I'll just never understand why anyone would care about what covers their feet as long as they are comfortable.
I was converted in the 90s when women started - briefly - wearing trendy "comfortable" shoes. They were so fucking ugly that even *I* noticed that they looked bad. My wife can have a whole shoe room now, as far as I am concerned. Just don't dare have a pair of Birkenstocks in there.
I do eat a lot of cold cereal, simply because it is so fast and easy. But really, I'd love something new every morning. My favorite breakfast is two eggs, sunny side up with a side of rye toast, home fries, and bacon... but even that, I don't order every time I'm out for breakfast.
As for lunch, not only do I eat something different every day - but food actually tastes worse to me if it is something I commonly eat. I'll make a sandwich for lunch a couple of days in a row (because otherwise the lunch meat will go bad), and by the last day, I never want to see a ham (or Lebanon bologna... mmmm) sandwich again - and I will go a few months before buying it again.
On the other hand, clothes are a boring subject for me. I wear jeans almost every day. In the summer, a polo shirt. In the winter, a button-down. Sneakers on the feet - I rotate between two pairs to keep the stink down. I know my sizes, so I can buy online. When I get too fat and my jeans get tight, I lose some weight rather than buy new... such is my hatred of the mall:)
I apparently don't put enough energy into it - but I'm an engineer so I don't have to look nice. I'd probably stress out, too, if I were President or CEO. Find something that looks nice and stick to it.
(As it is now, I usually don't pay much attention to what I'm wearing until my wife says, "Is that what you are wearing?")
Yeah, I grew up in a 60s-era house and it had closets. Never saw a wardrobe until I was much older, and I only owned one when I was living in NYC, where storage space is at a premium... lined a whole wall with Ikea wardrobes... a wall is a waste of precious space:)
Lots of things are a waste of time and resources - or worse. I drive automobiles, despite the horrific toll they take on the environment and our lives. And this is mostly just to improve my standard of living. I keep my house heated to about 70 degrees, when I don't need anywhere near that amount of heat to survive. I eat meat, which costs something like 7 times the amount of grain that is necessary for me to live comfortably. I run the A/C sometimes in the summer, for no reason other than comfort. Occasionally I take a boat ride, for no reason other than pleasure. I just re-did a perfectly livable room in my house because it looked "dated", and I'm going to pull out a perfectly serviceable bathroom for the same reason. I wash my clothes just so they smell nice. I have clothes that I only wear on special occasions. I buy toys that I don't really need. I use disposable batteries. I post on Slashdot. My engineering job is in the microelectronics industry, which is almost entirely composed of sales of consumer toys. You are playing with one of them right now. I waste resources all the time - who the hell am I to judge Sarah Brightman?
Yeah, rocket fuel. It's like a form of kerosene. It doesn't have the punch of hydrogen, but it is much more stable. The Merlin engine used on the Falcon 9 uses the same fuel.
What's this obsession with charity? The $50 million can also pay for hundreds of jobs in the Russian aerospace industry. Those people can then use their salaries to buy houses. Granted, she's quite literally going to be burning a lot of the money, but it's not like it will all just disappear from the economy. Even the rocket fuel is employing oil industry workers.
I did programming (mostly just PHP and VBA, but still...) and Matlab for years on a 13" iBook. Sure, the screen was confining, but at the time I was working remotely most of the time and lugging around a big laptop was a bigger pain than the small screen.
I don't know what screen you have, but you can certainly do better than the standard 1366x768 that your Dell comes with in the 13" form factor. Hell, that's the resolution of the 11" MacBook Air! The 1920x1080 screen, that's going to be very difficult to match in the 13" world. The little Sony Vaio Z might be your only choice - and that would be of questionable utility to anyone over 40.:)
You don't know anyone who has to carry around a laptop on a daily basis? Many people will make some compromises on price or performance to get a small size and low weight. Apple has like 40 or 50% of the profit in laptops now - doesn't that seem to indicate that there is a market for light, pricey laptops with questionable gaming potential?
It's fine not to have an adjustment... until the camber goes too negative. I have no issue with their being a lack of adjustment - I only have an issue with it getting knocked out of alignment and no way to fix it without replacing parts.
I forgot to mention the rear "suspension". It's out of alignment, too - but there's no adjustment for camber. The dealer thought that he might be able to fix it if he "started by replacing the strut". Since camber isn't going to wear out my tires like the front was I'm not even going there.
I don't think a public road can be inherently anything except existing for use by anyone who wishes to do so.
In other words, it is a publicly owned utility?
That doesn't change the fact that bicyclists don't pay squat for public roads
I don't think that's true at all. They aren't allowed on freeways, so those are not in play. Local roads are usually funded through property taxes. State roads usually are funded through gas tax, sales tax, and income tax. The only one of those bikers aren't paying is the gas tax - but neither are electric car owners. Clearly they should all leave the road, too.
they rail against the idea that a greater economic concern (car owners) ought to have a greater right to an ECONOMIC resource (roads) than them
That's what you get when you submit to socialist concepts like publicly owned roads... you have to share the resources with the other voters. Whether you personally feel more entitled to the road or not has very little bearing on your actual rights. You could buy your own road, or purchase rights to use someone else's road on terms you agree with if you'd like to solve this little problem.
My Japanese "suspension" (Toyota Sienna, based on Lexus RX330) pops out of alignment and burns through tires very easily. At $90 per alignment, I have to weigh the cost of new tires against the cost of aligning every 6 months.
The roads here (Philly) are terrible, but I never had this problem with my Chevy Blazer.
That said, the Sienna is a better vehicle in almost every way than the Blazer - I just wish it were more pothole-tolerant.
You are an adult, but you are using public roads. I think the public should be able to regulate the use of it's roads, short of violating your civil rights.
My dad was an EMT. He used to joke that he liked the (motorcycle) helmet laws, because it meant that he could pick up the brain by the strap instead of getting the shovel out. Bicycle injuries are generally much less serious, and I tend to agree that helmet laws are probably unfounded. That said, I think that you should push for the law to be changed - I do not agree that the government has overstepped it's bounds.
I think that is much more reasonable than the current system, though I don't know if we need to bother with the revenue proof part... after all, we don't really care if money is being made or not, and it adds a layer of complexity to the system.
You have opened the definition of gambling up so wide as to become meaningless.
Am I "gambling" that I'll make it to work alive when I get in the car in the morning for my commute?
Most of us use "gambling" to describe a game of chance with no purpose other than to try and make a lot of money using a little. Futures are a tool that let you reduce risk in your day-to-day decision making. Reduction in risk is not usually associated with gambling. The futures market is what makes it possible to buy or sell a contract without inefficient negotiation. Certainly there are gamblers trading futures - I don't think anyone would dispute that. And certainly they add some volatility that is not helpful. On the other hand, they also provide some liquidity and efficiency, which is helpful. The system just needs to be set up to balance these competing interests.
This is what you're not getting. When the trust fund buys bonds, the value is no more gone than if they had put it in annuities or commodities as you suggest (in fact the value is more secure than if it were in annuities or commodities!). Those bonds get paid back. They don't disappear into the ether.
Yes, I am not making myself clear. Sorry.
I know that treasuries are safe investments. I know that the SS Administration will be able to redeem the bonds.
The problem is this: if the SS Administration had purchased - let's just use plain gold for example. If they had purchased 2.7 trillion dollars worth of gold, there would now be an unbelievable pile of gold sitting at Fort Knox, just waiting for the boomers to retire. Instead, they bought government debt. So instead of having a $2.7 trillion asset, this generation has a $2.7 trillion liability.
Boomers would be in a substantially better position saying, "give us our gold, you thieves!" then they are saying, "pay back our debt, you thieves!"
Just because two entities are under the same umbrella does not mean they are one and the same.
This is where "they" fooled you. It does not matter whether they take your money out of your paycheck with FICA next to it or with WITHHOLDING next to it... it all went to the general fund. The "two income streams" both come from your paycheck, they just put them in two different ledgers. But all of that money went into the same fund. The Social Security Trust Fund exists only on paper, and was nothing but a huge scam to kick the obvious problems down the road to the next generation. "Solving" a problem by loading up on debt is not going to work.
The SS trust fund is a separate entity from the Treasury. The fact that they both happen to be part of the federal government has no bearing on the solvency of one versus the other.
I'm not talking about solvency. I'm talking about taking working people's money, telling them that you need to take extra so that they can build up a trust fund for their future, and then spending this extra money. The fact that there is a ledger somewhere saying exactly what is owed does not change the fact that the money is gone.
The Social Security trust fund was set up in 1939. I wasn't around to "fall for" anything -- not even my parents were!
I was referring to the big revamp in '86 IIRC that gave us the current "trust fund".
With a growing population, sometimes you take in more money than you pay out. Should that extra cash just be burned?
My personal preference would be for the payroll tax to be reduced. But barring that, a sensible investment in either annuities or commodities.
Recessions/depressions can suddenly reduce tax income, but retirees will still need their social security. There needs to be a buffer.
That's fine. Base the payroll tax on long term moving average (perhaps 3-5 years). That will produce a small surplus in boom years that can be drawn from in down years.
Changing demographics also require a buffer.
This principle is sound, but they then went and spent the buffer. Also, it just shifts the problem down the road (to their grand-kids instead of their kids). I'd rather have a slow increase of the payroll tax then a sudden crises when the system's "trust fund" inevitably runs out.
People talk as if the money in the trust fund is gone.
It's not "gone", it was never there. They've used it to pay for deficit spending until very recently when the fund stopped growing.
What you're proposing is that I loan $10,000 to my neighbor Mr. Goldman under the premise that, well, my Uncle Sam will still cover any losses because Mr. Goldman is such an important member of the community we can't have him going bankrupt.
No, what I'm suggesting is that you shouldn't have let Uncle Sam have this money in the first place. Or rather, it should have been raised through regular taxes that didn't put your kids into deep debt. If you insist on giving the government all this money to keep you nice and safe, for God's sake don't let him spend it and then turn around and tell you that it is "invested". It's invested in a big filing cabinet full of paper. Sure, they are Treasury Bonds... very safe investment. Do you think you'll ever be allowed to cash them in? I think not. At least, not before inflation renders them worth a lot less.
If I take my life savings of $500,000 and buy bonds, I'm not suddenly broke. I have $500,000 in bonds (and at the end of a few years of interest payments, I'll have even more).
They government did not "buy bonds". They bought their own bonds and then spent the money. The analog is that you took your life savings of $500,000, wrote yourself an IOU, and then spent the money. Sure, you have a piece of paper that says $500,000 - but that doesn't mean you'll ever see it.
In the case of SS, I have no doubt that they will draw down the fund.... and finance that activity with more bonds, but on the other side of the Treasury balance sheet. Or worse, they'll print some more money and pay it off with that. By the time they are done, you'll get your promised $1800/month or whatever - but it will be seriously devalued and your kids will still be in debt.
But you act as if the government spends money by burning it, and we never see a positive benefit at all.
That is not my contention. I actually think debt can be a very good thing. Large capital projects should probably b
Slashdot Mirror
Hell I had to Google WTF a Birkenstock was
God you are making me feel old.
Well, it's lost opportunity then :)
I'll just never understand why anyone would care about what covers their feet as long as they are comfortable.
I was converted in the 90s when women started - briefly - wearing trendy "comfortable" shoes. They were so fucking ugly that even *I* noticed that they looked bad. My wife can have a whole shoe room now, as far as I am concerned. Just don't dare have a pair of Birkenstocks in there.
I do eat a lot of cold cereal, simply because it is so fast and easy. But really, I'd love something new every morning. My favorite breakfast is two eggs, sunny side up with a side of rye toast, home fries, and bacon... but even that, I don't order every time I'm out for breakfast.
As for lunch, not only do I eat something different every day - but food actually tastes worse to me if it is something I commonly eat. I'll make a sandwich for lunch a couple of days in a row (because otherwise the lunch meat will go bad), and by the last day, I never want to see a ham (or Lebanon bologna... mmmm) sandwich again - and I will go a few months before buying it again.
On the other hand, clothes are a boring subject for me. I wear jeans almost every day. In the summer, a polo shirt. In the winter, a button-down. Sneakers on the feet - I rotate between two pairs to keep the stink down. I know my sizes, so I can buy online. When I get too fat and my jeans get tight, I lose some weight rather than buy new... such is my hatred of the mall :)
I apparently don't put enough energy into it - but I'm an engineer so I don't have to look nice. I'd probably stress out, too, if I were President or CEO. Find something that looks nice and stick to it.
(As it is now, I usually don't pay much attention to what I'm wearing until my wife says, "Is that what you are wearing?")
Yeah, I grew up in a 60s-era house and it had closets. Never saw a wardrobe until I was much older, and I only owned one when I was living in NYC, where storage space is at a premium... lined a whole wall with Ikea wardrobes... a wall is a waste of precious space :)
Lots of things are a waste of time and resources - or worse. I drive automobiles, despite the horrific toll they take on the environment and our lives. And this is mostly just to improve my standard of living. I keep my house heated to about 70 degrees, when I don't need anywhere near that amount of heat to survive. I eat meat, which costs something like 7 times the amount of grain that is necessary for me to live comfortably. I run the A/C sometimes in the summer, for no reason other than comfort. Occasionally I take a boat ride, for no reason other than pleasure. I just re-did a perfectly livable room in my house because it looked "dated", and I'm going to pull out a perfectly serviceable bathroom for the same reason. I wash my clothes just so they smell nice. I have clothes that I only wear on special occasions. I buy toys that I don't really need. I use disposable batteries. I post on Slashdot. My engineering job is in the microelectronics industry, which is almost entirely composed of sales of consumer toys. You are playing with one of them right now. I waste resources all the time - who the hell am I to judge Sarah Brightman?
It's not the broken window fallacy unless I break the rocket to build a new one. This is building a new window for new construction.
Yeah, rocket fuel. It's like a form of kerosene. It doesn't have the punch of hydrogen, but it is much more stable. The Merlin engine used on the Falcon 9 uses the same fuel.
What's this obsession with charity? The $50 million can also pay for hundreds of jobs in the Russian aerospace industry. Those people can then use their salaries to buy houses. Granted, she's quite literally going to be burning a lot of the money, but it's not like it will all just disappear from the economy. Even the rocket fuel is employing oil industry workers.
I did programming (mostly just PHP and VBA, but still...) and Matlab for years on a 13" iBook. Sure, the screen was confining, but at the time I was working remotely most of the time and lugging around a big laptop was a bigger pain than the small screen.
I don't know what screen you have, but you can certainly do better than the standard 1366x768 that your Dell comes with in the 13" form factor. Hell, that's the resolution of the 11" MacBook Air! The 1920x1080 screen, that's going to be very difficult to match in the 13" world. The little Sony Vaio Z might be your only choice - and that would be of questionable utility to anyone over 40. :)
You don't know anyone who has to carry around a laptop on a daily basis? Many people will make some compromises on price or performance to get a small size and low weight. Apple has like 40 or 50% of the profit in laptops now - doesn't that seem to indicate that there is a market for light, pricey laptops with questionable gaming potential?
I wonder if anyone has actually put that together in real-life. It would be pretty cool...
It's fine not to have an adjustment... until the camber goes too negative. I have no issue with their being a lack of adjustment - I only have an issue with it getting knocked out of alignment and no way to fix it without replacing parts.
I forgot to mention the rear "suspension". It's out of alignment, too - but there's no adjustment for camber. The dealer thought that he might be able to fix it if he "started by replacing the strut". Since camber isn't going to wear out my tires like the front was I'm not even going there.
I don't think a public road can be inherently anything except existing for use by anyone who wishes to do so.
In other words, it is a publicly owned utility?
That doesn't change the fact that bicyclists don't pay squat for public roads
I don't think that's true at all. They aren't allowed on freeways, so those are not in play. Local roads are usually funded through property taxes. State roads usually are funded through gas tax, sales tax, and income tax. The only one of those bikers aren't paying is the gas tax - but neither are electric car owners. Clearly they should all leave the road, too.
they rail against the idea that a greater economic concern (car owners) ought to have a greater right to an ECONOMIC resource (roads) than them
That's what you get when you submit to socialist concepts like publicly owned roads... you have to share the resources with the other voters. Whether you personally feel more entitled to the road or not has very little bearing on your actual rights. You could buy your own road, or purchase rights to use someone else's road on terms you agree with if you'd like to solve this little problem.
My Japanese "suspension" (Toyota Sienna, based on Lexus RX330) pops out of alignment and burns through tires very easily. At $90 per alignment, I have to weigh the cost of new tires against the cost of aligning every 6 months.
The roads here (Philly) are terrible, but I never had this problem with my Chevy Blazer.
That said, the Sienna is a better vehicle in almost every way than the Blazer - I just wish it were more pothole-tolerant.
Aren't public roads inherently socialist?
You are an adult, but you are using public roads. I think the public should be able to regulate the use of it's roads, short of violating your civil rights.
My dad was an EMT. He used to joke that he liked the (motorcycle) helmet laws, because it meant that he could pick up the brain by the strap instead of getting the shovel out. Bicycle injuries are generally much less serious, and I tend to agree that helmet laws are probably unfounded. That said, I think that you should push for the law to be changed - I do not agree that the government has overstepped it's bounds.
I think that is much more reasonable than the current system, though I don't know if we need to bother with the revenue proof part... after all, we don't really care if money is being made or not, and it adds a layer of complexity to the system.
It's worse than that. The federal politicians are also mostly lawyers. Obama and Romney both have a J.D.
It's a monoculture, and I don't care how much you like lawyers, a monoculture is not good for the country.
You have opened the definition of gambling up so wide as to become meaningless.
Am I "gambling" that I'll make it to work alive when I get in the car in the morning for my commute?
Most of us use "gambling" to describe a game of chance with no purpose other than to try and make a lot of money using a little. Futures are a tool that let you reduce risk in your day-to-day decision making. Reduction in risk is not usually associated with gambling. The futures market is what makes it possible to buy or sell a contract without inefficient negotiation. Certainly there are gamblers trading futures - I don't think anyone would dispute that. And certainly they add some volatility that is not helpful. On the other hand, they also provide some liquidity and efficiency, which is helpful. The system just needs to be set up to balance these competing interests.
This is what you're not getting. When the trust fund buys bonds, the value is no more gone than if they had put it in annuities or commodities as you suggest (in fact the value is more secure than if it were in annuities or commodities!). Those bonds get paid back. They don't disappear into the ether.
Yes, I am not making myself clear. Sorry.
I know that treasuries are safe investments. I know that the SS Administration will be able to redeem the bonds.
The problem is this: if the SS Administration had purchased - let's just use plain gold for example. If they had purchased 2.7 trillion dollars worth of gold, there would now be an unbelievable pile of gold sitting at Fort Knox, just waiting for the boomers to retire. Instead, they bought government debt. So instead of having a $2.7 trillion asset, this generation has a $2.7 trillion liability.
Boomers would be in a substantially better position saying, "give us our gold, you thieves!" then they are saying, "pay back our debt, you thieves!"
Just because two entities are under the same umbrella does not mean they are one and the same.
This is where "they" fooled you. It does not matter whether they take your money out of your paycheck with FICA next to it or with WITHHOLDING next to it... it all went to the general fund. The "two income streams" both come from your paycheck, they just put them in two different ledgers. But all of that money went into the same fund. The Social Security Trust Fund exists only on paper, and was nothing but a huge scam to kick the obvious problems down the road to the next generation. "Solving" a problem by loading up on debt is not going to work.
Get grilling!
The SS trust fund is a separate entity from the Treasury. The fact that they both happen to be part of the federal government has no bearing on the solvency of one versus the other.
I'm not talking about solvency. I'm talking about taking working people's money, telling them that you need to take extra so that they can build up a trust fund for their future, and then spending this extra money. The fact that there is a ledger somewhere saying exactly what is owed does not change the fact that the money is gone.
The Social Security trust fund was set up in 1939. I wasn't around to "fall for" anything -- not even my parents were!
I was referring to the big revamp in '86 IIRC that gave us the current "trust fund".
With a growing population, sometimes you take in more money than you pay out. Should that extra cash just be burned?
My personal preference would be for the payroll tax to be reduced. But barring that, a sensible investment in either annuities or commodities.
Recessions/depressions can suddenly reduce tax income, but retirees will still need their social security. There needs to be a buffer.
That's fine. Base the payroll tax on long term moving average (perhaps 3-5 years). That will produce a small surplus in boom years that can be drawn from in down years.
Changing demographics also require a buffer.
This principle is sound, but they then went and spent the buffer. Also, it just shifts the problem down the road (to their grand-kids instead of their kids). I'd rather have a slow increase of the payroll tax then a sudden crises when the system's "trust fund" inevitably runs out.
People talk as if the money in the trust fund is gone.
It's not "gone", it was never there. They've used it to pay for deficit spending until very recently when the fund stopped growing.
What you're proposing is that I loan $10,000 to my neighbor Mr. Goldman under the premise that, well, my Uncle Sam will still cover any losses because Mr. Goldman is such an important member of the community we can't have him going bankrupt.
No, what I'm suggesting is that you shouldn't have let Uncle Sam have this money in the first place. Or rather, it should have been raised through regular taxes that didn't put your kids into deep debt. If you insist on giving the government all this money to keep you nice and safe, for God's sake don't let him spend it and then turn around and tell you that it is "invested". It's invested in a big filing cabinet full of paper. Sure, they are Treasury Bonds... very safe investment. Do you think you'll ever be allowed to cash them in? I think not. At least, not before inflation renders them worth a lot less.
If I take my life savings of $500,000 and buy bonds, I'm not suddenly broke. I have $500,000 in bonds (and at the end of a few years of interest payments, I'll have even more).
They government did not "buy bonds". They bought their own bonds and then spent the money. The analog is that you took your life savings of $500,000, wrote yourself an IOU, and then spent the money. Sure, you have a piece of paper that says $500,000 - but that doesn't mean you'll ever see it.
In the case of SS, I have no doubt that they will draw down the fund.... and finance that activity with more bonds, but on the other side of the Treasury balance sheet. Or worse, they'll print some more money and pay it off with that. By the time they are done, you'll get your promised $1800/month or whatever - but it will be seriously devalued and your kids will still be in debt.
But you act as if the government spends money by burning it, and we never see a positive benefit at all.
That is not my contention. I actually think debt can be a very good thing. Large capital projects should probably b
if prototypical inheritance is so great, why does almost everyone write a class-like wrapper around it to make it useful?
Probably because they haven't read this.