I buy unlimited, and I've hit many tens of GB downloading entire ftp sites of old software for win95 and such, like ftp.sac.sk. However I don't know what the actual limits are, or what they feel they should be. If they gave me a quota of 10GB/mo or 100GB/mo or 1000GB/mo, I'd pretty much hit that quota every month. Say I have 4 days left, my quota is 100GB/mo, and my total usage is 55GB so far, I'd pretty much download all kinds of ISO files for the remaining 45 GB nonstop, just because that's the quota. So this kind of behavior is what they are trying to avoid, by not giving a quota, and instead let users use what they need. There might be some doctor watching x-ray videos of patients at really high resolutions at home and making diagnoses in he evening before he goes to sleep, postpones some and makes the diagnoses when he wakes up, after sleeping over them, at say 5 TB/mo, coming from the nearby hospital through the same isp service, say Time Warner Cable, without tracerouting through other corporations networks in other cities, such as AT&T. Since it's a doctor helping the local community, and he does need that kind of bandwidth, the cable company would probably more than be happy to provide this service to him even for free, and throttle everyone else so he can get his job done. Unlike somebody who's pulling 100GB of free porn down each month, or warez-like things, he might get a notice, but somebody watching regular netflix movies at 200GB might be left alone, under the same conditions. Ideally ISP's would be agnostic about the kinds of content their users consume, as they are technically supposed to be, but in the real world, when counting beans, and optimizing a limited resource, such things as judging the type of content consumed do come into play, without explicitly stating this, or without it standing up in court.
If you ask me about it, one of the most important things when getting killed is the awareness part. As in, if you have to kill me, please do it in my sleep, so that I go to sleep but never wake up. Every time I wake up it's a new surprise. So if you have to kill an embryo, you should do it before it's aware, before it develops a functioning brain and senses, like a skin that can sense heartbeat or motions. By the way it's easy to step back and just reject all embryonic research, but had you had the chance to walk in Christopher Reeds shoes, you might have ended up being a big fan too or stem cell research, as the only way to live your life normally again, at the expense of killing an unconscious, unborn embryo, who was never meant to be born in the first place, but created for stem cells. People kill each other all over the world, sometimes with the blessing of the highest of the highest powers. Such as Bin Ladin, watched by the whole White House while it was going down. You say he committed a crime, but a child is born innocent. And you would be right. But innocent was a cow that sits as steak on your plate, with more conscience and life "wasted" than an embryo of a few cells. I don't have a problem flushing sperm, potential for life down the toilet. And neither do women flushing eggs from periods. Not every potential egg has to turn into a child. So we're wasting all the reproductive capacity, potential for human life, as a custom, and we're wasting live creatures with eyes, ears and brains, for meat on our plates, but we're not willing to waste a few undifferentiated embryonic cells to fix somebody in a wheelchair? It's complicated, I know it's complicated. That's why I'm happy I don't have to deal with it, and let other people do it. That's how I deal with meat, I'll eat it, but I let other people do the killing. Makes me feel less guilty.
When you can take over and control the whole world's food supply via intellectual property and infertile seeds, there are trillions of dollars at stake. As in, you might be getting your food cheaply today, but how much would you be willing to pay for it if blackmailed by a monopoly? What price is the free market willing to bear? $1000/mo//person? $10,000? The sky's the limit, first comes air, then water, then food, and only after that healthcare, and they are raping everyone in the ass with the cost of healthcare, with the argument of, well, how much is your health really worth to you? A million dollars? Ten million dollars? The sky is the limit, just like with food, water and air. And btw, infertile seeds have an argument going for them, biotech safety, as we're not unleashing anything biotech into the wild without being able to contain it later. I still say stick to traditional fertile seed crops, and don't bend over to Da Man called Monsanto, and take it in the ass from him.
Also, Greenland has the highest suicide rate around the world not in attempted suicides, but actual suicides, because the people there don't fuck around, and the methods they use are very efficient and deadly. That means they are very smart, and can get things done and over with.
All they need in Greenland is more heat, it gets too fucking cold there. And to get heat, and good life, they need to learn how to run a nuclear power plant, and how to dig for that ore. Hopefully they got some of that. Once you get heat, light, energy, life is good. Even in the middle of the frozen arctic winter night. They of course have to do it in secret, without fanfare, as I would not be worried of nukes coming at us or anyone else from Greenland, but the technology proliferating to an Arab state like Iraq could be dangerous, where people routinely blow each other up because they are not cousins of each other, or the same gang, like one's a Shia muslim follower of Mohammed the Prophet, the other one is a Sunni muslim follower of Mohammed the Prophet, and that difference is enough to kill each other.
I have two prepaid cellphones, one from Verizon (it says Alltel on the phone from the days before transition) and one from T-mobile, which currently has like 80 cents left on it. Both are LG now, though I've been through a few Samsung and Nokia ones that ended up defective on the T-mobile side, but LG seems to be an amazing brand. The LG on the Verizon/Alltel is so plain vanilla that it does not even have a camera, and I love it. Also, whoever in their right mind would buy a smartphone? Having a smartphone means you get away from the computer and sit on the web with the smartphone, more and more, and as far as I know, cell phones and smartphones won't even start up without a SIM card, or run completely off the network, and you're constantly getting snooped on, and with the cloud coming, all your data will be held hostage with you getting blackmailed for access. My little HP Mini Laptop is nice in that if I don't wanna be on the network, I pull the Ethernet cable out of the socket, and it still works, unlike a smartphone, that's off the network, it's almost useless. Even hitting the pause button on top of the cable modem, or powering off a wifi connection where the LED light is off, indicating it's off, it's no guarantee that its not actually on, just pretending to be off. It gets very complicated to bypass a plain wire connection, as if I yank the 100Base-TX cable from the Ethernet socket, and the Internet is still on, and the computer acts like somebody hacked into it and it's getting remote controlled, something is not kosher and they got some explanation to do. If they made a smartphone that can go off network, or function without a build in SIM, just a plugin SIM, and run fine even without any SIM present, I might be interested, if the price is good. But I don't really see what I'd use it for. Also, if I yanked the SIM out of the socket, hot-plug style, it should still work, but without any network activity, as in if it were a fake, makebelieve SIM socket, and the whole thing actually ran off of a built in SIM, but the device also takes into consideration the SIM you plugged in, when reporting things to you.
That's why you make your own solar panels. It does not cost a dollar to have another one, once you have a setup going, if you live like a caveman, isolated from the economy. Even the caveman had tools, like a copper ax, without having any money. That can only work if the government does not charge you a tax, or a fee, per calorie of sunshine collected, on the sunshine that comes from the Sun that's owned by big corporations, and you can only afford to buy a small share in it. Also all wind originally comes from temperature fluctuations due to sunshine, so it's derived from solar power, and the owners of the Sun can also collect a fee per calorie of energy collected via windmills. For now the Sun is a nomadic territory, without anyone claiming ownership over it.
If you had enough battery capacity - which is what a Tesla car is supposed to be - you could run a washing machine off solar, as long as you charge the batteries for 10 hrs, and run the washing machine for 20 minutes, depending on your battery and solar power capacity of course. Your calculator solar cell is never gonna run your washing machine, even if you wait 2 years to gather the charge. A rooftop solar might directly run it, or maybe a 20 minute run with continuous charging off of a 40 minute paused charging time. By the way a big problem with new batteries compared to lead acid is the discharge rate, the peak amps, though if you have a large enough battery, such as for a whole house, or a car, you can go completely lead free, and even the Edison nickel-iron battery might work, which loses charge very fast, within a month, but it's very robust and environmentally friendly, so hillbillies can't really mess things up with it, compared to lead acid, nickel-cadmium, or even the super expensive lithium-ion, which by the way is kind of hard to fix and rebuild. With lead, cadmium and nickel-iron you can almost DIY your batteries very simply, and rebuild them when necessary. Especially lead is simple, because you can melt it down very easily, and mold a new shape, new electrode, in a gypsum mold, compared to nickel iron, where iron requires a blacksmith forge. There was this book at my college library, that really struck me, titled "Lead, the Precious Metal." And I was like how can they say that, it's toxic, Beethoven died from it, but when it comes to batteries and possibility of rebuilding them in your own home after they are aged and don't hold a charge well, nothing really beats lead. Plus it can be used as bullets, and x-ray shielding(though plain earth is better), and fishing sinker, low melting glass additive (CRT TV screen glass), a lot of chemical equipments in the 1800's specifiy lead lined vessels. Just don't get it in you, and if you do, make sure the dose is ultra small, on the level of a medicine, plus you consume chelating therapy agents, like drink Mountain Dew or anything that has EDTA in it, or sulfur rich compounds like garlic, onions and egg yolks, By the way acetate of lead is called sugar of lead, it used to be used to adulterate the wine of Beethoven, who was a big wine lover and got really fucked up from it, to make it taste sweeter, and the acetic smell or taste was not that strange in a wine environment. But when someone is trying to poison you with lead, there are few soluble lead compounds, such as acetate, nitrate and silicofluoride, everything else is insoluble, and the most likely poison would be acetate of lead that's sweet like sugar. Also, minium, Pb3O4, is a bright red pigment, and sometimes red dust spices, like paprika, used to be adulterated with it. If you eat paprika, try not to have it in a dust form, but crumbled pieces. I'm really watching out for both lead (Pb) and mercury(Hg) toxicity, because both can create mental illness, and at the autopsy they can frame you into a source, or how it got into your body, so if you handle any Hg or Pb, even if you're careful you're at a danger of mental illness poisoning, by providing an alibi to how it got into you. Also don't get it into the environment, and keep things like carpenter ants away from it, because they really love drilling holes into lead, not knowing they are getting poisoned by it.
I used to eat a noncooked diet, but I find that cooking rice/potatoes/eggs, plus raw veggies + electric is a cheaper and tastier way to go than the allergy prone bread(wheat,gluten)/mayo(soybeans)/cheese(nonlactose but very expensive protein)/milk(lactose protein)/veggies diet. Out of the above the 20lb bag of rice from the Asia Supermarket nearby by far outdoes everything else on food vs. price, and ease of storage. Which must be why half the world's population lives on rice, not bread. , Only ease of consumption is more difficult for rice than the other, but not worse than wheat that has to be turned into bread, or potatoes that also have to be cooked forever - both my hotplate and microwave must be near 1500-2000W, and potatoes take 15-20 minutes to bake in the microwave, whether you bake 1 or 6 at the same time, while I can fry rice in less time on the hotplate, and drain the oil save it for next time, as that's the really expensive part. Then dump water on top of it, bring it back to a boil, once it bubbles, pull the plug and walk away. 15 minutes later it swelled up and ready. As a vegetarian, I really can't live without eggs, for protein. Rice, potatoes and bread just does not have enough protein for omnivores like humans, cheese does, but that's even more expensive than meat, compared to eggs being really cheap. I'm a vegetarian mostly for cost reasons, if they sold meat at 5 cents a lb and eggs over $1/dozen, I'd definitely be eating meat, as long as it's kosherly killed, and learn to deal with any repulsion I'd have against it, in the name of good economy.
I still get a dam good price on my electric cooking from a private electric company, under $20/mo, mostly due to having a local public utility company to compete with, even if I'm not the public utility company's customer. From what I hear that's not the case in places like Carolina's, where monopolies run rampant and charge anything they feel like,. To them Tesla is a blessing, but I don't really give a crap right now. I do know however that almost any kind of energy independence starts through electric, as renewable energies like wind and solar are electric. Only biofuels are not electric, but the photosynthesis efficiency is like 0.25 compared to 15% for a silicon crystal solar panel, so you're talking a 60x difference in energy capturing area, and that's why they are not worried about natural gas prices, or wood pellets, but they are holding the line low on the electric front, at least in my area. Who likes to be shafted on the price by monopolies, throw yo hands in da aya, and say I!
By the way a girl I once worked with, and harassed, told me "I have a 22." And I'm kinda happy about that, because in this age of feminism she can stand up for herself like that. Freedom, respect and responsibility only possible through owning a 22. I don't know where she keeps it, she probably did not bring it to work, and she may not even have it at all, but the possibility is a great thing. On an airplane terrorists with plastic knives are currently guaranteed that nobody has a pistol. That's bullshit.
And because of that I'm not a big fan of automation. I mean I love computers, and know automation can get precision and repeatability and profit at its extreme, and you can sit back and collect, but all that does is drop the price to market, and everything ultra efficiently produced becomes ultra cheap, to where you have to lower your own pay, and the basic living expenses. The housing market is still living in a world where union jobs at $25/hr with overtime paid $100,000/year to someone with a high school degree. Those days are gone, and housing refuses to correct to the new realities. As that's all you have to do, is adapt to the circumstances, that's what life does, it adapts. I'd love to pay $2000/mo rent on an apartment that overlooks a lake with a beautiful sundown, if somebody gives me a factory janitor job where I get to sleep on the job while being paid for it, to collect overtime money that totals up to $100,000/year. In 1997 I worked at a place where a union janitor did just that. Then you can ask for high prices in the stores, and high rent too. Live in your own little world, as a country, isolated from the rest of the world competition, block all foreign imports with huge tariffs, and maintain such income and housing levels. But all I see is dollar stores sprouting up everywhere, and every time I flip an object upside down, on the bottom it says "Made in China." If you could raise the cost of living in China to match the US, then you could keep high prices, high incomes and high housing and insurance and car price and taxes. But then all you end up doing is chasing corporations to other low cost areas, like Bangladesh and Pakistan and Afganistan, and Zimbabwe and Namibia and Liberia, Ecuador, Papua, Russia, etc... good luck with fixing up the whole world, where costs of living are high because everyone is paying them, and people are no longer willing to work for peanuts. The simplest thing to do is to adapt, and drop your living costs to where you can beat the Made in China stuff on what they do best, price, because you can make it cheaper, and better quality.
By the way I would not take this as far as have everyone walk around with a pistol on their belt, like in western movies, in everyday life, out on the streets, as there would be too many idiots shooting randomly. An airplane situation is different. For one, you have to be able to come up with the ticket fee, and homeless alcoholic hallucinating lunatics usually don't get on an airplane, unlike the city streets. Plus the total loss of life is only how many people ride on a plane, at max, is limited, unlike in a city where it's unlimited. The chances of a crash or hostages dying are probably smaller when everyone is armed, and hijacking a plane has a much lower incentive if the hijackers know everyone has a pistol. I think the biggest failure of 9/11 was the naivety the passengers thought they'd be negotiated for and land safely, else they would have done like the Pennsylvania flight, headed for the Pentagon, where passengers must have found out about the WTC planes, and heroically rebelled against plastic knives. You can't really see where you're going from the passenger seats, so you'd still need fighterjets ready to escort and shoot planes out of the sky. 200 passengers dying is better than 3000 plus a very expensive building's collapse. Also, hijacking the controls is not possible if the pilot compartment is isolated with a bullet proof wall and a separate entrance and exit, like on Israeli planes. Like duh, how much more complicated could this aviation safety get. Only an idiot would let the passengers and stewardesses have access to the pilots, under the threats of terrorism. But I guess the ides is to have people get used to picking through their stuff, waiting in line for ages, picking at their personal things, personal histories, views, opinions, genetic makeup, and see if anyone speaks up, and then you can hand pick out these free-speech abusers, that start the one bad apple spoils the bunch kinds of trends, so the transition to the the oncoming age of slavery and oppression is smoother. If we could only get everyone to stop speaking and just text everything, then monitoring thoughts and social rebellion and uprising becomes very easy, and such a thing as the French revolution could never happen, even if tax rates are at 99%, charged by the nobility, clergy and general upper class to the lower class working poor and peasants. But in fact we no longer need working poor and peasants as robots and automated machines like vending machines can substitute them, so I feel really bad for anybody lower class like myself, as they are not really needed anymore in the future economy and social structure, and there will be welfare, for a while...but if it ever stops, it's gonna be nastay.. The only argument a lower class poor can use in the labor market is that look, I'm cheaper than a computer with a robot, because they are complicated to repair and replace, maintenance on them is expensive when you can't even figure out what's wrong, because it has a stupid chip inside.
Thorium connects to the price of gas through liquid ammonia carried hydrogen hydrogen economy. And by the way, earlier on Slashdot I expressed ideas and opinions of how even the Sun was powered by fission, not fusion, as I look at a volcanic eruption on earth, and it's molten hot lava, then I look at an asteroid and know it's not big enough to have molten lava on the inside, and neither is the Moon, but Earth is big enough, and Jupiter is probably very hot underneath all that hydrogen gas, to the point of probably glowing, but nothing beats the Sun nearby, which is the most humongous object nearby, at 333,000 Earth's combined in mass, at 99% of the solar system weight, and given its size, even in the absence of hydrogen it would probably have surface lava making it glow like it does, and that was my expressed opinion, but the actual scientifically measured numbers say differently, by orders of magnitude, so the official stance is that there is actual fusion in the Sun. But fusion might be a hell of a lot more difficult to achieve than we think, especially if basic things like fusors by the inventor of television, Farnsworth, don't pay off energetically, and if anyone was a bright mind in that electric field shaping plasma/ions area, it should have been him, but of course anybody can be surpassed. One of the issues with fusion is the structural stability of the materials involved under the order of magnitude higher neutron bombardment, and also the conditions necessary to conduct it, very high temperatures, or laser blasts, compared to conventional fission that works in a pot filled with water, at moderate temperatures of steam boilers, or even the Thorium and depleted (of U235) U238 fast neutron liquid sodium reactors, which are still much simpler conditions than the millions of Centigrade degree temperatures required by all fusion experiments so far. We can piss around with fusion in a lab, but if you want to have a ready replacement to hold transportation costs low when carbon tax hits, and gas hits $5-8-10-20/gal due to free market scarcity, you gotta go for nuclear fission+ammonia hydrogen economy car fuel. And then the biggest issue is having too many idiots around the world, as you would not give a rocket grenade launcher to a chimp, and expect him not to shoot it at the other chimps, he's too big of an idiot, so you can't really give nuclear power plants to countries that have a lot of people that blow themselves up, so you have to give them the electricity, from the outside, for almost free. And then you have the issue of 9/11 suicidal plane hijackers. And there comes the idea of Archie Bunker on how to deal with these situations, a better idea than fighter jets shooting them out of the sky. Inspect the packages for bombs, or better, don't inspect anything, put them on a separate plane that flies tandem, or gets towed at a distance, or even design the airplane so that the baggage compartment can freely blow away and do it safely so, with the airplane maintaining integrity and flight, like a lizard shedding its tail. A baggage is only property, and if anyone can't live without what they had in their baggages, I feel really sorry for them. Separate the pilot compartment from the rest of the plane with a bulletproof shield, with no access to the passenger zone, like it's done by the Israeli civilian flights. Fly at a depressurization safe zone at lower altitude, even if more expensive, so that everyone can breathe fine if bullets fly about and pierce the walls.Then hand out pistols to all responsible nonviolent criminal record adults at the beginning of the trip, and collect the pistols back at the end. Then nobody with plastic knives can hijack the plane, due to superiority in air power, as even an 80 year old grandma with a pistol can subdue them. I don't understand what's so complicated about this, you don't need no x-rays, no violation of privacy, flipping through somebody's underwear, but you can still figure out a way to fly about safely anyway. After all this is the USA, and we all love guns, privacy, personal responsibility and respect, and freedoms.
I beg to differ. Good standards of living in the Eastern Bloc would not have caused a rebellion and overthrow of communist governments in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 50's, and have free elections elect a noncommunist one, to where Russian tanks had to invade the country and reinstate a communist government, and execute all the rebels, except those that escaped, mostly ending up in the same place, in the USA, where they faced a different fate. And the countries in the West said, well, if it was Croatia, or Slovenia, of west Yugoslavia, that could be considered West or close enough to the other side of the iron curtain, and they might have done something, but Hungary and Czechoslovakia are too deep under Russian territorial sphere of influence, and they did not want to turn the Cold War into a full fledged thermonuclear Hot War. And the West has a very good point about just letting it go, and not start a full fledged war between two superpowers, over some minor issue like Soviet tanks invading and replacing a freely elected government with a communist one, even if Korea and Vietnam was about the same topic, but obviously far enough from the Soviet territorial sphere of influence. But the reinstated commie regime after the rebellion was radically different, in the Eastern Bloc. Even though continuing to live in the misery and economic deprivation that a commie system provides, there was relative liberty, along the lines of the 1st Amendment of the USA. Free speech ran rampant to an even greater degree on public, national TV than it does today in the USA. But so did in the USA, back in the 70's, you had lots of free speech, I mean things like All in the Family, in a joking way, but top rated show on prime time TV. You could not get away with such stuff today. I mean you have some idiots like Rush Limbaugh, but nobody really pays attention to them, they are not prime time TV of ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS or CNN. But you have late night shows like the Tonight Show w/Jay Leno, and Mad TV, maybe even SNL, so it's still around, and as long as things like these are around, and freedom of speech to ridicule the presidents is protected, you have an overall sense of freedom for the population, even if critical thinking instead of a 'balanced harmonious view of let's hear the other side' is not as intense as back in the 70's. But freedom, liberty, alone does not equal economic well being too, as you can be free and very poor, or free and rich, or a slave and poor, or a slave and rich. In the USA we still have quite a sense of free and rich, but it's eroding on both fronts, unless by rich you mean look at all the marvelous stuff I can buy on minimum wage, like a computer, or internet, or a bicycle, and a used car, and gasoline to go with it. Back in the Eastern Bloc you had to park your car in a queue at a gas station, for two weeks, until gasoline arrived, and then only the front few in the line got any, and the ones at the back of the line told sorry, come back later, we're out of gas. You had to do the same thing with your propane tanks used for cooking gas, usually 10-20 people paying somebody for 2-3 weeks to hold their position in the line, and be there at night and watch their propane cylinders (and it was a huge, 50 gallon one, painted black, carried on a dolly, that would last for a while in the kitchen). Imagine a CNN talking like Rush Limbaugh, or a similar quack everyone laughs at, at least sometimes, if not all the time. Or if we had someone like G.W. Bush in charge, a counter-equivalent of him, on the democratic party side, like some uber-gay-pride-march ultra-feminist enviro-tree-huggers, or something antirepublican anti-gun. As both sides would have a point and the public would learn the truths and how to ignore extreme thought. That would be liberty, loud and clear, coming at you from mainstream media, and responsible individual citizens learning about all the extreme news, but also learning how to filter the brainwashing aimed at them and how make up their own minds, and that's only possible when you get really extreme
Eh, that's OK. The companies were essentially stolen from the state by oligarchs during the collapse of the USSR. It's all a wash really...
The method is a variation on how organised crime takes over a business,
Well, it is the putin government..."
I hope we never have a phrase like "collapse of the USA." And what does "it's all a wash.." mean? That's what I was told I when I could not longer make the payments on a residential/agricultural lot, no letter of acknowledgement or account status update, no final letter, just a verbal over the phone "it's just gonna be a wash.."
"A car manufacturer built the factory to manufacture cars not tanks.....No individual human should be compelled to do what he is unwilling to do under normal free market conditions. "
That reminds me the case of mercenaries. As in, two soldiers are talking, one is a volunteer, the other a mercenary. The volunteer asks the mercenary: What are you fighting for? He says: Money. The volunteer says: That's despicable, that you're willing to lower yourself like that, I fight for liberty and honor. To which the mercenary says: Well, everyone fights for what they lack.
So that would be the free market point of view of war, and in that I agree somewhat with the idealist volunteers and not the free market mercenaries, in that when you're dying, it's better to die for liberty and honor, for the well being of your people and your nation, than it is for just money, for the well being of the bank account of your heirs. But I've met some people, like a foster child with a sister who've been through 40 foster homes, and he's open and honest about having gone to Afghanistan to shoot people two shots in the chest and one to the head during night vision infrared night raids, and he did it to make a living, and provide a roof for himself and his sister, after being tired of being through so many foster homes, or sleeping in the Walmart parking lot to finish highschool, washing up in the Walmart bathroom. Now he has it made, but he'd be reluctant to go to Iran to do the same thing, as in Afganistan all you had to do was shoot disorganized hillbillies, but Iran has an organized army, like the USA, and he did not go to war to die, he went to war to scratch out an existence for himself and his sister. And he cares about the hillbillies too, like when he downed one of them packed with explosives coming toward him, and that guy fell, that guy started getting up. And he was like dude, stay down, I already shot you, what the fuck is wrong with you. So these guys pick up even when shot, and then they keep coming towards you and your only option is to take them out. You can't really reason with an Afghani hillbilly who gets up after being shot down, and pulls all his energy together to make a run at you.
He also advertised, that it's best for girls to hook up with a soldier before he goes to war, because, should he die, the government will provide benefits. And I'm adding that, having a girl back home has a huge psychological effect on a young soldier, even if she lied to him and does not really care about him that much, but she cares about having a secure future for herself. I don't know if girlfriend/boyfriend qualifies, it's like you have to marry the guy to qualify as a widow for death benefits, but then that's another complicated topic, but as far as individual soldiers are concerned, it's pretty simple to them: having a girl to write to, even if she don't write back, was good, however that was in the days of letters and mail, and of course, censoring, in the days of instant messaging and emails censoring is not possible anymore, to the point of even me working with a soldier's wife, him being in Iraq, she mentions how he writes her that he's talking to this other girl, and what not, and she's waiting for him back home, and it's like they got married and he ran away all the way to Iraq, it's how you look at it, and it's complicated.
The whole fucking government is a puppet show, provided to the masses and run by big money. Here, stupid, go to the voting booth and we give you the illusion that you have some kind of control over what happens in the politics that affect your life, when in reality, we own your ass, call all the shots, and make all the decisions for you, through providing you with the options we feel suit you the best. And you can't really blame them, after all, they do try to provide everyone with the options that they think suit them best. That's what you call caring. Oscar Wilde said democracy is the idea that people know what they want, and they get it good and hard too. In the USA we have a paternalistic fake democracy, where people are brainwashed into wanting what somebody else think they should want, like a smartphone, something that's best for them, and this fake democracy controlled by a select elite, by big money, wiser then you, guiding your life, probably works better than pure absolute democracy where you let the idiots decide for themselves and run amok. I tell it like it is.
I rode the public transit system today. At first you see all these scared "agents" checking you out. It kinda makes you feel good that somebody cares and watches out for everybody. In a sense I'm starting not to mind the cameras either, but only in a very crowded city. It's a whole lot different in the country side, because it's hard to do terrorism where people are not very crowded together, so they shouldn't need cameras on back country dirt roads for instance. Oh what freedom that is, camera free, crowd free, terrorism free. Privacy. Go ahead, pick your nose at a red light, clean it out good, nobody's watching. It's only possible when you don't overpopulate and get too crowded. Then only public gatherings have to be watched, like church or wedding, or sports, but you can go about your everyday life without being constantly on camera. Who wants to be on camera? Everyone makes mistakes, and it's like a 5th amendment right not to have your mistakes too meticulously on record.
Depends on whether I feel like it or not. You're welcome not to read what I post, so if you don't like the style. Just skip along, mister...
By the way having skirts is a double edged sword - on the one hand you can see some benefits from above, on the other hand, it hides the lower body physique, to where most black women either have super awesome bodies under the waist, or they are exaggerated on hip and butt booty sexual features, but almost none have short leg issues, or highly deformed legs, like it's more common among europeans and arabs wearing skirt-like clothes, and even east asians. So in a sense dressing your women in pants and putting their lower body features on display, helps sex-select to a better looking and healthier future generation. Now if only women had a way to put on display the male feature so important to them, other than lower body physique, and that is penis size, they could select to make their own future generations happier too. Lower body features in men are already on diplay as they wear pants - other than some folklore attires, or, again, the arabs in hot deserts - but penis size where it matters, not in the flaccid state, but in the erect state, is difficult to inspect. It's like it's only possible in a world where everybody is fucking everybody, and therefore knows the dicksizes of everybody. That kind of overly promiscuous world has a lot of downsides too, but it does lead to an increased sexual happiness of future female generations, even if may sacrifice other important characteristics, such as brainpower, but not necessarily so. It should be possible for future males to have a big dick and be smart too, and then the women should be really happy. Maybe the wonders of biotechnology coming from Monsanto will allow modifying characteristics such as this, for the descendants. Like you submit an egg and a sperm to the lab (and you lose out on sperm competition swimming toward the egg), but you can pick eyecolor, height, dick size and arm and leg muscle if a son, or breast size and hip size if a daughter, and Monsanto will modify and customize fo you your future family tree as desired.
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I buy unlimited, and I've hit many tens of GB downloading entire ftp sites of old software for win95 and such, like ftp.sac.sk. However I don't know what the actual limits are, or what they feel they should be. If they gave me a quota of 10GB/mo or 100GB/mo or 1000GB/mo, I'd pretty much hit that quota every month. Say I have 4 days left, my quota is 100GB/mo, and my total usage is 55GB so far, I'd pretty much download all kinds of ISO files for the remaining 45 GB nonstop, just because that's the quota. So this kind of behavior is what they are trying to avoid, by not giving a quota, and instead let users use what they need. There might be some doctor watching x-ray videos of patients at really high resolutions at home and making diagnoses in he evening before he goes to sleep, postpones some and makes the diagnoses when he wakes up, after sleeping over them, at say 5 TB /mo, coming from the nearby hospital through the same isp service, say Time Warner Cable, without tracerouting through other corporations networks in other cities, such as AT&T. Since it's a doctor helping the local community, and he does need that kind of bandwidth, the cable company would probably more than be happy to provide this service to him even for free, and throttle everyone else so he can get his job done. Unlike somebody who's pulling 100GB of free porn down each month, or warez-like things, he might get a notice, but somebody watching regular netflix movies at 200GB might be left alone, under the same conditions. Ideally ISP's would be agnostic about the kinds of content their users consume, as they are technically supposed to be, but in the real world, when counting beans, and optimizing a limited resource, such things as judging the type of content consumed do come into play, without explicitly stating this, or without it standing up in court.
If you ask me about it, one of the most important things when getting killed is the awareness part. As in, if you have to kill me, please do it in my sleep, so that I go to sleep but never wake up. Every time I wake up it's a new surprise. So if you have to kill an embryo, you should do it before it's aware, before it develops a functioning brain and senses, like a skin that can sense heartbeat or motions. By the way it's easy to step back and just reject all embryonic research, but had you had the chance to walk in Christopher Reeds shoes, you might have ended up being a big fan too or stem cell research, as the only way to live your life normally again, at the expense of killing an unconscious, unborn embryo, who was never meant to be born in the first place, but created for stem cells. People kill each other all over the world, sometimes with the blessing of the highest of the highest powers. Such as Bin Ladin, watched by the whole White House while it was going down. You say he committed a crime, but a child is born innocent. And you would be right. But innocent was a cow that sits as steak on your plate, with more conscience and life "wasted" than an embryo of a few cells. I don't have a problem flushing sperm, potential for life down the toilet. And neither do women flushing eggs from periods. Not every potential egg has to turn into a child. So we're wasting all the reproductive capacity, potential for human life, as a custom, and we're wasting live creatures with eyes, ears and brains, for meat on our plates, but we're not willing to waste a few undifferentiated embryonic cells to fix somebody in a wheelchair? It's complicated, I know it's complicated. That's why I'm happy I don't have to deal with it, and let other people do it. That's how I deal with meat, I'll eat it, but I let other people do the killing. Makes me feel less guilty.
When you can take over and control the whole world's food supply via intellectual property and infertile seeds, there are trillions of dollars at stake. As in, you might be getting your food cheaply today, but how much would you be willing to pay for it if blackmailed by a monopoly? What price is the free market willing to bear? $1000/mo//person? $10,000? The sky's the limit, first comes air, then water, then food, and only after that healthcare, and they are raping everyone in the ass with the cost of healthcare, with the argument of, well, how much is your health really worth to you? A million dollars? Ten million dollars? The sky is the limit, just like with food, water and air. And btw, infertile seeds have an argument going for them, biotech safety, as we're not unleashing anything biotech into the wild without being able to contain it later. I still say stick to traditional fertile seed crops, and don't bend over to Da Man called Monsanto, and take it in the ass from him.
Also, an interesting note is that in most places in the world where suicide rates are high, the violent crime is extremely low, almost nonexistent.
Also, Greenland has the highest suicide rate around the world not in attempted suicides, but actual suicides, because the people there don't fuck around, and the methods they use are very efficient and deadly. That means they are very smart, and can get things done and over with.
That's a long tradition, but leaving a carefully crafted suicide not to everybody left behind alive, that adds a special artistic touch to it.
Can't be no vegetarian in those places. All you get to eat is fish and dolphins and such.
All they need in Greenland is more heat, it gets too fucking cold there. And to get heat, and good life, they need to learn how to run a nuclear power plant, and how to dig for that ore. Hopefully they got some of that. Once you get heat, light, energy, life is good. Even in the middle of the frozen arctic winter night. They of course have to do it in secret, without fanfare, as I would not be worried of nukes coming at us or anyone else from Greenland, but the technology proliferating to an Arab state like Iraq could be dangerous, where people routinely blow each other up because they are not cousins of each other, or the same gang, like one's a Shia muslim follower of Mohammed the Prophet, the other one is a Sunni muslim follower of Mohammed the Prophet, and that difference is enough to kill each other.
That's a shame, as a necktie is the only proper piece of clothing to wear while having sex.
I have two prepaid cellphones, one from Verizon (it says Alltel on the phone from the days before transition) and one from T-mobile, which currently has like 80 cents left on it. Both are LG now, though I've been through a few Samsung and Nokia ones that ended up defective on the T-mobile side, but LG seems to be an amazing brand. The LG on the Verizon/Alltel is so plain vanilla that it does not even have a camera, and I love it. Also, whoever in their right mind would buy a smartphone? Having a smartphone means you get away from the computer and sit on the web with the smartphone, more and more, and as far as I know, cell phones and smartphones won't even start up without a SIM card, or run completely off the network, and you're constantly getting snooped on, and with the cloud coming, all your data will be held hostage with you getting blackmailed for access. My little HP Mini Laptop is nice in that if I don't wanna be on the network, I pull the Ethernet cable out of the socket, and it still works, unlike a smartphone, that's off the network, it's almost useless. Even hitting the pause button on top of the cable modem, or powering off a wifi connection where the LED light is off, indicating it's off, it's no guarantee that its not actually on, just pretending to be off. It gets very complicated to bypass a plain wire connection, as if I yank the 100Base-TX cable from the Ethernet socket, and the Internet is still on, and the computer acts like somebody hacked into it and it's getting remote controlled, something is not kosher and they got some explanation to do. If they made a smartphone that can go off network, or function without a build in SIM, just a plugin SIM, and run fine even without any SIM present, I might be interested, if the price is good. But I don't really see what I'd use it for. Also, if I yanked the SIM out of the socket, hot-plug style, it should still work, but without any network activity, as in if it were a fake, makebelieve SIM socket, and the whole thing actually ran off of a built in SIM, but the device also takes into consideration the SIM you plugged in, when reporting things to you.
That's why you make your own solar panels. It does not cost a dollar to have another one, once you have a setup going, if you live like a caveman, isolated from the economy. Even the caveman had tools, like a copper ax, without having any money. That can only work if the government does not charge you a tax, or a fee, per calorie of sunshine collected, on the sunshine that comes from the Sun that's owned by big corporations, and you can only afford to buy a small share in it. Also all wind originally comes from temperature fluctuations due to sunshine, so it's derived from solar power, and the owners of the Sun can also collect a fee per calorie of energy collected via windmills. For now the Sun is a nomadic territory, without anyone claiming ownership over it.
If you had enough battery capacity - which is what a Tesla car is supposed to be - you could run a washing machine off solar, as long as you charge the batteries for 10 hrs, and run the washing machine for 20 minutes, depending on your battery and solar power capacity of course. Your calculator solar cell is never gonna run your washing machine, even if you wait 2 years to gather the charge. A rooftop solar might directly run it, or maybe a 20 minute run with continuous charging off of a 40 minute paused charging time. By the way a big problem with new batteries compared to lead acid is the discharge rate, the peak amps, though if you have a large enough battery, such as for a whole house, or a car, you can go completely lead free, and even the Edison nickel-iron battery might work, which loses charge very fast, within a month, but it's very robust and environmentally friendly, so hillbillies can't really mess things up with it, compared to lead acid, nickel-cadmium, or even the super expensive lithium-ion, which by the way is kind of hard to fix and rebuild. With lead, cadmium and nickel-iron you can almost DIY your batteries very simply, and rebuild them when necessary. Especially lead is simple, because you can melt it down very easily, and mold a new shape, new electrode, in a gypsum mold, compared to nickel iron, where iron requires a blacksmith forge. There was this book at my college library, that really struck me, titled "Lead, the Precious Metal." And I was like how can they say that, it's toxic, Beethoven died from it, but when it comes to batteries and possibility of rebuilding them in your own home after they are aged and don't hold a charge well, nothing really beats lead. Plus it can be used as bullets, and x-ray shielding(though plain earth is better), and fishing sinker, low melting glass additive (CRT TV screen glass), a lot of chemical equipments in the 1800's specifiy lead lined vessels. Just don't get it in you, and if you do, make sure the dose is ultra small, on the level of a medicine, plus you consume chelating therapy agents, like drink Mountain Dew or anything that has EDTA in it, or sulfur rich compounds like garlic, onions and egg yolks, By the way acetate of lead is called sugar of lead, it used to be used to adulterate the wine of Beethoven, who was a big wine lover and got really fucked up from it, to make it taste sweeter, and the acetic smell or taste was not that strange in a wine environment. But when someone is trying to poison you with lead, there are few soluble lead compounds, such as acetate, nitrate and silicofluoride, everything else is insoluble, and the most likely poison would be acetate of lead that's sweet like sugar. Also, minium, Pb3O4, is a bright red pigment, and sometimes red dust spices, like paprika, used to be adulterated with it. If you eat paprika, try not to have it in a dust form, but crumbled pieces. I'm really watching out for both lead (Pb) and mercury(Hg) toxicity, because both can create mental illness, and at the autopsy they can frame you into a source, or how it got into your body, so if you handle any Hg or Pb, even if you're careful you're at a danger of mental illness poisoning, by providing an alibi to how it got into you. Also don't get it into the environment, and keep things like carpenter ants away from it, because they really love drilling holes into lead, not knowing they are getting poisoned by it.
I used to eat a noncooked diet, but I find that cooking rice/potatoes/eggs, plus raw veggies + electric is a cheaper and tastier way to go than the allergy prone bread(wheat,gluten)/mayo(soybeans)/cheese(nonlactose but very expensive protein)/milk(lactose protein)/veggies diet. Out of the above the 20lb bag of rice from the Asia Supermarket nearby by far outdoes everything else on food vs. price, and ease of storage. Which must be why half the world's population lives on rice, not bread. , Only ease of consumption is more difficult for rice than the other, but not worse than wheat that has to be turned into bread, or potatoes that also have to be cooked forever - both my hotplate and microwave must be near 1500-2000W, and potatoes take 15-20 minutes to bake in the microwave, whether you bake 1 or 6 at the same time, while I can fry rice in less time on the hotplate, and drain the oil save it for next time, as that's the really expensive part. Then dump water on top of it, bring it back to a boil, once it bubbles, pull the plug and walk away. 15 minutes later it swelled up and ready. As a vegetarian, I really can't live without eggs, for protein. Rice, potatoes and bread just does not have enough protein for omnivores like humans, cheese does, but that's even more expensive than meat, compared to eggs being really cheap. I'm a vegetarian mostly for cost reasons, if they sold meat at 5 cents a lb and eggs over $1/dozen, I'd definitely be eating meat, as long as it's kosherly killed, and learn to deal with any repulsion I'd have against it, in the name of good economy.
I still get a dam good price on my electric cooking from a private electric company, under $20/mo, mostly due to having a local public utility company to compete with, even if I'm not the public utility company's customer. From what I hear that's not the case in places like Carolina's, where monopolies run rampant and charge anything they feel like,. To them Tesla is a blessing, but I don't really give a crap right now. I do know however that almost any kind of energy independence starts through electric, as renewable energies like wind and solar are electric. Only biofuels are not electric, but the photosynthesis efficiency is like 0.25 compared to 15% for a silicon crystal solar panel, so you're talking a 60x difference in energy capturing area, and that's why they are not worried about natural gas prices, or wood pellets, but they are holding the line low on the electric front, at least in my area. Who likes to be shafted on the price by monopolies, throw yo hands in da aya, and say I!
By the way a girl I once worked with, and harassed, told me "I have a 22." And I'm kinda happy about that, because in this age of feminism she can stand up for herself like that. Freedom, respect and responsibility only possible through owning a 22. I don't know where she keeps it, she probably did not bring it to work, and she may not even have it at all, but the possibility is a great thing. On an airplane terrorists with plastic knives are currently guaranteed that nobody has a pistol. That's bullshit.
And because of that I'm not a big fan of automation. I mean I love computers, and know automation can get precision and repeatability and profit at its extreme, and you can sit back and collect, but all that does is drop the price to market, and everything ultra efficiently produced becomes ultra cheap, to where you have to lower your own pay, and the basic living expenses. The housing market is still living in a world where union jobs at $25/hr with overtime paid $100,000/year to someone with a high school degree. Those days are gone, and housing refuses to correct to the new realities. As that's all you have to do, is adapt to the circumstances, that's what life does, it adapts. I'd love to pay $2000/mo rent on an apartment that overlooks a lake with a beautiful sundown, if somebody gives me a factory janitor job where I get to sleep on the job while being paid for it, to collect overtime money that totals up to $100,000/year. In 1997 I worked at a place where a union janitor did just that. Then you can ask for high prices in the stores, and high rent too. Live in your own little world, as a country, isolated from the rest of the world competition, block all foreign imports with huge tariffs, and maintain such income and housing levels. But all I see is dollar stores sprouting up everywhere, and every time I flip an object upside down, on the bottom it says "Made in China." If you could raise the cost of living in China to match the US, then you could keep high prices, high incomes and high housing and insurance and car price and taxes. But then all you end up doing is chasing corporations to other low cost areas, like Bangladesh and Pakistan and Afganistan, and Zimbabwe and Namibia and Liberia, Ecuador, Papua, Russia, etc... good luck with fixing up the whole world, where costs of living are high because everyone is paying them, and people are no longer willing to work for peanuts. The simplest thing to do is to adapt, and drop your living costs to where you can beat the Made in China stuff on what they do best, price, because you can make it cheaper, and better quality.
By the way I would not take this as far as have everyone walk around with a pistol on their belt, like in western movies, in everyday life, out on the streets, as there would be too many idiots shooting randomly. An airplane situation is different. For one, you have to be able to come up with the ticket fee, and homeless alcoholic hallucinating lunatics usually don't get on an airplane, unlike the city streets. Plus the total loss of life is only how many people ride on a plane, at max, is limited, unlike in a city where it's unlimited. The chances of a crash or hostages dying are probably smaller when everyone is armed, and hijacking a plane has a much lower incentive if the hijackers know everyone has a pistol. I think the biggest failure of 9/11 was the naivety the passengers thought they'd be negotiated for and land safely, else they would have done like the Pennsylvania flight, headed for the Pentagon, where passengers must have found out about the WTC planes, and heroically rebelled against plastic knives. You can't really see where you're going from the passenger seats, so you'd still need fighterjets ready to escort and shoot planes out of the sky. 200 passengers dying is better than 3000 plus a very expensive building's collapse. Also, hijacking the controls is not possible if the pilot compartment is isolated with a bullet proof wall and a separate entrance and exit, like on Israeli planes. Like duh, how much more complicated could this aviation safety get. Only an idiot would let the passengers and stewardesses have access to the pilots, under the threats of terrorism. But I guess the ides is to have people get used to picking through their stuff, waiting in line for ages, picking at their personal things, personal histories, views, opinions, genetic makeup, and see if anyone speaks up, and then you can hand pick out these free-speech abusers, that start the one bad apple spoils the bunch kinds of trends, so the transition to the the oncoming age of slavery and oppression is smoother. If we could only get everyone to stop speaking and just text everything, then monitoring thoughts and social rebellion and uprising becomes very easy, and such a thing as the French revolution could never happen, even if tax rates are at 99%, charged by the nobility, clergy and general upper class to the lower class working poor and peasants. But in fact we no longer need working poor and peasants as robots and automated machines like vending machines can substitute them, so I feel really bad for anybody lower class like myself, as they are not really needed anymore in the future economy and social structure, and there will be welfare, for a while...but if it ever stops, it's gonna be nastay.. The only argument a lower class poor can use in the labor market is that look, I'm cheaper than a computer with a robot, because they are complicated to repair and replace, maintenance on them is expensive when you can't even figure out what's wrong, because it has a stupid chip inside.
Thorium connects to the price of gas through liquid ammonia carried hydrogen hydrogen economy. And by the way, earlier on Slashdot I expressed ideas and opinions of how even the Sun was powered by fission, not fusion, as I look at a volcanic eruption on earth, and it's molten hot lava, then I look at an asteroid and know it's not big enough to have molten lava on the inside, and neither is the Moon, but Earth is big enough, and Jupiter is probably very hot underneath all that hydrogen gas, to the point of probably glowing, but nothing beats the Sun nearby, which is the most humongous object nearby, at 333,000 Earth's combined in mass, at 99% of the solar system weight, and given its size, even in the absence of hydrogen it would probably have surface lava making it glow like it does, and that was my expressed opinion, but the actual scientifically measured numbers say differently, by orders of magnitude, so the official stance is that there is actual fusion in the Sun. But fusion might be a hell of a lot more difficult to achieve than we think, especially if basic things like fusors by the inventor of television, Farnsworth, don't pay off energetically, and if anyone was a bright mind in that electric field shaping plasma/ions area, it should have been him, but of course anybody can be surpassed. One of the issues with fusion is the structural stability of the materials involved under the order of magnitude higher neutron bombardment, and also the conditions necessary to conduct it, very high temperatures, or laser blasts, compared to conventional fission that works in a pot filled with water, at moderate temperatures of steam boilers, or even the Thorium and depleted (of U235) U238 fast neutron liquid sodium reactors, which are still much simpler conditions than the millions of Centigrade degree temperatures required by all fusion experiments so far. We can piss around with fusion in a lab, but if you want to have a ready replacement to hold transportation costs low when carbon tax hits, and gas hits $5-8-10-20/gal due to free market scarcity, you gotta go for nuclear fission+ammonia hydrogen economy car fuel. And then the biggest issue is having too many idiots around the world, as you would not give a rocket grenade launcher to a chimp, and expect him not to shoot it at the other chimps, he's too big of an idiot, so you can't really give nuclear power plants to countries that have a lot of people that blow themselves up, so you have to give them the electricity, from the outside, for almost free. And then you have the issue of 9/11 suicidal plane hijackers. And there comes the idea of Archie Bunker on how to deal with these situations, a better idea than fighter jets shooting them out of the sky. Inspect the packages for bombs, or better, don't inspect anything, put them on a separate plane that flies tandem, or gets towed at a distance, or even design the airplane so that the baggage compartment can freely blow away and do it safely so, with the airplane maintaining integrity and flight, like a lizard shedding its tail. A baggage is only property, and if anyone can't live without what they had in their baggages, I feel really sorry for them. Separate the pilot compartment from the rest of the plane with a bulletproof shield, with no access to the passenger zone, like it's done by the Israeli civilian flights. Fly at a depressurization safe zone at lower altitude, even if more expensive, so that everyone can breathe fine if bullets fly about and pierce the walls.Then hand out pistols to all responsible nonviolent criminal record adults at the beginning of the trip, and collect the pistols back at the end. Then nobody with plastic knives can hijack the plane, due to superiority in air power, as even an 80 year old grandma with a pistol can subdue them. I don't understand what's so complicated about this, you don't need no x-rays, no violation of privacy, flipping through somebody's underwear, but you can still figure out a way to fly about safely anyway. After all this is the USA, and we all love guns, privacy, personal responsibility and respect, and freedoms.
I beg to differ. Good standards of living in the Eastern Bloc would not have caused a rebellion and overthrow of communist governments in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 50's, and have free elections elect a noncommunist one, to where Russian tanks had to invade the country and reinstate a communist government, and execute all the rebels, except those that escaped, mostly ending up in the same place, in the USA, where they faced a different fate. And the countries in the West said, well, if it was Croatia, or Slovenia, of west Yugoslavia, that could be considered West or close enough to the other side of the iron curtain, and they might have done something, but Hungary and Czechoslovakia are too deep under Russian territorial sphere of influence, and they did not want to turn the Cold War into a full fledged thermonuclear Hot War. And the West has a very good point about just letting it go, and not start a full fledged war between two superpowers, over some minor issue like Soviet tanks invading and replacing a freely elected government with a communist one, even if Korea and Vietnam was about the same topic, but obviously far enough from the Soviet territorial sphere of influence. But the reinstated commie regime after the rebellion was radically different, in the Eastern Bloc. Even though continuing to live in the misery and economic deprivation that a commie system provides, there was relative liberty, along the lines of the 1st Amendment of the USA. Free speech ran rampant to an even greater degree on public, national TV than it does today in the USA. But so did in the USA, back in the 70's, you had lots of free speech, I mean things like All in the Family, in a joking way, but top rated show on prime time TV. You could not get away with such stuff today. I mean you have some idiots like Rush Limbaugh, but nobody really pays attention to them, they are not prime time TV of ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS or CNN. But you have late night shows like the Tonight Show w/Jay Leno, and Mad TV, maybe even SNL, so it's still around, and as long as things like these are around, and freedom of speech to ridicule the presidents is protected, you have an overall sense of freedom for the population, even if critical thinking instead of a 'balanced harmonious view of let's hear the other side' is not as intense as back in the 70's. But freedom, liberty, alone does not equal economic well being too, as you can be free and very poor, or free and rich, or a slave and poor, or a slave and rich. In the USA we still have quite a sense of free and rich, but it's eroding on both fronts, unless by rich you mean look at all the marvelous stuff I can buy on minimum wage, like a computer, or internet, or a bicycle, and a used car, and gasoline to go with it. Back in the Eastern Bloc you had to park your car in a queue at a gas station, for two weeks, until gasoline arrived, and then only the front few in the line got any, and the ones at the back of the line told sorry, come back later, we're out of gas. You had to do the same thing with your propane tanks used for cooking gas, usually 10-20 people paying somebody for 2-3 weeks to hold their position in the line, and be there at night and watch their propane cylinders (and it was a huge, 50 gallon one, painted black, carried on a dolly, that would last for a while in the kitchen). Imagine a CNN talking like Rush Limbaugh, or a similar quack everyone laughs at, at least sometimes, if not all the time. Or if we had someone like G.W. Bush in charge, a counter-equivalent of him, on the democratic party side, like some uber-gay-pride-march ultra-feminist enviro-tree-huggers, or something antirepublican anti-gun. As both sides would have a point and the public would learn the truths and how to ignore extreme thought. That would be liberty, loud and clear, coming at you from mainstream media, and responsible individual citizens learning about all the extreme news, but also learning how to filter the brainwashing aimed at them and how make up their own minds, and that's only possible when you get really extreme
One might conclude that there must be less criminals deserving the death penalty in Russia than in Texas.
"What the Russians are doing is just theft
Eh, that's OK. The companies were essentially stolen from the state by oligarchs during the collapse of the USSR. It's all a wash really...
The method is a variation on how organised crime takes over a business,
Well, it is the putin government..."
I hope we never have a phrase like "collapse of the USA." And what does "it's all a wash.." mean? That's what I was told I when I could not longer make the payments on a residential/agricultural lot, no letter of acknowledgement or account status update, no final letter, just a verbal over the phone "it's just gonna be a wash.."
"A car manufacturer built the factory to manufacture cars not tanks.....No individual human should be compelled to do what he is unwilling to do under normal free market conditions. "
That reminds me the case of mercenaries. As in, two soldiers are talking, one is a volunteer, the other a mercenary. The volunteer asks the mercenary: What are you fighting for? He says: Money. The volunteer says: That's despicable, that you're willing to lower yourself like that, I fight for liberty and honor. To which the mercenary says: Well, everyone fights for what they lack.
So that would be the free market point of view of war, and in that I agree somewhat with the idealist volunteers and not the free market mercenaries, in that when you're dying, it's better to die for liberty and honor, for the well being of your people and your nation, than it is for just money, for the well being of the bank account of your heirs. But I've met some people, like a foster child with a sister who've been through 40 foster homes, and he's open and honest about having gone to Afghanistan to shoot people two shots in the chest and one to the head during night vision infrared night raids, and he did it to make a living, and provide a roof for himself and his sister, after being tired of being through so many foster homes, or sleeping in the Walmart parking lot to finish highschool, washing up in the Walmart bathroom. Now he has it made, but he'd be reluctant to go to Iran to do the same thing, as in Afganistan all you had to do was shoot disorganized hillbillies, but Iran has an organized army, like the USA, and he did not go to war to die, he went to war to scratch out an existence for himself and his sister. And he cares about the hillbillies too, like when he downed one of them packed with explosives coming toward him, and that guy fell, that guy started getting up. And he was like dude, stay down, I already shot you, what the fuck is wrong with you. So these guys pick up even when shot, and then they keep coming towards you and your only option is to take them out. You can't really reason with an Afghani hillbilly who gets up after being shot down, and pulls all his energy together to make a run at you. He also advertised, that it's best for girls to hook up with a soldier before he goes to war, because, should he die, the government will provide benefits. And I'm adding that, having a girl back home has a huge psychological effect on a young soldier, even if she lied to him and does not really care about him that much, but she cares about having a secure future for herself. I don't know if girlfriend/boyfriend qualifies, it's like you have to marry the guy to qualify as a widow for death benefits, but then that's another complicated topic, but as far as individual soldiers are concerned, it's pretty simple to them: having a girl to write to, even if she don't write back, was good, however that was in the days of letters and mail, and of course, censoring, in the days of instant messaging and emails censoring is not possible anymore, to the point of even me working with a soldier's wife, him being in Iraq, she mentions how he writes her that he's talking to this other girl, and what not, and she's waiting for him back home, and it's like they got married and he ran away all the way to Iraq, it's how you look at it, and it's complicated.
The whole fucking government is a puppet show, provided to the masses and run by big money. Here, stupid, go to the voting booth and we give you the illusion that you have some kind of control over what happens in the politics that affect your life, when in reality, we own your ass, call all the shots, and make all the decisions for you, through providing you with the options we feel suit you the best. And you can't really blame them, after all, they do try to provide everyone with the options that they think suit them best. That's what you call caring. Oscar Wilde said democracy is the idea that people know what they want, and they get it good and hard too. In the USA we have a paternalistic fake democracy, where people are brainwashed into wanting what somebody else think they should want, like a smartphone, something that's best for them, and this fake democracy controlled by a select elite, by big money, wiser then you, guiding your life, probably works better than pure absolute democracy where you let the idiots decide for themselves and run amok. I tell it like it is.
I rode the public transit system today. At first you see all these scared "agents" checking you out. It kinda makes you feel good that somebody cares and watches out for everybody. In a sense I'm starting not to mind the cameras either, but only in a very crowded city. It's a whole lot different in the country side, because it's hard to do terrorism where people are not very crowded together, so they shouldn't need cameras on back country dirt roads for instance. Oh what freedom that is, camera free, crowd free, terrorism free. Privacy. Go ahead, pick your nose at a red light, clean it out good, nobody's watching. It's only possible when you don't overpopulate and get too crowded. Then only public gatherings have to be watched, like church or wedding, or sports, but you can go about your everyday life without being constantly on camera. Who wants to be on camera? Everyone makes mistakes, and it's like a 5th amendment right not to have your mistakes too meticulously on record.
Depends on whether I feel like it or not. You're welcome not to read what I post, so if you don't like the style. Just skip along, mister...
By the way having skirts is a double edged sword - on the one hand you can see some benefits from above, on the other hand, it hides the lower body physique, to where most black women either have super awesome bodies under the waist, or they are exaggerated on hip and butt booty sexual features, but almost none have short leg issues, or highly deformed legs, like it's more common among europeans and arabs wearing skirt-like clothes, and even east asians. So in a sense dressing your women in pants and putting their lower body features on display, helps sex-select to a better looking and healthier future generation. Now if only women had a way to put on display the male feature so important to them, other than lower body physique, and that is penis size, they could select to make their own future generations happier too. Lower body features in men are already on diplay as they wear pants - other than some folklore attires, or, again, the arabs in hot deserts - but penis size where it matters, not in the flaccid state, but in the erect state, is difficult to inspect. It's like it's only possible in a world where everybody is fucking everybody, and therefore knows the dicksizes of everybody. That kind of overly promiscuous world has a lot of downsides too, but it does lead to an increased sexual happiness of future female generations, even if may sacrifice other important characteristics, such as brainpower, but not necessarily so. It should be possible for future males to have a big dick and be smart too, and then the women should be really happy. Maybe the wonders of biotechnology coming from Monsanto will allow modifying characteristics such as this, for the descendants. Like you submit an egg and a sperm to the lab (and you lose out on sperm competition swimming toward the egg), but you can pick eyecolor, height, dick size and arm and leg muscle if a son, or breast size and hip size if a daughter, and Monsanto will modify and customize fo you your future family tree as desired.