Negligible benefit? Then why have so many police agencies abandoned the 9mm in favor of other calibers? Why did the Federal government settle on the.357 SIG (for the USSS) and.40S&W (for the FBI) instead of the cheaper and more commonly available 9mm? Most law enforcement agencies don't issue.45s but the fact that they've abandoned the 9mm in such large numbers ought to tell you something.
Personally, I'm not married to the.45. I have one, because I love the 1911 platform, but I'd also trust my life to a.40S&W,.357 magnum or 10mm. I've just read about too many spectacular failures of the 9mm to be willing to trust my life to it. To each their own though.
Last time I checked USA refused any commitment to lower its pollution at all and was the biggest polluter in the world.
CO2 != pollution
I really hope the world will, some distant time in the future maybe, refuse to pay the debts of the USA.
Translation: I really hope the world will willingly decide to gut the global economy, even though I'll suffer, because I hate the United States so much and want to spite them regardless of the consequences of doing so.
Besides, they have something better. Go ask an economics professor what happens to the United States if China dumps their $1 Trillion in US debt for $10 Billion.
The same thing that would happen to your neighbor if he dumped his $100,000 house for $1,000. He'd lose a shitload of money.
Yes, it would hurt us, but it would hurt them just as badly if not more so.
It's amusing that you are still beating this drum when I was responding to one specific comment that wasn't even about sales tax but was rather about corporate taxes.
Tell your Mom I said hi. It's about time to you to head back up the stairs and nuke a hot pocket, isn't it?
Yeah right. Obama is just as addicted to "cheap" Chinese money as every other jackass politician (Republican and Democrat) we've had in recent memory. Cutting that supply off would require us to actually made hard choices about taxes and spending. Such choices might actually have consequences at the ballot box. We wouldn't want that to happen, now would we?
I had hoped that Obama would be an actual leader willing to make hard choices but he's just another empty suit that's ignoring reality in favor of catering to his base and pushing his agenda. Don't worry though, we can't ignore economic reality indefinitely. If you think the economic crisis last year was serious just wait until the ponzi scheme that is the US->Chinese economic relationship actually blows up. I hope you've stockpiled as much ammo, canned food and greenbacks (gotta burn something to keep warm) as possible.
I wonder if Obama was made an offer he couldn't refuse.
Somehow I don't think the Chinese are crazy enough to try and blackmail a nuclear armed state. It would hurt them as much as it would hurt us anyway. In the long run it might even be worse for them, as it would bring their economic growth to a screeching halt.
What pisses me off is that we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars we don't have on health care "reform" that isn't and hundreds of billions more on invading countries that never attacked us but we can't find the money to fund NASA. The last round of serious investment into space exploration brought us cheap microchips, GPS, satellite photography, etc.
You don't understand geopolitics very well. France and the UK wouldn't have spilled many tears but do you really think they would have sat on the sidelines and allowed Germany to conquer Eastern Europe without a fight? They would have gotten involved for the exact same reason that the US got involved in the world wars -- allowing Germany to absorb Russia would have made her too powerful and upset the geopolitical balance of power. The Western European powers would have been reduced to satellite states with independence in name only.
Remember that this is in the day and age before nuclear weapons. You don't have any effective way to deter an enemy that's substantially stronger than you. Every decision that the Western powers (France in particular) made in the interwar period was designed to maintain the balance of power in Europe. This balance was shattered by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
You don't have to take my word for it though. Go read it in Hitler's own words. He spelled out his plan pretty clearly in Mein Kempf. His intention all along was to absorb Poland, neutralize France, seek an alliance (or at least a non-aggression pact) with the UK and absorb the European portion of the Soviet Union. His timetable was upset somewhat as he didn't believe the British and French would ally themselves with the Poles, nor did he anticipate the campaigns in the Balkans (necessitated by Italy's incompetence), but for the most part he stuck to the outline of his original plan.
Had the Nazis won, France would have been reduced to a satellite state. That sounds pretty bad until you consider what they had in mind for the poor bastards living in the East -- read Generalplan Ost some time. Had they won the war and carried that out it would have rivaled the Holocaust in terms of human suffering and misery. Thank god we were able to defeat them.
Maybe if you took a break from obsessing over conservatives and trying to stereotype them you would have noticed the comment I was replying to. Let me spell it out slowly for you:
Comment I was replying to: If Amazon wants to use state provided infrastructure and national defense, they [i.e: Amazon] should pay their share of the financial burden. My response: Their employees and shareholders already pay their share.
Do you understand now? I know that watching MSNBC can dull your critical thinking skills but presumably you still know how to read.
What is really needed is a federal clearinghouse for this: have each state (and municipality, etc) register their tax requirements with a central authority, have it publish a computer-readable database mapping address->tax rate, and have it collect the money, remitting to states. This is a clear interstate commerce issue, I don't see how even a libertarian could object to a federal role here.
I would object to it. What you are suggesting is nothing more than a database that would be populated by thousands of different entities. Why does your clearinghouse need to be run by Uncle Sam? We don't expect Uncle Sam to run the DNS root on the internet. We don't expect him to run the routing tables for the PSTN. Why should he run a database that isn't even going to be populated with information from the Feds?
If Amazon wants to use state provided infrastructure and national defense, they should pay their share of the financial burden.
Their employees and shareholders already pay their share. I know that punishing "big business" is politically popular right now but in the end corporate taxes are nothing more than a hidden tax on individuals. The business will just raise prices to compensate for the taxes that are imposed on it. The end result is that individuals wind up paying the taxes but it's politically popular because some jackass politician can say that he's being tough on "big [insert boogieman of the day here]".
The sad thing is that people eat this stuff up hook, line and sinker.
It's already the law in some states to report purchases that you have not paid sales tax on, called a Use Tax. If you purchase something and Amazon does not collect sales tax, you are supposed to report this directly and pay it directly to the government.
Yeah, and every year when I file my New York State taxes I put a big fat zero in that box. Given that my state government has found numerous other ways to put the screws to me (the latest example: everybody has to buy new license plates even though there's nothing wrong with the ones we already have, the state is just using DMV as a revenue source) I figure that it's only fair. If they want to audit me and subpoena my bank records to find every single out of state purchase then all the power to them. They'll spend more money doing that then they'll collect.
The use tax is a joke. I don't know a single New Yorker that actually pays it, nor do I know anyone that's been audited over a refusal to pay it. The funny thing is the state even gives you a "fair use formula" that takes a percentage of your income rather than requiring you to find all of your out of state receipts. Nobody uses that formula either. Only Government could come up with a "fair use" formula that takes a percentage of your income without consideration as to whether or not you actually bought any items out of state.
That makes no sense. You don't avoid a two-front war by attacking nations on opposite sides of you.
Yes you do. He cut a deal with enemy #1 (Russia) to give him time to neutralize enemy #2 (France). Then you deal with enemy #1 without having to worry about enemy #2. Divide and conquer, I presume you've heard of it?
It almost worked too. The Wehrmacht got to fought a one front war until the Allied invasion of France. Yes, there was Africa and Italy but the former was a side show and the latter was easy enough to bottle up the Allies due to the geography.
The Zimmerman telegram wasn't even a good hail mary. Given US and British Naval supremacy there was no conceivable way that Germany could have supplied Mexico with any meaningful military aid. Mexico would have been fighting the United States on her own without outside support. It gets worse though -- Mexico had no meaningful armaments industry of her own and the bulk of said industry in the New World was located in the United States.
That might explain why the Mexican Government said "thanks but no thanks" in response to the Zimmerman telegram. The Germans should have anticipated this and avoided sending the thing in the first place. It might not have kept the US out of the war but why anger the population of a neutral country for no conceivable gain?
something which Extreme Associates was in the process of doing (and had a lot of luck with) until they, for some weird reason, decided to plead guilty
They ran out of money. Lawyers don't work for sleezebags for free. I wish they had continued to fight it because even sleezebags deserve free speech but I understand why they would want to cut their losses and move on with their lives.
What part of 'defaulted on their war debts' wasn't clear?
The Lusitania wasn't the only casus belli either. It probably wasn't even the most important one. Ever hear of the Zimmermann Telegram? I'd say that a plan to ally with a Western power and crave up the United States is a much greater provocation than sinking a British ship after warning Americans not to travel on it.
And to add one more point (sorry for replying twice), it really wouldn't have mattered anyway. If there were 300 divisions in France then the first nuclear bomb would have been dropped on Germany instead of Japan. The Manhattan project was aimed at Germany all along anyway.
Of course it's all moot, because if the Soviet Union hadn't signed the non-aggression pact Hitler never would have had the ability to invade Poland, much less Norway, France, the low countries, etc.
If there was no Russian front then there would have been no French front and hence no D-Day. Every decision that Hitler made was part of his long term plan to obtain lebensraum in the east. If you take that away then he had no compelling reason to go to war with the Western Allies.
Yes, I do think it would be allowed. I think that such a game would be a failure in the marketplace and that many stores (Wal-Mart) would refuse to sell it but I do not see the Government preventing you from publishing such a game. If you have any evidence to suggest that they have done so recently then let's see it.
It probably wouldn't break any sales records but the Government wouldn't prohibit you from publishing it. Why can't you wrap your head around that difference? To bastardize a line from a previous American President, it's the censorship, stupid.....
Stalingrad and Kursk don't cancel out the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In fact Stalingrad and Kursk would never have happened if Stalin hadn't cut that deal with Hitler. Taking the Soviet Union out of play in 1939 was the only thing that enabled Germany to invade Poland and deal with the Western Allies.
Just admit it, the Russians shot themselves in the foot......
Slashdot Mirror
Negligible benefit? Then why have so many police agencies abandoned the 9mm in favor of other calibers? Why did the Federal government settle on the .357 SIG (for the USSS) and .40S&W (for the FBI) instead of the cheaper and more commonly available 9mm? Most law enforcement agencies don't issue .45s but the fact that they've abandoned the 9mm in such large numbers ought to tell you something.
Personally, I'm not married to the .45. I have one, because I love the 1911 platform, but I'd also trust my life to a .40S&W, .357 magnum or 10mm. I've just read about too many spectacular failures of the 9mm to be willing to trust my life to it. To each their own though.
Last time I checked USA refused any commitment to lower its pollution at all and was the biggest polluter in the world.
CO2 != pollution
I really hope the world will, some distant time in the future maybe, refuse to pay the debts of the USA.
Translation: I really hope the world will willingly decide to gut the global economy, even though I'll suffer, because I hate the United States so much and want to spite them regardless of the consequences of doing so.
Besides, they have something better. Go ask an economics professor what happens to the United States if China dumps their $1 Trillion in US debt for $10 Billion.
The same thing that would happen to your neighbor if he dumped his $100,000 house for $1,000. He'd lose a shitload of money.
Yes, it would hurt us, but it would hurt them just as badly if not more so.
Why not compare it to a real handgun caliber? ;)
But if they just happen to develop the technology themselves
Yeah, and if dolphins crawl out of the oceans and master fire we can partner with them as well....
I don't see any reason to leave out China, Iran or North Korea if they are willing to contribute money and talent.
Iran and North Korea? Are you fucking serious? You do realize that space launchers have other applications, right?
It's amusing that you are still beating this drum when I was responding to one specific comment that wasn't even about sales tax but was rather about corporate taxes.
Tell your Mom I said hi. It's about time to you to head back up the stairs and nuke a hot pocket, isn't it?
Hopefully, Obama is smarter than to do this.
Yeah right. Obama is just as addicted to "cheap" Chinese money as every other jackass politician (Republican and Democrat) we've had in recent memory. Cutting that supply off would require us to actually made hard choices about taxes and spending. Such choices might actually have consequences at the ballot box. We wouldn't want that to happen, now would we?
I had hoped that Obama would be an actual leader willing to make hard choices but he's just another empty suit that's ignoring reality in favor of catering to his base and pushing his agenda. Don't worry though, we can't ignore economic reality indefinitely. If you think the economic crisis last year was serious just wait until the ponzi scheme that is the US->Chinese economic relationship actually blows up. I hope you've stockpiled as much ammo, canned food and greenbacks (gotta burn something to keep warm) as possible.
I wonder if Obama was made an offer he couldn't refuse.
Somehow I don't think the Chinese are crazy enough to try and blackmail a nuclear armed state. It would hurt them as much as it would hurt us anyway. In the long run it might even be worse for them, as it would bring their economic growth to a screeching halt.
What pisses me off is that we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars we don't have on health care "reform" that isn't and hundreds of billions more on invading countries that never attacked us but we can't find the money to fund NASA. The last round of serious investment into space exploration brought us cheap microchips, GPS, satellite photography, etc.
Fucking shortsighted stupidity.
You don't understand geopolitics very well. France and the UK wouldn't have spilled many tears but do you really think they would have sat on the sidelines and allowed Germany to conquer Eastern Europe without a fight? They would have gotten involved for the exact same reason that the US got involved in the world wars -- allowing Germany to absorb Russia would have made her too powerful and upset the geopolitical balance of power. The Western European powers would have been reduced to satellite states with independence in name only.
Remember that this is in the day and age before nuclear weapons. You don't have any effective way to deter an enemy that's substantially stronger than you. Every decision that the Western powers (France in particular) made in the interwar period was designed to maintain the balance of power in Europe. This balance was shattered by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
You don't have to take my word for it though. Go read it in Hitler's own words. He spelled out his plan pretty clearly in Mein Kempf. His intention all along was to absorb Poland, neutralize France, seek an alliance (or at least a non-aggression pact) with the UK and absorb the European portion of the Soviet Union. His timetable was upset somewhat as he didn't believe the British and French would ally themselves with the Poles, nor did he anticipate the campaigns in the Balkans (necessitated by Italy's incompetence), but for the most part he stuck to the outline of his original plan.
Had the Nazis won, France would have been reduced to a satellite state. That sounds pretty bad until you consider what they had in mind for the poor bastards living in the East -- read Generalplan Ost some time. Had they won the war and carried that out it would have rivaled the Holocaust in terms of human suffering and misery. Thank god we were able to defeat them.
Maybe if you took a break from obsessing over conservatives and trying to stereotype them you would have noticed the comment I was replying to. Let me spell it out slowly for you:
Comment I was replying to: If Amazon wants to use state provided infrastructure and national defense, they [i.e: Amazon] should pay their share of the financial burden.
My response: Their employees and shareholders already pay their share.
Do you understand now? I know that watching MSNBC can dull your critical thinking skills but presumably you still know how to read.
What is really needed is a federal clearinghouse for this: have each state (and municipality, etc) register their tax requirements with a central authority, have it publish a computer-readable database mapping address->tax rate, and have it collect the money, remitting to states. This is a clear interstate commerce issue, I don't see how even a libertarian could object to a federal role here.
I would object to it. What you are suggesting is nothing more than a database that would be populated by thousands of different entities. Why does your clearinghouse need to be run by Uncle Sam? We don't expect Uncle Sam to run the DNS root on the internet. We don't expect him to run the routing tables for the PSTN. Why should he run a database that isn't even going to be populated with information from the Feds?
Do we really need to tax people's money as it goes into the wallet AND as it goes out?
Yes, how else can we take enough money from the producer class to keep the consumer class voting for the status quo?
If Amazon wants to use state provided infrastructure and national defense, they should pay their share of the financial burden.
Their employees and shareholders already pay their share. I know that punishing "big business" is politically popular right now but in the end corporate taxes are nothing more than a hidden tax on individuals. The business will just raise prices to compensate for the taxes that are imposed on it. The end result is that individuals wind up paying the taxes but it's politically popular because some jackass politician can say that he's being tough on "big [insert boogieman of the day here]".
The sad thing is that people eat this stuff up hook, line and sinker.
It's already the law in some states to report purchases that you have not paid sales tax on, called a Use Tax. If you purchase something and Amazon does not collect sales tax, you are supposed to report this directly and pay it directly to the government.
Yeah, and every year when I file my New York State taxes I put a big fat zero in that box. Given that my state government has found numerous other ways to put the screws to me (the latest example: everybody has to buy new license plates even though there's nothing wrong with the ones we already have, the state is just using DMV as a revenue source) I figure that it's only fair. If they want to audit me and subpoena my bank records to find every single out of state purchase then all the power to them. They'll spend more money doing that then they'll collect.
The use tax is a joke. I don't know a single New Yorker that actually pays it, nor do I know anyone that's been audited over a refusal to pay it. The funny thing is the state even gives you a "fair use formula" that takes a percentage of your income rather than requiring you to find all of your out of state receipts. Nobody uses that formula either. Only Government could come up with a "fair use" formula that takes a percentage of your income without consideration as to whether or not you actually bought any items out of state.
and Nevadans/Greeks are not fond of that idea.
So what you are saying is that they aren't being team players?
That makes no sense. You don't avoid a two-front war by attacking nations on opposite sides of you.
Yes you do. He cut a deal with enemy #1 (Russia) to give him time to neutralize enemy #2 (France). Then you deal with enemy #1 without having to worry about enemy #2. Divide and conquer, I presume you've heard of it?
It almost worked too. The Wehrmacht got to fought a one front war until the Allied invasion of France. Yes, there was Africa and Italy but the former was a side show and the latter was easy enough to bottle up the Allies due to the geography.
The Zimmerman telegram wasn't even a good hail mary. Given US and British Naval supremacy there was no conceivable way that Germany could have supplied Mexico with any meaningful military aid. Mexico would have been fighting the United States on her own without outside support. It gets worse though -- Mexico had no meaningful armaments industry of her own and the bulk of said industry in the New World was located in the United States.
That might explain why the Mexican Government said "thanks but no thanks" in response to the Zimmerman telegram. The Germans should have anticipated this and avoided sending the thing in the first place. It might not have kept the US out of the war but why anger the population of a neutral country for no conceivable gain?
something which Extreme Associates was in the process of doing (and had a lot of luck with) until they, for some weird reason, decided to plead guilty
They ran out of money. Lawyers don't work for sleezebags for free. I wish they had continued to fight it because even sleezebags deserve free speech but I understand why they would want to cut their losses and move on with their lives.
What part of 'defaulted on their war debts' wasn't clear?
The Lusitania wasn't the only casus belli either. It probably wasn't even the most important one. Ever hear of the Zimmermann Telegram? I'd say that a plan to ally with a Western power and crave up the United States is a much greater provocation than sinking a British ship after warning Americans not to travel on it.
And to add one more point (sorry for replying twice), it really wouldn't have mattered anyway. If there were 300 divisions in France then the first nuclear bomb would have been dropped on Germany instead of Japan. The Manhattan project was aimed at Germany all along anyway.
Of course it's all moot, because if the Soviet Union hadn't signed the non-aggression pact Hitler never would have had the ability to invade Poland, much less Norway, France, the low countries, etc.
If there was no Russian front then there would have been no French front and hence no D-Day. Every decision that Hitler made was part of his long term plan to obtain lebensraum in the east. If you take that away then he had no compelling reason to go to war with the Western Allies.
Yes, I do think it would be allowed. I think that such a game would be a failure in the marketplace and that many stores (Wal-Mart) would refuse to sell it but I do not see the Government preventing you from publishing such a game. If you have any evidence to suggest that they have done so recently then let's see it.
It probably wouldn't break any sales records but the Government wouldn't prohibit you from publishing it. Why can't you wrap your head around that difference? To bastardize a line from a previous American President, it's the censorship, stupid.....
Stalingrad and Kursk. Defense rests.
Stalingrad and Kursk don't cancel out the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In fact Stalingrad and Kursk would never have happened if Stalin hadn't cut that deal with Hitler. Taking the Soviet Union out of play in 1939 was the only thing that enabled Germany to invade Poland and deal with the Western Allies.
Just admit it, the Russians shot themselves in the foot......