Most of that "40%" has kids, or they couldn't get enough Earned Income Credit to even negate their own income tax owed. They do still pay Social Security and Medicare and Federal Unemployment taxes, all they aren't paying is the Income tax itself. It's called Earned Income tax credit because you have to have a job, with wages, to qualify for it. That's not sitting on their asses and doing absolutely nothing, that's working. If that 40% had been sitting around for years, not working, then we would have had a multi-year 40% unemployment rate (which, you may notice, we didn't)
Your figures are totally wrong, your principles are false, your conclusions are wrong, and the part at the end about "the 15% you are blaming", shows you didn't read the parent post before reflexively vomitng forth your mindless hate and fomenting class warfare. As that parent poster said "You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts." Please get some real facts about how the system works and stop repeating misinformation.
Governments look at the financial bottom line, not necessarily in the exact same way as for profit corporations, but they do look. That said, profit is overriding to a for profit. A government could conceivably decide it was going to follow every nitpicking internal regulation precisely, and use, for example, regulations that paid bonuses to DHS caseworkers who did a better job of getting abused children out of bad situations and getting their abusive parents properly thrown into jail. Spot the abuse cases, follow through with doctors and schools, provide good records and maintain the chain of evidence that results in nobody beating the rap because of flaws in the DHS's part of the case, and get a bonus. They could have penalties for the people who do a lousy job, or discharge the worst X% and open the jobs to new candidates each year, or otherwise get rid of the deadwood by an objective metric. All it would take was requiring performance levels prioritised by the social values, so that a person who did well on what society decided were the most important parts of their job wasn't going to lose out to someone who accomplished little but filed every 1014-stroke-Jay-slash-Arr properly.
Right now, the IRS has a quota program for some classes of agents (salaried, rather than hourly grades). The way the numbers tilt things, an agent can put in 12 hour days picking off low hanging fruit, finding minor violations on taxes committed by people obviously too poor to afford lawyers, and their are some agents who still seem to do that, just put in extra hours for job security, but it's very hard to make the quotas that way and get home from work on time, keep your weekends free, and actually look good enough to be promoted. The alternative is to do the hard work of investigating major frauds, where the case requires quality work or the 'bad guy' will definitely be able to afford a lawyer that can find any weak spots. Agents are encouraged to value a family life enough to want to meet their quotas early, be able to schedule vacations at good times, get home for the weekends, and have a life outside the agency, and word gets around that the best way to do this is to get the big dogs. From what I've seen as a tax pro dealing with the IRS, the general trend is good for the public, more professional agents and more arrests on the people most of us agree are the real problems, like business owners who keep a desk full of fake IDs to give to their illegal alien hires.
We could run the whole government like that, consistently (or a lot more consistently than we do - being human, I'm sure there will be less than perfection), and adjust just how much gets spent and which regulations have the highest priorities when they clash by open political action. We don't as much as (I think) we should, but we could. Nothing like that can happen in a for profit. A regulation can always be ignored if it has enough negative impact on the bottom line, and especially the penalties for being caught are low enough. The corporate veil means there is no force acting to ensure openness in debating policy. Decisions get made by comptrollers or accountants whose job is only to analyse the financial side and the next quarter and not to consider the ethics, or longer term consequences. I'm pretty sure that, when the government needed to make nuclear weapons more secure, the people who were tasked with it didn't sit down and say "How can I make this dangerous thing safe enough that there won't be an accident until after I'm promoted to some other job?".
You can't have it both ways. Sure you can: While it may be logically impossible to claim that both mega corporations and big government are our benevolent benefactors, claiming both represent a single interlocking authoritarian nightmare is both logically possible and may well represent objective reality. (Sucks, doesn't it?)
By the regulations, a 1099-INT is issued any time the bank has paid at least 10$ interest during the year to a person, and in all cases where any interest is subject to a foreign tax, however small. The IRS gets copies. A SSN (or other Taxpayer ID Number like a business's Employer Id Number or a Resident Alien ID) is included on any 1099-INT form. The institution can put XXX-XX-XXXX in that field only if they have been notified multiple times by the IRS that the number is fraudulent and have repeatedly taken the normal steps to correct it and informed the IRS of those steps.
Also, if an institution reports interest on more than one account for the same person, the specific account number must be included on the form, which can arguably be a tip off to the IRS other accounts exist, although most banks just fill in the account number all the time, so if the IRS wanted to somehow use this tip off, they would have to know how reliably the given bank follows the instructions. I'm not sure if there's any real potential for an abuse here, though for those of you who really don't trust the government at all, I can't say it's impossible either.
Solutions for commerce will arise from commerce itself. You mean, like commerce started demanding Social Security Numbers even though the law said they weren't supposed to? What's really strange to me is anyone still arguing big government is bad and the solution is more 'fixes' that sound just like ignoring how most businesses are violating the law on SSN's. The same businesses that want less government regulation have shown they will gladly co-opt a government only database to their purposes if at all possible. I worry too about how government programs can expand, and what was a voluntary tool become mandatory, but doesn't this sort of doublethink form the corporate side make their arguments as suspect as the ones from the government?
Any decent e-tailier And all the lazy or not so decent ones? Because a lot of sensible or responsible on line services do seem to have instituted some systems, but I don't see the lazy or irresponsible ones being driven from business just yet, and if it's not happening in a severe economic downturn, it sure won't happen if there's improvement. If the 'free market' isn't really working as you claim it will, how long do we wait for reality to start matching your theory?
Not all states even require a presented ID. In no state is a driver's licence required to vote. You may want to note that the very first State on the list at the above site, Alabama, does not specifically allow a driver's licence as one of its alternates. Most, if not all, states that have ID requirements issue Voter Registration Cards, and for those states, these are THE primary ID. (I really can't claim all issue cards because, for example, the current Arizona law on this has not yet taken effect, so one state, at least, has no policy or alternatives in place, although they will). Some states always go to a provisional ballot if the person lacks ID, and some states primary method is a signed affidavit and comparison of the signature to one on record. This comparison is by human eye (either the Registrar or attendant Judge of Polls, as required by state law), but now sometimes the signature it is being compared to is not in a physical book in the hands of the poll worker, but is transmitted electronically from a more centralised location. Most states will work with some forms of alternate ID such as a driver's licence, passport, state or county issued ID or sometimes other documents, AND follow this with signature comparison.
Notice that issuing a net ID and still allowing using the net without any ID at all is exactly analogous to what some states on the lists above do for voting. I guess you'd better start writing the election commissions of all those states and telling them too to "Go back to bed."
The Social Security Administration will not give a person a new card or other information upon them merely presenting a driver's licence. In the simplest case, an adult born in the US, who has already had a card and merely wants a replacement, they will require proof of citizenship as well as some form of proof of identity, and must see either a U.S. birth certificate, U.S. consular report of birth, U.S. passport, Certificate of Naturalisation or Certificate of Citizenship for the first. All other cases, such as initial issue of a social security card, are more complex. Requests for specific information and actually applying for retirement are, if anything, more constrained than the simple application for a replacement card, until you actually have one.
OK, I think I've proved that you were spreading misinformation exactly 100% counter to the actual, well known facts. I won't advise you to go back to bed, rather stay with the debate and learn something before you post again.
Temperature change - it's not a very reliable metric for a reading in free air. A cool breeze from a natural cause can rapidly change your readings. Less than ethical 'spiritual investigators' could even deliberately open a window or run water and not record that part on video, and abandoned old houses are very likely to have large openings that allow large drafts - the typical 30 years abandoned house has holes big enough for stray cats or raccoons to get in and out.
So, would you get better data if you shielded a temperature probe from drafts, and placed it against a sizable thermal mass like a concrete wall or granite mantle-piece. What if you measured a 20 degree change in seconds on a heavy thermal mass object with a sensor that was protected from other sides by a sealed Styrofoam shell, while you had strips of light paper hung nearby in many directions to indicate possible drafts? You're not just looking for a change, but a change whose type and magnitude makes it less likely there's a sufficient natural explanation.
Noises - Turn on the faucets and see if you can produce a natural water hammering noise. Make sure to include ones down in the basement or outside the house. Open chimney flues. Open or close furnace or air conditioning vents, even if they appear not to be hooked up to the main system any more. Try different settings in many combinations. Check water even if the water is supposedly completely turned off, as sometimes a little trickle is leaking, and it will build up to normal pressure and cause transient effects that you can't reproduce unless you let that pressure build up for days again. Do a survey of all the rooms, including closets, and look for evidence of nesting birds, rodents and other possible organic sources of odd sounds. You know all those movies with the wind blowing scratchy old tree branches across the shingles? Look for real possible cases of those. Watch for ways somebody could try to sneak up close to the house and deliberately hoax you, because anyone trying that will probably use noises. That doesn't mean, of course, that any noise you still can't explain is supernatural.
Lights - A good camera could record a mysterious light accurately, much more accurately than a cheap one. Old fashioned film cameras might reveal things that don't show to digital ones, and vice versa. You might even be able to mount multiple types of cameras and/or film stocks so you could trigger them all at once and get interesting comparison photos. A simple prism can spread out the spectrum of a strange light on a flat wall, you can get a test light source that has known peak frequencies to 'calibrate' the prism so you aren't just reporting that the peak looked vaguely greenish, and a really strange spectrum that can't be from something like car headlights or a flashlight reflecting around might be pretty good evidence, or at least guide you in going further next time. A camera can record color much too faint for you to see, so photograph those faint specta with long exposures. Imagine if the spectrum you photograph is almost monochromatic, with only a few sharply defined peaks, and those are not on wavelengths that match any commercial laser pointer or specialty florescent bulb or other such source. Or what if a polarimeter reveals the odd light is elliptically polarised? A pair of polarised sunglasses and a bit of cross polarising filter you can rotate before them is a pretty cheap piece of test gear.
Electronics. Old fashioned CB radios or kid's walkie-talkies might be less hypersenitive to interference than your modern devices. Experiment to find ways to communicate with helpers that don't seem subject to odd noises. What does your digital display look like when its signal is glitching from normal causes? What does your radio handset sound like as you and your helper walk farther and farther apart outdoors, until one of you walks under a highway overpass? If there is something really strange going on, you won't know it because systems are experiencing normal failures, but you might just spot something really interesting if the failure mode ISN'T one of the normal ones.
Asimov's 'best' pun - "But how was the content of our winter's disc made spurious by this scum of cork?" "It was elementally adhered, Watson". No one's gonna top that.
At least one of the origin sources of the word Redneck was as a term applied to mine workers in the pre civil war era and afterwards up to the 1880's. There were people lynched by hired goons (mostly the Pinkertons) to bust up unionising efforts, who had the word "Redneck" carved into their corpses afterwards, which makes it every bit as bad as the N word in my view. (just because we're talking a few dozen lynchings instead of thousands total, doesn't mean they aren't still lynchings). People like Foxworthy were using the term just like Richard Prior or Chris Rock were using the N word, and Foxworthy has dropped it for similar reasons finding out how seriously its still taken as an insult in some places. My maternal great grandfather was a sociailst party mine organizer, and he had to throw the wife and kids into the bathtub one night as shots were fired at his house by unidentitfied people who also repeatedly called him a redneck in the process. Yeah, people might want to drop that one from the vocabulary.
No, no, a Pernacious door would lead to a planet inhabited by dragons who were allegedly oddly explicable without crossing the boundaries of SF and fantasy. Some of them are green whats.
When he was explicitly supporting the 'Birther' movement, he made a bunch of false claims about what the constitution said about natural born Americans, first claiming that it required both parents to be US Citizens and then claiming that there was specific language required on State birth certificates and that the phrase "Certification of Live Birth", as was specifically used as in the Hawaii document's header, was specifically spelled out as wrong in the Constitution, as there was a supposed requirement to say "Certificate of Live Birth" instead. He repeatedly passed on claims the document was photoshopped and the seal was faked, uncritically.
During a spate of California wild fires, Mr. Beck said: ''I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.'' The Glenn Beck Program,' Oct. 22, 2007
Nobody, you're committing a logical fallacy. People educated in the modern era don't really believe the universe had to have a creator simply because it is big and complex. I'll bet you don't, if you know a little history of modern cosmology. So why are you reasoning from a principle you don't yourself accept? People generally believe that the universe could have been explained by a model that doesn't require any moment of creation (like the 1920's Steady State Model), but it turned out that a model that the scientific evidence fit better (The Big Bang), also implies a moment of creation. Nothing says that any and all conceptions of a universe require a creator just because they are big or complex, but the particular version of a universe we think is the best model has a moment of creation, and some people think that implies a creator. There's nothing internally illogical about God having been around forever and not having a moment of Creation - if there was, abstract logic would have been enough to disprove the Steady State Theory without us needing to cite scientific evidence such as the cosmic microwave background.
Except the original Hebrew word didn't mean a day, and was often used in other writings to mean an indeterminate period. If you're asking how you can trust a poor translation job, you may be on to something, but the original text didn't use the English word 'day' at all, let alone redefine it. Alternately, some people claim the account in Genesis is metaphorical. Now I'm not arguing that it definitely is or isn't, but your argument seems to be that if it is metaphorical, it's untrustworthy in some absolute sense. I.e. "Carl Sagan used a metaphor of the Milky Way as the Backbone of Night in Cosmos, so how can we trust anything else in Cosmos?" Or maybe you're going as far as "The discoverer of the Benzine ring used a metaphor of a snake devouring its tail to describe it, so how can we trust anything in organic chemistry?".
You are now cleared MAGINOT BLUE STARS and SCORPION STARE - further discussion of the system is authorised only with cleared personnel. You are not cleared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN (You'll thank me for that later when you die still technically human). GBTW and STFU.
I'm thinking of Jar Jar playing everything that passes within 10 feet of an egg depository, a lurking warrior caste, or an automated sentry gun. "Meesa-AAAGH! IT BURNS! Gettit Frellin Meesa OFFFAH ME!". Keep the whole thing short, no more than a twelve hour film, so it stays funny.
Yes, and yet most people are convinced his assassination was entirely a matter of racial politics, and couldn't possibly have anything to do with him going off script. Teddy Roosevelt said, in 1912, "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." That was coincidentally the year he delivered his most impromptu speech ever, The "Ladies and Gentlemen, I have just been shot - I may have to cut this one a little short" speech.
Not when you're surviving until the war crimes trial and the automatic hanging. Takes the fun out of it. You sit in a cell, get to see all the press reports demonizing you to the point where nobody will want to share your last name, The guards remind you daily that somebody will manage to smuggle the video of your hanging out to the internet and perverts will masturbate to it, and then Ziiip-Gaaaak!
All the nukes in the world can destroy ONE city, one small metropolis (say 1/4th of New York). That's it. Please check your math. I followed your link, and it looks like from their numbers it would take 4 B-83's to totally destroy London, and probably all of New York could be done with 3 if the spacing was just right.
Yes, you're quite certain, but why? As a former Nuke/Chem/Bio defense officer with the US Military, I can assure you that an attack on US soil with nuclear weapons would result in the big metaphorical glass parking lot becoming reality. They can take out a city center or two. We can and probably would literally kill 100% of their popualtion, unless our Comander in Chief excercises almost litterally inhuman restraint. We regularly trained back when I was in to drive M1A1 series tanks through four hour old craters just for the scenarios where the government opts to hunt down any and all survivors of the initial exchange and wants them all dead before any get a chance to surrender. We're talking the deaths of every man, woman and potentially every day old infant in North Korea as a matter of official doctrine. Although I have hopes we would do better than absolute genocide, I sure wouldn't bet on it, because the 300 Million + surviving Americans are mostly going to be wondering why we even try to avoid fallout drifting into South Korea or China, let alone what happens to the North. I trained from some of the response plans in the 1970s and they're finally public. We had plans that dedicated a Megaton for every village of over 500 people. Hell, in the 50's we had plans that involved seeding their croplands with radiocobalt isotopes so nothing would grow for a thousand years, and then crashing the nuclear powered, plutonium fueled, unmanned bombers that delivered it into their cities after they had spent a month each flying back and forth over the whole country. We've gotten more precise since then and started giving a damn about not poisoning the whole planet, but not less lethal. North Korea stands to lose literally 100% - it doesn't get any worse than that.
Scale invariance always demonstrates one thing clearly. Wherever it occurs for a real phenomenon, there is no sharp line between two or more things that are usually being called by different names (at least by somebody involved), and so, it's logical to infer that they are really not such different things at all. As one of my instructors put it back in the dark ages, "When you analyse data on smooth flow and turbulent flow and the problem turns out to be scale invariant, you have a situation where there are not really two kinds of flow at all, over the range you are looking at.".
In this case, the math implies that where anybody is talking about dealing with some types of terrorism as separate from others, the burden of proof is overwhelmingly on them to show the distinctions they base their arguments on even exist, before their arguments should be considered. Every pundit who claims that "State Funded", or "Islamosupremicist" or "Clifford the big red Terrorist" brand terrorism requires special solutions such as waterboarding or extraordinary rendition, even though previous terrorist acts could be addressed through the normal court system, should have to show how his proposed subclass divides the data in such a way it doesn't still follow scale invariance, or the presumption should be it makes no differences. Whatever solution they are proposing, the presumption should be it's a solution in search of a problem until proven otherwise. That's a pretty important result - there are huge numbers of people arguing about what's to be done about their particular specialised version of terrorism that requires special solutions, and if they are talking through a cocked hat, it's a damned good to know.
(golfclap mode)You got a +5 insightful effectively for telling people that this situation allows only statistical aggregate prediction, not short term prediction, and then attacking the use of a tool of statistical analysis. Worse, you phrased it as an attack on the user, not the tool. Congrats. (/golfclap mode)
Northern Ireland shows a strong correlation between both economic failure and economic uncertainty and increasing terrorist acts. The costs of the middle east and their impact on the rest of the economy have created precisely the situation that the record shows triggers a largish spike in terrorism in and around Ireland. You ignore this fact and call others naive, and come to the illogical conclusion that restoring a stable peacetime economy won't help. By your viewpoint, we have to stay the damned course at any cost, follow Ahab into the depths with the whale, and just accept that this issue will still haunt our great-great-grandchildren and beyond. You don't have a solution, just insults for everyone who won't accept your nihilistic attitude. I'm sure that gives you the faux self esteem to get through life, but sooner or later you will see yourself as you are - damned shame that.
There's a natural timescale. Individual people don't buy or eat bread every millisecond, they eat it once or twice a day, and buy it twice a week or so. Factors that influence how much bread can be produced don't come along every millisecond, they come along over weeks (it's called weather). How is this extra liquidity, above natural timing helpful? If I hear from a reliable source that the CEO of a company has been arrested for allowing melamine in baby food, I can act within a few minutes to sell, perhaps ahead of others who haven't heard it yet. If liquidity means millisecond trades, I have to choose whether to act on an unreliable and unverifiable rumor in the same way I would a more reliable report. Putting bad data on a par with good data is pretty much a guarantee of what you're calling speculation, by your definitions. So there's a slight gain in an already very liquid situation - coming at a cost of a huge loss to the thing you are calling 'fundamental' analysis.
When someone goes on chemotherapy, why not increase the doses given to as much as we can pump in? It would probably kill more cancer cells faster, right? Oh, but it would definitely kill the patent too. Speed is not an unlimited blessing. A little extra liquidity comes at a high price, and its by that very price that your 'investments' vs. 'speculations' can be distinguished.
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Most of that "40%" has kids, or they couldn't get enough Earned Income Credit to even negate their own income tax owed. They do still pay Social Security and Medicare and Federal Unemployment taxes, all they aren't paying is the Income tax itself. It's called Earned Income tax credit because you have to have a job, with wages, to qualify for it. That's not sitting on their asses and doing absolutely nothing, that's working. If that 40% had been sitting around for years, not working, then we would have had a multi-year 40% unemployment rate (which, you may notice, we didn't)
Your figures are totally wrong, your principles are false, your conclusions are wrong, and the part at the end about "the 15% you are blaming", shows you didn't read the parent post before reflexively vomitng forth your mindless hate and fomenting class warfare. As that parent poster said "You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts." Please get some real facts about how the system works and stop repeating misinformation.
Governments look at the financial bottom line, not necessarily in the exact same way as for profit corporations, but they do look.
That said, profit is overriding to a for profit. A government could conceivably decide it was going to follow every nitpicking internal regulation precisely, and use, for example, regulations that paid bonuses to DHS caseworkers who did a better job of getting abused children out of bad situations and getting their abusive parents properly thrown into jail. Spot the abuse cases, follow through with doctors and schools, provide good records and maintain the chain of evidence that results in nobody beating the rap because of flaws in the DHS's part of the case, and get a bonus. They could have penalties for the people who do a lousy job, or discharge the worst X% and open the jobs to new candidates each year, or otherwise get rid of the deadwood by an objective metric. All it would take was requiring performance levels prioritised by the social values, so that a person who did well on what society decided were the most important parts of their job wasn't going to lose out to someone who accomplished little but filed every 1014-stroke-Jay-slash-Arr properly.
Right now, the IRS has a quota program for some classes of agents (salaried, rather than hourly grades). The way the numbers tilt things, an agent can put in 12 hour days picking off low hanging fruit, finding minor violations on taxes committed by people obviously too poor to afford lawyers, and their are some agents who still seem to do that, just put in extra hours for job security, but it's very hard to make the quotas that way and get home from work on time, keep your weekends free, and actually look good enough to be promoted. The alternative is to do the hard work of investigating major frauds, where the case requires quality work or the 'bad guy' will definitely be able to afford a lawyer that can find any weak spots. Agents are encouraged to value a family life enough to want to meet their quotas early, be able to schedule vacations at good times, get home for the weekends, and have a life outside the agency, and word gets around that the best way to do this is to get the big dogs. From what I've seen as a tax pro dealing with the IRS, the general trend is good for the public, more professional agents and more arrests on the people most of us agree are the real problems, like business owners who keep a desk full of fake IDs to give to their illegal alien hires.
We could run the whole government like that, consistently (or a lot more consistently than we do - being human, I'm sure there will be less than perfection), and adjust just how much gets spent and which regulations have the highest priorities when they clash by open political action. We don't as much as (I think) we should, but we could. Nothing like that can happen in a for profit. A regulation can always be ignored if it has enough negative impact on the bottom line, and especially the penalties for being caught are low enough. The corporate veil means there is no force acting to ensure openness in debating policy. Decisions get made by comptrollers or accountants whose job is only to analyse the financial side and the next quarter and not to consider the ethics, or longer term consequences. I'm pretty sure that, when the government needed to make nuclear weapons more secure, the people who were tasked with it didn't sit down and say "How can I make this dangerous thing safe enough that there won't be an accident until after I'm promoted to some other job?".
You can't have it both ways.
Sure you can: While it may be logically impossible to claim that both mega corporations and big government are our benevolent benefactors, claiming both represent a single interlocking authoritarian nightmare is both logically possible and may well represent objective reality. (Sucks, doesn't it?)
By the regulations, a 1099-INT is issued any time the bank has paid at least 10$ interest during the year to a person, and in all cases where any interest is subject to a foreign tax, however small. The IRS gets copies. A SSN (or other Taxpayer ID Number like a business's Employer Id Number or a Resident Alien ID) is included on any 1099-INT form. The institution can put XXX-XX-XXXX in that field only if they have been notified multiple times by the IRS that the number is fraudulent and have repeatedly taken the normal steps to correct it and informed the IRS of those steps.
Also, if an institution reports interest on more than one account for the same person, the specific account number must be included on the form, which can arguably be a tip off to the IRS other accounts exist, although most banks just fill in the account number all the time, so if the IRS wanted to somehow use this tip off, they would have to know how reliably the given bank follows the instructions. I'm not sure if there's any real potential for an abuse here, though for those of you who really don't trust the government at all, I can't say it's impossible either.
Solutions for commerce will arise from commerce itself.
You mean, like commerce started demanding Social Security Numbers even though the law said they weren't supposed to? What's really strange to me is anyone still arguing big government is bad and the solution is more 'fixes' that sound just like ignoring how most businesses are violating the law on SSN's. The same businesses that want less government regulation have shown they will gladly co-opt a government only database to their purposes if at all possible. I worry too about how government programs can expand, and what was a voluntary tool become mandatory, but doesn't this sort of doublethink form the corporate side make their arguments as suspect as the ones from the government?
Any decent e-tailier
And all the lazy or not so decent ones? Because a lot of sensible or responsible on line services do seem to have instituted some systems, but I don't see the lazy or irresponsible ones being driven from business just yet, and if it's not happening in a severe economic downturn, it sure won't happen if there's improvement. If the 'free market' isn't really working as you claim it will, how long do we wait for reality to start matching your theory?
http://www.ncsl.org/LegislaturesElections/ElectionsCampaigns/StateRequirementsforVoterID/tabid/16602/Default.aspx
Not all states even require a presented ID. In no state is a driver's licence required to vote. You may want to note that the very first State on the list at the above site, Alabama, does not specifically allow a driver's licence as one of its alternates. Most, if not all, states that have ID requirements issue Voter Registration Cards, and for those states, these are THE primary ID. (I really can't claim all issue cards because, for example, the current Arizona law on this has not yet taken effect, so one state, at least, has no policy or alternatives in place, although they will). Some states always go to a provisional ballot if the person lacks ID, and some states primary method is a signed affidavit and comparison of the signature to one on record. This comparison is by human eye (either the Registrar or attendant Judge of Polls, as required by state law), but now sometimes the signature it is being compared to is not in a physical book in the hands of the poll worker, but is transmitted electronically from a more centralised location. Most states will work with some forms of alternate ID such as a driver's licence, passport, state or county issued ID or sometimes other documents, AND follow this with signature comparison.
Notice that issuing a net ID and still allowing using the net without any ID at all is exactly analogous to what some states on the lists above do for voting. I guess you'd better start writing the election commissions of all those states and telling them too to "Go back to bed."
http://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/
The Social Security Administration will not give a person a new card or other information upon them merely presenting a driver's licence. In the simplest case, an adult born in the US, who has already had a card and merely wants a replacement, they will require proof of citizenship as well as some form of proof of identity, and must see either a U.S. birth certificate, U.S. consular report of birth, U.S. passport, Certificate of Naturalisation or Certificate of Citizenship for the first. All other cases, such as initial issue of a social security card, are more complex. Requests for specific information and actually applying for retirement are, if anything, more constrained than the simple application for a replacement card, until you actually have one.
OK, I think I've proved that you were spreading misinformation exactly 100% counter to the actual, well known facts. I won't advise you to go back to bed, rather stay with the debate and learn something before you post again.
Temperature change - it's not a very reliable metric for a reading in free air. A cool breeze from a natural cause can rapidly change your readings. Less than ethical 'spiritual investigators' could even deliberately open a window or run water and not record that part on video, and abandoned old houses are very likely to have large openings that allow large drafts - the typical 30 years abandoned house has holes big enough for stray cats or raccoons to get in and out.
So, would you get better data if you shielded a temperature probe from drafts, and placed it against a sizable thermal mass like a concrete wall or granite mantle-piece. What if you measured a 20 degree change in seconds on a heavy thermal mass object with a sensor that was protected from other sides by a sealed Styrofoam shell, while you had strips of light paper hung nearby in many directions to indicate possible drafts? You're not just looking for a change, but a change whose type and magnitude makes it less likely there's a sufficient natural explanation.
Noises - Turn on the faucets and see if you can produce a natural water hammering noise. Make sure to include ones down in the basement or outside the house. Open chimney flues. Open or close furnace or air conditioning vents, even if they appear not to be hooked up to the main system any more. Try different settings in many combinations. Check water even if the water is supposedly completely turned off, as sometimes a little trickle is leaking, and it will build up to normal pressure and cause transient effects that you can't reproduce unless you let that pressure build up for days again. Do a survey of all the rooms, including closets, and look for evidence of nesting birds, rodents and other possible organic sources of odd sounds. You know all those movies with the wind blowing scratchy old tree branches across the shingles? Look for real possible cases of those. Watch for ways somebody could try to sneak up close to the house and deliberately hoax you, because anyone trying that will probably use noises. That doesn't mean, of course, that any noise you still can't explain is supernatural.
Lights - A good camera could record a mysterious light accurately, much more accurately than a cheap one. Old fashioned film cameras might reveal things that don't show to digital ones, and vice versa. You might even be able to mount multiple types of cameras and/or film stocks so you could trigger them all at once and get interesting comparison photos. A simple prism can spread out the spectrum of a strange light on a flat wall, you can get a test light source that has known peak frequencies to 'calibrate' the prism so you aren't just reporting that the peak looked vaguely greenish, and a really strange spectrum that can't be from something like car headlights or a flashlight reflecting around might be pretty good evidence, or at least guide you in going further next time. A camera can record color much too faint for you to see, so photograph those faint specta with long exposures. Imagine if the spectrum you photograph is almost monochromatic, with only a few sharply defined peaks, and those are not on wavelengths that match any commercial laser pointer or specialty florescent bulb or other such source. Or what if a polarimeter reveals the odd light is elliptically polarised? A pair of polarised sunglasses and a bit of cross polarising filter you can rotate before them is a pretty cheap piece of test gear.
Electronics. Old fashioned CB radios or kid's walkie-talkies might be less hypersenitive to interference than your modern devices. Experiment to find ways to communicate with helpers that don't seem subject to odd noises. What does your digital display look like when its signal is glitching from normal causes? What does your radio handset sound like as you and your helper walk farther and farther apart outdoors, until one of you walks under a highway overpass? If there is something really strange going on, you won't know it because systems are experiencing normal failures, but you might just spot something really interesting if the failure mode ISN'T one of the normal ones.
Asimov's 'best' pun - "But how was the content of our winter's disc made spurious by this scum of cork?" "It was elementally adhered, Watson".
No one's gonna top that.
At least one of the origin sources of the word Redneck was as a term applied to mine workers in the pre civil war era and afterwards up to the 1880's. There were people lynched by hired goons (mostly the Pinkertons) to bust up unionising efforts, who had the word "Redneck" carved into their corpses afterwards, which makes it every bit as bad as the N word in my view. (just because we're talking a few dozen lynchings instead of thousands total, doesn't mean they aren't still lynchings). People like Foxworthy were using the term just like Richard Prior or Chris Rock were using the N word, and Foxworthy has dropped it for similar reasons finding out how seriously its still taken as an insult in some places. My maternal great grandfather was a sociailst party mine organizer, and he had to throw the wife and kids into the bathtub one night as shots were fired at his house by unidentitfied people who also repeatedly called him a redneck in the process. Yeah, people might want to drop that one from the vocabulary.
No, no, a Pernacious door would lead to a planet inhabited by dragons who were allegedly oddly explicable without crossing the boundaries of SF and fantasy. Some of them are green whats.
Something even more bizarre and inexplicable
a new season
I'm not seeing a distinction here.
When he was explicitly supporting the 'Birther' movement, he made a bunch of false claims about what the constitution said about natural born Americans, first claiming that it required both parents to be US Citizens and then claiming that there was specific language required on State birth certificates and that the phrase "Certification of Live Birth", as was specifically used as in the Hawaii document's header, was specifically spelled out as wrong in the Constitution, as there was a supposed requirement to say "Certificate of Live Birth" instead. He repeatedly passed on claims the document was photoshopped and the seal was faked, uncritically.
During a spate of California wild fires, Mr. Beck said:
''I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.''
The Glenn Beck Program,' Oct. 22, 2007
This is Slashdot, please convert your analogy to use Quadrotriticale (A fine Canadian product).
Nobody, you're committing a logical fallacy. People educated in the modern era don't really believe the universe had to have a creator simply because it is big and complex. I'll bet you don't, if you know a little history of modern cosmology. So why are you reasoning from a principle you don't yourself accept? People generally believe that the universe could have been explained by a model that doesn't require any moment of creation (like the 1920's Steady State Model), but it turned out that a model that the scientific evidence fit better (The Big Bang), also implies a moment of creation. Nothing says that any and all conceptions of a universe require a creator just because they are big or complex, but the particular version of a universe we think is the best model has a moment of creation, and some people think that implies a creator. There's nothing internally illogical about God having been around forever and not having a moment of Creation - if there was, abstract logic would have been enough to disprove the Steady State Theory without us needing to cite scientific evidence such as the cosmic microwave background.
Except the original Hebrew word didn't mean a day, and was often used in other writings to mean an indeterminate period. If you're asking how you can trust a poor translation job, you may be on to something, but the original text didn't use the English word 'day' at all, let alone redefine it.
Alternately, some people claim the account in Genesis is metaphorical. Now I'm not arguing that it definitely is or isn't, but your argument seems to be that if it is metaphorical, it's untrustworthy in some absolute sense. I.e. "Carl Sagan used a metaphor of the Milky Way as the Backbone of Night in Cosmos, so how can we trust anything else in Cosmos?" Or maybe you're going as far as "The discoverer of the Benzine ring used a metaphor of a snake devouring its tail to describe it, so how can we trust anything in organic chemistry?".
I sometimes suspect the list is titled "Things to do to make more systems slip through our fingers", but yes.
You are now cleared MAGINOT BLUE STARS and SCORPION STARE - further discussion of the system is authorised only with cleared personnel. You are not cleared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN (You'll thank me for that later when you die still technically human). GBTW and STFU.
I'm thinking of Jar Jar playing everything that passes within 10 feet of an egg depository, a lurking warrior caste, or an automated sentry gun. "Meesa-AAAGH! IT BURNS! Gettit Frellin Meesa OFFFAH ME!". Keep the whole thing short, no more than a twelve hour film, so it stays funny.
Yes, and yet most people are convinced his assassination was entirely a matter of racial politics, and couldn't possibly have anything to do with him going off script.
Teddy Roosevelt said, in 1912, "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." That was coincidentally the year he delivered his most impromptu speech ever, The "Ladies and Gentlemen, I have just been shot - I may have to cut this one a little short" speech.
Not when you're surviving until the war crimes trial and the automatic hanging. Takes the fun out of it. You sit in a cell, get to see all the press reports demonizing you to the point where nobody will want to share your last name, The guards remind you daily that somebody will manage to smuggle the video of your hanging out to the internet and perverts will masturbate to it, and then Ziiip-Gaaaak!
All the nukes in the world can destroy ONE city, one small metropolis (say 1/4th of New York). That's it.
Please check your math. I followed your link, and it looks like from their numbers it would take 4 B-83's to totally destroy London, and probably all of New York could be done with 3 if the spacing was just right.
Yes, you're quite certain, but why? As a former Nuke/Chem/Bio defense officer with the US Military, I can assure you that an attack on US soil with nuclear weapons would result in the big metaphorical glass parking lot becoming reality. They can take out a city center or two. We can and probably would literally kill 100% of their popualtion, unless our Comander in Chief excercises almost litterally inhuman restraint. We regularly trained back when I was in to drive M1A1 series tanks through four hour old craters just for the scenarios where the government opts to hunt down any and all survivors of the initial exchange and wants them all dead before any get a chance to surrender. We're talking the deaths of every man, woman and potentially every day old infant in North Korea as a matter of official doctrine. Although I have hopes we would do better than absolute genocide, I sure wouldn't bet on it, because the 300 Million + surviving Americans are mostly going to be wondering why we even try to avoid fallout drifting into South Korea or China, let alone what happens to the North. I trained from some of the response plans in the 1970s and they're finally public. We had plans that dedicated a Megaton for every village of over 500 people. Hell, in the 50's we had plans that involved seeding their croplands with radiocobalt isotopes so nothing would grow for a thousand years, and then crashing the nuclear powered, plutonium fueled, unmanned bombers that delivered it into their cities after they had spent a month each flying back and forth over the whole country. We've gotten more precise since then and started giving a damn about not poisoning the whole planet, but not less lethal. North Korea stands to lose literally 100% - it doesn't get any worse than that.
Scale invariance always demonstrates one thing clearly. Wherever it occurs for a real phenomenon, there is no sharp line between two or more things that are usually being called by different names (at least by somebody involved), and so, it's logical to infer that they are really not such different things at all. As one of my instructors put it back in the dark ages, "When you analyse data on smooth flow and turbulent flow and the problem turns out to be scale invariant, you have a situation where there are not really two kinds of flow at all, over the range you are looking at.".
In this case, the math implies that where anybody is talking about dealing with some types of terrorism as separate from others, the burden of proof is overwhelmingly on them to show the distinctions they base their arguments on even exist, before their arguments should be considered. Every pundit who claims that "State Funded", or "Islamosupremicist" or "Clifford the big red Terrorist" brand terrorism requires special solutions such as waterboarding or extraordinary rendition, even though previous terrorist acts could be addressed through the normal court system, should have to show how his proposed subclass divides the data in such a way it doesn't still follow scale invariance, or the presumption should be it makes no differences. Whatever solution they are proposing, the presumption should be it's a solution in search of a problem until proven otherwise. That's a pretty important result - there are huge numbers of people arguing about what's to be done about their particular specialised version of terrorism that requires special solutions, and if they are talking through a cocked hat, it's a damned good to know.
(golfclap mode)You got a +5 insightful effectively for telling people that this situation allows only statistical aggregate prediction, not short term prediction, and then attacking the use of a tool of statistical analysis. Worse, you phrased it as an attack on the user, not the tool. Congrats. (/golfclap mode)
Northern Ireland shows a strong correlation between both economic failure and economic uncertainty and increasing terrorist acts. The costs of the middle east and their impact on the rest of the economy have created precisely the situation that the record shows triggers a largish spike in terrorism in and around Ireland. You ignore this fact and call others naive, and come to the illogical conclusion that restoring a stable peacetime economy won't help. By your viewpoint, we have to stay the damned course at any cost, follow Ahab into the depths with the whale, and just accept that this issue will still haunt our great-great-grandchildren and beyond. You don't have a solution, just insults for everyone who won't accept your nihilistic attitude. I'm sure that gives you the faux self esteem to get through life, but sooner or later you will see yourself as you are - damned shame that.
There's a natural timescale. Individual people don't buy or eat bread every millisecond, they eat it once or twice a day, and buy it twice a week or so. Factors that influence how much bread can be produced don't come along every millisecond, they come along over weeks (it's called weather). How is this extra liquidity, above natural timing helpful? If I hear from a reliable source that the CEO of a company has been arrested for allowing melamine in baby food, I can act within a few minutes to sell, perhaps ahead of others who haven't heard it yet. If liquidity means millisecond trades, I have to choose whether to act on an unreliable and unverifiable rumor in the same way I would a more reliable report. Putting bad data on a par with good data is pretty much a guarantee of what you're calling speculation, by your definitions. So there's a slight gain in an already very liquid situation - coming at a cost of a huge loss to the thing you are calling 'fundamental' analysis.
When someone goes on chemotherapy, why not increase the doses given to as much as we can pump in? It would probably kill more cancer cells faster, right? Oh, but it would definitely kill the patent too. Speed is not an unlimited blessing. A little extra liquidity comes at a high price, and its by that very price that your 'investments' vs. 'speculations' can be distinguished.