Anyone else find it ironic that these rulers enslaved entire races of people for generations to build gigantic pyramids so that they would never be forgotten only to have grave robbers steal everything and Western archaeologists show up thousands of years later asking, "Who the fuck were you?"
Nitpicking but you are doubly wrong... As far as I know the pyramids were not built by slaves. The XVIII dynasty occurred roughly 1000 years after the pyramids were built, when Egyptian rulers were being buried in the valley of the kings.
The average Egyptian probably loved their king in the same way than your average catholic love his pope. They built these tombs (and maintained them for thousands of years) with love and care.
When you can figure out an economic system where government programs aren't funded by taxes, and government workers don't get paid by taxes, and when it's shown to work better than, say, anarchy, we can come back to this discussion. Until then it's just you bitching meaninglessly, all the while taking for granted every service that taxes pay for. Sure, much revenue from taxes is misused, but much of it *isn't.*
That system exists. It is called capitalism. It worked great for the first decades of U.S. history and can work again... in theory AND in practice. Taxes were non existent or much less in earlier history. There was no *constitutional* federal income tax until the 16th amendment (passed in 1913), and that was only 1-7% (1913 1040 form).
For pragmatic reasons tax funded services are bad (nearly all of them can be much more efficaciously be provided by the free market) and for moral reasons taxes are bad (anyway you want to cut it taxation IS slavery).
No troll. And look at user id before calling people noobs. Some of your taxes are going to things I care for, but a) some of my taxes are going to things I DON'T care for, b) of most of the taxes that are going to things I care for: I'd still prefer alternative means of funding over the coercive nature of taxes and c) I DON'T want to spend YOUR taxes, I'd be perfectly content if there were no taxes (or at least much, much less of them).
Even that 3 hours to charge up are not too onerous for a long trip. At 70 mph, 250 miles equals a bit over 3 1/2 hours, which is a good period to drive before stepping for a bathroom break and some food, sure, you have to make your stops for 3 hours instead of just 1. I think this is getting very close, make the range a bit higher and the charging a bit shorter to where you have to stop (let's say) for 2 hours every 5 hours of driving and you've got it.
A very good point! I personally would be happy to have some of my taxes go towards a high-tech train system in our city, connecting distant parts of town as well as other cities.
Let me translate: I personally would be happy to have some of my and YOUR taxes go towards a high-tech train system in our city, connecting distant parts of town as well as other cities.
Please stop spending my money.
the thought of voting for that particular candidate may make me unwell for days on end, but I have to do it.
First of all... most of us don't live in swing states, so a protest vote for a third party counts much more (in visibility of dissatisfaction) than a vote for either the likely winner or loser in your state. No reason to vote for Hillary there.
Even if you live in a swing state... the small difference my vote may make in getting another Republican elected is most definitely not worth the Maalox I'll have to take for weeks after giving my vote to that power-hungry, poor excuse for a human being that is Hillary. And I still have my protest vote
I must say though, in the interest of full disclosure that though I'm a strong Objectivist I also support, vote and have run (once for State Assembly and once for State Senate) as a Libertarian.
Frankly from personal experience most Libertarians are excellent human beings (in all senses of the word), many who run are unqualified by inexperience and ideas that are not too practical, mostly lacking in a good, solid implementation plan to get us out of our current mess without tipping things into an armed revolt or the side effects felt when they attempt to make change too sudden (e.g. letting all non violent drug offenders on the street overnight, firing the thousands of government employees overnight, etc). I still vote and recommend that you vote and support your Libertarian organization... until the day comes when the two parties are the Libertarian and the Objectivist
Then how about getting some guts and voting to your convictions. Vote for the Libertarian candidate (assuming you are lucky enough to a) be in a place where they get ballot access and b) don't get burdened with one of the many loony (and unelectable) libertarians that make up the movement).
And yeah, I'm aware that Objectivism is at odds with Libertarianism according to the orthodoxy, but still, until there is an Objectivist party the LP comes damn close.
Most of the problems of the world can be traced to the fact that we have 6 billion humans instead of 1 billion humans. If there were only a billion of us, the world would be an abundant paradise.
the aztec and incan ruling classes were not happy at the arrival of new technology and unseen phenomena like the gun, the cannon, heavy metal swords, heavy metal shields, the horse, syphilis, and smallpox. the arrival was unplanned and overwhelming. but however unhappy they were at the arrival of such things, it did not change the fact that it spelled their quick and certain doom
Small correction: Smallpox (together with chicken pox, bubonic plague, malaria, and many others) went from Europeans to Native Americans. Syphilis is one of the few that went the other way.
Emhhh... please specify, that's only Core inflation, which doesn't take into account a huge amount of the economy. Core inflation is government's attempt at pretending that printing out bills is not inflationary. Core inflation does not take into account energy (I was paying $2.00 for gas not too long ago, now I'm paying $3.50...) My food bills are larger than they were a few years ago. I don't know if this measurement includes housing, but I've heard from others that the current housing "boom" is not a boom but actually taking steam off from the inflationary pressure of the 50 trillion in debt that our fiscally conservative government has borrowed.
Terrorism can only be diminished by not having people who hate you.
Let me amend that a bit:
Terrorism can only be diminished by not having people who hate you enough to kill themselves over it.
Islamic terrorists hate people of other religions particularly secularists, that's a fact, communists hate capitalists, that's a fact. We cannot eliminate this hate, because it is based on irrational arguments (faith, passion).
What we can eliminate (or at least reduce) are the additional incentives that terrorists have. OBL would have had much harder time recruiting terrorists if he was not armed with the very convincing arguments that the U.S., with its extreme foreign interventions are causing much strife throughout the world. In the same way that the Cuban embargo is used by the Cuban government to prove the evil of the U.S., the Iraqi war, and U.S. intervention in the middle east is used by terrorists to prove the evil of the U.S.
I have a U10 (512K), I think it's the predecessor of yours. Originally we were screwed and there was only an MTP version in the U.S. they've since (due to many complaints) added a USB version of the firmware. Once installed you still have to go through the pain of running a program called easypmp after you copy files to it in order to get the indexing to work correctly. I have no idea if your model has a USB version of the firmware.
I bought mine originally because it was one of the few players that can play ogg (plus it looks really cool) but I'm still a bit disapointed that another important feature for me is still missing: proper gapless playback. It is hard to listen to classical music (or Pink Floyd) with gaps in between the tracks).
Except that in this particular election, I support Ron Paul before the primaries and after the primaries on the snowball's chance that he gets through. He's a much more credible candidate than any of the Libertarians running. If he looses the primary then I'll obviously support the Libertarian Candidate... hoping we don't get a one-issue candidate (such as Kubby).
I wish that tech support centers had a special phone line, you call and answer a few technical questions about the product, if your answers are correct you get to talk to a second tier person directly. This would ensure that people who need to be asked if their computer is plugged in get to the cheap, first tier support and geeks get to talk to someone who actually nows their product.
I can't count the number of times I've spent hours on the phone just trying to get to the person who can fix the problem. With surewest I once spent days figuring out a problem and I endede up having to prove to them that they were filtering UDP DNS packets (using nmap), once I got to the person that knew something it took 5 minutes to fix.
I've thought that a different arrangement for a constitutional government may be to have a legislative body divided in three: one body elected by the people on a one-to-one vote, one body elected by the states (like the senate was before the 17th ammendment) and one elected by taxpayers (one dollar, one vote), this last one would have ultimate veto over any expenses. Make the flow of money into politics obvious that way.
I saw this game played at the very touristy spot of Xel-ha (near Cancun, Mexico). It is amazingly exciting and fast paced, though they've removed the ancient incentive for the winners to get their head chopped-off. A well made computer game based on it would be very cool to see.
Because the US currency is no longer backed by anything of actual value (like gold), the people who control the currency (the power elite) can simply print money out of thin air to serve their agenda. And that is exactly what they do. When you have X dollars in circulation, and you print Y more dollars out of thin air (with nothing of actual value to back them up) and inject those dollars into the circulation, what happens? It's not rocket science. The value of the dollar goes down, due to the principle of supply and demand. Dollars are now more common (less scarce), and therefore less valuable.
Which is why I think we should just use leaves as currency, as our friends of the B-Ark did.
Very interesting!
I've had discussions about the current housing "boom", one theory and how it won't really crash (though it may adjust) because it isn't really a boom, but it is instead just the way that inflation is showing up.
If I'm not mistaken, though IANAE [Economist], after switching from the Gold Standard, the current currency system was designed to devalue over time.
hee, hee, you fell into the trap. By removing the gold standard we opened wider the flood gates of government borrowing to increase the size of government. They can print all the paper they want now, which means that they can spend more. This is nothing more than a tax to be payed on the future, plus interest, meanwhile, inflation means that the value of the money you have is reduced, because of conservation of "energy" what's really happening is that the value of the money you had is being siphoned off into more government growth.
and I loved having that big fat "ENTER" key right where it was under the index finger. (Don't understand *what* possessed HP to dump that idea in later models...)
The same thing that made them dump the opening book of the 28sx, space for many more keys, much easier to use.
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Anyone else find it ironic that these rulers enslaved entire races of people for generations to build gigantic pyramids so that they would never be forgotten only to have grave robbers steal everything and Western archaeologists show up thousands of years later asking, "Who the fuck were you?"
Nitpicking but you are doubly wrong... As far as I know the pyramids were not built by slaves. The XVIII dynasty occurred roughly 1000 years after the pyramids were built, when Egyptian rulers were being buried in the valley of the kings.
The average Egyptian probably loved their king in the same way than your average catholic love his pope. They built these tombs (and maintained them for thousands of years) with love and care.
When you can figure out an economic system where government programs aren't funded by taxes, and government workers don't get paid by taxes, and when it's shown to work better than, say, anarchy, we can come back to this discussion. Until then it's just you bitching meaninglessly, all the while taking for granted every service that taxes pay for. Sure, much revenue from taxes is misused, but much of it *isn't.*
That system exists. It is called capitalism. It worked great for the first decades of U.S. history and can work again... in theory AND in practice. Taxes were non existent or much less in earlier history. There was no *constitutional* federal income tax until the 16th amendment (passed in 1913), and that was only 1-7% (1913 1040 form).
For pragmatic reasons tax funded services are bad (nearly all of them can be much more efficaciously be provided by the free market) and for moral reasons taxes are bad (anyway you want to cut it taxation IS slavery).
No troll. And look at user id before calling people noobs. Some of your taxes are going to things I care for, but a) some of my taxes are going to things I DON'T care for, b) of most of the taxes that are going to things I care for: I'd still prefer alternative means of funding over the coercive nature of taxes and c) I DON'T want to spend YOUR taxes, I'd be perfectly content if there were no taxes (or at least much, much less of them).
Even that 3 hours to charge up are not too onerous for a long trip. At 70 mph, 250 miles equals a bit over 3 1/2 hours, which is a good period to drive before stepping for a bathroom break and some food, sure, you have to make your stops for 3 hours instead of just 1. I think this is getting very close, make the range a bit higher and the charging a bit shorter to where you have to stop (let's say) for 2 hours every 5 hours of driving and you've got it.
A very good point! I personally would be happy to have some of my taxes go towards a high-tech train system in our city, connecting distant parts of town as well as other cities.
Let me translate: I personally would be happy to have some of my and YOUR taxes go towards a high-tech train system in our city, connecting distant parts of town as well as other cities.
Please stop spending my money.
the thought of voting for that particular candidate may make me unwell for days on end, but I have to do it.
First of all... most of us don't live in swing states, so a protest vote for a third party counts much more (in visibility of dissatisfaction) than a vote for either the likely winner or loser in your state. No reason to vote for Hillary there.
Even if you live in a swing state... the small difference my vote may make in getting another Republican elected is most definitely not worth the Maalox I'll have to take for weeks after giving my vote to that power-hungry, poor excuse for a human being that is Hillary. And I still have my protest vote
I must say though, in the interest of full disclosure that though I'm a strong Objectivist I also support, vote and have run (once for State Assembly and once for State Senate) as a Libertarian.
Frankly from personal experience most Libertarians are excellent human beings (in all senses of the word), many who run are unqualified by inexperience and ideas that are not too practical, mostly lacking in a good, solid implementation plan to get us out of our current mess without tipping things into an armed revolt or the side effects felt when they attempt to make change too sudden (e.g. letting all non violent drug offenders on the street overnight, firing the thousands of government employees overnight, etc). I still vote and recommend that you vote and support your Libertarian organization... until the day comes when the two parties are the Libertarian and the Objectivist
Then how about getting some guts and voting to your convictions. Vote for the Libertarian candidate (assuming you are lucky enough to a) be in a place where they get ballot access and b) don't get burdened with one of the many loony (and unelectable) libertarians that make up the movement). And yeah, I'm aware that Objectivism is at odds with Libertarianism according to the orthodoxy, but still, until there is an Objectivist party the LP comes damn close.
Funny that you'd consider voting for Hillary given your signature... somehow I don't see Hillary as Dagny
Or colimate the tachyon beam... or assert a graviton pulse? I'm sure any of those would work.
Most of the problems of the world can be traced to the fact that we have 6 billion humans instead of 1 billion humans. If there were only a billion of us, the world would be an abundant paradise.
Are you volunteering to get off?
the aztec and incan ruling classes were not happy at the arrival of new technology and unseen phenomena like the gun, the cannon, heavy metal swords, heavy metal shields, the horse, syphilis, and smallpox. the arrival was unplanned and overwhelming. but however unhappy they were at the arrival of such things, it did not change the fact that it spelled their quick and certain doom
Small correction: Smallpox (together with chicken pox, bubonic plague, malaria, and many others) went from Europeans to Native Americans. Syphilis is one of the few that went the other way.
I have no idea about the poster's keyboard, but in my keyboard (Dvorak) N is immediately below R!
Yeah, except inflation is down.
Emhhh... please specify, that's only Core inflation, which doesn't take into account a huge amount of the economy. Core inflation is government's attempt at pretending that printing out bills is not inflationary. Core inflation does not take into account energy (I was paying $2.00 for gas not too long ago, now I'm paying $3.50...) My food bills are larger than they were a few years ago. I don't know if this measurement includes housing, but I've heard from others that the current housing "boom" is not a boom but actually taking steam off from the inflationary pressure of the 50 trillion in debt that our fiscally conservative government has borrowed.
Terrorism can only be diminished by not having people who hate you.
Let me amend that a bit:
Terrorism can only be diminished by not having people who hate you enough to kill themselves over it.
Islamic terrorists hate people of other religions particularly secularists, that's a fact, communists hate capitalists, that's a fact. We cannot eliminate this hate, because it is based on irrational arguments (faith, passion).
What we can eliminate (or at least reduce) are the additional incentives that terrorists have. OBL would have had much harder time recruiting terrorists if he was not armed with the very convincing arguments that the U.S., with its extreme foreign interventions are causing much strife throughout the world. In the same way that the Cuban embargo is used by the Cuban government to prove the evil of the U.S., the Iraqi war, and U.S. intervention in the middle east is used by terrorists to prove the evil of the U.S.
I have a U10 (512K), I think it's the predecessor of yours. Originally we were screwed and there was only an MTP version in the U.S. they've since (due to many complaints) added a USB version of the firmware. Once installed you still have to go through the pain of running a program called easypmp after you copy files to it in order to get the indexing to work correctly. I have no idea if your model has a USB version of the firmware.
I bought mine originally because it was one of the few players that can play ogg (plus it looks really cool) but I'm still a bit disapointed that another important feature for me is still missing: proper gapless playback. It is hard to listen to classical music (or Pink Floyd) with gaps in between the tracks).
Double that number of points if the language is Esperanto. Cxu ne?
Except that in this particular election, I support Ron Paul before the primaries and after the primaries on the snowball's chance that he gets through. He's a much more credible candidate than any of the Libertarians running. If he looses the primary then I'll obviously support the Libertarian Candidate... hoping we don't get a one-issue candidate (such as Kubby).
I wish that tech support centers had a special phone line, you call and answer a few technical questions about the product, if your answers are correct you get to talk to a second tier person directly. This would ensure that people who need to be asked if their computer is plugged in get to the cheap, first tier support and geeks get to talk to someone who actually nows their product. I can't count the number of times I've spent hours on the phone just trying to get to the person who can fix the problem. With surewest I once spent days figuring out a problem and I endede up having to prove to them that they were filtering UDP DNS packets (using nmap), once I got to the person that knew something it took 5 minutes to fix.
I've thought that a different arrangement for a constitutional government may be to have a legislative body divided in three: one body elected by the people on a one-to-one vote, one body elected by the states (like the senate was before the 17th ammendment) and one elected by taxpayers (one dollar, one vote), this last one would have ultimate veto over any expenses. Make the flow of money into politics obvious that way.
I saw this game played at the very touristy spot of Xel-ha (near Cancun, Mexico). It is amazingly exciting and fast paced, though they've removed the ancient incentive for the winners to get their head chopped-off. A well made computer game based on it would be very cool to see.
Because the US currency is no longer backed by anything of actual value (like gold), the people who control the currency (the power elite) can simply print money out of thin air to serve their agenda. And that is exactly what they do. When you have X dollars in circulation, and you print Y more dollars out of thin air (with nothing of actual value to back them up) and inject those dollars into the circulation, what happens? It's not rocket science. The value of the dollar goes down, due to the principle of supply and demand. Dollars are now more common (less scarce), and therefore less valuable.
Which is why I think we should just use leaves as currency, as our friends of the B-Ark did.
Very interesting!
I've had discussions about the current housing "boom", one theory and how it won't really crash (though it may adjust) because it isn't really a boom, but it is instead just the way that inflation is showing up.
If I'm not mistaken, though IANAE [Economist], after switching from the Gold Standard, the current currency system was designed to devalue over time.
hee, hee, you fell into the trap. By removing the gold standard we opened wider the flood gates of government borrowing to increase the size of government. They can print all the paper they want now, which means that they can spend more. This is nothing more than a tax to be payed on the future, plus interest, meanwhile, inflation means that the value of the money you have is reduced, because of conservation of "energy" what's really happening is that the value of the money you had is being siphoned off into more government growth.
and I loved having that big fat "ENTER" key right where it was under the index finger. (Don't understand *what* possessed HP to dump that idea in later models...)
The same thing that made them dump the opening book of the 28sx, space for many more keys, much easier to use.
And to quote Carl Sagan, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
I'll take your quote and raise: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"