The only thing I can guess would be so that it's harder to open the door from the outside without damaging anything. But most people who would be breaking into a car would either already know that there is a rod that goes from the key lock to the lock itself and the locking indicator in top of the door panel and they would likely go for that first. Well, that or they would just smash the window out.
Maybe they are thinking that water could get into it and short it out causing the windows to open during a rain storm of something. I had one electric window that wouldn't go up or down if it rained more then an inch. It turned out to be something in the motor that was bad and the weather stripping around the windows was old and cracked.
Truthfully, I don't know. Those are two guesses I have come up with after thinking about it myself. I'm sure people can come up with more reasons to why but I'm not sure we would ever know exactly why.
Ultra paranoid people like them as well since you can open them under water...
Interestingly, my grandmother made me wire then to a hot switch so they could be operated with the keys off. She was so afraid of going somewhere and waiting in the car and not being able to role the windows up if someone scary or less then respectable people started hanging around.
I wouldn't call her ultra paranoid or crazy or anything but as a teen, her and her mom (my great grandmother) got mugged in Chicago Ill. That sort of shaped how she viewed everything as to her own protection. She pretty much already did what they tell the girls in those self defense classes and being able to put a windows up between her and a potential attacker (even if there was no threat) was one thing she insisted on.
Anyway, I don't think she was/is alone in thinking like that. Perhaps you should add that situation to your ultra paranoid list.
I think the "wedge" refers to the slice of the brain contained on it and not the hard drive itself. The metal handle is there because they are hot swappable and the handle folds over to lock it in their cradle (think backplane). When they fist started talking about the wedges, they mentioned that they data blocks containing a slice of someone's life up to the time it was made.
It's like using a windows XP box as a file server. It isn't really a server but if that's its only rule, you generally call the workstation a server even though the system is not set up like a server or running a server OS.
I would think differently if the person viewing you were subject to the same rules. However, the GPS tracking device doesn't give you that option or warning and it isn't able to interpret any actions it records that may be used against you. If the officer was required to be present, not only could I see them, but my trip down crack ally that was a result of a traffic accident blocking the road in front of me is completely understood and not mistaken as a stop to get drugs.
The scary part is that I'm pretty sure that if a private citizen put a tracking device on any other car (that they didn't own), they would be up on stalking charges. I don't understand why this is different outside of the idea that the police shouldn't concern themselves with you unless they suspect you of breaking a law but then they should have the warrant test to ensure they aren't overstepping anyone's rights.
Which is more important, robberies without cops or knowing that the 3am shift of cops aren't sitting in the parking lot of dunkin donuts taking turns grabbing cream pies and talking about their last major bust which turns out to be a drunk driver or something.
I would thing that knowing the cops were moving and patrolling would discourage a lot of the robberies. Just lock down your wifi so they can't use it to see when it's ok to smash your windows out.
Okay, so you took two paragraphs to dance around the actual question and buried your answer in the middle of a rant. I asked how it was plagiarism, and ultimately you admitted it isn't. Two words would have sufficed. Oh, and where did I suggest that I was the AC? This is an open forum, I saw a thread I felt like commenting on. That's all there is to it.
Lol.. So it wasn't a word for word copy, it's still an exact paraphrase of Buffet's rant about how he pays less then his secretary in tax rates and how he thinks he should pay more but refused to do so. Now it is possible that someone could have came to the same conclusions about needing to pay more taxes, but the comment wasn't limited to them paying more taxes, it was expanded from the AC's personal to everyone as well as naming a specific tax example which makes it nothing but a shill parroting Buffet's statement that was attempting to push a political agenda. The fact that the AC has yet to comment even though you seem to want to speak for him sort of shows how sincere he was.
Your own sources are where the issue of deductions came from. If you didn't want to use them, why did you supply them? As far as the way he structures his earnings, I wouldn't call it "hiding" the money if everyone knows where it is and how much there is. Once again, you don't like the rules of the game, you try to get the rules changed. You don't go after particular individuals and say that they're a problem because playing by the rules isn't good enough. Buffet proposes changing the rules, and says he'll follow them. Until he does otherwise, he's in-bounds.
Jesus fucking christ man. My own sources also said that Buffet who claims he needed to pay more in taxes structured his holding company so that profits go back into equity instead of being paid out as a salary so he could take the tax hit at the capitol gains rate instead of his personal income tax rate. That has nothing to fucking do with any deductions. I said the deductions don't even matter- they arne't important- they are not the reason he pays so little in taxes. The reson he pays so little in taxes is because he takes them as a capitol gain and not an income. He can if he things he need to pay more in taxes, increase his salary to the point of his expended capitol gains and pay the full rate as income tax. Now deductions have nothing to do with that and no one could take enough deductions to lower their effective tax rates to the levels Buffet did with strictly deductions.
If you still don't understand that, then speak with a tax professional or something because you aren't getting the fundamental situation. Buffet structured his income to specifically avoid taxes and he is now claiming he doesn't pay enough but refuses to make the simple changes that he has control over that could almost double his effective tax rate before any fucking deduction comes into play. And yes, deductions are completely insignificant at this stage- they don't fucking apply.
Nonsense. This game has rules. You can suggest changes to a rule before going off and applying it only to yourself, no hypocrisy involved. Hypocrisy would be to get the rule changed, and then ignore it, not the other way around.
And here is where you comprehension problem rears it's ugly head again. He would still be playing by the same rules in place if he made the changes. It's not about making the change so he pays more taxes, it's about advancing a political idea under some false pretense. If he thinks he is not paying enough, then simply change the way he takes his income and he will pay lots more.
And here you completely lose it. A 10% flat tax is far more onerous to the poor and middle-class than to someone like Buffet. If you make $30,000/yr, your $3000 tax bill will have a much more massive impact on your standard of living than someone makeing $10Million/year and paying $1Mil
And here I thought people interpreted their religion relative to that of their personal beliefs? How many supposed Catholics do you know, who condone the use of condoms? Or others in any number of religious denominations, who have intercourse before marriage?/i>
That's sort of evading the point. Those Catholics can and do vote differently then their preacher tells them plus they are freely capable of moving to another church or even denomination. But I haven't seen any catholic churches attempting to ban the use of condoms, extra marital, or premarital sex though the lobbying of government and the implementation of laws.
The oligarchy you allow to represent yourselves, are likely to be far more hard-line (read, extremist?) than the rest of their supposed 'congregation'. Hardly the 'voice of the people'.
the point wasn't that they were the voice of the people rather that the people voluntarily associate with their voice. This seems to be a dificult concept to follow so let me spend a few more minutes on it.
At work, if your boss says something in the political realm, you can say "I don't agree with that". But are you going to be willing to quit your job and go unemployed in a depressed economy because of that? Regardless of your answer, most people will say no because they have to pay bills and put food on the table for their families. Some may look for a new job but their job will almost instantly be filled by someone else who needs to do the same. So for the corporation to say I represent 10,000 employees, that may or may not be true but your participation in that representation is a little more then voluntary. Now a church on the other hand is really no different then a gun club, a senior citizen group like the ARP or whatever. If you don't agree, you can change influence their opinions by the threat of removal of your participation. If a church goes rogue and doesn't represent your ideals anymore, you find a new church. If the gun club starts advocating the over throw of the government, you find a new gun club. There is no real impediment in you moving to another organization even if still in the same religion or whatever. You won't lose your livelihood or the ability to care for your family's needs, you won't be black listed by a scorned boss who wants to teach you a lesson by attempting to keep you unemployed with less then honest references.
Now this doesn't mean that you will magically start agreeing with everything they say or everything they attempt to influence. It means that if you disagree strongly enough, you can freely disassociate yourself with them while speaking to the opposite of their message without the hurdles of losing your income, insurance, or whatever else. In essence, with religion, your participation is voluntary, this isn't really the case with employment.
At least shareholders get some form of democracy.
The same is true with religions. You just have to think of it more as a caucus then a secrete ballot. Most all organized religions have their belief structures set in stone before you join them. Some religions like the Roman Catholics, have the pope who interprets modern invention within those rules and values. There are catholic churches that are separate from the pope and the roman catholic structures so instead of passing a secrete ballot for a vote, you simply find a church that you agree with just like you would a chess club or gun club or bar or a clan/guild on WoW or whatever. It doesn't mean you have to agree with everything, it just means that you can walk away easier if you disagree.
You mean the German and Japanese cars produced in the US? I don't think we have imported a complete car since the mid 1980's or so after the foreign markets got smarts and defeated the Union's "Buy American to keep Americans' working" campaign and opened shops up in the US so they were buying American assembled cars to keep Americans working.
Anyways, your talking more about development and R&D and engineering experience as to the reasons some foreign cars don't suck. This isn't really a who puts them together issue. I'm sorry you thought it was though. The Japanese and Germans took a different approach to car making which lead to tighter tolerances and longer lasting engined as well as handling. American cars spent most of this time dumping raw power into the engine which required a different type of tolerances. In short, the development of both came from completely different directions which created different goals.
Well that's different. If you felt it was a H&S concern then of course you should do something about it.
The area I was working in was where the cartons for the glassware was assembled. You sometimes have to cut pieces of string and cardboard to make them fit right in their assembly. These cuttings fall to the floor by you feet and pile up after a while. I did start sliding around on them so I'm pretty sure it was a safety issue.
What you did wrong was hit a colleague - that's an automatic fire in any job except contact sports.
Sure it was. I know it was my fault. The part I got pissed about was being yelled at saying I was taking the job of another employee who obviously wasn't there. I find that extremely frustrating when my job is more difficult because someone wants to show a need for someone else to be employed to do something that took me all of 5 minutes to accomplish with the bulk of the time spend looking for a broom.
I'm not going to go into the rest of your post because it seems like there are things deeply wrong with unions in the USA if that's what they're like. If a factory is a closed shop then it doesn't make sense to keep slackers around simply for membership dues, it'd be better to encourage efficiency and redeploy staff. In the event of there really being too much staff it's generally cheaper to have a hiring freeze and let retirement and natural churn take its course.
If you increase productivity in that manner than you can justify higher pay and therefore membership dues!
I don't really agree with closed shop policies. Membership of political organisations should always be voluntary and a closed shop policy essentially promotes a tax on workers to fund the bureaucracy. I also think it compromises the independence of the union, the bureaucracy knows that they'll get their subs come what may so they start to serve themselves rather than the members.
Yes, there are closed shops, even closed jobs sites that won't even allow contractors in unless they are part of a union. This is what they claim makes the union strong. One of the pieces of legislation floating around, I'm not sure if it passed but it was one of the things Obama wanted in the first 100 days of office was a bill that took the voting process to bring unions into a shop from a secrete ballot to a signed and open system where the union, the employee right next to you, and your boss can see how you voted on whether to unionize or not. There are laws against the employer treating you differently for you support of unionizing but there aren't any special laws about your co workers pressuring you or doing anything to encourage your support which I find frightening to some degree.
As for the rest of your paragraphs, I agree. It just doesn't seem right. and yes, it is messed up.
That's exactly right, which is why (in the firm I work for at least) senior management values the communication they get from our union. As far as they're concerned all their polices, which involve listening to the workforce & acting on concerns, etc, are being acted upon. In certain cases that's not happening and so having an independent union representing people and communicating concerns upwards is a big help.
Most places I have worked at has had a liberal open door policy. It also wasn't uncommon to see the owners who took no active role in the day to day operations as well as the CEOs or whoever walking through the different levels. They weren't really checking anything but just being seen in case someone wanted to grab an ear and talk. I guess it gets a little more difficult when the size of the company increases. Maybe I have just been lucky in where I have worked.
I know there have been at least one major incident at the firm I work for where managers have tried to scapegoat th
This is what always amazes me about people with anti-union prejudices. The steward was just pointing out to you that you were doing work for free thereby depriving someone else of employment so you swear and hit him. That's somehow the fault of the lazy slacker unions?
Well, no. I wasn't doing work for free. I was getting paid by the hour the entire time I stood there. The only difference would be if I was stepping on scraps of cardboard from the boxes and sliding around or not. I felt the area was creating a hazard which is why I grabbed the broom when someone else backed the line up.
If that means I'm evil and incapable of appreciating unions, then I guess I'm guilty. However, I think it makes more of a statement about the union then it does me. I don't think anyone in any job should be reprimanded for taking the time to clear hazards away from the work area and attempt to maintain a safe working environment. It wasn't like I was spring cleaning the entire plant on my day off or anything.
Also, if employment is "at will" and the firm can fire you for any reason, why do they keep the slackers? Something is missing from that picture.
The unions force them to keep them by specifying certain provisions in the contracts. A contract with supersede "at will" in the same way that you not obligated to pay me anything unless we have a contract defining terms in which you will pay me. Obviously your not familiar with how unions work. The unions seem to fight to keep the slackers because it requires more people to do the same amount of work which in turn get more union dues for the union. The more union dues paid, the higher the salaries can be and the more political power they can amass due to supporting politicians and so on. Anyways, it's all about power and exerting it. Power over the company, power over the employees, power over the politicians, there is a reason the mob was highly involved with unions throughout their history.
I recently got appointed to the Executive Committee of our branch (I discovered there was a spare slot so I spoke to one of our reps) so I do have an interest here, but in my experience active union members are actually some of the most committed and hard-working people in any workplace.
Dude, don't take what I said as an insult over all union workers. I said there was one guy, the entire plant was union if you were there longer then 90 days. The problem is that one guy should have been fired or moved to another position but he wasn't and the union stuck up for him. As I noted with the piece work, I lost 5-15 dollars a day with him being on the line. And yes, that probably lead to all the animosity I had towards the shop steward when he attempted to reprimand me for cleaning my area of tripping hazards.
Managers like to demonise unions because we embarrass the bad ones and are always campaigning for more pay but, when profits are soaring, of course it's right to ask for more money.
All the Union shops I have worked in, high supervisor level management directly from the floor. There no real demonization there outside of unrealistic demands being placed on the employer. Take GM for instance, by the time you add up all the befits and pay packages of the union employees, GM was paying roughly two third more per employee then any of their competitors and almost twice as much as Toyota and other foreign manufacturers who set up shop in the US. Then you had the temp labor which the union refused to allow so GM had to pay people to come in and sit in a break room for 8 hours a day instead of hiring temporary labor and laying them off after the work was caught up. And what do we see from all this? We saw people complaining that GM was making SUVs instead of something that people previously didn't want from GM as the reason they are in so much trouble when the economy finally tanked
I started to pick apart your reply until I saw the last part of your statement. I think we are on the same page and personally, I understand that corporations are people and should have the power to lobby government.
But I think the difference that you are looking for is in the make up of the representation. A corporation represents the entirety of the corporation which includes the owners, employees, and customers to varying degrees. A church represents it's congregation which can be the same people. But the major differences here are the voluntary associations.
In a church, everyone (*unless their parents are forcing them to attend) is doing so of their own free will. This makes a church much the same as the ARP or NAACP, or NRA, or what ever group of people who come together for a common cause and the benefits of those causes. The only voluntary associations with a corporation is the handful of owners compared to the employees which are paid to be there and customers which in some cases are missing the benefits of the corporation's lobbying efforts. In fact, I would say sometimes the employees are missing the benefits too.
So in contrast, a corporation that has 10,000 people behind it may only be reflecting the owners wishes which could be as little as one person of just a couple hundred of people while it appears to be larger. With a church, you can find another church to go to so similar representation of 10,000 is likely to reflect a lot more people in the community then a corporation.
It does seem that I misconstrued your original position but I think this sort of segregates some of the differences. Personally, I don't care if corporations have the power as long as it's public knowledge and political conversations happen to the extent that we at least know how many people the corporation actually represents on any given position. Obviously, if the employees don't agree with their position, they shouldn't be counted as being in agreement. It's a little more difficult to find a new job then to find a new church or gun rights club or senior citizens group or anti oppression group or whatever. So I think some protections against being fired for political views should be made but I wouldn't want it to be so construed that you couldn't fire someone for telling lies about the company or something to advance their agenda.
We have both of the same in America. In the US it's called constructive discharge and in some states, if it can be shown, the employee still gets the unemployment benefits and the employer's rates still go up. In all US states, if it can be linked to one of the discrimination bans provided by law, you can sue too.
Most of the states in the US are "at will" which means you can be fired for no good/any reason at all. If it's not a good reason or not the fault of the employee, then you get an unemployment compensation package that the state administers. Generally it's two thirds of your average salary over the last six month paid in bi-weekly payments until you find another job or a year or something which ever comes first.
In companies that have unions, it starts getting difficult to fire people because the union will back them and you end up with worthless people who know they won't lose their jobs if they do the bare minimum. I worked with such a person when I was 18 at a local factory for the summer. We got paid $12 an hour plus one half cent for every 100 sets of product put out (glassware) with no defects. On the days I had to work with the guy I mentioned, my line was lucky to put out 3500-4000 sets in an 8 hour shift with a half hour lunch. On the days without him, the line could produce 5000-7000 sets. That's a piece work difference of around $20 per day extra when he worked compared to $25-35 per day when he was off. I ended up getting fired because the slacker reported me for sweeping the cardboard scraps up around my work station and evidently, that "took a job from another union member" even though no one had come around all day long to do it. Well, I actually got fired for cussing out the Shop Steward as he was yelling at me and the shift foreman had to call security to pull me off him. But that's what started it.
the interesting thing here is that the article says the government passed the email along as informational. Probably what happened was that the government was in contact with the network over the rejection or implementation of the 3 strikes law and it was passed along as an example of a compliant or the TV network got CC'd a copy of some communications without realizing that the email in question was burring 10 replies down.
I have seen this happen in other private companies in the past where after a several month dialog by email transpires, you start seeing miscellaneous messages in emails where two people emailed back and forth to collaborate before responding to you with an answer. My favorite was a choice one email session where they couldn't reprovision a block of IP's on a separate subnet between two buildings and the sales staff went drinking with the engineers or something. As near as I can tell, someone got some but they also forgot that their lack of understanding to why I needed separate subnets didn't make it any less important which they also indicated in the email. (BTW, the subnet issues was because of some VPN software that wouldn't work properly between ip ranges on the same subnets. We have two applications that were specifically tuned to work with the VPN appliance we were using and couldn't upgrade or change anything without a large investment of time and money.)
Anyways, I'm not sure that passing along the email and identifying information was actually on purpose as the post and most of the replies seem to insinuate. I think it's more of an ignorance instead of malice thing until you get to the TV network who shouldn't have used the information to fire the person over.
Secular and atheist aren't what you think they are in this context.
The concept wasn't secular as much as government control and control of the government. This is why the first amendment says congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof and not "no government entity can express anything religious".
The concept was that the government could express religious morals and values insomuch as it was a reflection of the people but no binding to those religions could exist further then the representative or government official. In Jefferson's letter to a church as a governor, he spoke about the wall of separation in an attempt to explain this concept to a worried pastor who thought his church was going to be outlawed. This wall of separation has been exaggerated and grabbed by the courts and some idiots actually think the term wall is in the constitution. But by all means, Neither Jefferson or any of the founding fathers wanted a strict secular state. They wanted a state that reflected the people and could change with the reflections of the people.
As for the vinegar, that's basically what a douche is made of. Even the newer brands use the same concept. The woman's vagina is slightly acidic anyways which is why vinegar and water douches were originally useful. The PH inside the vagina is something like 3.8-4.5 compared with the rest of the body which is usually around 7.4 or so.
As for the hot pepper juice, I know a guy who use to sprinkle a light amount of powdered cayenne pepper dust (the cooking kind) on the passenger car seat before taking a date out. Supposedly it would heat up her private parts after a night of dancing and hopping around from place to place. He claimed it would get any girl horny and almost guarantee sex. Then he got one girl with sensitive skin who suffered chemical burns and went to the hospital instead of his bedroom that night with blisters on the surface of her pussy lips. This is actually how we found out about it because she told everyone she could about the ordeal to foil his attempts into manipulating anyone else. But the reason I'm telling you this is so that if somehow you end up burning your pecker or some woman gets into contact with the heat of the pepper, vegetable oil will dilute it and allow it to be cleaned off quickly. You must then take the vegetable oil off before it does any damage but it should help in removing the heat which is probably the fist and most important issue at hand.
Isn't the reason the coffee was dropped/spilled in the first place because the coffee was kept at a temperature too hot for the container it was served in which caused melting, weakening and the eventual collapse or tearing of the cup near where the lid goes onto it?
I specifically remember something about the coffee cup being rated for 175 degrees or so and with that knowledge, the management of the store kept the coffee 15 degree or more hotter and about 20 degrees hotter then the other stores in the same town.
I used to know a link to a site that listed all the points that the jury found to support the decision. I could find it with a quick google search so it might be gone now. If I remember correctly, the spill would have actually been McDonald's fault too and it was an example of a "good" and just lawsuit. (BTW, the jury increased the award to the large number based around all the facts presented. The original lawsuit was looking for medical bills and lost work to be covered. The large award was created by the jury because of how strong of a case for the placing the public in danger was made).
Unfortunately, the McDonald's hot coffee wasn't really about being to hot to drink. It was too hot for the container used and it melted the top of the cup where the lid fits on causing it to separate and then spill all over the person in question.
The suit happened after 12 other people were injured and made claims against to the store's insurance for the same cause and McDonald's sent a memo out suggesting they lower the temp but the store manager refused to pay the technician to come in and adjust the machines. McDonald's apparently offered the lady in question something like $700 for the incident when the medical bills were well past that and rising because her treatment wasn't finished.
The hot coffee suit was more like buying a car which was known to have total break failure but someone decided not to recall it or fix the problem because it cost too much.
Some computer gaming mag I use to read back in the early 90's had an advertisement for a gaming chair with a toilet build into it right next to a fridge. It was a joke more or less but this was about the time Active X was just becoming popular and featured Active Splash with forcefeedback for the commode, an acne cream dispenser that doubled as a jolt cola and Doritos holder, and a host more of moronic statements/devices that had you rolling for days.
I'm not sure why I had to tell you that outside to ensure that the crapper built into the chair has been thought through for some time now and it probably wouldn't be an issue for you. Or was it in case someone else remembers the article and has a link to it so I can laugh again? Anyways, this sort of seems like something that we could only dream of 18 years ago.
The problem here is that you don't understand the roles of the governments in question. The federal government doesn't police your streets making you safe. The federal government doesn't make your drinking water safe nor does it supply drinking water to anyone outside of an emergency situation unless they are treating their own well water. The Federal government does not put your house out if it's on fire nor does it stop your neighbors house fire from spreading to yours.
The federal government does has some involvement with mass transit and roads and parks and libraries. Roads being the only constitutional role in question. The problem there is that they already charge you user fees in the form of Tickets to ride the public transit, taxes levied on gasoline and other fuels so your use of the roads actually provide funding for their maintenance. As for parks and libraries, most libraries are primarily county or city funded and with the parks, the same is said with state, city, and county funding. The library in my county if primarily county funded with cities investing a little for the branches outside the county seat. Total federal funding has never reached more then half of one percent of the annual budget. And yes, I am involved with the county library and I do know that to be true for at least the last 30 years.
So even if paying more taxes could be a moral decision, the parent made mention to paying federal taxes and it still doesn't apply on the whole here. Not to mention that people in this thread (and I'm assuming you too because your replying to a comment about federal taxes) don't understand which government entity provides what service and where or how any taxes or the bulk of the taxes should be paid to for the services they value. But paying you share is way too subjective of an idea. Do you have less of a share if you use the libraries or parks less then me? Do I now owe more of a share because I use them 10 times as much and had the neighbors house catch fire once and the fire department stopped it from spreading to mine? How about if I make 10% of the yearly income you make? How about if I make that ten percent but live with others and our total household income is 2 times as much as yours?
So we see there are services offered by the various governments we live under. Paying our share could be the cost of those services X divided by the population Y. We can even adjust that to X divided by income earning population Yi. But here is the big difference between what the AC said, the parent to you and what you said. If we look at your statement we can see that there is some confusion in at minimum, what was perceived to have been said.
So yeah, I can see how a certain sort of person might say "Gee, I sure am getting a good deal here. Now that I can afford it, paying my share seems like a good thing." Heck, some people might even go so far as to say "And heck, now that I can afford it, why don't I pay MORE than my share, to help make up for the time when I was paying less than my share? Or to help cover people who aren't as lucky as I am to be able to?"
Here you are suggesting that a person thinks it his duty to pay his share or x divided by Yi. You even acknowledge that he might want to pay more in his own for those not as happy with their income or Yi status.
I don't think anyone has a problem with that. Well other then the misconception you showed by linking all of the local functions of government with the federal government. The problem is that the AC said all of this was about him and how he was friendly to paying more but ended the statement with
i think going back to the rates that existed under Clinton will be fine
so he doesn't want just him to pay more because he can, he wants everyone to pay more and he wants it to be paid on a federal level because he_thinks_he_can. The problem with that is that not all people have the same finances and none of the reasons you suggest
Okay then, let's start there. If this is plagiarism, supply the original quote that was copied. Not a similar sentiment, but the quote that was copied. That would be plagiarism, otherwise, it's just a similar viewpoint. I think vanilla ice cream is good. Have I just "plagiarized" everyone who made this discovery before me, or is it possible I came to this conclusion on my own.
Are you attempting to claim you were the AC? Anyways, the views where not of the AC's own, the AC won't even comment on them, and if the AC commented on them we still wouldn't know anything because people post AC in order to hide their identity and say things that can't or would be difficult to trace back to them. I'm not so sure why you are claiming the AC is some ultra upstanding citizen who shouldn't be questioned. I mean fuck, he posted anonymously so none of his statements could be connected to him, he parroted something Warren Buffet has said and the democrats have heralded as some sort of battle cry when they think rich is anyone making a living and they need to tax them back into poverty just to claim they are helping the poor.
The AC didn't believe that way, he was brainwashed into it. I can tell this because while it isn't exactly plagiarism, it is 90% of what has already been said in an effort to push a political agenda. I'm not sure why you're so upset over calling a spade a spade.
I would if I were as deluded as you are, but I'm not. Again, I know plenty of people who hold this view. They make the amounts that would put them in the tax brackets that would actually go up. They don't have a problem with the taxes going back up to the rates under Clinton (which is what the AC specifically mentioned), or even a little higher. And scream it all you want, but legitimate deductions are okay. If you want to argue otherwise, go find someone else to do it with, because I see no moral or ethical dilemma with using them.
There is no delusion on my part. You don't hide your income to escape higher taxes then claim your not paying enough taxes. That's a fucking oxymoron is there ever was one. Because you know asshats like that doesn't change this issue. It's like you hoarding all the water during an emergency and then claiming it should be illegal for others to hoard clean drinking water. Do you see where that just isn't right?
It's not about deductions either. Do you even know what tax structure is or the concept we are looking at? We will focus on Buffet because those words were his originally. Buffet didn't take a deduction, he structured his income from Berkshire Hathaway so that he specifically pays only half the taxes he would otherwise pay if he would have taken a regular paycheck. This is all before deductions and any other bullshit. This is why he is paying less and it has nothing to do with raising taxes to the level that was in place when Clinton was in office. It's a direct manipulation to avoid paying what everyone else pays in taxes and he's claiming he should be paying more. Well, the answer is to stop manipulating your income structure to evade the regular tax rates and you would be paying more.
Really? So Buffet's point that he should be paying a higher rate than his secretary was actually code for his secretary should be paying a higher rate? Aside from that, the AC specifically talked about higher rates for high-income earners. So how, exactly, would my taxes go up while theirs don't? And for the love of god, leave legal and legitimate deductions out of it. I can do those too, and so can you.
His point was to push a political agenda that he knew wouldn't effect him, not to raise taxes period. If he anted to pay more, all he would have to do is pay himself a larger salary instead of selling off shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffet specifically set his income structure up like that to avoid paying the normal tax rates. Most all who have enough money to m
KDE of course. Gnome is slick but it tends to do what it wants instead of what you want. As a fine Linux user named Linus once said, Gnome eventually treats you like an idiot.
So it's KDE of course. You might miss on the looks a little but at least you can convince her to do some things she wouldn't normally want to do. And if the looks are really that bad, just install a theme (boob job) and don't look back.
I'm a single person living alone and I have 5 cars. It's actually pretty easy to accumulate cars.
The first car I own is a 1969 chevele SS that I purchased when I was 16. I have change from using it as an every day driver to a only in good weather and to and from car shows after I got another car and started restoring it. I have a truck that I use for working around the farm, hauling crap, and going places where a 2 wheel drive vehicle can't go. I have a van I use for trips with friends when we go fishing or something. It's a full size 3/4 ton so it can pull the boat or camper just fine. I have a smaller Toyota with a 4 cylinder engine that I use for an everyday driver when I don't need anything more.
Then I just acquired a 1985 Chevy blazer that I was able to intercept from a scrap yard sell off for $500. The back is removable and I'm planning on setting it up with a sliding lift kit and converting the engine to a fully electronic fuel injection with an upgraded ignition system and a nice new computer to control the power and fuel economy. When it's all done, I will use it to supplement the truck for lighter work and better fuel economy and I will be able to loosen the suspension and let loose with some four wheeling activity.
I have collected these vehicles over a period of years and never had to make payments on more then one at a time. Each vehicle filled a gap or need that the others couldn't with the exception of the Blazer in which I created a need for. It was in too good of shape to be sold as scrap metal because the owner couldn't afford to drive it and needed the cash to pay for the gas to drive to work in his small car. It's easy to collect a number of cars, especially when you live far enough away from work or basic services like the grocery store or whatever that you need a spare in case something happens to the car you depend on. If I has one car and it broke down, I would have a hell of a time putting food on the table, keeping the farm up, checking on the well being of family members and so on. I'm 6 miles from the nearest town, 38 miles from where I used to work, I'm an consultant now so my job moves from place to place and sometimes in the same day. And I don't think I'm an exception to the rule for a lot of people. It's just easy to amass a collection of vehicles when considering things like that.
There are two issues your statement doesn't seem to acknowledge. First is in the later part of the statement with the roads. The roads are largely paid for by fuel taxes and property taxes along the roads the buildings sit on. Most of the rural roads originally started out as tractor paths and private roads passing through farm lands that either links family homesteads together or they links cities and townships together. When I did some work for the local township board, I was able to trace all but 5 of the 700 different roads that aren't US or State highways back to private access to farm houses or development projects initially financed by private investment. At some point in time, enough homes and people lived along those roads that they joined together in the maintenance of them. When people disagreed on the needs for maintenance and/or refused to pay, this costs started coming from property taxes. Then with the advent of the interstate highway system, the concept of pay as you go system with road use taxes came about where taxes on fuel, tires, licenses and registrations began to supplement some of these costs.
The second issue is with public transportation. 100 years ago, the average wage was much lower and cars were quite a bit more expensive. Many towns started outlawing the keeping of livestock (horses) within the city limits and public transportation found a niche market as a result. It thrived until we started over regulating it and placing (needed but overly expensive) restrictions for safety and so on onto the task. In 1904, in my home town, you could ride all day long on the public tansport (horse drawn trolly) for a penny a day which gave you a dated ticket and you could ride from anywhere the entire day. In 1945, this was a bus that operated similar to a taxi that would go from one end of town to another and back while moving laterally up to 10 blocks to get you closer to your destination for less then 5 cents per day. Both of those were privately run operations. The school busing in my area was originally private too. Those who needed to ride paid something on the order of 5-10 dollars a year and was owned and subsidized by private businesses with a company logo printed on the side of the bus (no pictures).
Anyways, the cities and school districts started taking over the school busing as regulations and safety concerns started making it too expensive. Then the public transportation started experiencing the same issue with the city wanting to charge fees to operate which eventually ended up in monopoly services and that seems to have become too expensive. Now the cities think they are responsible for public transportation and they don't seem to do a good job of it in many areas. We recently brought back buses in the form of short motor coaches in my area and to match the same coverage that was in place from private enterprise back in 1965, it would cost the city on the order of 190 million a year on top of user fees. Of course this gets more complicated when you consider the town has grown since 1965. But the reality of the situation is that something that was profitable for private enterprise to tackle in 1965 has been regulated and changed so much that rider fees aren't enough to cover expenses and the city has to sink tons of money into it.
So when considering what you said, we should also consider the how of roads and the why of the lack of public transportation. It isn't a matter of we can do something because something happened a long time ago. It's a matter of how those roads came to be, how they are paid for today, how public transportation will be paid for today and why it isn't profitable enough today as it was in the past so private enterprise would be attracted to it. Almost every city takes a loss on public transportation and has to pay for it in the form of taxes plus fees to use the thing. The big difference is convenience and initial costs. If the train or bus passed my house when I wanted to go somewhere and if it could take me to where I need to go, and if it could do that without increasing my taxes, I would be glad to use it. That just doesn't seem to be the case for most of America though.
I'm going to admit that my experience with public transport is limited to a few specific occasions where I was away on a business trip, but I want to second your notion.
In my experiences, I take a flights to another city, stay at a hotel and took public transit to where I needed to go (well, used to, I don't anymore). It generally took roughly an hour to an hour and a half longer to get to each destination I needed to go to and I had the itinerary and routing worked out in advance by the secretary at the places I was visiting. One trip, I had to take a $15 or $20 cab ride to the lite rail station and wait 20 minutes for the train. Then after a 35-40 minute ride, I had to hop a bus with two transfers so that meant not only waiting the extra time while each bus hits the other stops on the line, I had to get off twice, walk two blocks away, and wait 15 to 20 minutes for the connector to come by. Then I still walked roughly 3 city blocks to get where I needed to be. My meetings took roughly an hour longer then planned so I took a taxi all the way back to the hotel for $80. I spent roughly $25-$30 on the public transportation and it took a total of four and a half hours or so one way. On the way back I decided to just take a cab, it took me one and a half hours, cost $80 for the cab, and I was still able to hit a show that night. The next trip, I rented a car for $50 a day, squeezed in two extra meetings (over two days), and saved not only time but money as well. I also was able to park in the lots of the places I visited so walking which isn't an issue outside of time involved (moving at 3mph verses 20-30mph or faster) was rather limited to the back edge of large parking lots.
While public transportation works for some, it isn't a magic bullet for anything. Well, at least not like the story is attempting to claim. Also, if you take the parking away from the study, it loses most of it's bite. This is especially true if you look at all the driving you have to do in a normal day. We seem to be focusing on the one task of going to work but if you get rid of your car, you will need to go to the market more often because you can only carry a few bags of groceries at a time, you will lose the hour there, lose an hour when going to the doctors, the movies, the jazz festival downtown or county fair or whatever else it is that normal people do with their spare time. It's just not worth it.
I have rarely went to some place where my parking wasn't validated by one of the places I visited or the place had it's own parking lot and the parking was free. Even my attorneys office in downtown Columbus Ohio will pick up the parking tab by issuing you a promissory voucher that you present to the parking attendant when leaving. And we know how greedy those sharks can be. I have never had to pay to park on the street in front of my friend's houses, a relative's house, the grocery store, or the local pub/bar. They put too much stock into the paying to park thing to be grounded in reality for most people. And that's not even considering the extra time that can be used more productively doing something else that is important to you.
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The only thing I can guess would be so that it's harder to open the door from the outside without damaging anything. But most people who would be breaking into a car would either already know that there is a rod that goes from the key lock to the lock itself and the locking indicator in top of the door panel and they would likely go for that first. Well, that or they would just smash the window out.
Maybe they are thinking that water could get into it and short it out causing the windows to open during a rain storm of something. I had one electric window that wouldn't go up or down if it rained more then an inch. It turned out to be something in the motor that was bad and the weather stripping around the windows was old and cracked.
Truthfully, I don't know. Those are two guesses I have come up with after thinking about it myself. I'm sure people can come up with more reasons to why but I'm not sure we would ever know exactly why.
Interestingly, my grandmother made me wire then to a hot switch so they could be operated with the keys off. She was so afraid of going somewhere and waiting in the car and not being able to role the windows up if someone scary or less then respectable people started hanging around.
I wouldn't call her ultra paranoid or crazy or anything but as a teen, her and her mom (my great grandmother) got mugged in Chicago Ill. That sort of shaped how she viewed everything as to her own protection. She pretty much already did what they tell the girls in those self defense classes and being able to put a windows up between her and a potential attacker (even if there was no threat) was one thing she insisted on.
Anyway, I don't think she was/is alone in thinking like that. Perhaps you should add that situation to your ultra paranoid list.
I think the "wedge" refers to the slice of the brain contained on it and not the hard drive itself. The metal handle is there because they are hot swappable and the handle folds over to lock it in their cradle (think backplane). When they fist started talking about the wedges, they mentioned that they data blocks containing a slice of someone's life up to the time it was made.
It's like using a windows XP box as a file server. It isn't really a server but if that's its only rule, you generally call the workstation a server even though the system is not set up like a server or running a server OS.
I would think differently if the person viewing you were subject to the same rules. However, the GPS tracking device doesn't give you that option or warning and it isn't able to interpret any actions it records that may be used against you. If the officer was required to be present, not only could I see them, but my trip down crack ally that was a result of a traffic accident blocking the road in front of me is completely understood and not mistaken as a stop to get drugs.
The scary part is that I'm pretty sure that if a private citizen put a tracking device on any other car (that they didn't own), they would be up on stalking charges. I don't understand why this is different outside of the idea that the police shouldn't concern themselves with you unless they suspect you of breaking a law but then they should have the warrant test to ensure they aren't overstepping anyone's rights.
Which is more important, robberies without cops or knowing that the 3am shift of cops aren't sitting in the parking lot of dunkin donuts taking turns grabbing cream pies and talking about their last major bust which turns out to be a drunk driver or something.
I would thing that knowing the cops were moving and patrolling would discourage a lot of the robberies. Just lock down your wifi so they can't use it to see when it's ok to smash your windows out.
Lol.. So it wasn't a word for word copy, it's still an exact paraphrase of Buffet's rant about how he pays less then his secretary in tax rates and how he thinks he should pay more but refused to do so. Now it is possible that someone could have came to the same conclusions about needing to pay more taxes, but the comment wasn't limited to them paying more taxes, it was expanded from the AC's personal to everyone as well as naming a specific tax example which makes it nothing but a shill parroting Buffet's statement that was attempting to push a political agenda. The fact that the AC has yet to comment even though you seem to want to speak for him sort of shows how sincere he was.
Jesus fucking christ man. My own sources also said that Buffet who claims he needed to pay more in taxes structured his holding company so that profits go back into equity instead of being paid out as a salary so he could take the tax hit at the capitol gains rate instead of his personal income tax rate. That has nothing to fucking do with any deductions. I said the deductions don't even matter- they arne't important- they are not the reason he pays so little in taxes. The reson he pays so little in taxes is because he takes them as a capitol gain and not an income. He can if he things he need to pay more in taxes, increase his salary to the point of his expended capitol gains and pay the full rate as income tax. Now deductions have nothing to do with that and no one could take enough deductions to lower their effective tax rates to the levels Buffet did with strictly deductions.
If you still don't understand that, then speak with a tax professional or something because you aren't getting the fundamental situation. Buffet structured his income to specifically avoid taxes and he is now claiming he doesn't pay enough but refuses to make the simple changes that he has control over that could almost double his effective tax rate before any fucking deduction comes into play. And yes, deductions are completely insignificant at this stage- they don't fucking apply.
And here is where you comprehension problem rears it's ugly head again. He would still be playing by the same rules in place if he made the changes. It's not about making the change so he pays more taxes, it's about advancing a political idea under some false pretense. If he thinks he is not paying enough, then simply change the way he takes his income and he will pay lots more.
That's sort of evading the point. Those Catholics can and do vote differently then their preacher tells them plus they are freely capable of moving to another church or even denomination. But I haven't seen any catholic churches attempting to ban the use of condoms, extra marital, or premarital sex though the lobbying of government and the implementation of laws.
the point wasn't that they were the voice of the people rather that the people voluntarily associate with their voice. This seems to be a dificult concept to follow so let me spend a few more minutes on it.
At work, if your boss says something in the political realm, you can say "I don't agree with that". But are you going to be willing to quit your job and go unemployed in a depressed economy because of that? Regardless of your answer, most people will say no because they have to pay bills and put food on the table for their families. Some may look for a new job but their job will almost instantly be filled by someone else who needs to do the same. So for the corporation to say I represent 10,000 employees, that may or may not be true but your participation in that representation is a little more then voluntary. Now a church on the other hand is really no different then a gun club, a senior citizen group like the ARP or whatever. If you don't agree, you can change influence their opinions by the threat of removal of your participation. If a church goes rogue and doesn't represent your ideals anymore, you find a new church. If the gun club starts advocating the over throw of the government, you find a new gun club. There is no real impediment in you moving to another organization even if still in the same religion or whatever. You won't lose your livelihood or the ability to care for your family's needs, you won't be black listed by a scorned boss who wants to teach you a lesson by attempting to keep you unemployed with less then honest references.
Now this doesn't mean that you will magically start agreeing with everything they say or everything they attempt to influence. It means that if you disagree strongly enough, you can freely disassociate yourself with them while speaking to the opposite of their message without the hurdles of losing your income, insurance, or whatever else. In essence, with religion, your participation is voluntary, this isn't really the case with employment.
The same is true with religions. You just have to think of it more as a caucus then a secrete ballot. Most all organized religions have their belief structures set in stone before you join them. Some religions like the Roman Catholics, have the pope who interprets modern invention within those rules and values. There are catholic churches that are separate from the pope and the roman catholic structures so instead of passing a secrete ballot for a vote, you simply find a church that you agree with just like you would a chess club or gun club or bar or a clan/guild on WoW or whatever. It doesn't mean you have to agree with everything, it just means that you can walk away easier if you disagree.
You mean the German and Japanese cars produced in the US? I don't think we have imported a complete car since the mid 1980's or so after the foreign markets got smarts and defeated the Union's "Buy American to keep Americans' working" campaign and opened shops up in the US so they were buying American assembled cars to keep Americans working.
Anyways, your talking more about development and R&D and engineering experience as to the reasons some foreign cars don't suck. This isn't really a who puts them together issue. I'm sorry you thought it was though. The Japanese and Germans took a different approach to car making which lead to tighter tolerances and longer lasting engined as well as handling. American cars spent most of this time dumping raw power into the engine which required a different type of tolerances. In short, the development of both came from completely different directions which created different goals.
The area I was working in was where the cartons for the glassware was assembled. You sometimes have to cut pieces of string and cardboard to make them fit right in their assembly. These cuttings fall to the floor by you feet and pile up after a while. I did start sliding around on them so I'm pretty sure it was a safety issue.
Sure it was. I know it was my fault. The part I got pissed about was being yelled at saying I was taking the job of another employee who obviously wasn't there. I find that extremely frustrating when my job is more difficult because someone wants to show a need for someone else to be employed to do something that took me all of 5 minutes to accomplish with the bulk of the time spend looking for a broom.
Yes, there are closed shops, even closed jobs sites that won't even allow contractors in unless they are part of a union. This is what they claim makes the union strong. One of the pieces of legislation floating around, I'm not sure if it passed but it was one of the things Obama wanted in the first 100 days of office was a bill that took the voting process to bring unions into a shop from a secrete ballot to a signed and open system where the union, the employee right next to you, and your boss can see how you voted on whether to unionize or not. There are laws against the employer treating you differently for you support of unionizing but there aren't any special laws about your co workers pressuring you or doing anything to encourage your support which I find frightening to some degree.
As for the rest of your paragraphs, I agree. It just doesn't seem right. and yes, it is messed up.
Most places I have worked at has had a liberal open door policy. It also wasn't uncommon to see the owners who took no active role in the day to day operations as well as the CEOs or whoever walking through the different levels. They weren't really checking anything but just being seen in case someone wanted to grab an ear and talk. I guess it gets a little more difficult when the size of the company increases. Maybe I have just been lucky in where I have worked.
Well, no. I wasn't doing work for free. I was getting paid by the hour the entire time I stood there. The only difference would be if I was stepping on scraps of cardboard from the boxes and sliding around or not. I felt the area was creating a hazard which is why I grabbed the broom when someone else backed the line up.
If that means I'm evil and incapable of appreciating unions, then I guess I'm guilty. However, I think it makes more of a statement about the union then it does me. I don't think anyone in any job should be reprimanded for taking the time to clear hazards away from the work area and attempt to maintain a safe working environment. It wasn't like I was spring cleaning the entire plant on my day off or anything.
The unions force them to keep them by specifying certain provisions in the contracts. A contract with supersede "at will" in the same way that you not obligated to pay me anything unless we have a contract defining terms in which you will pay me. Obviously your not familiar with how unions work. The unions seem to fight to keep the slackers because it requires more people to do the same amount of work which in turn get more union dues for the union. The more union dues paid, the higher the salaries can be and the more political power they can amass due to supporting politicians and so on. Anyways, it's all about power and exerting it. Power over the company, power over the employees, power over the politicians, there is a reason the mob was highly involved with unions throughout their history.
Dude, don't take what I said as an insult over all union workers. I said there was one guy, the entire plant was union if you were there longer then 90 days. The problem is that one guy should have been fired or moved to another position but he wasn't and the union stuck up for him. As I noted with the piece work, I lost 5-15 dollars a day with him being on the line. And yes, that probably lead to all the animosity I had towards the shop steward when he attempted to reprimand me for cleaning my area of tripping hazards.
All the Union shops I have worked in, high supervisor level management directly from the floor. There no real demonization there outside of unrealistic demands being placed on the employer. Take GM for instance, by the time you add up all the befits and pay packages of the union employees, GM was paying roughly two third more per employee then any of their competitors and almost twice as much as Toyota and other foreign manufacturers who set up shop in the US. Then you had the temp labor which the union refused to allow so GM had to pay people to come in and sit in a break room for 8 hours a day instead of hiring temporary labor and laying them off after the work was caught up. And what do we see from all this? We saw people complaining that GM was making SUVs instead of something that people previously didn't want from GM as the reason they are in so much trouble when the economy finally tanked
I started to pick apart your reply until I saw the last part of your statement. I think we are on the same page and personally, I understand that corporations are people and should have the power to lobby government.
But I think the difference that you are looking for is in the make up of the representation. A corporation represents the entirety of the corporation which includes the owners, employees, and customers to varying degrees. A church represents it's congregation which can be the same people. But the major differences here are the voluntary associations.
In a church, everyone (*unless their parents are forcing them to attend) is doing so of their own free will. This makes a church much the same as the ARP or NAACP, or NRA, or what ever group of people who come together for a common cause and the benefits of those causes. The only voluntary associations with a corporation is the handful of owners compared to the employees which are paid to be there and customers which in some cases are missing the benefits of the corporation's lobbying efforts. In fact, I would say sometimes the employees are missing the benefits too.
So in contrast, a corporation that has 10,000 people behind it may only be reflecting the owners wishes which could be as little as one person of just a couple hundred of people while it appears to be larger. With a church, you can find another church to go to so similar representation of 10,000 is likely to reflect a lot more people in the community then a corporation.
It does seem that I misconstrued your original position but I think this sort of segregates some of the differences. Personally, I don't care if corporations have the power as long as it's public knowledge and political conversations happen to the extent that we at least know how many people the corporation actually represents on any given position. Obviously, if the employees don't agree with their position, they shouldn't be counted as being in agreement. It's a little more difficult to find a new job then to find a new church or gun rights club or senior citizens group or anti oppression group or whatever. So I think some protections against being fired for political views should be made but I wouldn't want it to be so construed that you couldn't fire someone for telling lies about the company or something to advance their agenda.
We have both of the same in America. In the US it's called constructive discharge and in some states, if it can be shown, the employee still gets the unemployment benefits and the employer's rates still go up. In all US states, if it can be linked to one of the discrimination bans provided by law, you can sue too.
Most of the states in the US are "at will" which means you can be fired for no good/any reason at all. If it's not a good reason or not the fault of the employee, then you get an unemployment compensation package that the state administers. Generally it's two thirds of your average salary over the last six month paid in bi-weekly payments until you find another job or a year or something which ever comes first.
In companies that have unions, it starts getting difficult to fire people because the union will back them and you end up with worthless people who know they won't lose their jobs if they do the bare minimum. I worked with such a person when I was 18 at a local factory for the summer. We got paid $12 an hour plus one half cent for every 100 sets of product put out (glassware) with no defects. On the days I had to work with the guy I mentioned, my line was lucky to put out 3500-4000 sets in an 8 hour shift with a half hour lunch. On the days without him, the line could produce 5000-7000 sets. That's a piece work difference of around $20 per day extra when he worked compared to $25-35 per day when he was off. I ended up getting fired because the slacker reported me for sweeping the cardboard scraps up around my work station and evidently, that "took a job from another union member" even though no one had come around all day long to do it. Well, I actually got fired for cussing out the Shop Steward as he was yelling at me and the shift foreman had to call security to pull me off him. But that's what started it.
the interesting thing here is that the article says the government passed the email along as informational. Probably what happened was that the government was in contact with the network over the rejection or implementation of the 3 strikes law and it was passed along as an example of a compliant or the TV network got CC'd a copy of some communications without realizing that the email in question was burring 10 replies down.
I have seen this happen in other private companies in the past where after a several month dialog by email transpires, you start seeing miscellaneous messages in emails where two people emailed back and forth to collaborate before responding to you with an answer. My favorite was a choice one email session where they couldn't reprovision a block of IP's on a separate subnet between two buildings and the sales staff went drinking with the engineers or something. As near as I can tell, someone got some but they also forgot that their lack of understanding to why I needed separate subnets didn't make it any less important which they also indicated in the email. (BTW, the subnet issues was because of some VPN software that wouldn't work properly between ip ranges on the same subnets. We have two applications that were specifically tuned to work with the VPN appliance we were using and couldn't upgrade or change anything without a large investment of time and money.)
Anyways, I'm not sure that passing along the email and identifying information was actually on purpose as the post and most of the replies seem to insinuate. I think it's more of an ignorance instead of malice thing until you get to the TV network who shouldn't have used the information to fire the person over.
Secular and atheist aren't what you think they are in this context.
The concept wasn't secular as much as government control and control of the government. This is why the first amendment says congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof and not "no government entity can express anything religious".
The concept was that the government could express religious morals and values insomuch as it was a reflection of the people but no binding to those religions could exist further then the representative or government official. In Jefferson's letter to a church as a governor, he spoke about the wall of separation in an attempt to explain this concept to a worried pastor who thought his church was going to be outlawed. This wall of separation has been exaggerated and grabbed by the courts and some idiots actually think the term wall is in the constitution. But by all means, Neither Jefferson or any of the founding fathers wanted a strict secular state. They wanted a state that reflected the people and could change with the reflections of the people.
Two words. Yep.
Don't try to count them, just say it twice. It will all work out in the end.
As for the vinegar, that's basically what a douche is made of. Even the newer brands use the same concept. The woman's vagina is slightly acidic anyways which is why vinegar and water douches were originally useful. The PH inside the vagina is something like 3.8-4.5 compared with the rest of the body which is usually around 7.4 or so.
As for the hot pepper juice, I know a guy who use to sprinkle a light amount of powdered cayenne pepper dust (the cooking kind) on the passenger car seat before taking a date out. Supposedly it would heat up her private parts after a night of dancing and hopping around from place to place. He claimed it would get any girl horny and almost guarantee sex. Then he got one girl with sensitive skin who suffered chemical burns and went to the hospital instead of his bedroom that night with blisters on the surface of her pussy lips. This is actually how we found out about it because she told everyone she could about the ordeal to foil his attempts into manipulating anyone else. But the reason I'm telling you this is so that if somehow you end up burning your pecker or some woman gets into contact with the heat of the pepper, vegetable oil will dilute it and allow it to be cleaned off quickly. You must then take the vegetable oil off before it does any damage but it should help in removing the heat which is probably the fist and most important issue at hand.
Isn't the reason the coffee was dropped/spilled in the first place because the coffee was kept at a temperature too hot for the container it was served in which caused melting, weakening and the eventual collapse or tearing of the cup near where the lid goes onto it?
I specifically remember something about the coffee cup being rated for 175 degrees or so and with that knowledge, the management of the store kept the coffee 15 degree or more hotter and about 20 degrees hotter then the other stores in the same town.
I used to know a link to a site that listed all the points that the jury found to support the decision. I could find it with a quick google search so it might be gone now. If I remember correctly, the spill would have actually been McDonald's fault too and it was an example of a "good" and just lawsuit. (BTW, the jury increased the award to the large number based around all the facts presented. The original lawsuit was looking for medical bills and lost work to be covered. The large award was created by the jury because of how strong of a case for the placing the public in danger was made).
Unfortunately, the McDonald's hot coffee wasn't really about being to hot to drink. It was too hot for the container used and it melted the top of the cup where the lid fits on causing it to separate and then spill all over the person in question.
The suit happened after 12 other people were injured and made claims against to the store's insurance for the same cause and McDonald's sent a memo out suggesting they lower the temp but the store manager refused to pay the technician to come in and adjust the machines. McDonald's apparently offered the lady in question something like $700 for the incident when the medical bills were well past that and rising because her treatment wasn't finished.
The hot coffee suit was more like buying a car which was known to have total break failure but someone decided not to recall it or fix the problem because it cost too much.
Some computer gaming mag I use to read back in the early 90's had an advertisement for a gaming chair with a toilet build into it right next to a fridge. It was a joke more or less but this was about the time Active X was just becoming popular and featured Active Splash with forcefeedback for the commode, an acne cream dispenser that doubled as a jolt cola and Doritos holder, and a host more of moronic statements/devices that had you rolling for days.
I'm not sure why I had to tell you that outside to ensure that the crapper built into the chair has been thought through for some time now and it probably wouldn't be an issue for you. Or was it in case someone else remembers the article and has a link to it so I can laugh again? Anyways, this sort of seems like something that we could only dream of 18 years ago.
The problem here is that you don't understand the roles of the governments in question. The federal government doesn't police your streets making you safe. The federal government doesn't make your drinking water safe nor does it supply drinking water to anyone outside of an emergency situation unless they are treating their own well water. The Federal government does not put your house out if it's on fire nor does it stop your neighbors house fire from spreading to yours.
The federal government does has some involvement with mass transit and roads and parks and libraries. Roads being the only constitutional role in question. The problem there is that they already charge you user fees in the form of Tickets to ride the public transit, taxes levied on gasoline and other fuels so your use of the roads actually provide funding for their maintenance. As for parks and libraries, most libraries are primarily county or city funded and with the parks, the same is said with state, city, and county funding. The library in my county if primarily county funded with cities investing a little for the branches outside the county seat. Total federal funding has never reached more then half of one percent of the annual budget. And yes, I am involved with the county library and I do know that to be true for at least the last 30 years.
So even if paying more taxes could be a moral decision, the parent made mention to paying federal taxes and it still doesn't apply on the whole here. Not to mention that people in this thread (and I'm assuming you too because your replying to a comment about federal taxes) don't understand which government entity provides what service and where or how any taxes or the bulk of the taxes should be paid to for the services they value. But paying you share is way too subjective of an idea. Do you have less of a share if you use the libraries or parks less then me? Do I now owe more of a share because I use them 10 times as much and had the neighbors house catch fire once and the fire department stopped it from spreading to mine? How about if I make 10% of the yearly income you make? How about if I make that ten percent but live with others and our total household income is 2 times as much as yours?
So we see there are services offered by the various governments we live under. Paying our share could be the cost of those services X divided by the population Y. We can even adjust that to X divided by income earning population Yi. But here is the big difference between what the AC said, the parent to you and what you said. If we look at your statement we can see that there is some confusion in at minimum, what was perceived to have been said.
Here you are suggesting that a person thinks it his duty to pay his share or x divided by Yi. You even acknowledge that he might want to pay more in his own for those not as happy with their income or Yi status.
I don't think anyone has a problem with that. Well other then the misconception you showed by linking all of the local functions of government with the federal government. The problem is that the AC said all of this was about him and how he was friendly to paying more but ended the statement with
so he doesn't want just him to pay more because he can, he wants everyone to pay more and he wants it to be paid on a federal level because he_thinks_he_can. The problem with that is that not all people have the same finances and none of the reasons you suggest
Are you attempting to claim you were the AC? Anyways, the views where not of the AC's own, the AC won't even comment on them, and if the AC commented on them we still wouldn't know anything because people post AC in order to hide their identity and say things that can't or would be difficult to trace back to them. I'm not so sure why you are claiming the AC is some ultra upstanding citizen who shouldn't be questioned. I mean fuck, he posted anonymously so none of his statements could be connected to him, he parroted something Warren Buffet has said and the democrats have heralded as some sort of battle cry when they think rich is anyone making a living and they need to tax them back into poverty just to claim they are helping the poor.
The AC didn't believe that way, he was brainwashed into it. I can tell this because while it isn't exactly plagiarism, it is 90% of what has already been said in an effort to push a political agenda. I'm not sure why you're so upset over calling a spade a spade.
There is no delusion on my part. You don't hide your income to escape higher taxes then claim your not paying enough taxes. That's a fucking oxymoron is there ever was one. Because you know asshats like that doesn't change this issue. It's like you hoarding all the water during an emergency and then claiming it should be illegal for others to hoard clean drinking water. Do you see where that just isn't right?
It's not about deductions either. Do you even know what tax structure is or the concept we are looking at? We will focus on Buffet because those words were his originally. Buffet didn't take a deduction, he structured his income from Berkshire Hathaway so that he specifically pays only half the taxes he would otherwise pay if he would have taken a regular paycheck. This is all before deductions and any other bullshit. This is why he is paying less and it has nothing to do with raising taxes to the level that was in place when Clinton was in office. It's a direct manipulation to avoid paying what everyone else pays in taxes and he's claiming he should be paying more. Well, the answer is to stop manipulating your income structure to evade the regular tax rates and you would be paying more.
His point was to push a political agenda that he knew wouldn't effect him, not to raise taxes period. If he anted to pay more, all he would have to do is pay himself a larger salary instead of selling off shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffet specifically set his income structure up like that to avoid paying the normal tax rates. Most all who have enough money to m
KDE of course. Gnome is slick but it tends to do what it wants instead of what you want. As a fine Linux user named Linus once said, Gnome eventually treats you like an idiot.
So it's KDE of course. You might miss on the looks a little but at least you can convince her to do some things she wouldn't normally want to do. And if the looks are really that bad, just install a theme (boob job) and don't look back.
I'm a single person living alone and I have 5 cars. It's actually pretty easy to accumulate cars.
The first car I own is a 1969 chevele SS that I purchased when I was 16. I have change from using it as an every day driver to a only in good weather and to and from car shows after I got another car and started restoring it. I have a truck that I use for working around the farm, hauling crap, and going places where a 2 wheel drive vehicle can't go. I have a van I use for trips with friends when we go fishing or something. It's a full size 3/4 ton so it can pull the boat or camper just fine. I have a smaller Toyota with a 4 cylinder engine that I use for an everyday driver when I don't need anything more.
Then I just acquired a 1985 Chevy blazer that I was able to intercept from a scrap yard sell off for $500. The back is removable and I'm planning on setting it up with a sliding lift kit and converting the engine to a fully electronic fuel injection with an upgraded ignition system and a nice new computer to control the power and fuel economy. When it's all done, I will use it to supplement the truck for lighter work and better fuel economy and I will be able to loosen the suspension and let loose with some four wheeling activity.
I have collected these vehicles over a period of years and never had to make payments on more then one at a time. Each vehicle filled a gap or need that the others couldn't with the exception of the Blazer in which I created a need for. It was in too good of shape to be sold as scrap metal because the owner couldn't afford to drive it and needed the cash to pay for the gas to drive to work in his small car. It's easy to collect a number of cars, especially when you live far enough away from work or basic services like the grocery store or whatever that you need a spare in case something happens to the car you depend on. If I has one car and it broke down, I would have a hell of a time putting food on the table, keeping the farm up, checking on the well being of family members and so on. I'm 6 miles from the nearest town, 38 miles from where I used to work, I'm an consultant now so my job moves from place to place and sometimes in the same day. And I don't think I'm an exception to the rule for a lot of people. It's just easy to amass a collection of vehicles when considering things like that.
There are two issues your statement doesn't seem to acknowledge. First is in the later part of the statement with the roads. The roads are largely paid for by fuel taxes and property taxes along the roads the buildings sit on. Most of the rural roads originally started out as tractor paths and private roads passing through farm lands that either links family homesteads together or they links cities and townships together. When I did some work for the local township board, I was able to trace all but 5 of the 700 different roads that aren't US or State highways back to private access to farm houses or development projects initially financed by private investment. At some point in time, enough homes and people lived along those roads that they joined together in the maintenance of them. When people disagreed on the needs for maintenance and/or refused to pay, this costs started coming from property taxes. Then with the advent of the interstate highway system, the concept of pay as you go system with road use taxes came about where taxes on fuel, tires, licenses and registrations began to supplement some of these costs.
The second issue is with public transportation. 100 years ago, the average wage was much lower and cars were quite a bit more expensive. Many towns started outlawing the keeping of livestock (horses) within the city limits and public transportation found a niche market as a result. It thrived until we started over regulating it and placing (needed but overly expensive) restrictions for safety and so on onto the task. In 1904, in my home town, you could ride all day long on the public tansport (horse drawn trolly) for a penny a day which gave you a dated ticket and you could ride from anywhere the entire day. In 1945, this was a bus that operated similar to a taxi that would go from one end of town to another and back while moving laterally up to 10 blocks to get you closer to your destination for less then 5 cents per day. Both of those were privately run operations. The school busing in my area was originally private too. Those who needed to ride paid something on the order of 5-10 dollars a year and was owned and subsidized by private businesses with a company logo printed on the side of the bus (no pictures).
Anyways, the cities and school districts started taking over the school busing as regulations and safety concerns started making it too expensive. Then the public transportation started experiencing the same issue with the city wanting to charge fees to operate which eventually ended up in monopoly services and that seems to have become too expensive. Now the cities think they are responsible for public transportation and they don't seem to do a good job of it in many areas. We recently brought back buses in the form of short motor coaches in my area and to match the same coverage that was in place from private enterprise back in 1965, it would cost the city on the order of 190 million a year on top of user fees. Of course this gets more complicated when you consider the town has grown since 1965. But the reality of the situation is that something that was profitable for private enterprise to tackle in 1965 has been regulated and changed so much that rider fees aren't enough to cover expenses and the city has to sink tons of money into it.
So when considering what you said, we should also consider the how of roads and the why of the lack of public transportation. It isn't a matter of we can do something because something happened a long time ago. It's a matter of how those roads came to be, how they are paid for today, how public transportation will be paid for today and why it isn't profitable enough today as it was in the past so private enterprise would be attracted to it. Almost every city takes a loss on public transportation and has to pay for it in the form of taxes plus fees to use the thing. The big difference is convenience and initial costs. If the train or bus passed my house when I wanted to go somewhere and if it could take me to where I need to go, and if it could do that without increasing my taxes, I would be glad to use it. That just doesn't seem to be the case for most of America though.
I'm going to admit that my experience with public transport is limited to a few specific occasions where I was away on a business trip, but I want to second your notion.
In my experiences, I take a flights to another city, stay at a hotel and took public transit to where I needed to go (well, used to, I don't anymore). It generally took roughly an hour to an hour and a half longer to get to each destination I needed to go to and I had the itinerary and routing worked out in advance by the secretary at the places I was visiting. One trip, I had to take a $15 or $20 cab ride to the lite rail station and wait 20 minutes for the train. Then after a 35-40 minute ride, I had to hop a bus with two transfers so that meant not only waiting the extra time while each bus hits the other stops on the line, I had to get off twice, walk two blocks away, and wait 15 to 20 minutes for the connector to come by. Then I still walked roughly 3 city blocks to get where I needed to be. My meetings took roughly an hour longer then planned so I took a taxi all the way back to the hotel for $80. I spent roughly $25-$30 on the public transportation and it took a total of four and a half hours or so one way. On the way back I decided to just take a cab, it took me one and a half hours, cost $80 for the cab, and I was still able to hit a show that night. The next trip, I rented a car for $50 a day, squeezed in two extra meetings (over two days), and saved not only time but money as well. I also was able to park in the lots of the places I visited so walking which isn't an issue outside of time involved (moving at 3mph verses 20-30mph or faster) was rather limited to the back edge of large parking lots.
While public transportation works for some, it isn't a magic bullet for anything. Well, at least not like the story is attempting to claim. Also, if you take the parking away from the study, it loses most of it's bite. This is especially true if you look at all the driving you have to do in a normal day. We seem to be focusing on the one task of going to work but if you get rid of your car, you will need to go to the market more often because you can only carry a few bags of groceries at a time, you will lose the hour there, lose an hour when going to the doctors, the movies, the jazz festival downtown or county fair or whatever else it is that normal people do with their spare time. It's just not worth it.
I have rarely went to some place where my parking wasn't validated by one of the places I visited or the place had it's own parking lot and the parking was free. Even my attorneys office in downtown Columbus Ohio will pick up the parking tab by issuing you a promissory voucher that you present to the parking attendant when leaving. And we know how greedy those sharks can be. I have never had to pay to park on the street in front of my friend's houses, a relative's house, the grocery store, or the local pub/bar. They put too much stock into the paying to park thing to be grounded in reality for most people. And that's not even considering the extra time that can be used more productively doing something else that is important to you.