The only point to holding a currency is if you expect it to rise against some other currency.
I take it you've never heard of the concept of saving money in order to purchase things or for 'rainy day' expenses? It's a really nice feeling to know I could pay cash for a new car today if I wanted to, or could pay to put a new roof on my house tomorrow if it were necessary. Not everyone lives off credit cards or believes in making monthly payments to the bank for the rest of their lives.
If you're holding currency because you're a speculator hoping to make money off its rise against some other currency then you're either 1) dumber than the redneck who bets his mortgage on the roulette wheel, or 2) a friend of George Soros and therefore in a truly elite class of scumbags barely one step above mercenaries.
Just the sheer mass of an asteroid is valuable, first for radiation protection and also for reaction mass. Strap a small nuclear reactor on a big ingot of whatever you've mined, feed slag into a NERVA-type engine, and let the resulting plasma propel your product to its destination.
If the natural pre-industrial systems could absorb the excess CO2 that we were putting out then the levels wouldn't be rising. Ergo, if natural systems are keeping up CO2 levels are not rising.
The Incas (and other Mesoamerican peoples) were doing BRAIN SURGERY before the arrival of the Spanish barbarians. Their style of warfare was to incapacitate the enemy soldiers, then heal them, because what was the purpose of taking over territory if there was no one left to work the land? The weaponry was mostly clubs and slings of various types, which created a lot of head injuries and broken bones that were then healed so that the ex-soldiers could go back to the fields. They really didn't understand the Spanish when they came and killed, and killed, and killed everything that moved. They didn't have the historical background of the glorious Age of Chivalry, where if a European lordling had designs on a neighbors territory he sent his mercenaries to kill all the neighbors peasants, so that there was no one to take in the harvest and the neighbor's mercenaries would defect when he couldn't pay them. In contrast most of the participants of an Incan battle survived, a bit worse for wear but alive and able to work.
1) Help? Setting up a military dictatorship and fraudulent elections, secret police with torture camps, massacring entire villages, and poisoning thousands of square kilometers of cropland is "help"??? I'd hate to see what your definition of "oppression" is. Damn.
2) The Indians were outnumbered by whites, so the whites became "the population" and the Indians could not hold on to the territory.
Because they're the ONLY ones there afterwards. The British couldn't even set up a satrap to rule in their stead when they pulled out, and the day the US withdraws is the day Karzai needs to grab his stolen wealth and start running.
The purpose of warfare is generally to control something, be it territory, a trade route, raw materials, a population, whatever. By no reasonable standards does the US control most of the Afghan countryside, they can't even stop farmers from planting opium a couple of miles from their bases. Opium is easily visible from the air, and production is at record highs. The US can't stop them from processing the thousands of tons of opium into hundreds of tons of heroin, which requires thousands of gallons of chemicals that they can't seem to control, nor can it stop them from exporting those hundreds of tons of product all over the world. The same goes for hashish, which Afghanistan supplies most of the world with as well.
After a dozen years of the second-most expensive occupation in history the entire accomplishments of the US in Afghanistan is that they control most of Kabul and some if its suburbs, their heavily-armed military bases are secure, and they control some of the mountain passes. Even in Vietnam a soldier could visit a bar or brothel alone and unarmed and expect to survive. Any claim that the US is somehow "winning" in Afghanistan is nothing more than fantasy.
So CO2 levels aren't rising? Really? That's a rather amazing claim.
Humans put out massive amounts of CO2, mostly by burning fossil fuel. We're the single largest source for the gas on the planet, far surpassing the volcanoes. Atmospheric levels of CO2 are rising because our output outstrips the natural processing of the gas into the crust, to the point where if we all died off and stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow it would be most of a century before our excess was finally processed out. The natural processes are pretty well known, they know how much limestone, peat, deepwater sediments, etc. are produced every year, and how much CO2 should be trapped by them.
The only reason why atmospheric CO2 levels aren't rising even faster is because the ocean is absorbing massive amounts of it and changing PH sufficiently to kill aquatic species in many areas. Dead coral, clams and diatoms can't process CO2 into calcium carbonate, so now we're producing a feedback loop in those places too.
Since you seem to think I'm completely out in left field, why do **YOU** think that atmospheric and oceanic CO2 levels are rising? Is it just coincidence that the rate of rise corresponds to the rate of our output?
At that time Ford and the other US car companies were still building in Detroit, my cousins worked on their assembly lines. When Reagan's Reign of Error came around they first moved production to non-union states, and then out of the country entirely. Contrary to the standard anti-union propaganda, wages weren't the reason for the moves. My cousin made just as much in Alabama as she had in Ann Arbor. Environmental and worker safety laws were much more lax in the South, her assembly line went from signs saying "X-many days without a serious accident" to "X-many months without a fatal accident".
Someone had convinced one of my co-irkers that the original Apollo 8 'Earthrise' image was Photoshopped (I'm **hoping** as a joke). He seemed surprised to hear that Photoshop didn't exist in 1968.
By all the gods, there are still people who spout this nonsense? Good grief. Vietnam was unwillable from the moment the French originally invaded. It's impossible to permanently hold a territory where the population hates you, and the day they organize is the day you start to lose. Why do you think that Cuba is still free? Even the morons in the Pentagon don't want to touch that one.
Actually, no one ever wins in Afghanistan but the Afghans (a grouping of peoples which is about as nebulous as can be). No one has managed to hold that territory for more than a generation since Alexander the Great. Not the British, not the Moguls, not the Mongols, not the Kazakhs, not even the Persians. The utter stupidity of the Pentagon rarely amazes me any more, but when they agreed to take over Afghanistan I was totally flabbergasted. WTF were they even thinking?
Under Hussein the country had developed the highest standard of living in the region outside urban Israel, the best medical care and educational systems (both free for everyone) in the region, had potable water and processed sewage systems for all communities larger than small towns, and had achieved a degree of sexual equality unequaled in the region outside (again) urban Israel. Jews and Christians were protected and had representatives in the parliament, the Jewish community in Baghdad was the largest of any Arab country, the government was notably secular, and the judiciary used no religious criteria. Crime was extremely low, and the only terrorism was that performed by US-financed groups.
Was it heaven on Earth? Of course not, but it was the best thing in the entire Middle East. It was a hundred times better than what we have put in its place. It was an example of what could be done if a country's oil income were used for the benefit of the populace rather than funneled exclusively to royalty and other elites, so it had to be destroyed.
Well, if it's any consolation, I completely missed Haley's Comet. Was living in Seattle at that time, and the only cloudless nights I either had to work or ended up too stoned to drive anywhere out of the city lights.
Actually the satellite photos of Iraqi tanks massing at the border of Saudi Arabia were faked, which the US has since admitted. It's likely that Bahndar Bush and the rest of the Saudi royalty even knew, but needed some justification to keep the population from freaking out about the US building air bases in the country.
Pipeline, rare earth elements (which the Soviets had mapped), but most important it was the largest source of opiates on the planet before the Taliban shut down production. The only opium still being grown in the country was in the territory controlled by our allies the Northern Warlords, and the prospective loss of income was frightening for the large international banks. Over a trillion dollars in drug money is laundered every year, over half of it through the US, with bank charges averaging 10-15% for the service. The Colombians and Mexicans were starting to pick up the slack, but they launder their money differently and the banksters were looking at a huge revenue loss. Certainly not the only reason for the invasion, just one of several.
In 1987-1988 I was traveling around Peru ($2000 lasted a lot longer then) for five months. I read about the supernova in an English-language newspaper someone had left in the hotel lobby, and had tried to see it but there was too much light in Cusco or Arequipa to even distinguish the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The bus between Cusco and Puno ran only at night, but it was supposed to be non-stop and I hoped that light levels in Puno were low enough to maybe be able to walk down the shoreline of Lake Titicaca to where I could see something. Shortly after crossing 4000-meter high La Raya pass the bus blew a tire. Most of the bus just snuggled down and went back to sleep, while a few got off to take the unscheduled bathroom break while the tire was changed. I walked away from the lights of the bus and over the crest of a knoll and looked up into a blacker, more star-studded sky than I had ever imagined. Absolutely frelling stunning.
After I recovered from the initial sight I was very quickly able to find the Large Magellanic Cloud, and offset from the center there was the first naked-eye visible supernova in over 900 years. I stayed out under that really amazing sky until I was shivering so badly from the cold that I couldn't hold my binoculars steady.
Is that a protest action? "If I'm forced to use awful software I insist on using the absolutely worst ever created!" I mean really, if I had to pick a piece of software worse than McAfee there is only one possible candidate.
Could be worse, could be Symantec/Norton. Always wondered what poor Peter Norton thought about his products after Symantec took over. They went from powerful tools no techie would want to live without to useless crap in only two revisions.
Really? Then it's just our imagination that the levels of CO2 have been rising faster over the last 200 years than at any other time in the last 110,000 years? Or are you saying that the dramatic rise of atmospheric CO2 at the same time as humanity has started generating massive amounts of the stuff is just coincidental?
So much stupid in such a short post. Where do I start?
1) Planned Parenthood developed TOP on its own over 20 years ago. HHS recommends it, because the program works to prevent teen pregnancies and teens fathering children
2) Planned Parenthood does not pay students to attend TOP sessions
3) Planned Parenthood does not pay students to get sterilized
4) I don't know of any state where it costs only $6000 to have a kid at a hospital, even without complications common among teens
5) You do realize that abortion services are 6) The whole intent of WHO is... what??? Is that an actual belief anywhere? I'd love to see where the logic train derailed on this.
Where in the world does crap disinformation like this get started?
The spelunker-level bullshit intrigued me. Sometimes you just have to plumb the depth of the well to see how truly deluded people are. I'm hoping for black helicopters spraying chemtrails.
Slashdot Mirror
The only point to holding a currency is if you expect it to rise against some other currency.
I take it you've never heard of the concept of saving money in order to purchase things or for 'rainy day' expenses? It's a really nice feeling to know I could pay cash for a new car today if I wanted to, or could pay to put a new roof on my house tomorrow if it were necessary. Not everyone lives off credit cards or believes in making monthly payments to the bank for the rest of their lives.
If you're holding currency because you're a speculator hoping to make money off its rise against some other currency then you're either 1) dumber than the redneck who bets his mortgage on the roulette wheel, or 2) a friend of George Soros and therefore in a truly elite class of scumbags barely one step above mercenaries.
The FBI is already one of the largest holders of Bitcoin, since they confiscated the assets of Silk Road.
Just the sheer mass of an asteroid is valuable, first for radiation protection and also for reaction mass. Strap a small nuclear reactor on a big ingot of whatever you've mined, feed slag into a NERVA-type engine, and let the resulting plasma propel your product to its destination.
Larry Flynt/Charlie Sheen
If the natural pre-industrial systems could absorb the excess CO2 that we were putting out then the levels wouldn't be rising. Ergo, if natural systems are keeping up CO2 levels are not rising.
The Incas (and other Mesoamerican peoples) were doing BRAIN SURGERY before the arrival of the Spanish barbarians. Their style of warfare was to incapacitate the enemy soldiers, then heal them, because what was the purpose of taking over territory if there was no one left to work the land? The weaponry was mostly clubs and slings of various types, which created a lot of head injuries and broken bones that were then healed so that the ex-soldiers could go back to the fields. They really didn't understand the Spanish when they came and killed, and killed, and killed everything that moved. They didn't have the historical background of the glorious Age of Chivalry, where if a European lordling had designs on a neighbors territory he sent his mercenaries to kill all the neighbors peasants, so that there was no one to take in the harvest and the neighbor's mercenaries would defect when he couldn't pay them. In contrast most of the participants of an Incan battle survived, a bit worse for wear but alive and able to work.
Huh. Part of 5) disappeared. Should read:
5) You do realize that abortion services are less than 5 percent of the services that Planned Parenthood provides, don't you?
1) Help? Setting up a military dictatorship and fraudulent elections, secret police with torture camps, massacring entire villages, and poisoning thousands of square kilometers of cropland is "help"??? I'd hate to see what your definition of "oppression" is. Damn.
2) The Indians were outnumbered by whites, so the whites became "the population" and the Indians could not hold on to the territory.
Because they're still there afterwards?
Because they're the ONLY ones there afterwards. The British couldn't even set up a satrap to rule in their stead when they pulled out, and the day the US withdraws is the day Karzai needs to grab his stolen wealth and start running.
The purpose of warfare is generally to control something, be it territory, a trade route, raw materials, a population, whatever. By no reasonable standards does the US control most of the Afghan countryside, they can't even stop farmers from planting opium a couple of miles from their bases. Opium is easily visible from the air, and production is at record highs. The US can't stop them from processing the thousands of tons of opium into hundreds of tons of heroin, which requires thousands of gallons of chemicals that they can't seem to control, nor can it stop them from exporting those hundreds of tons of product all over the world. The same goes for hashish, which Afghanistan supplies most of the world with as well.
After a dozen years of the second-most expensive occupation in history the entire accomplishments of the US in Afghanistan is that they control most of Kabul and some if its suburbs, their heavily-armed military bases are secure, and they control some of the mountain passes. Even in Vietnam a soldier could visit a bar or brothel alone and unarmed and expect to survive. Any claim that the US is somehow "winning" in Afghanistan is nothing more than fantasy.
So CO2 levels aren't rising? Really? That's a rather amazing claim.
Humans put out massive amounts of CO2, mostly by burning fossil fuel. We're the single largest source for the gas on the planet, far surpassing the volcanoes. Atmospheric levels of CO2 are rising because our output outstrips the natural processing of the gas into the crust, to the point where if we all died off and stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow it would be most of a century before our excess was finally processed out. The natural processes are pretty well known, they know how much limestone, peat, deepwater sediments, etc. are produced every year, and how much CO2 should be trapped by them.
The only reason why atmospheric CO2 levels aren't rising even faster is because the ocean is absorbing massive amounts of it and changing PH sufficiently to kill aquatic species in many areas. Dead coral, clams and diatoms can't process CO2 into calcium carbonate, so now we're producing a feedback loop in those places too.
Since you seem to think I'm completely out in left field, why do **YOU** think that atmospheric and oceanic CO2 levels are rising? Is it just coincidence that the rate of rise corresponds to the rate of our output?
At that time Ford and the other US car companies were still building in Detroit, my cousins worked on their assembly lines. When Reagan's Reign of Error came around they first moved production to non-union states, and then out of the country entirely. Contrary to the standard anti-union propaganda, wages weren't the reason for the moves. My cousin made just as much in Alabama as she had in Ann Arbor. Environmental and worker safety laws were much more lax in the South, her assembly line went from signs saying "X-many days without a serious accident" to "X-many months without a fatal accident".
Someone had convinced one of my co-irkers that the original Apollo 8 'Earthrise' image was Photoshopped (I'm **hoping** as a joke). He seemed surprised to hear that Photoshop didn't exist in 1968.
By all the gods, there are still people who spout this nonsense? Good grief. Vietnam was unwillable from the moment the French originally invaded. It's impossible to permanently hold a territory where the population hates you, and the day they organize is the day you start to lose. Why do you think that Cuba is still free? Even the morons in the Pentagon don't want to touch that one.
Actually, no one ever wins in Afghanistan but the Afghans (a grouping of peoples which is about as nebulous as can be). No one has managed to hold that territory for more than a generation since Alexander the Great. Not the British, not the Moguls, not the Mongols, not the Kazakhs, not even the Persians. The utter stupidity of the Pentagon rarely amazes me any more, but when they agreed to take over Afghanistan I was totally flabbergasted. WTF were they even thinking?
Under Hussein the country had developed the highest standard of living in the region outside urban Israel, the best medical care and educational systems (both free for everyone) in the region, had potable water and processed sewage systems for all communities larger than small towns, and had achieved a degree of sexual equality unequaled in the region outside (again) urban Israel. Jews and Christians were protected and had representatives in the parliament, the Jewish community in Baghdad was the largest of any Arab country, the government was notably secular, and the judiciary used no religious criteria. Crime was extremely low, and the only terrorism was that performed by US-financed groups.
Was it heaven on Earth? Of course not, but it was the best thing in the entire Middle East. It was a hundred times better than what we have put in its place. It was an example of what could be done if a country's oil income were used for the benefit of the populace rather than funneled exclusively to royalty and other elites, so it had to be destroyed.
Well, if it's any consolation, I completely missed Haley's Comet. Was living in Seattle at that time, and the only cloudless nights I either had to work or ended up too stoned to drive anywhere out of the city lights.
Actually the satellite photos of Iraqi tanks massing at the border of Saudi Arabia were faked, which the US has since admitted. It's likely that Bahndar Bush and the rest of the Saudi royalty even knew, but needed some justification to keep the population from freaking out about the US building air bases in the country.
Pipeline, rare earth elements (which the Soviets had mapped), but most important it was the largest source of opiates on the planet before the Taliban shut down production. The only opium still being grown in the country was in the territory controlled by our allies the Northern Warlords, and the prospective loss of income was frightening for the large international banks. Over a trillion dollars in drug money is laundered every year, over half of it through the US, with bank charges averaging 10-15% for the service. The Colombians and Mexicans were starting to pick up the slack, but they launder their money differently and the banksters were looking at a huge revenue loss. Certainly not the only reason for the invasion, just one of several.
In 1987-1988 I was traveling around Peru ($2000 lasted a lot longer then) for five months. I read about the supernova in an English-language newspaper someone had left in the hotel lobby, and had tried to see it but there was too much light in Cusco or Arequipa to even distinguish the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The bus between Cusco and Puno ran only at night, but it was supposed to be non-stop and I hoped that light levels in Puno were low enough to maybe be able to walk down the shoreline of Lake Titicaca to where I could see something. Shortly after crossing 4000-meter high La Raya pass the bus blew a tire. Most of the bus just snuggled down and went back to sleep, while a few got off to take the unscheduled bathroom break while the tire was changed. I walked away from the lights of the bus and over the crest of a knoll and looked up into a blacker, more star-studded sky than I had ever imagined. Absolutely frelling stunning.
After I recovered from the initial sight I was very quickly able to find the Large Magellanic Cloud, and offset from the center there was the first naked-eye visible supernova in over 900 years. I stayed out under that really amazing sky until I was shivering so badly from the cold that I couldn't hold my binoculars steady.
Is that a protest action? "If I'm forced to use awful software I insist on using the absolutely worst ever created!" I mean really, if I had to pick a piece of software worse than McAfee there is only one possible candidate.
Could be worse, could be Symantec/Norton. Always wondered what poor Peter Norton thought about his products after Symantec took over. They went from powerful tools no techie would want to live without to useless crap in only two revisions.
Pure conjecture.
Really? Then it's just our imagination that the levels of CO2 have been rising faster over the last 200 years than at any other time in the last 110,000 years? Or are you saying that the dramatic rise of atmospheric CO2 at the same time as humanity has started generating massive amounts of the stuff is just coincidental?
It's the Electric Universe folderal again, I think. Better than arguing with the people who believe in 'morphic fields', but not much.
So much stupid in such a short post. Where do I start?
1) Planned Parenthood developed TOP on its own over 20 years ago. HHS recommends it, because the program works to prevent teen pregnancies and teens fathering children
2) Planned Parenthood does not pay students to attend TOP sessions
3) Planned Parenthood does not pay students to get sterilized
4) I don't know of any state where it costs only $6000 to have a kid at a hospital, even without complications common among teens
5) You do realize that abortion services are ... what??? Is that an actual belief anywhere? I'd love to see where the logic train derailed on this.
6) The whole intent of WHO is
Where in the world does crap disinformation like this get started?
The spelunker-level bullshit intrigued me. Sometimes you just have to plumb the depth of the well to see how truly deluded people are. I'm hoping for black helicopters spraying chemtrails.