Yep. That's my problem with 'em. I love my kindle, but when I can get a dead tree book for half the price of the ebook with free shipping.... how does that make sense? The death of printed books would be a hell of a lot less exaggerated if they didn't overprice ebooks.
Except that, as the article points out, there haven't been any threats. She's doing this based on a "large volume of negative email". It just points to what gun owners have said all along - people who follow the law (in this case by registering their guns) are, well, law abiding citizens. The person this paranoid editor needs to worry about isn't someone on her list, it's someone who bought a gun illegally.
So much of what you've written here is just plain wrong.
The LDP has indeed been in the driving seat for a LONG time. Both during the rise AND fall of Japan in fact.
Japan's fall? Even post bubble Japan is still one of the richest and nicest countries to live in in the world. The economy is growing, if not swiftly. That's something you'd expect, by the way, with a shrinking population. To describe any event since WW II as a "fall" is just hyperbole.
And then it turned out the new guys couldn't fix a decade and longer of mis management and the honey moon ended. So... to punish the new guy for not instantly fixing the world, lets elect the old guys, that will show that new guy! Talk about cutting of your nose to spite your face.
The DPJ is gone because it's incompetent. They were completely unable to handle simple things, like negotiations over a US base in Okinawa, let alone complicated things like a relationship with China. The party has been continually mired in corruption scandals and infighting - hell, nothing says "we're not serious about clean politics" like having Ozawa on board. Yes, the public kicked out the LDP because the party was getting a bit too comfortable in power. Then they realized the DPJ was worse and corrected the mistake.
The LDP are the guys who created Fukushima, not the accident but the corruption surrounding it
Yes, and if only the DPJ hadn't proven itself even more corrupt the voters might have had other options.
This is the party that wants to take a though line over China, despite the fact that all the meaningless rhetoric is hurting the already fragile Japanese economy because the Chinese are no longer buying Japanese.
China buys fully 30% of Japan's exports. I don't know how anyone could possibly characterize that as "no longer buying Japanese". In any event, maybe you haven't been following current events, but China has been throwing its weight around quite a bit lately, and that has every country in the region concerned. They've asserted rights to islands that don't belong to them and they've asserted the right to board vessels far outside internationally recognized Chinese maritime boundaries. Of course Japan has to take a tougher line with China. That's the only option.
These guys made a mess of Japan, do you really think they learned their lesson?
Most people in the world wish someone would come and make a mess of their country in exactly the same way.
Japan has no good will in the area, just a failing economy and US backing. They are tolerated, not loved. And nobody wants to see Japan get imperialistic ideas again.
No country is loved by other countries, and Japan's economy isn't failing. In any event, the Chinese have managed to do what everyone thought was impossible - they've managed to have all their neighbors rallying around Japan and begging the Japanese to shoulder more of the military burden in the region. It's not Japan that doesn't have any allies. It's China. Well, unless you want to count Burma and North Korea, but as they say, you're known by the company you keep.
Don't forget that where the Germans have spend their time since WW2 mostly apologizing (although not actually to the point of prosecuting their war criminals until they are likely to drop dead before the trial) the Japanese have not.
Eh... what? This is delusional. The Germans haven't done any more apologizing than the Japanese. Anyway it was war - the fact that you lose a war doesn't mean your grandchildren need to run around apologizing for things. Japan did some nasty things during that time, but don't forget a lot of nasty things were done to Japan as well. The people involved on both sides are long dead, and there's no reason for people born after 1945 to go around apologizing.
Still, Japan produces most of its power from Thermal/Fossil plants.
Since virtually every bit of this is imported, it represents a huge drain on the economy.
This is a real strategic problem for Japan, since you could completely shut down the Japanese economy (including the train system) with a half-dozen modern submarines. They can't afford to leave themselves that open, especially with the way tensions have been rising in the region lately.
If an uninhabitable zone is your concern, what about the huge swaths of land consumed by hydro-electric, solar, and wind power?
The difference, of course, is that if you tear a wind turbine down, drain a dam, or cart solar cells away the land can be used for something else immediately, whereas land around Fukushima and Chernobyl is pretty much ruined for the foreseeable future.
Or they just may not have enough evidence. If they don't have a witness or physical evidence all they're left with is the suspicion that a drug-addled nut took a conflict with his neighbor too far.
As much as the man on the street tries to maintain the dream of a unified Korea, the people who would actually have to coordinate unification balk at the unimaginable burden rebuilding the North would represent. Even Germany had a hard time absorbing the East. At the time a) West Germany was wealthier than South Korea and b) East Germany was in a lot better shape than North Korea.
So South Korea and China will continue to send enough aid that they don't have millions of refugees flooding over the border. In the long run it hurts the people of North Korea, but nobody - not China, not South Korea, not the US, and certainly not their own government, cares about that.
The problem is he's said so much that isn't lucid or rational it's pretty easy to believe McAfee shot Gregory Faull because he thought Faull was an alien intent on stealing his sexual power.
The fact is, while this country is spending too much on its military (more than the next 13 military-spending countries combined), its main problem is, indeed, a revenue problem. The tax rates and the tax revenues as percent of GDP are lower than they have been at any time since the Great Depression.
You've swallowed leftist whoppers hook, line, and sinker. The government takes in less as a percentage of GDP than it did at its peak, because people make less during a bad recession. But it borrows $0.40 for every tax dollar it spends. That's not a revenue problem. We never, ever, had taxes even close to what they'd need to be to fund the government the way it's being run this year, and things only get worse on the horizon.
So unless you are one of those who honestly believes that we'd be better off with, essentially, no federal government at all (in which case I disagree with you, but at least respect you for having beliefs consistent with your policy preferences), we need taxes to be a lot higher than they are if we want to continue to function as a first-world country.
So those are the choices, eh? The bloated behemoth we have today or nothing. I have a better idea. How about we pare the government back to the dark, dark, days of say, 2006 when, you know, people were starving on the streets.
The top 1% of tax payers earn what - 75% of total earnings in the US? They should be paying 75% of all income taxes. No, 20% is not plenty - even if that figure is accurate. The more you make, the more you pay.
75%? Seems hard to believe. At any rate, the top 1% of taxpayers don't draw on 20% of the budget. They pay more than enough. We don't have a revenue problem in the US - we have a spending problem.
Sophisticated investors like mutual funds certainly care about long-term performance. Why, they try to anticipate performance several quarters into the future!
They look at the company as an ongoing concern. Funds are pretty good at spotting corporations that are eating the seed corn and adjusting their perceived value of the stock appropriately. A company that stops investing in new product design, for example, may get a short-term bump and long term slide in profits, but if everyone understands that (and the big guys do), the price of the stock will go down even as the company announces record profits.
And performance is nothing more than whatever the books say it is. Whether you're Ken Lay or Jack Welch there is tremendous pressure to manage your numbers, or analyst expectations.
And the analysts aren't stupid, at least not the ones you've never heard of who work in the bowels of big funds. Even a company like Enron could only do what it did because they had so many subsidiaries and shell corporations nobody could figure out what was going on. Not even the IRS. The way to deal with that is to only buy stock in companies you understand at the financial level. My employer didn't lose a dime in Enron despite the bias toward big players in industry sectors. They looked at the quarterly reports and said "It's not impossible this is legit, but there's no way to tell so we're not interested."
Read my post. The people who run mutual funds aren't stupid. They understand underpaying people to get a short term boost in the stock price is going to destroy value in the long run. People accuse investors of only caring about next quarter's numbers, but it's not true.
As far as Ken Lay goes, yeah, sometimes you get guys who cook the books. But his contention was shareholders "are not paying the slightest bit of attention to what management is doing". The fact that you're paying attention doesn't preclude the possibility someone is cooking the books. The fund company I worked for actually sent people around to look at factories and count things, but there's only so much you can do.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. That's my problem with 'em. I love my kindle, but when I can get a dead tree book for half the price of the ebook with free shipping.... how does that make sense? The death of printed books would be a hell of a lot less exaggerated if they didn't overprice ebooks.
Terminator genes seem like a good idea to me - wouldn't they reduce the chance the GMO would successfully cross pollinate with other strains?
Except that, as the article points out, there haven't been any threats. She's doing this based on a "large volume of negative email". It just points to what gun owners have said all along - people who follow the law (in this case by registering their guns) are, well, law abiding citizens. The person this paranoid editor needs to worry about isn't someone on her list, it's someone who bought a gun illegally.
Yeah, it's either a publicity stunt or the editor is just paranoid.
Well then, everyone's protected. What's the problem?
So much of what you've written here is just plain wrong.
Japan's fall? Even post bubble Japan is still one of the richest and nicest countries to live in in the world. The economy is growing, if not swiftly. That's something you'd expect, by the way, with a shrinking population. To describe any event since WW II as a "fall" is just hyperbole.
The DPJ is gone because it's incompetent. They were completely unable to handle simple things, like negotiations over a US base in Okinawa, let alone complicated things like a relationship with China. The party has been continually mired in corruption scandals and infighting - hell, nothing says "we're not serious about clean politics" like having Ozawa on board. Yes, the public kicked out the LDP because the party was getting a bit too comfortable in power. Then they realized the DPJ was worse and corrected the mistake.
Yes, and if only the DPJ hadn't proven itself even more corrupt the voters might have had other options.
China buys fully 30% of Japan's exports. I don't know how anyone could possibly characterize that as "no longer buying Japanese". In any event, maybe you haven't been following current events, but China has been throwing its weight around quite a bit lately, and that has every country in the region concerned. They've asserted rights to islands that don't belong to them and they've asserted the right to board vessels far outside internationally recognized Chinese maritime boundaries. Of course Japan has to take a tougher line with China. That's the only option.
Most people in the world wish someone would come and make a mess of their country in exactly the same way.
No country is loved by other countries, and Japan's economy isn't failing. In any event, the Chinese have managed to do what everyone thought was impossible - they've managed to have all their neighbors rallying around Japan and begging the Japanese to shoulder more of the military burden in the region. It's not Japan that doesn't have any allies. It's China. Well, unless you want to count Burma and North Korea, but as they say, you're known by the company you keep.
Eh... what? This is delusional. The Germans haven't done any more apologizing than the Japanese. Anyway it was war - the fact that you lose a war doesn't mean your grandchildren need to run around apologizing for things. Japan did some nasty things during that time, but don't forget a lot of nasty things were done to Japan as well. The people involved on both sides are long dead, and there's no reason for people born after 1945 to go around apologizing.
This is a real strategic problem for Japan, since you could completely shut down the Japanese economy (including the train system) with a half-dozen modern submarines. They can't afford to leave themselves that open, especially with the way tensions have been rising in the region lately.
The difference, of course, is that if you tear a wind turbine down, drain a dam, or cart solar cells away the land can be used for something else immediately, whereas land around Fukushima and Chernobyl is pretty much ruined for the foreseeable future.
Right. If you're Quebec or Iceland all this stuff is academic. But for the other, you know, 6.99 billion of us things are different.
Do you think a patent should be granted based on aesthetics?
Probably true, but Apple has been suing the hell out of everyone with the same kind of flimsy portfolio. Sauce for the goose.
Or they just may not have enough evidence. If they don't have a witness or physical evidence all they're left with is the suspicion that a drug-addled nut took a conflict with his neighbor too far.
As much as the man on the street tries to maintain the dream of a unified Korea, the people who would actually have to coordinate unification balk at the unimaginable burden rebuilding the North would represent. Even Germany had a hard time absorbing the East. At the time a) West Germany was wealthier than South Korea and b) East Germany was in a lot better shape than North Korea.
So South Korea and China will continue to send enough aid that they don't have millions of refugees flooding over the border. In the long run it hurts the people of North Korea, but nobody - not China, not South Korea, not the US, and certainly not their own government, cares about that.
It's hard to know from what he writes, since he may be smart enough to publish when he's reasonably straight.
For a photo journalist to innocently take pictures with the gps function on is rather suspect is it not?
Thinking back to my fellow students who ended up in J-school... not really, no.
The problem is he's said so much that isn't lucid or rational it's pretty easy to believe McAfee shot Gregory Faull because he thought Faull was an alien intent on stealing his sexual power.
No, they don't. They draw on almost 100%.
This is idiotic. You have no idea what the government spends money on, do you?
Again with the straw men. Where did he say the social safety net is unnecessary?
The fact is, while this country is spending too much on its military (more than the next 13 military-spending countries combined), its main problem is, indeed, a revenue problem. The tax rates and the tax revenues as percent of GDP are lower than they have been at any time since the Great Depression.
You've swallowed leftist whoppers hook, line, and sinker. The government takes in less as a percentage of GDP than it did at its peak, because people make less during a bad recession. But it borrows $0.40 for every tax dollar it spends. That's not a revenue problem. We never, ever, had taxes even close to what they'd need to be to fund the government the way it's being run this year, and things only get worse on the horizon.
So unless you are one of those who honestly believes that we'd be better off with, essentially, no federal government at all (in which case I disagree with you, but at least respect you for having beliefs consistent with your policy preferences), we need taxes to be a lot higher than they are if we want to continue to function as a first-world country.
So those are the choices, eh? The bloated behemoth we have today or nothing. I have a better idea. How about we pare the government back to the dark, dark, days of say, 2006 when, you know, people were starving on the streets.
The top 1% of tax payers earn what - 75% of total earnings in the US? They should be paying 75% of all income taxes. No, 20% is not plenty - even if that figure is accurate. The more you make, the more you pay.
75%? Seems hard to believe. At any rate, the top 1% of taxpayers don't draw on 20% of the budget. They pay more than enough. We don't have a revenue problem in the US - we have a spending problem.
There's nothing wrong or unfair about avoiding taxation. The top 1% of taxpayers pay 20% of the taxes. That's plenty.
Sure, but Soros won.
The housing crisis was a policy failure on the part of the government going back to the '70s.
Sophisticated investors like mutual funds certainly care about long-term performance. Why, they try to anticipate performance several quarters into the future!
They look at the company as an ongoing concern. Funds are pretty good at spotting corporations that are eating the seed corn and adjusting their perceived value of the stock appropriately. A company that stops investing in new product design, for example, may get a short-term bump and long term slide in profits, but if everyone understands that (and the big guys do), the price of the stock will go down even as the company announces record profits.
And performance is nothing more than whatever the books say it is. Whether you're Ken Lay or Jack Welch there is tremendous pressure to manage your numbers, or analyst expectations.
And the analysts aren't stupid, at least not the ones you've never heard of who work in the bowels of big funds. Even a company like Enron could only do what it did because they had so many subsidiaries and shell corporations nobody could figure out what was going on. Not even the IRS. The way to deal with that is to only buy stock in companies you understand at the financial level. My employer didn't lose a dime in Enron despite the bias toward big players in industry sectors. They looked at the quarterly reports and said "It's not impossible this is legit, but there's no way to tell so we're not interested."
Read my post. The people who run mutual funds aren't stupid. They understand underpaying people to get a short term boost in the stock price is going to destroy value in the long run. People accuse investors of only caring about next quarter's numbers, but it's not true.
As far as Ken Lay goes, yeah, sometimes you get guys who cook the books. But his contention was shareholders "are not paying the slightest bit of attention to what management is doing". The fact that you're paying attention doesn't preclude the possibility someone is cooking the books. The fund company I worked for actually sent people around to look at factories and count things, but there's only so much you can do.