It was illegal for the older one to have a firearm of any kind due to his history of domestic violence, as per Federal law enacted during the prior administration.
Look at your tax form. A charitable donation to an eligible non-profit (e.g. cannot be political...) can, if you itemize rather than accepting the standard deduction, reduce your taxable income.
However, it's still a net loss, because you're unlikely to be taxed at rates exceeding 100% (*), so the reduction in tax is guaranteed to be less than the amount you donated.
(*) It used to and may still perhaps be possible that, if you added $X to your income, you could end up paying more than $X in additional taxes if you triggered AMT in certain rare cases. This has actually happened.
You could e-mail your local Congresspeople and ask about the constitutionality of the DEA, I suppose.
My guess would be that they'll claim it's legal based on the ability of the government to regulate food and pharmaceuticals, which is probably based on the "necessary and proper" clause (if anywhere) because there isn't much justification elsewhere for it.
(a) Arty shells are still a potential problem, and
(b) While there are alternate solutions to incoming aircraft (like aircraft of your own, or SAMs), those generally won't help you with arty.
(Well, aircraft will let you get revenge or can try to stop shelling by bombing first, but once the shell is launched you can't exactly fire a Sidewinder or Phoenix at it and expect any results).
Try doing some research on Hezbollah. They've got mortars, Katyushas, and a considerable number of foot soldiers, courtesy of Syria and Iran, plus a host country (Lebanon, operating as a proxy for Syria).
Oh, and they're not too fond of Israel, as evidenced by its habit of shelling.
Don't forget Iran and Iraq, which also have decent amounts of firepower, including Katyushas (gotta love the Cold War USSR...) and mortars of their own, and other artillery pieces. Oh, and both have virulently anti-US elements in power right now (although Iran is almost in play; if only Khatami can leverage his support among the people against Khameni and the rest of the Revolutionary Council...).
Oh, and also, don't forget the Taliban, which still has people running around with mortars taking pot shots at American bases. But hey, it doesn't matter if Americans die, because they're American, right?
Oh, and China might have a bit of a beef with the US that might eventually come down to arms, if the US shows weakness. They'd like to regain the "renegade province" some day, and they're no doubt working on how to neutralize the possible threat of a US Carrier Battlegroup that would be the obvious intervention force. China has advanced sufficiently to have artillery andmissiles, in case you haven't noticed.
Oh, and perhaps if you paid more attention and had more clue than you exhibit above, you wouldn't have had to pay as much for college...
Technology isn't everything. Hell, technology plus military leadership plus strategy plus tactics plus logistics isn't everything.
There's politics. An enemy does not have to defeat the entire power of the United States; it only needs to plausibly threaten enough damage to make the US reconsider its commitment, and balance the value of objectives versus projected losses. North Korea, for instance, might question whether we'd either (a) offer them a hefty no-questions-asked aid package, or (b) accept the destruction of a major American city on the west coast. The Iraqi ambassador might suggest to the US ambassador that, should the US attack, the first Iraqi action would be launching its entire chemical arsenal at Jerusalem, and query as to whether or not the ensuing chaos would be helpful to the US. And so forth.
Protecting South Vietnam's dictatorship was not worth it, politically...
Oh, and the US does and will continue to cause collateral damage -- we killed quite a few innocent bystanders in Afghanistan, for instance. Some were due to misidentification, some due to misses, some due to accepting bad intelligence. And, should there be war in Iraq, there will probably be deliberate "collateral" damage in the sense that it may be necessary to directly or indirectly damage civillian infrastructure e.g. power grids, water supplies, that sort of thing.
(1) To feed people, first you need to wipe out the bastards using food as a weapon -- a real problem in many conflict zones. Mogadishu, anyone? Recall what happened when the lightly-armed UN handed out food? It got seized by the militias. In other places, it'd be the government that'd confiscate the food.
(2) Your peace is not their peace. Radical Islamists want the world to be Moslem. Some others would prefer there to be NO Moslems. Some prefer equality of opportunity, while others prefer equality of poverty. Some want a modern world, while others will only be happy with a Year Zero Khmer Rouge-style approach. You can't make them all happy, simultaneously.
At any given point in history, probably a large portion of the human population is Thoroughly Pissed Off. Are you going to tell them to just completely change their value systems and surrender?
It'd also be useful in Afghanistan right now, where every so often somebody tries to lob a mortar round or rocket into a US camp. They don't lob a huge salvo (e.g. a Katyusha launcher might be tough to hide from the drones, satellites, manned aircraft, patrols...) but one could do some damage if they improved their accuracy or just got lucky enough. The ability to zap 'em would be nice.
Israel... yes, they're probably expecting more Katyushas c/o Hezbollah, and all the mortars that the Palestinians technically agreed not to have, but do have anyway.
According to Pres. Clinton, the assassination ban only applies to heads of state. Mr. Al-Qaeda-Man doesn't qualify.
Also, the Yemenis already tried to arrest the guy, and lost eighteen soldiers in the process when the locals attacked the authorities -- the region is lawless and the Yemenis have very, very poor control over there. An "arrest" doesn't work very well when the locals are heavily armed and against you, and it'd be an utter humiliation for the government if the/US/ (which would also have to kill the villagers to succeed) were summoned to bring him in. It's also more politically acceptable in the region for Yemenis (Moslem) to kill Yemenis (Moslem) than for the US (has Moslems, but seen as an infidel state) to kill Moslems.
'sides from the above facts, they were in a vehicle, in the desert, away from traffic, with weapons. What, you think they'd kindly stop if a helicopter (which wasn't in the area) buzzed by with a megaphone?
How about "US v. Morrison" -- in May 15, 2000 SCOTUS affirmed an US Court of Appeals ruling striking down 42 USC 13981 on the basis that the Constitution did/not/ give Congress the ability to legislate on the matter covered, and explicitly stating that the Commerce Clause could/not/ be stretched as ludicrously far as Congress and the President had wanted.
The ruling even states, "Every law enacted by Congress must be based on one or more of its powers enumerated in the Constitution", and specifically cites Marbury v. Madison in rejecting arbitrary extensions of federal power.
Incidentally, it was the four liberal justices who dissented in order to promote federal power over every little bit of American society (and likewise in striking down the Gun Free School Zone law, where again Congress tried to buy votes by grossly exceeding its limits).
(And for the but-the-Conservatives-screwd-States-Rights-to-help -Bush whiners -- Florida did/not/ apply its own law evenly to its counties; hence, the 14th Amendment violation. SCOTUS got jurisdiction as an appellate court. Ergo, no states-rights problem, as the states do not have a right to apply their own laws unevenly and thus violate equal-protection.)
In certain cases, the materials may be/harder/ to trace. Nails, pipes, gasoline, rags, vaseline, bottles, lightbulbs... Your average home likely already contains all the components necessary to build a small-scale antipersonnel bomb.
Funny man. But/most/ books would likely not get attention.
The ones that would interest the DEA might be fairly obvious -- books explicitly aimed at manufacturing illegal drugs, mainly.
The ones that would interest the Homeland Security folks... perhaps texts on urban insurrectionist tactics, improvised explosives and army field manuals, heh.
Re:This decision was bad news for MS in the long r
on
Microsoft's New Hurdles
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
You didn't check the guy's posting history, obviously. "PhysicsGenius" is a troll who's making a monkey out of moderators by getting karma for buzzword-heavy bullshit.
Perhaps you've forgotten your history, or maybe you never looked it up... but the United States has had marginal tax rates exceeding 90%; and during the Carter years, the highest marginal rate was 70%; it took the Reagan tax cuts to bring things down to a saner place on the Lasser curve. See this table.
As for the wealthy, according to a CBO report in 1999, the top 5% of US taxpayers pay 50% of all taxes, while the top 1% pay 29%. Hmmm, that doesn't sound like "little or no tax" to me.
You charge more in wealthier regions, and less in others, and rely on the region system to prevent people in wealthier regions from importing cheaper copies.
(1) There's a substitution effect. A pirated product still costs time, and may sate an appetite; if you could download a somewhat crappy game and spend hours playing it, would you still be likely to buy a different game, or would you be sufficiently content already?
(2) There are those who claim a "try before you buy" approach, and who end up rarely if ever buying. It's interesting how that happens... while the rest of us conserve money by watching closely for reviews and feedback.
(3) Widespread infringement contributes to an "economy" in which the overall tendency to buy anything may decrease, because availability shoots up. Witness, for instance, China... most software there is illegal, and because of that it's socially acceptable to be a massive infringer -- your boss is doing it, your friends are doing it, probably the government is doing it. Therefore it's nothing special to rip off the latest product and send it to the CD replicators, and the cycle continues.
Believe it or not, rarity does matter for perception of value. For a trivial example, got a girlfriend? Would she be happy if she went to a party and found out that two other people wore the same exact dress as she did? Would she treasure a diamond as much, if the De Beers cartel's stranglehold on supply were shattered and the world was flooded in diamonds?
More seriously... Would you pay the same for a print of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers #Foo" as you would for the original? Most people would not, I'd wager.
Would the original go for immense amounts of money, if Van Gogh had instead worked with silk-screen, and cranked out thousands, Franklin-Mint style?
Would you pay ANYTHING for a print, if you could get it for free online? Quite a few people would not -- at least that's what we learn from Napster, et al.
Face it. Quantity and availability affect effective price. The more copies there are, and the easier it is to get them, the less perceived value something has.
Suddenly? No. The change came quite some time ago, under Deng Xiaoping, who was pragmatic enough to declare that "It is glorious to be rich" and that "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice". In other words, prosperity was the objective moreso than maintaining a clearly nonfunctional ideology.
So, since then, they've basically been a vaguely capitalist single-party dictatorship; there are some socialist traces left like state-owned companies, but they've been edging away from them as well as the guaranteed-employment model.
Your "expression", however, should come in the form of not obtaining the product, should you choose not to pay for it. Likewise, if you refuse to pay more (or anything), Hollywood has a perfectly valid right to deny you its products and services.
Neither side may unilaterally force a transaction in a moral system.
What strategy saves you from having to walk over every bloody square to find _the_ Vibrating Square in the maze?
What strategy gets you enough trap-detection scrolls to avoid going insane looking for a moving, hidden teleporter on the elemental levels?
What strategy guarantees you that the game won't kill you on your first step via a fire trap?
What in-game strategy could POSSIBLY have told the player, given the complete lack of in-game hints and, if memory serves, lack of information about this from the Oracle, about the need for the Bell, the Book and the Candlelabrum, and how to use them?
The game has/plenty/ of irritations, absymally tedious nonsense, and random deaths, and would appear to be mostly a collection of bizarre in-jokes and generator of nigh-mandatory spoiler files.
Slashdot Mirror
It was illegal for the older one to have a firearm of any kind due to his history of domestic violence, as per Federal law enacted during the prior administration.
Look at your tax form. A charitable donation to an eligible non-profit (e.g. cannot be political...) can, if you itemize rather than accepting the standard deduction, reduce your taxable income.
However, it's still a net loss, because you're unlikely to be taxed at rates exceeding 100% (*), so the reduction in tax is guaranteed to be less than the amount you donated.
(*) It used to and may still perhaps be possible that, if you added $X to your income, you could end up paying more than $X in additional taxes if you triggered AMT in certain rare cases. This has actually happened.
You could e-mail your local Congresspeople and ask about the constitutionality of the DEA, I suppose.
My guess would be that they'll claim it's legal based on the ability of the government to regulate food and pharmaceuticals, which is probably based on the "necessary and proper" clause (if anywhere) because there isn't much justification elsewhere for it.
Hm, probably because
(a) Arty shells are still a potential problem, and
(b) While there are alternate solutions to incoming aircraft (like aircraft of your own, or SAMs), those generally won't help you with arty.
(Well, aircraft will let you get revenge or can try to stop shelling by bombing first, but once the shell is launched you can't exactly fire a Sidewinder or Phoenix at it and expect any results).
Try doing some research on Hezbollah. They've got mortars, Katyushas, and a considerable number of foot soldiers, courtesy of Syria and Iran, plus a host country (Lebanon, operating as a proxy for Syria).
Oh, and they're not too fond of Israel, as evidenced by its habit of shelling.
Don't forget Iran and Iraq, which also have decent amounts of firepower, including Katyushas (gotta love the Cold War USSR...) and mortars of their own, and other artillery pieces. Oh, and both have virulently anti-US elements in power right now (although Iran is almost in play; if only Khatami can leverage his support among the people against Khameni and the rest of the Revolutionary Council...).
Oh, and also, don't forget the Taliban, which still has people running around with mortars taking pot shots at American bases. But hey, it doesn't matter if Americans die, because they're American, right?
Oh, and China might have a bit of a beef with the US that might eventually come down to arms, if the US shows weakness. They'd like to regain the "renegade province" some day, and they're no doubt working on how to neutralize the possible threat of a US Carrier Battlegroup that would be the obvious intervention force. China has advanced sufficiently to have artillery andmissiles, in case you haven't noticed.
Oh, and perhaps if you paid more attention and had more clue than you exhibit above, you wouldn't have had to pay as much for college...
Technology isn't everything. Hell, technology plus military leadership plus strategy plus tactics plus logistics isn't everything.
There's politics. An enemy does not have to defeat the entire power of the United States; it only needs to plausibly threaten enough damage to make the US reconsider its commitment, and balance the value of objectives versus projected losses. North Korea, for instance, might question whether we'd either (a) offer them a hefty no-questions-asked aid package, or (b) accept the destruction of a major American city on the west coast. The Iraqi ambassador might suggest to the US ambassador that, should the US attack, the first Iraqi action would be launching its entire chemical arsenal at Jerusalem, and query as to whether or not the ensuing chaos would be helpful to the US. And so forth.
Protecting South Vietnam's dictatorship was not worth it, politically...
Oh, and the US does and will continue to cause collateral damage -- we killed quite a few innocent bystanders in Afghanistan, for instance. Some were due to misidentification, some due to misses, some due to accepting bad intelligence. And, should there be war in Iraq, there will probably be deliberate "collateral" damage in the sense that it may be necessary to directly or indirectly damage civillian infrastructure e.g. power grids, water supplies, that sort of thing.
Nope. This isn't _Star Trek_...
(1) To feed people, first you need to wipe out the bastards using food as a weapon -- a real problem in many conflict zones. Mogadishu, anyone? Recall what happened when the lightly-armed UN handed out food? It got seized by the militias. In other places, it'd be the government that'd confiscate the food.
(2) Your peace is not their peace. Radical Islamists want the world to be Moslem. Some others would prefer there to be NO Moslems. Some prefer equality of opportunity, while others prefer equality of poverty. Some want a modern world, while others will only be happy with a Year Zero Khmer Rouge-style approach. You can't make them all happy, simultaneously.
At any given point in history, probably a large portion of the human population is Thoroughly Pissed Off. Are you going to tell them to just completely change their value systems and surrender?
It'd also be useful in Afghanistan right now, where every so often somebody tries to lob a mortar round or rocket into a US camp. They don't lob a huge salvo (e.g. a Katyusha launcher might be tough to hide from the drones, satellites, manned aircraft, patrols...) but one could do some damage if they improved their accuracy or just got lucky enough. The ability to zap 'em would be nice.
Israel... yes, they're probably expecting more Katyushas c/o Hezbollah, and all the mortars that the Palestinians technically agreed not to have, but do have anyway.
According to Pres. Clinton, the assassination ban only applies to heads of state. Mr. Al-Qaeda-Man doesn't qualify.
/US/ (which would also have to kill the villagers to succeed) were summoned to bring him in. It's also more politically acceptable in the region for Yemenis (Moslem) to kill Yemenis (Moslem) than for the US (has Moslems, but seen as an infidel state) to kill Moslems.
Also, the Yemenis already tried to arrest the guy, and lost eighteen soldiers in the process when the locals attacked the authorities -- the region is lawless and the Yemenis have very, very poor control over there. An "arrest" doesn't work very well when the locals are heavily armed and against you, and it'd be an utter humiliation for the government if the
'sides from the above facts, they were in a vehicle, in the desert, away from traffic, with weapons. What, you think they'd kindly stop if a helicopter (which wasn't in the area) buzzed by with a megaphone?
(1) Because /that/ would be a clear-cut Constitutional violation, whereas monitoring is more of a grey area.
(2) As a more practical matter, it would deny the Feds the ability to find out who's especially interested in such texts.
How about "US v. Morrison" -- in May 15, 2000 SCOTUS affirmed an US Court of Appeals ruling striking down 42 USC 13981 on the basis that the Constitution did /not/ give Congress the ability to legislate on the matter covered, and explicitly stating that the Commerce Clause could /not/ be stretched as ludicrously far as Congress and the President had wanted.
p -Bush whiners -- Florida did /not/ apply its own law evenly to its counties; hence, the 14th Amendment violation. SCOTUS got jurisdiction as an appellate court. Ergo, no states-rights problem, as the states do not have a right to apply their own laws unevenly and thus violate equal-protection.)
The ruling even states, "Every law enacted by Congress must be based on one or more of its powers enumerated in the Constitution", and specifically cites Marbury v. Madison in rejecting arbitrary extensions of federal power.
Incidentally, it was the four liberal justices who dissented in order to promote federal power over every little bit of American society (and likewise in striking down the Gun Free School Zone law, where again Congress tried to buy votes by grossly exceeding its limits).
(And for the but-the-Conservatives-screwd-States-Rights-to-hel
In certain cases, the materials may be /harder/ to trace. Nails, pipes, gasoline, rags, vaseline, bottles, lightbulbs... Your average home likely already contains all the components necessary to build a small-scale antipersonnel bomb.
Funny man. But /most/ books would likely not get attention.
The ones that would interest the DEA might be fairly obvious -- books explicitly aimed at manufacturing illegal drugs, mainly.
The ones that would interest the Homeland Security folks... perhaps texts on urban insurrectionist tactics, improvised explosives and army field manuals, heh.
You didn't check the guy's posting history, obviously. "PhysicsGenius" is a troll who's making a monkey out of moderators by getting karma for buzzword-heavy bullshit.
Don't forget the P(D) term.
I'll probably be modded into hell itself...
;)
You mean... flamebait?
It depends, since parties aren't monolithic.
Compare Democrats from the Deep South with New England Republicans, for instance...
Perhaps you've forgotten your history, or maybe you never looked it up... but the United States has had marginal tax rates exceeding 90%; and during the Carter years, the highest marginal rate was 70%; it took the Reagan tax cuts to bring things down to a saner place on the Lasser curve. See this table.
As for the wealthy, according to a CBO report in 1999, the top 5% of US taxpayers pay 50% of all taxes, while the top 1% pay 29%. Hmmm, that doesn't sound like "little or no tax" to me.
...and the point of that is differential pricing.
You charge more in wealthier regions, and less in others, and rely on the region system to prevent people in wealthier regions from importing cheaper copies.
Try Kaige Chen's "The Emperor and the Assassin" and "Farewell My Concubine", and Timou Zhang's "Raise the Red Lantern".
It causes other losses, as well.
(1) There's a substitution effect. A pirated product still costs time, and may sate an appetite; if you could download a somewhat crappy game and spend hours playing it, would you still be likely to buy a different game, or would you be sufficiently content already?
(2) There are those who claim a "try before you buy" approach, and who end up rarely if ever buying. It's interesting how that happens... while the rest of us conserve money by watching closely for reviews and feedback.
(3) Widespread infringement contributes to an "economy" in which the overall tendency to buy anything may decrease, because availability shoots up. Witness, for instance, China... most software there is illegal, and because of that it's socially acceptable to be a massive infringer -- your boss is doing it, your friends are doing it, probably the government is doing it. Therefore it's nothing special to rip off the latest product and send it to the CD replicators, and the cycle continues.
Believe it or not, rarity does matter for perception of value. For a trivial example, got a girlfriend? Would she be happy if she went to a party and found out that two other people wore the same exact dress as she did? Would she treasure a diamond as much, if the De Beers cartel's stranglehold on supply were shattered and the world was flooded in diamonds?
More seriously... Would you pay the same for a print of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers #Foo" as you would for the original? Most people would not, I'd wager.
Would the original go for immense amounts of money, if Van Gogh had instead worked with silk-screen, and cranked out thousands, Franklin-Mint style?
Would you pay ANYTHING for a print, if you could get it for free online? Quite a few people would not -- at least that's what we learn from Napster, et al.
Face it. Quantity and availability affect effective price. The more copies there are, and the easier it is to get them, the less perceived value something has.
Suddenly? No. The change came quite some time ago, under Deng Xiaoping, who was pragmatic enough to declare that "It is glorious to be rich" and that "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice". In other words, prosperity was the objective moreso than maintaining a clearly nonfunctional ideology.
So, since then, they've basically been a vaguely capitalist single-party dictatorship; there are some socialist traces left like state-owned companies, but they've been edging away from them as well as the guaranteed-employment model.
Your "expression", however, should come in the form of not obtaining the product, should you choose not to pay for it. Likewise, if you refuse to pay more (or anything), Hollywood has a perfectly valid right to deny you its products and services.
Neither side may unilaterally force a transaction in a moral system.
What strategy saves you from having to walk over every bloody square to find _the_ Vibrating Square in the maze?
/plenty/ of irritations, absymally tedious nonsense, and random deaths, and would appear to be mostly a collection of bizarre in-jokes and generator of nigh-mandatory spoiler files.
What strategy gets you enough trap-detection scrolls to avoid going insane looking for a moving, hidden teleporter on the elemental levels?
What strategy guarantees you that the game won't kill you on your first step via a fire trap?
What in-game strategy could POSSIBLY have told the player, given the complete lack of in-game hints and, if memory serves, lack of information about this from the Oracle, about the need for the Bell, the Book and the Candlelabrum, and how to use them?
The game has