "Pay TV", where you pay for basically the same product you used to get for free.
For the vast majority of users, this is not true. They've always paid for the cable specific content. I don't recall any time when cable was free.
Perhaps you are thinking of things like 'Rock The Ring 453', the latest and greatest WWF (wrestling, not wildlife) spectacular. That has nothing to do with the centralization or (non) monopoly status of cable, it's a realization that people will pay for things they want to see and adaptation to that. Or the fact that Big Brother 12 24-hour content is now only available for money, when BB1 was free. (But not free on cable.)