From what I've seen, that 'cash windfall' lasts about a year, 6 quarters at most. And even when they privatize, they don't get rid of any of the bureaucrats that were in that department. Government gets bigger, tax money bleeds like severed arteries, the corporation makes money hadn over fist, and the taxpayers take it in the ass. Business as usual.
Hugely out of context quotes, calls for people to resign on a daily basis (usually for petty issues), an insane amount of spin on almost every domestic political article. They've become a parody of themselves.
Sounds like the Neocons in their relentless pursuit of Obama. Hardly a day goes by without some Neocon nutjob or wannabe claiming El Presidente's birth certificate is forged, no matter how much proof you show them. Hell, they wanted to open impeachment hearings on him the minute the polls closed the night of his election. They didn't even give him a chance to fuck up first.
I don't know of any government function that was privatized that actually saves the government any money. From what I've seen, they privatize, and the people doing the work get replaced by a bunch of semitrained minimum wagers while the corporation keeps negociating for ever higher priced contracts. It happened with the Post Office, it's happening in the prisons, it happened to Medicare.
Back in the day, Medicare payments came out of my income taxes. Then, they set aside a new specific Medicare tax. Then under Bush II, Medicare went private. Now they withhold Medicare premiums from peoples' Social Security checks to pay for private health insurance tarted up to look like Medicare. Back in the day, Medicare's paperwork costs were 2% of every healthcare dollar, while private insurance ran up to 30%. Then they passed HIPPA, the Healthcare Information Portability and Privacy Act, to bring private insurance paperwork practices in line with Medicare and make the data easily transported between the systems. Now that Medicare is private, healthcare costs are soaring, nobody gives a shit about the 'portability' portion of HIPPA, they just fine and/or sue about any percieved breach of the 'privacy' aspects of the act. Paperwork costs under the 'new' Medicare are climbing through the roof and will soon reach that 30% mark. And this is progress?
So now Britain has private police. Do they have private prisons like they do here in the US? How soon until the court system there goes private as well?
Because I kept getting people recommending Mint to those of us who were pissed off with Unity on Ubuntu, I gave it a try. I honestly don't understand what people like about it. Mint made me jump through hoops to get google as the default search engine in firefox because google doesn't pay mint to "send customers their way." I can understand getting paid to be the default option, but having to go through extra steps to make Google an option? That's an attempt at extortion, and I won't support it. There's no reason a search engine should pay you to not remove them from the default firefox options when you are building your distro.
Give Lubuntu a try. It's a simple 'icons on the desktop with a task bar & start button' interface that I gave a try after getting pissed off at fluxbox when a couple of my dock apps kept dying on me. I've been screwin with it for about a week now, & no problems other than I still haven't figured out the knack of getting my dock apps to autostart. Just head over to lubuntu.net and check it out.
When I went over to Debian, the method of upgrade is to modify/etc/apt/sources.list to swith to the new repository, then do "apt-get dist-upgrade", and the entire Debian system gets upgraded in place. This, combined with a very rich repository of software packages, meant that I no longer had to wipe and reinstall unless I wanted to for some reason, like changing filesystems or changing disks. And when I do reinstall, all I need is a package list via "dpkg --get-selections > filename" and I know what I need to install.
I ran into some serious dependency hell with Debian in the pre-sarge days. I switched to Ubuntu Dapper & stayed with it because they offered a consistent platform with specified libraries to link against. Nothing weird weird weird out of the gate. And when they updated the distro, the packages were all updated to compile against the new libraries. Can't get much simpler than sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade once you change your/etc/apt/sources.list updated.
The debian upgrade-in-place functionality is drop-dead easy and very rarely fails, but the failures tend to be spectacular.
This. But I haven't had any spectacular failures updating Ubuntu in about 5 releases. YYMV of course.
RPM and Debian both tend to break spectacularly when one, for instance, installs software from source. That is just a showstopper bug in my mind, back to the drawing room boys. Never, ever had pkgtools interfere with me in any way. So they do their job perfectly, and they dont get in my way. Winner by knockout.
Checkinstall works wonders for me. Once you learn to set the dependencies right in the menu, no problem. I just hang onto the sourcecode in a directory off/etc/src and when I update my Ubuntu, 'make clean &&./configure (whatever options) && make && sudo checkinstall make install' and it's money.
Vista for me was a lot like ME. It either worked on a particular machine or it didn't. ME wasn't bad either, if you could get it to work. Personally, if I had to use a Windows machine, I'd either go XP Pro or Windows 7.
I'd start them on Lubuntu. The LXDE desktop is the closest I've seen to XP, there'll be very little learning curve for them, just learning the names of the new apps they get to use.
Except in Star Trek: 90210 they went to warp only a couple hundred meters from space dock and dropped out in Vulcan orbit. Don't get me started on what else was wrong with it.
There's what, 100 billion stars in our galaxy? Say, 1 in a thousand has a planet in the proper zone from its primary for carbon based life and liquid water. That's 100 million planets capable of carrying life as we more or less know it. How many galaxies are there in this universe? Every time I hear a number, I hear a bigger one 6 months later. Say, 250,000 galaxies so far, even though that's liable to be on the low side (any astronomy geeks handy??) So, we're looking at over 100 billion planets where life might be possible. They've already demonstrated how simple proteins could have formed 3 billion years ago here on earth. You're telling me that it's over 100 billion to 1 that life would start by itself? I think it's more likely that there's several hundred million planets in the universe with life on them. The odds seem to be on my side. For extra credit, look up 'the Drake Equation', even though I didn't go all the way through it, and keep in mind that Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It's not like life showed up, oh, say, 6000 years ago...
I can so see an alien Stephen Hawking come up with the brilliant idea of beaming radio pulses at this nearby G-type star (us), and getting funding for a couple years.
And then I can totally see the local legislature pulling the funding for all that 'Buck Rogers stuff that nobody will get any use out of' in favor of buying itself some more votes and/or shutting the local neocon-alikes up before they march on the government with pitchforks and torches to kill them because the thought of intelligent life other than on Zykos is an affront to the gods.
If you need to use PayPal to receive payments and a bank account - just keep your funds low on that account.
Prob is, if you get chargebacks, you'll get an overdraw in your bank account and you'll still have to pay PayPal back. So, you're out the money and get a nasty overdraft charge on your account. It gets even worse if you wrote checks on the pre-chargeback balance, cause you're now stuck with overdraft charges on those checks, too.
Well, on the upside, if those vampires were human, the networks would be in deep shit for promoting pedophilia. Remember, all of those vampires are over 50 & their 'girlfriends' are under 18...
Of course, the Justice department usually prefers err on the safe side.
Problem is, the Justice Department's definition of 'safe' is different from ours. Their definition is more along the lines of 'cover your ass' than 'don't bug decent law-abiding citizens'.
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From what I've seen, that 'cash windfall' lasts about a year, 6 quarters at most. And even when they privatize, they don't get rid of any of the bureaucrats that were in that department. Government gets bigger, tax money bleeds like severed arteries, the corporation makes money hadn over fist, and the taxpayers take it in the ass. Business as usual.
Sounds like the Neocons in their relentless pursuit of Obama. Hardly a day goes by without some Neocon nutjob or wannabe claiming El Presidente's birth certificate is forged, no matter how much proof you show them. Hell, they wanted to open impeachment hearings on him the minute the polls closed the night of his election. They didn't even give him a chance to fuck up first.
The Hoosegow, any day. They had better food.
I could go for some Roundup Chili right about now...
I'm thinking maybe he has a point. Perhaps it is time to clear the decks for the next civilisation...
I don't know of any government function that was privatized that actually saves the government any money. From what I've seen, they privatize, and the people doing the work get replaced by a bunch of semitrained minimum wagers while the corporation keeps negociating for ever higher priced contracts. It happened with the Post Office, it's happening in the prisons, it happened to Medicare.
Back in the day, Medicare payments came out of my income taxes. Then, they set aside a new specific Medicare tax. Then under Bush II, Medicare went private. Now they withhold Medicare premiums from peoples' Social Security checks to pay for private health insurance tarted up to look like Medicare. Back in the day, Medicare's paperwork costs were 2% of every healthcare dollar, while private insurance ran up to 30%. Then they passed HIPPA, the Healthcare Information Portability and Privacy Act, to bring private insurance paperwork practices in line with Medicare and make the data easily transported between the systems. Now that Medicare is private, healthcare costs are soaring, nobody gives a shit about the 'portability' portion of HIPPA, they just fine and/or sue about any percieved breach of the 'privacy' aspects of the act. Paperwork costs under the 'new' Medicare are climbing through the roof and will soon reach that 30% mark. And this is progress?
So now Britain has private police. Do they have private prisons like they do here in the US? How soon until the court system there goes private as well?
Give Lubuntu a try. It's a simple 'icons on the desktop with a task bar & start button' interface that I gave a try after getting pissed off at fluxbox when a couple of my dock apps kept dying on me. I've been screwin with it for about a week now, & no problems other than I still haven't figured out the knack of getting my dock apps to autostart. Just head over to lubuntu.net and check it out.
I ran into some serious dependency hell with Debian in the pre-sarge days. I switched to Ubuntu Dapper & stayed with it because they offered a consistent platform with specified libraries to link against. Nothing weird weird weird out of the gate. And when they updated the distro, the packages were all updated to compile against the new libraries. Can't get much simpler than sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade once you change your /etc/apt/sources.list updated.
This. But I haven't had any spectacular failures updating Ubuntu in about 5 releases. YYMV of course.
Checkinstall works wonders for me. Once you learn to set the dependencies right in the menu, no problem. I just hang onto the sourcecode in a directory off /etc/src and when I update my Ubuntu, 'make clean && ./configure (whatever options) && make && sudo checkinstall make install' and it's money.
Vista for me was a lot like ME. It either worked on a particular machine or it didn't. ME wasn't bad either, if you could get it to work. Personally, if I had to use a Windows machine, I'd either go XP Pro or Windows 7.
I'd start them on Lubuntu. The LXDE desktop is the closest I've seen to XP, there'll be very little learning curve for them, just learning the names of the new apps they get to use.
Except in Star Trek: 90210 they went to warp only a couple hundred meters from space dock and dropped out in Vulcan orbit. Don't get me started on what else was wrong with it.
Urban renewal?
And yet you've never heard of the Drake Equation.
Lemme guess. Bookkeeper? Accounts clerk? Harvard MBA?
And you showed that you have no comprehension of mathematics. Turn in your geek card.
There's what, 100 billion stars in our galaxy? Say, 1 in a thousand has a planet in the proper zone from its primary for carbon based life and liquid water. That's 100 million planets capable of carrying life as we more or less know it. How many galaxies are there in this universe? Every time I hear a number, I hear a bigger one 6 months later. Say, 250,000 galaxies so far, even though that's liable to be on the low side (any astronomy geeks handy??) So, we're looking at over 100 billion planets where life might be possible. They've already demonstrated how simple proteins could have formed 3 billion years ago here on earth. You're telling me that it's over 100 billion to 1 that life would start by itself? I think it's more likely that there's several hundred million planets in the universe with life on them. The odds seem to be on my side. For extra credit, look up 'the Drake Equation', even though I didn't go all the way through it, and keep in mind that Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It's not like life showed up, oh, say, 6000 years ago...
I can so see an alien Stephen Hawking come up with the brilliant idea of beaming radio pulses at this nearby G-type star (us), and getting funding for a couple years.
And then I can totally see the local legislature pulling the funding for all that 'Buck Rogers stuff that nobody will get any use out of' in favor of buying itself some more votes and/or shutting the local neocon-alikes up before they march on the government with pitchforks and torches to kill them because the thought of intelligent life other than on Zykos is an affront to the gods.
Because, in the so-apt words of Monty Python, 'There's bugger-all down here!'
You wouldn't happen to work for the government, would you?
Doesn't matter. If he was 18 & the girl underaged, he can still be charged with statutory rape.
So why aren't the Moral Minority screaming to get this show off the air already? Hell, they'd be doing us a favor for a change.
Prob is, if you get chargebacks, you'll get an overdraw in your bank account and you'll still have to pay PayPal back. So, you're out the money and get a nasty overdraft charge on your account. It gets even worse if you wrote checks on the pre-chargeback balance, cause you're now stuck with overdraft charges on those checks, too.
Last time I looked, ebay owned PayPal. Of course they'd require its use.
Well, on the upside, if those vampires were human, the networks would be in deep shit for promoting pedophilia. Remember, all of those vampires are over 50 & their 'girlfriends' are under 18...
Damned repo men...
Dr Strangelove. The classic 'alien hand' routine.
Yeah, I read that. He gave it back. My question is, what would happen if they didn't get it back, if they never had a warrant to begin with?
Problem is, the Justice Department's definition of 'safe' is different from ours. Their definition is more along the lines of 'cover your ass' than 'don't bug decent law-abiding citizens'.