Only in poorly regulated capitalism do entities get too big to fail.
Wrong. Only in poorly regulated capitalism do entities deemed "too big to fail" by the government get propped up and continue doing the exact same stuff that caused them to fail in the first place while generously giving "campaign donations" back from the money given to the by the government.
In a true free market, GM went bankrupt and the pieces were bought by their smarter competitors. In a true free market, the big banks who had a bunch of failed mortgages went bankrupt and the pieces were bought by their smarter competitors.
(inane, clueless trashing of conservatives removed)
If it passes constitutional muster (which the ACA HAS), it is not "tyranny of the majority," it is simply a law YOU don't agree with.
Actually, some parts of it have been upheld by the Supreme Court. Barely. But it's not a tyranny of the majority because the majority of the people in this country are against it. One party pushed it through and now they're delaying parts of it to help stave off losing a lot of elections later this year.
Talking points? I'm not part of the looney left - I have a substitute for "talking points" known as "reality". I would take anything from the whitehouse with a grain of salt.
The federal government has been spending ever more money in order to prop up the GDP (remember that gov't spending is part of the GDP). In reality, the economy has been shrinking for some time except in Washington DC. And, no, we can't continue this forever or even much longer.
If you actually look at how much work is done and actual years worked (not just age) etc. the gap disappears. Actually, according to the summary here there *is* a gap as women get paid more. I'm sure the feminists and looney lefters will want to fix this new problem. Not.
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
It's easy -- because in many ways "science" has become a religion to many. However, many people lack a firm understanding of scientific principles and methods. So, if something looks "science-y" with Latin words, molecular drawings and other intelligent-sounding but hard-to-understand descriptions.
These days people have "faith" in "science"..and if that so-called science goes along with their worldview (which Whole Foods is self-selecting in that a certain worldview makes someone more likely to become a shopper there), then they may blindly accept it. Very few people have the skills and motivation to actually analyze the claims of these manufacturers and just go with their biases when making a decision.
Even the summary brushes on this. We find that the two things that get some people riled up are creationism and climate change denial. Actually, those are things that tend to get left-wingers riled up. A lot of folks also get riled up about, oh, anti-vaccination nuttery, anti-economic-reality nuttery (denying basic market principles), climate change extremism (we have to all give up our cars now to save the planet), green quackery (we have to destroy our nuclear power plants and replace them with wind farms!), etc.
There are plenty of religions in the world and many of them have nothing to do with God or gods.
Whether you agree or disagree with the need for the TSA, the above is a lousy childish argument.
The spinkler system at my office has not put out a single fire. My smoke detector has not once detected smoke.
And that's where your analogy just crashed and burned. Has there been a fire at your office?
There's been a shoe bomber. There's been Smokey the Terrorist who set his underwear on fire (yeah, not from here, but we're spreading our stupidity around the globe).
See, we've had the fires, it's just that our "smoke detector" - the one that costs us billions of dollars while violating our rights, that smoke detector - has demonstrably failed. While they were patting down old ladies and little kids in wheel chairs Richard Reid walked right through.
So, no, not only does it violate our rights, clog up airports, create a far larger security problem (ever see video of the Russian airport security line being bombed?) it has failed to catch at least one terrorist of which we are aware. And other airports using these same stupid policies around the world have likewise failed to catch actual terrorists.
This isn't the least bit surprising to anybody paying attention. Old white ladies don't bomb airplanes, and it's highly unlikely (to the point that it can be safely ignored) that an old Muslim lady would do the same. And, yeah, I know, "white" is a race and "Muslim" is a religion. There are a total of about 5 old white Muslim ladies on the planet. And they wouldn't bomb a plane, either.
So the simple fact is that the TSA has yet to catch a single terrorist, and they've actually failed to detect an actual terrorist. It's not because their policies work - quite the contrary it's because bombing a plane is difficult on a number of levels and very very few people care to do it. Combine that with people in the air who will "take care of business" (which started on 9/11/2001) and the chance of someone pulling off a successful terrorist attack on a plane is essentially nil. That's what happened to the shoe bomber. And the last hijacking that I'm aware of ended when the plane landed and the police stormed it and saved the "hijacker" from the rest of the passengers who were beating him to death.
Hell, look at what happened over Shanksville, PA, on 9/11. The poor fool who had the job of "guarding the passengers" was tortured with scalding water and beaten - likely to death. He's lucky I wasn't on the plane.
The real issue is the disconnect between company performance and executive pay. We're seeing a lot now of people who run a company into the ground and end up with a golden parachute, anyway. It's doubly insulting when people who make literally 1/1000th the CEO's pay end up with nothing.
My belief is that the real problem is that we're disconnected from the companies that we own. I own stock in a bunch of companies. Through mutual funds. In my Roth IRA. I can't show up at their annual meeting and vote because I don't directly own them.
In the old days, the board really represented the shareholders and shareholders often had bought the shares. As such, they had a closer stake in the company and the outcomes. The idea of a CEO ruining the company and then being compensated for it would have caused the board to be changed at the next annual meeting.
I'm not sure what the solution is but I believe this disconnect is a big part of the problem.
So, what is Congress going to do? Oh, I know. They'll allow this law to "time out" - a law that doesn't allow this, anyway - and then it'll be even more illegal! Yes, it'll be so illegal that......... what? Eric Holder will finally get off his ass and investigate?
Here's what makes this stop. Rather than saying "you no longer have statutory authority to do _______" (which they don't have now, anyway, but stick with me) we need to write a simple law that says "the government may not do ______, and if they do, it'll be a class A felony with a penalty of _______ for all employees involved".
Oh, that's crazy talk! Really? Oddly, any law that restricts non-governmental officials from an activity is written exactly like that. Read through statutory law sometime.
It's only when government is supposedly "restricted" that they conveniently forget penalties. It's time we put them back in. Throw a couple of people in prison and this crap will stop.
Look up the case of a guy named Ryan Frederick. His house was burgled while he was out one day, and the next day it was raided by the police suspecting there was a marijuana grow operation. The burglar wasn't caught.
When raided, he had no plants, I don't know if he ever did. He did have Japanese maples.
If we allow "parallel reconstruction", then police have a different path they can take to investigate crimes, and it's not a pretty path.
I somehow replied to the wrong one. Seafox is right.
Inflation is only good if you have debt since it devalues your debt. If I buy a house at $200,000 with a 30 year mortgage by year 30 the house is worth $400,000 just due to inflation and my mortgage payment at the end is essentially half of what I was paying up front.
If I'm saving money, on the other hand, and the bank is giving me 1% interest then the interest doesn't even cover inflation, so I'm actually losing money. One of the big problems we have right now in the economy is that there's no real way to keep money liquid without it losing value.
When the pipeline was initially turned down Buffett's net worth went up by over $100M in a day due to the railroad. Do the math.
The oil's coming out of Canada one way or another. If we don't buy it, China will. The idea that we can stop the pipeline and that'll make people figure out some other way to get cheap energy is simply naive. At best.
I'm glad we know what he told us. But you can't not prosecute people who undoubtedly did commit crimes because you agree with their stated motives.
So, we're fixing to prosecute those in the NSA who undoubtedly did commit crimes? Didn't the head of the NSA perjure himself before Congress?
See, we don't just have to prosecute everybody, do we?
I say we prosecute Snowden. I mean, just prosecute the hell out of him. I even have the timing for it: right after we prosecute every criminal in government that he exposed.
Kind of like "let him without sin cast the first stone", isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Only in poorly regulated capitalism do entities get too big to fail.
Wrong. Only in poorly regulated capitalism do entities deemed "too big to fail" by the government get propped up and continue doing the exact same stuff that caused them to fail in the first place while generously giving "campaign donations" back from the money given to the by the government.
In a true free market, GM went bankrupt and the pieces were bought by their smarter competitors. In a true free market, the big banks who had a bunch of failed mortgages went bankrupt and the pieces were bought by their smarter competitors.
Crony capitalism isn't the same as capitalism.
But, before hitting Silicon Valley, why not make a stop by the NBA?
I mean, asians and whites are dramatically underrepresented there. I'm sure you see this as a big problem, too.
Right, Jesse?
Um, Jesse?
It's the crappy software. Free isn't cheap enough, especially when you're 5 years too late to the party and a million apps behind.
Or, better yet, raise enough money to fix a real problem.
Right wing affiliation? Are you kidding? That gets you audited these days - look at Dr. Ben Carson as an example.
(inane, clueless trashing of conservatives removed)
If it passes constitutional muster (which the ACA HAS), it is not "tyranny of the majority," it is simply a law YOU don't agree with.
Actually, some parts of it have been upheld by the Supreme Court. Barely. But it's not a tyranny of the majority because the majority of the people in this country are against it. One party pushed it through and now they're delaying parts of it to help stave off losing a lot of elections later this year.
Talking points? I'm not part of the looney left - I have a substitute for "talking points" known as "reality". I would take anything from the whitehouse with a grain of salt.
The federal government has been spending ever more money in order to prop up the GDP (remember that gov't spending is part of the GDP). In reality, the economy has been shrinking for some time except in Washington DC. And, no, we can't continue this forever or even much longer.
Forbes and WSJ pointed this out a couple of years ago:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/re...
If you actually look at how much work is done and actual years worked (not just age) etc. the gap disappears. Actually, according to the summary here there *is* a gap as women get paid more. I'm sure the feminists and looney lefters will want to fix this new problem. Not.
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
It's easy -- because in many ways "science" has become a religion to many. However, many people lack a firm understanding of scientific principles and methods. So, if something looks "science-y" with Latin words, molecular drawings and other intelligent-sounding but hard-to-understand descriptions.
These days people have "faith" in "science"..and if that so-called science goes along with their worldview (which Whole Foods is self-selecting in that a certain worldview makes someone more likely to become a shopper there), then they may blindly accept it. Very few people have the skills and motivation to actually analyze the claims of these manufacturers and just go with their biases when making a decision.
Even the summary brushes on this. We find that the two things that get some people riled up are creationism and climate change denial. Actually, those are things that tend to get left-wingers riled up. A lot of folks also get riled up about, oh, anti-vaccination nuttery, anti-economic-reality nuttery (denying basic market principles), climate change extremism (we have to all give up our cars now to save the planet), green quackery (we have to destroy our nuclear power plants and replace them with wind farms!), etc.
There are plenty of religions in the world and many of them have nothing to do with God or gods.
You've got questions?
Hey, so do we!
Come to think of it I'm probably on the "fuck this guy over" list because of this and similar comments on other forums.
Don't sweat it - if there were such a list I'd be the first name on it. They don't seem to pay any attention to me at the airport.
Whether you agree or disagree with the need for the TSA, the above is a lousy childish argument.
The spinkler system at my office has not put out a single fire. My smoke detector has not once detected smoke.
And that's where your analogy just crashed and burned. Has there been a fire at your office?
There's been a shoe bomber. There's been Smokey the Terrorist who set his underwear on fire (yeah, not from here, but we're spreading our stupidity around the globe).
See, we've had the fires, it's just that our "smoke detector" - the one that costs us billions of dollars while violating our rights, that smoke detector - has demonstrably failed. While they were patting down old ladies and little kids in wheel chairs Richard Reid walked right through.
So, no, not only does it violate our rights, clog up airports, create a far larger security problem (ever see video of the Russian airport security line being bombed?) it has failed to catch at least one terrorist of which we are aware. And other airports using these same stupid policies around the world have likewise failed to catch actual terrorists.
This isn't the least bit surprising to anybody paying attention. Old white ladies don't bomb airplanes, and it's highly unlikely (to the point that it can be safely ignored) that an old Muslim lady would do the same. And, yeah, I know, "white" is a race and "Muslim" is a religion. There are a total of about 5 old white Muslim ladies on the planet. And they wouldn't bomb a plane, either.
So the simple fact is that the TSA has yet to catch a single terrorist, and they've actually failed to detect an actual terrorist. It's not because their policies work - quite the contrary it's because bombing a plane is difficult on a number of levels and very very few people care to do it. Combine that with people in the air who will "take care of business" (which started on 9/11/2001) and the chance of someone pulling off a successful terrorist attack on a plane is essentially nil. That's what happened to the shoe bomber. And the last hijacking that I'm aware of ended when the plane landed and the police stormed it and saved the "hijacker" from the rest of the passengers who were beating him to death.
Hell, look at what happened over Shanksville, PA, on 9/11. The poor fool who had the job of "guarding the passengers" was tortured with scalding water and beaten - likely to death. He's lucky I wasn't on the plane.
You're correct. You can even buy real estate with IRAs in some circumstances.
Do they really expect $20million in annual revenue from WhatsApp to grow to cover that $16billion?
The question is, how does Facebook ever hope to recover the cost?
Obviously in 1000 or so years....
The real issue is the disconnect between company performance and executive pay. We're seeing a lot now of people who run a company into the ground and end up with a golden parachute, anyway. It's doubly insulting when people who make literally 1/1000th the CEO's pay end up with nothing.
My belief is that the real problem is that we're disconnected from the companies that we own. I own stock in a bunch of companies. Through mutual funds. In my Roth IRA. I can't show up at their annual meeting and vote because I don't directly own them.
In the old days, the board really represented the shareholders and shareholders often had bought the shares. As such, they had a closer stake in the company and the outcomes. The idea of a CEO ruining the company and then being compensated for it would have caused the board to be changed at the next annual meeting.
I'm not sure what the solution is but I believe this disconnect is a big part of the problem.
So, what is Congress going to do? Oh, I know. They'll allow this law to "time out" - a law that doesn't allow this, anyway - and then it'll be even more illegal! Yes, it'll be so illegal that......... what? Eric Holder will finally get off his ass and investigate?
Here's what makes this stop. Rather than saying "you no longer have statutory authority to do _______" (which they don't have now, anyway, but stick with me) we need to write a simple law that says "the government may not do ______, and if they do, it'll be a class A felony with a penalty of _______ for all employees involved".
Oh, that's crazy talk! Really? Oddly, any law that restricts non-governmental officials from an activity is written exactly like that. Read through statutory law sometime.
It's only when government is supposedly "restricted" that they conveniently forget penalties. It's time we put them back in. Throw a couple of people in prison and this crap will stop.
A sane ruling on the matter...
and in Florida...
[Update;} I'm back from the window, but I didn't see neither a lake of fire *nor* four horsemen. :\
Because the lake of fire is frozen over....
Their stock opened at 36.97, hovering around 36.25 now. Not a lot of excitement either way for the announcement, but still slightly negative.
Look up the case of a guy named Ryan Frederick. His house was burgled while he was out one day, and the next day it was raided by the police suspecting there was a marijuana grow operation. The burglar wasn't caught.
When raided, he had no plants, I don't know if he ever did. He did have Japanese maples.
If we allow "parallel reconstruction", then police have a different path they can take to investigate crimes, and it's not a pretty path.
I somehow replied to the wrong one. Seafox is right.
Inflation is only good if you have debt since it devalues your debt. If I buy a house at $200,000 with a 30 year mortgage by year 30 the house is worth $400,000 just due to inflation and my mortgage payment at the end is essentially half of what I was paying up front.
If I'm saving money, on the other hand, and the bank is giving me 1% interest then the interest doesn't even cover inflation, so I'm actually losing money. One of the big problems we have right now in the economy is that there's no real way to keep money liquid without it losing value.
I should like to know more about the magical bank where you keep your money.
Bill Gates. As in "Bill Gates, Warren Buffett's friend". As in "Warren Buffett, guy who owns the Burlington-Northern Railroad". Note this part:
"Energy companies are already moving the oil out of Canada by rail."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
When the pipeline was initially turned down Buffett's net worth went up by over $100M in a day due to the railroad. Do the math.
The oil's coming out of Canada one way or another. If we don't buy it, China will. The idea that we can stop the pipeline and that'll make people figure out some other way to get cheap energy is simply naive. At best.
I thought lying to congress was a felony or something? Maybe that's why they're avoiding the L-word?
Well, yeah, if it's something important like whether a baseball player used steroids.
I'm glad we know what he told us. But you can't not prosecute people who undoubtedly did commit crimes because you agree with their stated motives.
So, we're fixing to prosecute those in the NSA who undoubtedly did commit crimes? Didn't the head of the NSA perjure himself before Congress?
See, we don't just have to prosecute everybody, do we?
I say we prosecute Snowden. I mean, just prosecute the hell out of him. I even have the timing for it: right after we prosecute every criminal in government that he exposed.
Kind of like "let him without sin cast the first stone", isn't it?