they had no choice but to value the asset lower than the underlying homes would have been worth in the event 50% of the land mass of the United States was destroyed in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.
Had there been such a nuclear exchange during the Reagan administration, 50% of the USA would have been left, and the rest could have been rebuilt.
The Bush administration has destroyed the financial system, the military, the international reputation, the civil liberties, the free press, the heavy industry, the high-tech sector, the economy, the Constitution and the heart of the USA. I doubt they will ever be rebuilt, because there is nothing left to rebuild them with.
the only real advantage would be that they could be scaled down.
Excellent point. Back in the 80s people were muttering about "suitcase nukes", though for some reason that quieted down -- maybe Sandia never got the funding.
With significant amounts of antimatter -- like about 10**12 times as much as discussed in the article -- and a good containment system, you could make a bomb the size of a pencil eraser that would take out the Pentagon. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
How would I feel if someone tricked dumb American criminals into getting arrested?
Yeah, but what if the *Iranians* tricked *President Bush* into going to Iran to accept a peace deal, and then stripped him naked, posed him humiliatingly, chained him to iron bars, and then slowly clubbed him to death? Would that be such a great idea??...Um, wait...
Wow, I see your point, that was so much more worthwhile than what I was doing before I read your post.
Your post is funny, but what you're really saying is that you have decided that you can't do anything about political issues. It may indeed be true that the USA is a two-party state where the citizens have no power, but ideally thoughtful people should react to that by trying to figure out some way to overcome that problem -- not by giving up. For you to sneer at someone who points that out seems like blackguarding.
I never bothered to work out exactly what happened, but it seems some small difference in font rendering or spacing meant half the dates wrapped onto the next line, so the whole thing looked a mess. I gave up on OO, switched to Word
Another poster has already made the point that you should have sent a.PDF. I want to add that you could have had the same experience from sending a.DOC file: fonts and many other issues cause the appearance of your file to vary, especially when the formatting is very tight like on a resume.
That's why a lot of people produce PDF output from Word, Excel, InDesign, and everything else.
If the defaults are not in line with your personal inclinations, then learn how to click on the Preferences menu.
I don't know about Ubuntu 8.10, but in 8.04 this only leads to changing the desktop background and window styles. I indeed changed those immediately, but was still bothered by the earth tones at the login stage before the main desktop loads. You can set the colors at login via System - Administration - Login window. Much more harmonious.
Btw, I find it impossible to figure out in advance whether a particular setting is in Administration or Preferences. It looks like Admin covers setups for all users and Preferences covers setups for the current user, but if you're hunting for a particular setup you probably don't know which kind it is in advance and usually have to check both lists. For instance, you can't set the login sounds by System - Admin - Login, you do it by System - Preferences - Sounds.
I'm not sure if today's games could inspire kids in the simple way that old game did for me. The skills and techniques involved in a modern rendered game are so far beyond the grasp of the average kid, the inspiration might be lost, requiring too great a leap to "get it."
I read a sf story about 25 years ago about a human expedition to a planet with a humanoid civilization at a roughly mediaeval level. They identified a native scientist who was on the brink of discovering Newtonian mechanics, and became highly concerned that if he observed any of their post-Newtonian gadgetry it would make him doubt his whole line of research.
Children's games used to embody mechanical principles by necessity. Now, computer games link action and effect by completely arbitrary rules. We are teaching children to inhabit an entirely magical world.
They'll give you a nice pill, you'll scream while they manhandle your arm back into position, and five minutes later you won't remember any of it
Yeah. That works well for general anaesthesia too. It's dangerous to give you enough morphine for you to really sleep through surgery: it'll kill you most of the time. So they give you inadequate morphine, plus curare so you can't move, and the date-rape drug so you don't remember the pain. But you *experience* the pain, every second of it, helpless and immobile.
Common sense didn't get in the way of them banning nailclippers...
It just occurred to me that I have used nail clippers to strip the insulation off wires for nearly fifty years. Perhaps the nail clippers were banned out of fear not of some sort of Ninja assassin technique, but of Osama ben Gyver.
"Mom, I found this guy who will pay an outrageous price for a 2003 Saab 9-5 in good condition, like the one in the driveway that you're not using since you got your BMW. I can get another one just like it at a lower price, but I can't get it until next Wednesday. If I give you a hundred bucks, can I sell yours to this guy and replace it next Wednesday?"
Your analogy makes me think you never had kids. Any prudent mom whose son tried to give her that spiel would respond "You're grounded". We should have said the same thing to Long Term Capital Management -- and many others.
The reason there's more willingness to try computerized voting in the USA than other countries is because many elections in the US involve voting on dozens of local officials, right down to the rat-catcher level. It's a nightmare for election officals just generating the appropriate list of candidates for the ballot in each locality. I don't know of any other country with problems on the same scale.
OTOH, the way computerization has been *implemented* stinks, of course.
The problem with this approach is that as soon as you arrest a man who was thought to be fairly blameless within his circle of friends and family, most of whom were aware of the political tension but were otherwise fairly ambivalent towards you, they turn against you. Lather, rinse and repeat a few times and if you didn't have a terrorist organisation before you do now.
You know that. I know that. Can you suggest a reason why the US and UK intelligence services didn't know exactly what the effect would be as well? The only question is *why* they wanted that result, in Northern Ireland, Eurasia, Algeria, Vietnam...
According to recent studies, more than forty per cent of children can read and write even before they start school.
Unfortunately, they can only read and write in Polish.
...For the sake of US readers, I should explain that there has been a huge amount of immigration to England from Poland over the last few years (although this has stabilized as England's economy has gone into depression).
Parent is correct: I have often considered making the same points whenever the whole "duck and cover" thing is discussed.
However, he leaves out the issues of flash and broken glass, which are even more likely to create a survivability opportunity over a wide radius than building collapse. Being under a desk is a simple rule of thumb for minimizing those injury modes.
Perhaps it is true that Germans do not hate the US for its treatment of Germany after WW2. However, there have been claims that hundreds of thousands of German servicemen perished in US, French and Soviet slave labor camps, and it is indisputable that the US took pains to classify its German prisoners as "disarmed enemy forces" to evade the Geneva convention. General Patton wrote in his diary "I'm also opposed to sending POW's to work as slaves in foreign lands (in particular, to France) where many will be starved to death."
When I lived in Cambodia I was amused to see the sign for a Ministry of Cults, but after a while I realized they'd taken the usage from French, where "culte" is non-pejorative, meaning any religion.
The obvious response to your post is that expenditure on defence improves our chances of *keeping* all the roads, networks, products, businesses, schools etc you spend the *remaining* money on.
I would like to make the point however that rational people might well judge that US defence expenditure for some time has been making the US *less* secure. *Much* less.
The reality of "antisemitism" (consider the fact that the word even EXISTS... is there a similar word for hating other ethnic or social groups?! There might be, but I can't think of any)
This reminds me an old joke about Premier Brezhnev. He goes to England and is interviewed about the USSR's support of Arab states against Israel. When asked why, he responds (imagine gravelly Russian accent) "Because... I... yam... yanti semittic". The interviewer burbles "Perhaps you don't know this, Mr Brezhnev, but in English that word means hating anybody who's semitic, like arabs, not just jews". Brezhnev allows a small smile to creep across his features. "I... know."
In other words, the whole War on Terror is antisemitic - gee, I should be in marketing.
Your point is valid, but there's an even more important reason why health care is not an ideal free market: the AMA fights tooth and nail to prevent consumers being able to rate outcomes from different health care providers, and to compare pricing. Health care workers swap stories among themselves, and the insurance companies know when one hospital winds up charging twice as much as another, but the consumer is deliberately left in the dark.
A related point is the 80/20 principle. It might well be that we could get 80% of the potential benefits of medical treatment by a course of treatment which cost 20% of the price... but we will never know.
Slashdot Mirror
w3woody:
Had there been such a nuclear exchange during the Reagan administration, 50% of the USA would have been left, and the rest could have been rebuilt.
The Bush administration has destroyed the financial system, the military, the international reputation, the civil liberties, the free press, the heavy industry, the high-tech sector, the economy, the Constitution and the heart of the USA. I doubt they will ever be rebuilt, because there is nothing left to rebuild them with.
Fnord666:
Perhaps you're joking, but in case you aren't: consider a population where 90% of people have an IQ of 90 and 10% have an IQ of 190.
Of course, IQ tests are normalized on the assumption of a symmetrical bellcurve distribution, but that's not a *math* issue.
AKAImBatman (238306):
Excellent point. Back in the 80s people were muttering about "suitcase nukes", though for some reason that quieted down -- maybe Sandia never got the funding.
With significant amounts of antimatter -- like about 10**12 times as much as discussed in the article -- and a good containment system, you could make a bomb the size of a pencil eraser that would take out the Pentagon. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Derkec (463377):
Yeah, but what if the *Iranians* tricked *President Bush* into going to Iran to accept a peace deal, and then stripped him naked, posed him humiliatingly, chained him to iron bars, and then slowly clubbed him to death? Would that be such a great idea?? ...Um, wait...
MobileTatsu-NJG (946591):
Your post is funny, but what you're really saying is that you have decided that you can't do anything about political issues. It may indeed be true that the USA is a two-party state where the citizens have no power, but ideally thoughtful people should react to that by trying to figure out some way to overcome that problem -- not by giving up. For you to sneer at someone who points that out seems like blackguarding.
phoenix321:
So your slogan is "I voted for Kodos"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Voted_for_Kodos/
mollymoo:
Another poster has already made the point that you should have sent a .PDF. I want to add that you could have had the same experience from sending a .DOC file: fonts and many other issues cause the appearance of your file to vary, especially when the formatting is very tight like on a resume.
That's why a lot of people produce PDF output from Word, Excel, InDesign, and everything else.
Also, you may be a troll.
ChameleonDave:
I don't know about Ubuntu 8.10, but in 8.04 this only leads to changing the desktop background and window styles. I indeed changed those immediately, but was still bothered by the earth tones at the login stage before the main desktop loads. You can set the colors at login via System - Administration - Login window. Much more harmonious.
Btw, I find it impossible to figure out in advance whether a particular setting is in Administration or Preferences. It looks like Admin covers setups for all users and Preferences covers setups for the current user, but if you're hunting for a particular setup you probably don't know which kind it is in advance and usually have to check both lists. For instance, you can't set the login sounds by System - Admin - Login, you do it by System - Preferences - Sounds.
PhotoGuy:
I read a sf story about 25 years ago about a human expedition to a planet with a humanoid civilization at a roughly mediaeval level. They identified a native scientist who was on the brink of discovering Newtonian mechanics, and became highly concerned that if he observed any of their post-Newtonian gadgetry it would make him doubt his whole line of research.
Children's games used to embody mechanical principles by necessity. Now, computer games link action and effect by completely arbitrary rules. We are teaching children to inhabit an entirely magical world.
thermian:
Yeah. That works well for general anaesthesia too. It's dangerous to give you enough morphine for you to really sleep through surgery: it'll kill you most of the time. So they give you inadequate morphine, plus curare so you can't move, and the date-rape drug so you don't remember the pain. But you *experience* the pain, every second of it, helpless and immobile.
Brain Damaged Bogan:
It just occurred to me that I have used nail clippers to strip the insulation off wires for nearly fifty years. Perhaps the nail clippers were banned out of fear not of some sort of Ninja assassin technique, but of Osama ben Gyver.
gknoy:
I see no reason to assume that this result is unintentional.
Your analogy makes me think you never had kids. Any prudent mom whose son tried to give her that spiel would respond "You're grounded". We should have said the same thing to Long Term Capital Management -- and many others.
The reason there's more willingness to try computerized voting in the USA than other countries is because many elections in the US involve voting on dozens of local officials, right down to the rat-catcher level. It's a nightmare for election officals just generating the appropriate list of candidates for the ballot in each locality. I don't know of any other country with problems on the same scale.
OTOH, the way computerization has been *implemented* stinks, of course.
You know that. I know that. Can you suggest a reason why the US and UK intelligence services didn't know exactly what the effect would be as well? The only question is *why* they wanted that result, in Northern Ireland, Eurasia, Algeria, Vietnam...
Here's an example I heard in England:
Parent is correct: I have often considered making the same points whenever the whole "duck and cover" thing is discussed.
However, he leaves out the issues of flash and broken glass, which are even more likely to create a survivability opportunity over a wide radius than building collapse. Being under a desk is a simple rule of thumb for minimizing those injury modes.
Most people in the UK would still find the following (famous) news headline perfectly reasonable:
lisaparatt:
PS: Please excuse wobbly writing.
References:
When I lived in Cambodia I was amused to see the sign for a Ministry of Cults, but after a while I realized they'd taken the usage from French, where "culte" is non-pejorative, meaning any religion.
Your tax dollars at work.
The obvious response to your post is that expenditure on defence improves our chances of *keeping* all the roads, networks, products, businesses, schools etc you spend the *remaining* money on.
I would like to make the point however that rational people might well judge that US defence expenditure for some time has been making the US *less* secure. *Much* less.
This reminds me an old joke about Premier Brezhnev. He goes to England and is interviewed about the USSR's support of Arab states against Israel. When asked why, he responds (imagine gravelly Russian accent) "Because... I... yam... yanti semittic". The interviewer burbles "Perhaps you don't know this, Mr Brezhnev, but in English that word means hating anybody who's semitic, like arabs, not just jews". Brezhnev allows a small smile to creep across his features. "I... know."
In other words, the whole War on Terror is antisemitic - gee, I should be in marketing.
Your point is valid, but there's an even more important reason why health care is not an ideal free market: the AMA fights tooth and nail to prevent consumers being able to rate outcomes from different health care providers, and to compare pricing. Health care workers swap stories among themselves, and the insurance companies know when one hospital winds up charging twice as much as another, but the consumer is deliberately left in the dark.
A related point is the 80/20 principle. It might well be that we could get 80% of the potential benefits of medical treatment by a course of treatment which cost 20% of the price... but we will never know.