Here's a thought: we get rid of the unions (especially for white collar workers and people who work for wages substantially higher than the minimum wage), let the moochers get off of the companies, and let's see if America looks like a good place to build a productive workforce.
You have no idea what the working environment was like here in the states before unions, do you?
You said nothing to convince me that the thousands, if not millions of Americans that already go to poorer countries to work some how have it worse when coming back home.
Okay, then let me repeat it: Savings. Retirement. Please do not mentally replace these words with "Not living in a box", please?
The question is not "are they worse off when they come back, compared to when they left". That's the simple paycheck-to-paycheck mentality. The question is "are they worse off versus staying here and working" and the answer is undeniably yes.
A lot of people on the UK's rich list are foreigners and come from Asia.
If you're already rich then none of this matters. The people at IBM who may have to move to India aren't rich, and they certainly aren't going to get rich on 1/3rd the pay.
Ah I see, so you're trying to argue that you aren't losing anything at all by transmuting "building a savings and retirement" into "not living on the streets". Like I just said, if all you care about is living paycheck to paycheck, then fine, this works great. Otherwise, it is costing a lot.
Oh and yes Indians who come to the U.S. can be poor when they arrive, but since by the very nature of the H1-B visa they have a job waiting for them, that's not really a problem for them.
So it's not like you're losing out by doing a stint in India
Yeah, unless you're one of those crazy people who wants to build up savings/retirement funds, and you want this to be a 'stint' not a permanent relocation. In which case you'll find that when you return the savings you built up is worth much less than if you had been employed here.
Lower cost of living mitigates the effect of lower wages. It does not eliminate the loss. Unless you're living check to check today, and want to continue to do so, in which case yes cost of living wherever you happen to be living at the moment is all you need consider.
Heck call me when a product is availible....at ANY price
Sure. You can order it now for the low low price of $3 billion. Shipping time is estimated at 10 years and 7 days with free standard shipping, or 10 years and 3 days with Express Shipping for $15 extra.
Q.Are they blinded by religious zealotry? A.They used children to clear minefields in the Iraq-Iran war, and the only protection they were given were wooden keys to get them into paradise.
That answer really does change everything
No, it doesn't change anything. That's a sign of cold-bloodedness, not religious zealotry. We're talking about what the leaders believe, not what they will use to manipulate the people. Leaders throughout history have used various rationales to motivate the people, rationales they themselves did not necessarily believe. In Stalin's day, the motivation was that if you left your post on the Eastern front, the Commissar would shoot you then and there. Callous use and abuse of one's people is the common theme here. That is not the same as irrational. In fact what Iran did was very rational, though cold blooded.
There is the very real possibility that even though Israel isn't Iran's only enemy that the removal of Israel is their only goal.
No, there is no possibility whatsoever that eliminating Israel is their only goal. What they want is more power for Iran and thus for themselves. Having Iran nuked into oblivion is the complete polar opposite of that goal, no matter which enemy they are able to eliminate in the process. Remember, we agree Iran's leaders are smart? Launching a preemptive strike against Israel would be retarded, not smart. The fear that they will do so is not in any way real, it is nothing more than propaganda.
Support for suicide bombers suggests it is entirely possible that if it cost their nation to eliminate Israel Iran's leadership would consider a victory for Islam and pull the trigger.
Call me when an Iranian leader becomes a suicide bomber, and then that will make a lick of sense. Nations all over the world send their own soldiers or proxy forces into certain death. Having one completely expendable footman -- often not even Iranian -- blow themselves up does not in any way even remotely imply that they would be willing to sacrifice their country just to strike at another. In fact, supporting non-Iranian proxy-force suicide bombers in attacks on Israel is exactly how they fight Israel without risking their own country.
Can you really in good conscience stand idly by and hope that a nation calling for elimination of one of it's neighbors won't use the nuclear arsenal it is building to do exactly what it says it wants to do?
I don't have to hope that they aren't suicidal idiots. That doesn't mean we should stand idly by, it means that MAD will work to fend off any Iranian missile threat. I'd rather that threat not exist, but there's no possible way to mesh the ideas "Iran's leaders are not retards" and "Iran could launch a preemptive strike".
The only way Iran would risk losing their entire country in a nuclear exchange is if their country was already effectively lost. As in, an invading force is on the verge of success. Which means that if they do acquire nukes, nobody will be able to invade them. That is essentially why they want them.
You're the child if your view of the world is so black-and-white that you only see either negotiating always no matter how futile, or never negotiating at all. Choosing when to do one or the other is called discernment. Don't deliberately ignore it. Obama has never said he thinks you can reason with everyone, that's coloring you added based on your own view.
Here's a clue for you: Obama didn't try to negotiate with the Talaban when he authorized a cross-border strike into Pakistan, now did he? Clearly he believes that sometimes negotiation is pointless, and the only ambassador you should send is a laser guided bomb. So much for your childish view of his view.
He's not an idiot. He knows sometimes you can negotiate, and sometimes you can't. He wisely thinks that negotiation should be preferred, and writing off anyone who doesn't immediately cave in to your demands as incapable of being negotiated with is detrimental.
TO me the most important part of the bill is that I'll be able to get another card for a converter, since my last one expired.
Yeah, more funding for the coupon program is a big part. You may be able to get another one regardless, since there's supposed to be two per household. Since an expired coupon's money goes back in the pool, you may luck out and be able to get one.
To people worried that this is just part of a never ending cycle of delays because we'll never have everyone ready for the switch... First, this delay is much shorter than previous delays which moved the roll out date by years, so even if it more delays occur I think we can all see the change is really going to happen. Second, you have to admit that there were problems with the implementation of the roll out. The coupon program was underfunded, and confusion resulted in a lot of people who didn't need converters using coupons to get them -- I remember seeing adds on cable TV that did not specify that having cable meant you didn't need the box. Shortages of converters meant a lot of people who did need the boxes couldn't get them before their coupon expired, then couldn't get a new one because the coupon program was out of money.
Fix those problems, let the extra publicity for the issue reach the public, give it a few months, and we should find that far fewer people are still unprepared. Yes not everyone will be and I'm perfectly happy letting the lazy suffer at that point. This is about fixing the problems the government caused by screwing up the program. If they do in fact fix the problem, they'll get most of the people who weren't ready because of those problems, and then I'll say we'll be ready for the switch.
Otherwise, I was just stopped, and asked what I was doing with the katana. "Going to kenjutsu class" or "Going out to a quiet spot to practice and meditate" were sufficient enough, and more often than not the truth.
The other times, when you were on your way to battle the forces of the evil Tamagotchi Ryu school that was responsible for the death of your true love... well, the police would really rather not know about that anyway. "Let ninja problems stay ninja problems" and everyone is better off, they say.
Well this is the nice thing about the Leatherman (or Gerber if that's your bent) multi-tools. Not that I think of them as a weapon, other than in the sense that anything point/heavy and easy to grip can be a weapon. The locking part is actually a lot more handy when using the screwdrivers.
Box cutters was picked by the airlines because it was one of those things that it actually was legal to bring on an airplane, and they wanted it to be a failure of regulations. In reality, they probably, indeed, had combat knives. But the airlines didn't like that, because it would be their failure to keep illegal weapons off airplanes.
Yeah, that seems sadly accurate.
In fact, there's not actually any evidence they didn't have guns. The passengers on Flight 93 thought they only had knives, but considering their attack failed, it's entirely possible it failed because, duh, they got shot. And even then, no guns on 93 didn't mean there weren't guns elsewhere.
Their attack did not fail. It was about to succeed, which is why the terrorists rolled the plane and made it crash rather than have the passengers regain control. If their attack had failed, the terrorists would have remained in control, and the plane would have reached its destination.
Yeah, well, as reasonable as that is, I hate to say this but no matter what NASA says or does if another shuttle (or whatever manned NASA craft) blows up in the next 10 or even 20 years, that could be it for our manned space program. Our actual (in-)ability to continue operations without a shuttle won't be the reason. The willingness of the astronauts despite knowing and understanding the risks won't enter into it. Public outrage will.
You mention NASA management paying attention to the true risks instead of filling out mountains of paper work to change a bolt. What will actually happen is that they will do both, and blanket the real risks with their own mountains of paper work to make damn sure (complete with verifiable paper trail) that they paid attention to and mitigated those risks. When the Challenger blew up, the political situation pushed them towards launching in spite of the risks. Today, the political situation is pushing them towards making damn sure no more astronauts are lost, and doing everything they can to demonstrate that this is their overriding concern. So they will err on the side of caution.
I'd say it is more like the fact their leaders would think nothing of nuking Israel even if it meant the deaths of 3/4ths of their populations.
MAD doesn't apply when the leaders don't give a crap about the people under them. Our entire strategy for keeping leaders with nuclear weapons in check is the utter certainty that their countries would suffer terrible retribution. I don't believe Iran is affected by this at all. I am equally unsure that North Korea's leaders care about the civilian population. It isn't like in either case there is a chance the civilian population is going to rise up in outrage and displace their government.
What is the point of attaining all of that power, only to have it all erased in a nuclear blast? Not caring about the people they rule is not at all the same as not caring if they have a people to rule at all! Do you think Stalin gave a flying rats ass about his people for their own sake? Ha, not a chance. He intentionally starved more than died in the Holocaust, and burned through more people on the Eastern Front than all the other Allies lost combined. And yet, we were able to count on MAD to keep him and his equally callous successors in check. Because while he didn't care at all about his people as such, he did care about the power they brought him. Having his country lain to waste would eliminate that power.
You can think of the leaders of Iran as similar. They aren't going to go through all the decades-long trouble of solidifying their control of the nation, staving off aggressive neighbors, jockeying with the U.S. and other international powers, in order to build the kind of industrialized nation that can actually build a nuclear deterrent, only to throw it all away by having the entire country bombed into oblivion in response to a nuclear attack. If one quarter of the people even survived, it would still be many decades more before they could return to similar levels of power, if they ever could recover at all. Sure, Israel may be gone, but that's hardly Iran's only enemy and those enemy's would find the post-nuclear-attack Iran an easy target.
Say whatever you want about them, the leaders of Iran are not dumb. If you said you thought they were blinded by religious zealotry, you'd be wrong but I'd at least understand why you think that. Why you think the Iranian leaders would "think nothing" of throwing away their entire power base and all the advantage they had struggled to gain by building nuclear weapons on a whim, I have no idea.
Which is a good thing - because the greatest threat lies along that vector.
What, you don't think there's a reason why Iran is chasing both nuclear and rocketry capability? You don't think it's the same reason North Korea is doing the same? Not to mention Pakistan and India.
Yeah, the reason is because having Nukes On Missiles puts you in the ICBM-having nuclear club and makes anyone around you who may have had a mind to invade you pull back and instead decide to sit down at the negotiating table.
India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran -- they all want ICBMs so they can take part in MAD politics. MAD politics means not using those missiles, only having them as a deterrent to prevent attack.
The idea that any of these countries, including Iran, would use ICBMs in a first strike is ridiculous. Whatever ridiculous notions of religious zealots leading a country down the path of madness you may have, the leaders of Iran are not suicidal. They do not want to be martyrs. They want to increase their power in this world, and that means not having The Islamic Republic wiped out by nuclear retaliation.
The problem is, that solution is only of value to terrorists - its has no deterrent effect and provides zero political or diplomatic value. No country is going to spend billions of dollars on a program with essentially zero return, especially since the potential political, diplomatic, and economic costs of such a program are so high.
It has value for anyone contemplating a first strike. If you're worried about the threat of an Iranian bomb through the vector of an ICBM, beyond simply the political ramifications, then you're worried about a nuke being used, presumably in a first strike. If you actually think that's a possibility from Iran, then the shipping container vector is vastly more likely than an ICBM-based attack. Because there's at least a hope that it won't be traced back to its source, and Iran won't be wiped out.
And for sure there is no way in H E double hockey sticks that we are going to irradiate it and then strap it onto a rocket and shoot it out of the country.
I would have thought that Canadians wouldn't use that particular euphemism due to the unavoidable positive connotations of being associated with hockey. At the very least, I imagine any preacher who wanted Canadians to think of hell as a place to avoid not not use it.
This stone tool is clearly a relic left behind from the Jurassic Elves, whose reign over Earth was ended almost two million years ago by the collision of the Shield of Immortality with the Sword of Penetrating Awesomeness.
Replace the Shield of Immortality with the Shield of Maidenhood, and this story just became way hotter.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a thought: we get rid of the unions (especially for white collar workers and people who work for wages substantially higher than the minimum wage), let the moochers get off of the companies, and let's see if America looks like a good place to build a productive workforce.
You have no idea what the working environment was like here in the states before unions, do you?
You said nothing to convince me that the thousands, if not millions of Americans that already go to poorer countries to work some how have it worse when coming back home.
Okay, then let me repeat it: Savings. Retirement. Please do not mentally replace these words with "Not living in a box", please?
The question is not "are they worse off when they come back, compared to when they left". That's the simple paycheck-to-paycheck mentality. The question is "are they worse off versus staying here and working" and the answer is undeniably yes.
A lot of people on the UK's rich list are foreigners and come from Asia.
If you're already rich then none of this matters. The people at IBM who may have to move to India aren't rich, and they certainly aren't going to get rich on 1/3rd the pay.
Ah I see, so you're trying to argue that you aren't losing anything at all by transmuting "building a savings and retirement" into "not living on the streets". Like I just said, if all you care about is living paycheck to paycheck, then fine, this works great. Otherwise, it is costing a lot.
Oh and yes Indians who come to the U.S. can be poor when they arrive, but since by the very nature of the H1-B visa they have a job waiting for them, that's not really a problem for them.
So it's not like you're losing out by doing a stint in India
Yeah, unless you're one of those crazy people who wants to build up savings/retirement funds, and you want this to be a 'stint' not a permanent relocation. In which case you'll find that when you return the savings you built up is worth much less than if you had been employed here.
Lower cost of living mitigates the effect of lower wages. It does not eliminate the loss. Unless you're living check to check today, and want to continue to do so, in which case yes cost of living wherever you happen to be living at the moment is all you need consider.
Heck call me when a product is availible....at ANY price
Sure. You can order it now for the low low price of $3 billion. Shipping time is estimated at 10 years and 7 days with free standard shipping, or 10 years and 3 days with Express Shipping for $15 extra.
Q.Are they blinded by religious zealotry?
A.They used children to clear minefields in the Iraq-Iran war, and the only protection they were given were wooden keys to get them into paradise.
That answer really does change everything
No, it doesn't change anything. That's a sign of cold-bloodedness, not religious zealotry. We're talking about what the leaders believe, not what they will use to manipulate the people. Leaders throughout history have used various rationales to motivate the people, rationales they themselves did not necessarily believe. In Stalin's day, the motivation was that if you left your post on the Eastern front, the Commissar would shoot you then and there. Callous use and abuse of one's people is the common theme here. That is not the same as irrational. In fact what Iran did was very rational, though cold blooded.
There is the very real possibility that even though Israel isn't Iran's only enemy that the removal of Israel is their only goal.
No, there is no possibility whatsoever that eliminating Israel is their only goal. What they want is more power for Iran and thus for themselves. Having Iran nuked into oblivion is the complete polar opposite of that goal, no matter which enemy they are able to eliminate in the process. Remember, we agree Iran's leaders are smart? Launching a preemptive strike against Israel would be retarded, not smart. The fear that they will do so is not in any way real, it is nothing more than propaganda.
Support for suicide bombers suggests it is entirely possible that if it cost their nation to eliminate Israel Iran's leadership would consider a victory for Islam and pull the trigger.
Call me when an Iranian leader becomes a suicide bomber, and then that will make a lick of sense. Nations all over the world send their own soldiers or proxy forces into certain death. Having one completely expendable footman -- often not even Iranian -- blow themselves up does not in any way even remotely imply that they would be willing to sacrifice their country just to strike at another. In fact, supporting non-Iranian proxy-force suicide bombers in attacks on Israel is exactly how they fight Israel without risking their own country.
Can you really in good conscience stand idly by and hope that a nation calling for elimination of one of it's neighbors won't use the nuclear arsenal it is building to do exactly what it says it wants to do?
I don't have to hope that they aren't suicidal idiots. That doesn't mean we should stand idly by, it means that MAD will work to fend off any Iranian missile threat. I'd rather that threat not exist, but there's no possible way to mesh the ideas "Iran's leaders are not retards" and "Iran could launch a preemptive strike".
The only way Iran would risk losing their entire country in a nuclear exchange is if their country was already effectively lost. As in, an invading force is on the verge of success. Which means that if they do acquire nukes, nobody will be able to invade them. That is essentially why they want them.
"For example, the gadget recognizes products on store shelves and can provide product and price comparison information."
Finally, we've discovered all 6 senses: Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and targeted marketing! =D
Disclaimer:I'm a mmo pvp die-hard, which is why I stayed away from that game.
Yeah, and I want a game that's easy, accessible, and accomodates casual play. Which is why I stay away from WoW. o_O
You're the child if your view of the world is so black-and-white that you only see either negotiating always no matter how futile, or never negotiating at all. Choosing when to do one or the other is called discernment. Don't deliberately ignore it. Obama has never said he thinks you can reason with everyone, that's coloring you added based on your own view.
Here's a clue for you: Obama didn't try to negotiate with the Talaban when he authorized a cross-border strike into Pakistan, now did he? Clearly he believes that sometimes negotiation is pointless, and the only ambassador you should send is a laser guided bomb. So much for your childish view of his view.
He's not an idiot. He knows sometimes you can negotiate, and sometimes you can't. He wisely thinks that negotiation should be preferred, and writing off anyone who doesn't immediately cave in to your demands as incapable of being negotiated with is detrimental.
TO me the most important part of the bill is that I'll be able to get another card for a converter, since my last one expired.
Yeah, more funding for the coupon program is a big part. You may be able to get another one regardless, since there's supposed to be two per household. Since an expired coupon's money goes back in the pool, you may luck out and be able to get one.
To people worried that this is just part of a never ending cycle of delays because we'll never have everyone ready for the switch... First, this delay is much shorter than previous delays which moved the roll out date by years, so even if it more delays occur I think we can all see the change is really going to happen. Second, you have to admit that there were problems with the implementation of the roll out. The coupon program was underfunded, and confusion resulted in a lot of people who didn't need converters using coupons to get them -- I remember seeing adds on cable TV that did not specify that having cable meant you didn't need the box. Shortages of converters meant a lot of people who did need the boxes couldn't get them before their coupon expired, then couldn't get a new one because the coupon program was out of money.
Fix those problems, let the extra publicity for the issue reach the public, give it a few months, and we should find that far fewer people are still unprepared. Yes not everyone will be and I'm perfectly happy letting the lazy suffer at that point. This is about fixing the problems the government caused by screwing up the program. If they do in fact fix the problem, they'll get most of the people who weren't ready because of those problems, and then I'll say we'll be ready for the switch.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to wash out my brain... with some hydrochloric acid.
I thought that was *how* you channeled Jack...
Otherwise, I was just stopped, and asked what I was doing with the katana. "Going to kenjutsu class" or "Going out to a quiet spot to practice and meditate" were sufficient enough, and more often than not the truth.
The other times, when you were on your way to battle the forces of the evil Tamagotchi Ryu school that was responsible for the death of your true love... well, the police would really rather not know about that anyway. "Let ninja problems stay ninja problems" and everyone is better off, they say.
Well this is the nice thing about the Leatherman (or Gerber if that's your bent) multi-tools. Not that I think of them as a weapon, other than in the sense that anything point/heavy and easy to grip can be a weapon. The locking part is actually a lot more handy when using the screwdrivers.
Box cutters was picked by the airlines because it was one of those things that it actually was legal to bring on an airplane, and they wanted it to be a failure of regulations. In reality, they probably, indeed, had combat knives. But the airlines didn't like that, because it would be their failure to keep illegal weapons off airplanes.
Yeah, that seems sadly accurate.
In fact, there's not actually any evidence they didn't have guns. The passengers on Flight 93 thought they only had knives, but considering their attack failed, it's entirely possible it failed because, duh, they got shot. And even then, no guns on 93 didn't mean there weren't guns elsewhere.
Their attack did not fail. It was about to succeed, which is why the terrorists rolled the plane and made it crash rather than have the passengers regain control. If their attack had failed, the terrorists would have remained in control, and the plane would have reached its destination.
Yeah, well, as reasonable as that is, I hate to say this but no matter what NASA says or does if another shuttle (or whatever manned NASA craft) blows up in the next 10 or even 20 years, that could be it for our manned space program. Our actual (in-)ability to continue operations without a shuttle won't be the reason. The willingness of the astronauts despite knowing and understanding the risks won't enter into it. Public outrage will.
You mention NASA management paying attention to the true risks instead of filling out mountains of paper work to change a bolt. What will actually happen is that they will do both, and blanket the real risks with their own mountains of paper work to make damn sure (complete with verifiable paper trail) that they paid attention to and mitigated those risks. When the Challenger blew up, the political situation pushed them towards launching in spite of the risks. Today, the political situation is pushing them towards making damn sure no more astronauts are lost, and doing everything they can to demonstrate that this is their overriding concern. So they will err on the side of caution.
don't you mean that he should be stripped of his grandmother's basement and his MMORPG accounts?
And he should be stripped of his "Chewbacca is my copilot" T-shirt immediately!
Ugh! Oh God! That was a mistake. Put the shirt back on! Put it on! You can keep it, I'm sorry.
Only if you move there.
Get packing. The earth needs you!
You mean, more embarrassing than all the other years you watched a bunch of big sweaty guys in tights slapping each other on the ass for hours?
They aren't slapping ass for hours. There's incidental ass-slapping between bouts of football playing. Here's how it works:
If you're watching a show where it's in the majority football, with occasional ass-slapping, then you're watching the Super Bowl.
If you're watching a show where it's mostly ass-slapping with some football thrown in, then you're watching the DVD classing The Super Bowel.
I'd say it is more like the fact their leaders would think nothing of nuking Israel even if it meant the deaths of 3/4ths of their populations.
MAD doesn't apply when the leaders don't give a crap about the people under them. Our entire strategy for keeping leaders with nuclear weapons in check is the utter certainty that their countries would suffer terrible retribution. I don't believe Iran is affected by this at all. I am equally unsure that North Korea's leaders care about the civilian population. It isn't like in either case there is a chance the civilian population is going to rise up in outrage and displace their government.
What is the point of attaining all of that power, only to have it all erased in a nuclear blast? Not caring about the people they rule is not at all the same as not caring if they have a people to rule at all! Do you think Stalin gave a flying rats ass about his people for their own sake? Ha, not a chance. He intentionally starved more than died in the Holocaust, and burned through more people on the Eastern Front than all the other Allies lost combined. And yet, we were able to count on MAD to keep him and his equally callous successors in check. Because while he didn't care at all about his people as such, he did care about the power they brought him. Having his country lain to waste would eliminate that power.
You can think of the leaders of Iran as similar. They aren't going to go through all the decades-long trouble of solidifying their control of the nation, staving off aggressive neighbors, jockeying with the U.S. and other international powers, in order to build the kind of industrialized nation that can actually build a nuclear deterrent, only to throw it all away by having the entire country bombed into oblivion in response to a nuclear attack. If one quarter of the people even survived, it would still be many decades more before they could return to similar levels of power, if they ever could recover at all. Sure, Israel may be gone, but that's hardly Iran's only enemy and those enemy's would find the post-nuclear-attack Iran an easy target.
Say whatever you want about them, the leaders of Iran are not dumb. If you said you thought they were blinded by religious zealotry, you'd be wrong but I'd at least understand why you think that. Why you think the Iranian leaders would "think nothing" of throwing away their entire power base and all the advantage they had struggled to gain by building nuclear weapons on a whim, I have no idea.
Maybe you should tell your family this isn't the Victorian era anymore.
But they'd already spent so much on their wigs!
Which is a good thing - because the greatest threat lies along that vector.
What, you don't think there's a reason why Iran is chasing both nuclear and rocketry capability? You don't think it's the same reason North Korea is doing the same? Not to mention Pakistan and India.
Yeah, the reason is because having Nukes On Missiles puts you in the ICBM-having nuclear club and makes anyone around you who may have had a mind to invade you pull back and instead decide to sit down at the negotiating table.
India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran -- they all want ICBMs so they can take part in MAD politics. MAD politics means not using those missiles, only having them as a deterrent to prevent attack.
The idea that any of these countries, including Iran, would use ICBMs in a first strike is ridiculous. Whatever ridiculous notions of religious zealots leading a country down the path of madness you may have, the leaders of Iran are not suicidal. They do not want to be martyrs. They want to increase their power in this world, and that means not having The Islamic Republic wiped out by nuclear retaliation.
The problem is, that solution is only of value to terrorists - its has no deterrent effect and provides zero political or diplomatic value. No country is going to spend billions of dollars on a program with essentially zero return, especially since the potential political, diplomatic, and economic costs of such a program are so high.
It has value for anyone contemplating a first strike. If you're worried about the threat of an Iranian bomb through the vector of an ICBM, beyond simply the political ramifications, then you're worried about a nuke being used, presumably in a first strike. If you actually think that's a possibility from Iran, then the shipping container vector is vastly more likely than an ICBM-based attack. Because there's at least a hope that it won't be traced back to its source, and Iran won't be wiped out.
And for sure there is no way in H E double hockey sticks that we are going to irradiate it and then strap it onto a rocket and shoot it out of the country.
I would have thought that Canadians wouldn't use that particular euphemism due to the unavoidable positive connotations of being associated with hockey. At the very least, I imagine any preacher who wanted Canadians to think of hell as a place to avoid not not use it.
No, I think my "colon-ist" pun was too subtle/terrible. :P
This stone tool is clearly a relic left behind from the Jurassic Elves, whose reign over Earth was ended almost two million years ago by the collision of the Shield of Immortality with the Sword of Penetrating Awesomeness.
Replace the Shield of Immortality with the Shield of Maidenhood, and this story just became way hotter.
If anyone needs a colonist I was recently laid off. I can weld and swim well.(You swim to move in zero g right?).
Either I'm completely misunderstanding the term "colonist", or I have no idea why and am frightened to hear that welding may be involved.