It's not buying the ETF, really. Think about if you ran, say... put XLF:SPY on stockcharts.com, and it came up 1.2. Now look at C:XLF, BAC:XLF, UBS:XLF... same deal, the ones outrunning the sector in a sector outrunning the market? Those are your growth stocks.
Yes well if Samsung asks the judge why in the hell he ordered Apple to give a prominent court endorsement about how much better and cooler the iPad is...
What's wrong with masturbating to naked pictures of 14 year old girls? If your job is specifically to sit around looking at naked pictures of 14 year old girls, you're already... looking at naked pictures of 14 year old girls. May as well rub one out?
I don't get it. If this is a problem, shouldn't we just not distribute naked pictures of 14 year old girls to government employees?
"It's not a police state because it's not as bad as Hitler in Schindler's List." The Flu is not an illness either. I've had the flu and it's not a disease, not even in the worst case. Ebola, that's a disease. Influenza is a case of the sniffles.
Well, most of us aren't smart enough to pick the bottom of the market.
Oh, it's not the bottom. You can't do that. It's the reversals. You look at prices and you see, say, a three white kings pattern--stock's up 4%, 6%, 3% in 3 days? Great! You know why it's up? People are buy-buy-buy! Then that fourth day you see it doji star... the price goes up, comes down, settles in the middle... or maybe you see a hammer, the price moves but there's only a tail on one side. In any case, suddenly the price isn't climbing a lot. Lucky you though, right? A chance to buy in before it continues rocketing up.
Yeah, right. It's peaking over. Sell that shit.
The exact same thing happens at the bottom. There's all these fancy patterns to try to predict the reversals in Japanese candlesticks, but when it's all over and done you can see smooth curves most of the time--prices rushing down, then slowly continuing down, then flattening, then reversing, like a parabola. Same thing going up.
That's... great when you've decided to trade a stock. To decide if you want it though, yes, fundamentals. News (look, see this? This news will favor MCP and Hunter and such), earnings, company balance sheets and plans (you use these to PREDICT news; the company making money doesn't make you rich, it's the market sentiment on the stock price that controls the stock price. Spiraling, failing businesses can go through the roof).
Graph the company's price history divided by the S&P500: if it's >1.0, then it's growing faster than the market, and probably a good investment; if it's <1.0, it's growing slower than the market (even if it's going up, it's not going up as fast as the S&P), and thus a bad investment. A stock growing faster than the market has money flowing into it--more capital going there than everywhere on average. You'll see things like the financials (XLF) with XLF/SPY above 1.0 during the housing and mortgage boom, then you see it level off, then start heading below 1.0. All's well... then six months later, the banks collapse and the stock prices crash down hard. Why? Because during the boom, there's a lot of buying going on in Citi, Bank of America, etc that are "good investments," and less going to the tech market etc. When Wall Street thinks it's about to be over, they start to pull out--and all that capital goes elsewhere, the financial sector either grows slower or shrinks faster than the rest of the market, and the ratio drops below 1.0.
This thing with China, this is just news. It makes you think, hey, maybe I should watch MCP and Hunter. Maybe buy in on a low signal, protect yourself from losses (stop loss or short something as a hedge), see if MCP announces reopening a mine and gets some attention and becomes desirable. Make 40%, move your stop loss up, either sell out (in fear of China starting up production again) or wait (in hopes China starts up production and it goes nowhere and MCP dominates and you make 80%).
Stock market is too much of a mess for me to play in. Too much stress.
Bullshit. That's theory; we're talking about the real world, so put away your picture book and stop telling the cute blonde next door she should go play with the wild grizzly bears. She's Canadian, she knows they won't have porridge.
And here you lost any credability of having a discussion on this. People who do not believe or do not understand do not by that nature hate the planet. I was skeptical when you started talking about people living in tree house forts but you simply jumped the shark on any credible efforts with ascribing "hate" to anyone who doesn't jump at the end of the world scenarios.
You have these people who immediately side against anything "environmental". A few days ago I brought up the interesting thing about using the excess idling power from hydro plants (they have to open the floodgates to dump excess water if there isn't power demand), wind farms, and solar arrays to generate gasoline, and was immediately gouged at by a huge dissertation about all the methane in the bottom of the ocean. It's like good, clean fuel is evil because we have all this fuel sitting around, and even if it's essentially free fuel it's enviro-hippie garbage. I get this stuff all the time. I have people jaw on about how solar arrays on your house are a great way to save money, but how large-scale solar farms are stupid because we have coal, oil, LP gas, and the like and we shouldn't waste money building unsustainable, unprofitable, expensive bullshit like solar plants. HUH? How are these people on both sides?
They're all over the place. Look around, people polarize like that. They don't want to be "liberals" so they become "anti-liberals." Don't tell me it's not real, 'cause I live in it, I get lectured by these people, and I present perfectly rational arguments and get push-back about stuff that's "a lot easier and cheaper" but "we haven't figured out how to do it yet".... what?
And I didn't say tree forts, or tree huts. I said houses in trees. Structurally stable, insulated, powered, plumbed. Think about a cityscape view versus a home with a more rural view with wide, open yards. Waterfront property gives you a harbor view. A few miles from me, there's a community where people have a good several acres of land, mostly wooded and streams--a coworker had a 1 mile driveway to the road, and her house was next to a cliff, there were boulders and trees and shrubs, like living in the woods.
These are all different things that happen when you walk outside your house. The past decade in Maryland and Delaware has seen a lot of housing development, some of which my parents bought into... houses with a solid 2/3 or 3/4 acre of land, nice and flat, where the developers razed down the woods into plains and built homes, roads, ran power line. Well water and septic, no plumbing. That's one particular environment of living, but after five years they started cutting further... the developers promised (on no contract) that they weren't interested in razing the trees around the area, so you look around and see nature. Now they've flattened some lots, but not built anything. Eventually this will look like just flat city, but with rural density--tree line is far away. Then the tree line will go away. This is displeasing the residents.
A lot of people seem to chatter once in a while about the environmental sustainability of underground homes, but the economics aren't there (and really, hobbit huts?). I prefer to intersperse light-medium density houses in trees, so you can have your rural area with the tree line, and the developers just build a six mile wide development *in* *the* *trees*, and some folks move there. This lets people who want to live near trees live near trees, without worrying about developers lopping them down; and it lets people who want to live *in* the trees (traditionally, on the ground, in a small clearing for their cottage, with a small dirt road run up from the main) actually live--almost literally--*in* the trees. It lets the developers pack
It gained some 200% last year over a few good 30%+ jumps, then crashed like crazy. It's down, yes, that means it's the best time to buy.
Seriously amateurs. Did you get taken in in 2005-2008 "BEST TIME TO BUY HOUSE PRICES ARE GOING UP UP UP!!" too? Going up... been going up... gold prices have been going up, people screaming gold will reach $2000, $5000, $10,000 in August of 2011, why do you think G Gordon Liddy was pushing gold so much then? When gold crashes down, it will be a good buy, and you will be like "It's down 95% off its 52-week... are you high? Why would I buy gold? How did you make money on this stuff?"
Of course not. The problem is the political insanity is creating a REAL problem. People polarize easily.
Look, I like today's clean vehicles--I like breathing clean air. And converting excess grid energy that usually gets wasted standing idle into petrol by FTP? Efficient, carbon-neutral energy, insanely clean. Roof top solar? PV not great, solar water heat into thermonic heating systems great, energy use reduction on easy-to-make parts. I want cities of houses in trees--not everywhere, just where it makes sense, lower environmental footprint and all (the culture would be different--everything 3 miles from subway-connected public garages so you could mountain bike out to your car in 10 minutes, then hit the state highway and go to work). All that stuff's great.
The problem is people want to force it down our throats because "we're all going to die!" or something insane. So you have people who are enviro-hippies and people who hate the planet, basically; and the people who hate the planet aren't sinister so much as they don't believe (or don't want to believe) you can hurt it AND they don't want to be hippies so they immediately side against anything that looks like hippie bullshit. Houses underground are hippie bullshit--use of the land above is limited, and the houses are expensive and hard to maintain and really they have a shelf life of 10-15 years. Houses in trees? Dude I could design the city PLANNING for houses in trees, the woods are an excellent place to build! I could even fit it in with red-blooded American lifestyle, with some detail modifications but no massive inconveniences. Durable, cost-efficient, comfortable, an attractive lifestyle for MANY... and total hippie bullshit nobody wants.
Nobody's neutral. I like houses in trees because of the scenery, the efficiency, yes the low impact, also the cultural and engineering challenge. You'd span rope and board bridges to walk above the ground. You'd use mountain bikes with hub motors for a boost (check Bionx). Satellite community planning, home engineering (especially fire control), automated fire suppression (because flying helicopters out is the only other way, and THAT sucks). Solving the last mile problem, cars and garages, roads (there aren't any, you have to go to the road). All anybody sees is "let's swim with the dolphins and talk to the flowers!" and all I want is to make a whole freaking community of "cabin in the woods" folk without cutting down the woods or only putting three cabins out there--and let's face it, even folks who (rightly) think environmentalists are nuts love the cabin in the woods thing, half of them have one for when they go hunting.
it is better than having our soldiers in harms ways doing the attacks. Or would you prefer these terrorist organizations to flourish and grow and get better organized again?
False comparison. Having our soldiers in harms way doesn't mean the terrorist organizations flourish.
If we lose 3 soldiers assassinating 1 guy, how is that worse than murdering 50 innocent bystanders using a remotely directed missile to assassinate that 1 guy? We have 3 military guys left alive, 1 military guy (terrorist = combatant) dead, and 50 non-combatants dead. Versus 4 military dead and 0 non-combatants dead. 51 is more dead than 4.
Maybe. The American disease tends to work out like that. Kill 200 innocent wankers in some third world country to assassinate one evil dictator, or send in 50 US Marines and lose 3 of them in the job? Hmm death toll of 200 versus 4 including the target. Well, 4 American lives are worth way more than 200 foreigners.
A big problem though is there's now and there's then. Now, we have around 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. Keep burning oil and that number goes up. Then what? Natural gas. Then what? The methane at the bottom of the ocean, which is a LOT more hydrocarbon fuel mass than oil and natural gas. So maybe we can hit 450ppm, which is the upper edge of variation for earth-normal atmosphere in recent (current biology relevant, measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years) history... and then we whip out ocean methane, and it's 1000ppm, 1400ppm, 2000ppm, which actually yes IS BAD.
I guess I have to lean back on the boy who cried wolf for once in my life. This is like that. What's going on now won't kill us. What we have on the horizon actually might be bad, but by then people will have figured out that all this stuff is just bullshit and they won't see the danger when it really does come. Do note that, beyond warming, the amount of CO2 you can dump into the earth's atmosphere (heavier than atmosphere, too, so it stays near the ground) from ocean methane is big enough to toxify the air for humans. We won't get there with oil, coal, and natural gas.
I have used BSD. I found it.... quite striking. There's a hell of a lot of performance enhancement in Linux, and it really shows when you try to boot BSD and find it's ass-slow from the get-go. I even tried slapping down Debian-kfreebsd to compare something roughly the same and... yeah it's just slow as shit. Solaris (both Sun Solaris and Nexenta = Ubuntu/Solaris) wasn't that slow.
Ah, see, in America, we have unemployment offices EVERYWHERE, and if you're not there you pay $3.50 for a bus ride (that takes 3 hours because stops are every half-block) to get there. That way we create jobs,and we pay for it by taxing the people who are on unemployment 30%, so when you get your $1600/mo cheque you get like $1066.
America has basically two strategies: Tax "the rich" (meaning big business, not rich oil tycoons--we call the businesses "The Rich" because it sounds better, like class warfare... all the peasants hate the nobles and they love Robin Hood) and destroy economic growth; or tax the poor and create wide-spread poverty while using the money to pay for services provided by big businesses, concentrating money at the top. Nobody wants to hear that trickle-down and trickle-up economics are a balanced cycle, that raising taxes on business income directly causes a decrease in venture projects (i.e. new ideals) and thus a decrease in market growth and jobs AND that raising taxes on consumers decreases the amount of money they can spend to support new business ventures despite all tax advantages passed to said businesses (tax advantages on income they're not getting).
Gotta raise taxes on SOMEBODY, so we raise taxes on everyone at different stages. Taking a more general approach, we might have been less cavalier... we might have admitted that you can't tax $RICH or $POOR to death without incurring an impact because of trickle-up/trickle-down economics. But then we wouldn't be able to "create jobs" by staffing too many government folk at high expense.
The government supplies free cell phones to unemployed people automatically--it goes out when the unemployment system detects you have no job (this is reported). A free data plan, a call-in system, whatever... even a kiosk system where the unemployment "offices" are largely unstaffed and instead replaced with a main office that allows access to many government services. Less taxpayer money, but that's okay because the big businesses get jobs and we tax the people at the bottom/the businesses are rich and we tax them 'cause they can afford it.
The British government funded Babbage ultimately to the tune of roughly 17000 Pounds, which would today be equivalent to somewhere between 1.3 and 1.6 million Pounds.
It's a political disease. People want more or less regulation, but they don't understand that regulation is not fungible. Regulation that raises barrier to entry and solidifies control in the hands of the megacorps is bad; regulation that protects the consumer and lowers barrier to entry without punishing megacorps just for being big but without directly aiding them is good. We have a mix of good with bad and a habit of throwing out the good and causing disasters.
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It's not buying the ETF, really. Think about if you ran, say... put XLF:SPY on stockcharts.com, and it came up 1.2. Now look at C:XLF, BAC:XLF, UBS:XLF... same deal, the ones outrunning the sector in a sector outrunning the market? Those are your growth stocks.
Yes well if Samsung asks the judge why in the hell he ordered Apple to give a prominent court endorsement about how much better and cooler the iPad is...
They have guns don't they? Every federal agency maintains a security force with full law enforcement privileges. For example Social Security has OIG.
What's wrong with masturbating to naked pictures of 14 year old girls? If your job is specifically to sit around looking at naked pictures of 14 year old girls, you're already... looking at naked pictures of 14 year old girls. May as well rub one out?
I don't get it. If this is a problem, shouldn't we just not distribute naked pictures of 14 year old girls to government employees?
Find me haggis, black pudding, Kyoto variety eggplant and carrots.
"It's not a police state because it's not as bad as Hitler in Schindler's List." The Flu is not an illness either. I've had the flu and it's not a disease, not even in the worst case. Ebola, that's a disease. Influenza is a case of the sniffles.
Well, most of us aren't smart enough to pick the bottom of the market.
Oh, it's not the bottom. You can't do that. It's the reversals. You look at prices and you see, say, a three white kings pattern--stock's up 4%, 6%, 3% in 3 days? Great! You know why it's up? People are buy-buy-buy! Then that fourth day you see it doji star... the price goes up, comes down, settles in the middle... or maybe you see a hammer, the price moves but there's only a tail on one side. In any case, suddenly the price isn't climbing a lot. Lucky you though, right? A chance to buy in before it continues rocketing up.
Yeah, right. It's peaking over. Sell that shit.
The exact same thing happens at the bottom. There's all these fancy patterns to try to predict the reversals in Japanese candlesticks, but when it's all over and done you can see smooth curves most of the time--prices rushing down, then slowly continuing down, then flattening, then reversing, like a parabola. Same thing going up.
That's ... great when you've decided to trade a stock. To decide if you want it though, yes, fundamentals. News (look, see this? This news will favor MCP and Hunter and such), earnings, company balance sheets and plans (you use these to PREDICT news; the company making money doesn't make you rich, it's the market sentiment on the stock price that controls the stock price. Spiraling, failing businesses can go through the roof).
Graph the company's price history divided by the S&P500: if it's >1.0, then it's growing faster than the market, and probably a good investment; if it's <1.0, it's growing slower than the market (even if it's going up, it's not going up as fast as the S&P), and thus a bad investment. A stock growing faster than the market has money flowing into it--more capital going there than everywhere on average. You'll see things like the financials (XLF) with XLF/SPY above 1.0 during the housing and mortgage boom, then you see it level off, then start heading below 1.0. All's well... then six months later, the banks collapse and the stock prices crash down hard. Why? Because during the boom, there's a lot of buying going on in Citi, Bank of America, etc that are "good investments," and less going to the tech market etc. When Wall Street thinks it's about to be over, they start to pull out--and all that capital goes elsewhere, the financial sector either grows slower or shrinks faster than the rest of the market, and the ratio drops below 1.0.
This thing with China, this is just news. It makes you think, hey, maybe I should watch MCP and Hunter. Maybe buy in on a low signal, protect yourself from losses (stop loss or short something as a hedge), see if MCP announces reopening a mine and gets some attention and becomes desirable. Make 40%, move your stop loss up, either sell out (in fear of China starting up production again) or wait (in hopes China starts up production and it goes nowhere and MCP dominates and you make 80%).
Stock market is too much of a mess for me to play in. Too much stress.
Bullshit. That's theory; we're talking about the real world, so put away your picture book and stop telling the cute blonde next door she should go play with the wild grizzly bears. She's Canadian, she knows they won't have porridge.
And here you lost any credability of having a discussion on this. People who do not believe or do not understand do not by that nature hate the planet. I was skeptical when you started talking about people living in tree house forts but you simply jumped the shark on any credible efforts with ascribing "hate" to anyone who doesn't jump at the end of the world scenarios.
You have these people who immediately side against anything "environmental". A few days ago I brought up the interesting thing about using the excess idling power from hydro plants (they have to open the floodgates to dump excess water if there isn't power demand), wind farms, and solar arrays to generate gasoline, and was immediately gouged at by a huge dissertation about all the methane in the bottom of the ocean. It's like good, clean fuel is evil because we have all this fuel sitting around, and even if it's essentially free fuel it's enviro-hippie garbage. I get this stuff all the time. I have people jaw on about how solar arrays on your house are a great way to save money, but how large-scale solar farms are stupid because we have coal, oil, LP gas, and the like and we shouldn't waste money building unsustainable, unprofitable, expensive bullshit like solar plants. HUH? How are these people on both sides?
They're all over the place. Look around, people polarize like that. They don't want to be "liberals" so they become "anti-liberals." Don't tell me it's not real, 'cause I live in it, I get lectured by these people, and I present perfectly rational arguments and get push-back about stuff that's "a lot easier and cheaper" but "we haven't figured out how to do it yet". ... what?
And I didn't say tree forts, or tree huts. I said houses in trees. Structurally stable, insulated, powered, plumbed. Think about a cityscape view versus a home with a more rural view with wide, open yards. Waterfront property gives you a harbor view. A few miles from me, there's a community where people have a good several acres of land, mostly wooded and streams--a coworker had a 1 mile driveway to the road, and her house was next to a cliff, there were boulders and trees and shrubs, like living in the woods.
These are all different things that happen when you walk outside your house. The past decade in Maryland and Delaware has seen a lot of housing development, some of which my parents bought into... houses with a solid 2/3 or 3/4 acre of land, nice and flat, where the developers razed down the woods into plains and built homes, roads, ran power line. Well water and septic, no plumbing. That's one particular environment of living, but after five years they started cutting further... the developers promised (on no contract) that they weren't interested in razing the trees around the area, so you look around and see nature. Now they've flattened some lots, but not built anything. Eventually this will look like just flat city, but with rural density--tree line is far away. Then the tree line will go away. This is displeasing the residents.
A lot of people seem to chatter once in a while about the environmental sustainability of underground homes, but the economics aren't there (and really, hobbit huts?). I prefer to intersperse light-medium density houses in trees, so you can have your rural area with the tree line, and the developers just build a six mile wide development *in* *the* *trees*, and some folks move there. This lets people who want to live near trees live near trees, without worrying about developers lopping them down; and it lets people who want to live *in* the trees (traditionally, on the ground, in a small clearing for their cottage, with a small dirt road run up from the main) actually live--almost literally--*in* the trees. It lets the developers pack
It gained some 200% last year over a few good 30%+ jumps, then crashed like crazy. It's down, yes, that means it's the best time to buy.
Seriously amateurs. Did you get taken in in 2005-2008 "BEST TIME TO BUY HOUSE PRICES ARE GOING UP UP UP!!" too? Going up... been going up... gold prices have been going up, people screaming gold will reach $2000, $5000, $10,000 in August of 2011, why do you think G Gordon Liddy was pushing gold so much then? When gold crashes down, it will be a good buy, and you will be like "It's down 95% off its 52-week... are you high? Why would I buy gold? How did you make money on this stuff?"
Promote the healthy development of prices, right?
Tyler Vernon?
Of course not. The problem is the political insanity is creating a REAL problem. People polarize easily.
Look, I like today's clean vehicles--I like breathing clean air. And converting excess grid energy that usually gets wasted standing idle into petrol by FTP? Efficient, carbon-neutral energy, insanely clean. Roof top solar? PV not great, solar water heat into thermonic heating systems great, energy use reduction on easy-to-make parts. I want cities of houses in trees--not everywhere, just where it makes sense, lower environmental footprint and all (the culture would be different--everything 3 miles from subway-connected public garages so you could mountain bike out to your car in 10 minutes, then hit the state highway and go to work). All that stuff's great.
The problem is people want to force it down our throats because "we're all going to die!" or something insane. So you have people who are enviro-hippies and people who hate the planet, basically; and the people who hate the planet aren't sinister so much as they don't believe (or don't want to believe) you can hurt it AND they don't want to be hippies so they immediately side against anything that looks like hippie bullshit. Houses underground are hippie bullshit--use of the land above is limited, and the houses are expensive and hard to maintain and really they have a shelf life of 10-15 years. Houses in trees? Dude I could design the city PLANNING for houses in trees, the woods are an excellent place to build! I could even fit it in with red-blooded American lifestyle, with some detail modifications but no massive inconveniences. Durable, cost-efficient, comfortable, an attractive lifestyle for MANY... and total hippie bullshit nobody wants.
Nobody's neutral. I like houses in trees because of the scenery, the efficiency, yes the low impact, also the cultural and engineering challenge. You'd span rope and board bridges to walk above the ground. You'd use mountain bikes with hub motors for a boost (check Bionx). Satellite community planning, home engineering (especially fire control), automated fire suppression (because flying helicopters out is the only other way, and THAT sucks). Solving the last mile problem, cars and garages, roads (there aren't any, you have to go to the road). All anybody sees is "let's swim with the dolphins and talk to the flowers!" and all I want is to make a whole freaking community of "cabin in the woods" folk without cutting down the woods or only putting three cabins out there--and let's face it, even folks who (rightly) think environmentalists are nuts love the cabin in the woods thing, half of them have one for when they go hunting.
it is better than having our soldiers in harms ways doing the attacks. Or would you prefer these terrorist organizations to flourish and grow and get better organized again?
False comparison. Having our soldiers in harms way doesn't mean the terrorist organizations flourish.
If we lose 3 soldiers assassinating 1 guy, how is that worse than murdering 50 innocent bystanders using a remotely directed missile to assassinate that 1 guy? We have 3 military guys left alive, 1 military guy (terrorist = combatant) dead, and 50 non-combatants dead. Versus 4 military dead and 0 non-combatants dead. 51 is more dead than 4.
Maybe. The American disease tends to work out like that. Kill 200 innocent wankers in some third world country to assassinate one evil dictator, or send in 50 US Marines and lose 3 of them in the job? Hmm death toll of 200 versus 4 including the target. Well, 4 American lives are worth way more than 200 foreigners.
A big problem though is there's now and there's then. Now, we have around 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. Keep burning oil and that number goes up. Then what? Natural gas. Then what? The methane at the bottom of the ocean, which is a LOT more hydrocarbon fuel mass than oil and natural gas. So maybe we can hit 450ppm, which is the upper edge of variation for earth-normal atmosphere in recent (current biology relevant, measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years) history... and then we whip out ocean methane, and it's 1000ppm, 1400ppm, 2000ppm, which actually yes IS BAD.
I guess I have to lean back on the boy who cried wolf for once in my life. This is like that. What's going on now won't kill us. What we have on the horizon actually might be bad, but by then people will have figured out that all this stuff is just bullshit and they won't see the danger when it really does come. Do note that, beyond warming, the amount of CO2 you can dump into the earth's atmosphere (heavier than atmosphere, too, so it stays near the ground) from ocean methane is big enough to toxify the air for humans. We won't get there with oil, coal, and natural gas.
Just punch it in Amazon.
Andrew Morton becomes the new... wait, what the hell? Marquee? I believe that word is spelled... Marquis.
It's not meant to be a Windows replacement. That's ReactOS.
I have used BSD. I found it .... quite striking. There's a hell of a lot of performance enhancement in Linux, and it really shows when you try to boot BSD and find it's ass-slow from the get-go. I even tried slapping down Debian-kfreebsd to compare something roughly the same and ... yeah it's just slow as shit. Solaris (both Sun Solaris and Nexenta = Ubuntu/Solaris) wasn't that slow.
Ah, see, in America, we have unemployment offices EVERYWHERE, and if you're not there you pay $3.50 for a bus ride (that takes 3 hours because stops are every half-block) to get there. That way we create jobs,and we pay for it by taxing the people who are on unemployment 30%, so when you get your $1600/mo cheque you get like $1066.
America has basically two strategies: Tax "the rich" (meaning big business, not rich oil tycoons--we call the businesses "The Rich" because it sounds better, like class warfare... all the peasants hate the nobles and they love Robin Hood) and destroy economic growth; or tax the poor and create wide-spread poverty while using the money to pay for services provided by big businesses, concentrating money at the top. Nobody wants to hear that trickle-down and trickle-up economics are a balanced cycle, that raising taxes on business income directly causes a decrease in venture projects (i.e. new ideals) and thus a decrease in market growth and jobs AND that raising taxes on consumers decreases the amount of money they can spend to support new business ventures despite all tax advantages passed to said businesses (tax advantages on income they're not getting).
Gotta raise taxes on SOMEBODY, so we raise taxes on everyone at different stages. Taking a more general approach, we might have been less cavalier... we might have admitted that you can't tax $RICH or $POOR to death without incurring an impact because of trickle-up/trickle-down economics. But then we wouldn't be able to "create jobs" by staffing too many government folk at high expense.
The government supplies free cell phones to unemployed people automatically--it goes out when the unemployment system detects you have no job (this is reported). A free data plan, a call-in system, whatever... even a kiosk system where the unemployment "offices" are largely unstaffed and instead replaced with a main office that allows access to many government services. Less taxpayer money, but that's okay because the big businesses get jobs and we tax the people at the bottom/the businesses are rich and we tax them 'cause they can afford it.
The British government funded Babbage ultimately to the tune of roughly 17000 Pounds, which would today be equivalent to somewhere between 1.3 and 1.6 million Pounds.
Americans have gotten heavier over time too.
Most dogs don't have balls because PETA has determined that it's cruel to not cut a creature's nuts off.
I was looking at THIS data plan as my data point.
It's a political disease. People want more or less regulation, but they don't understand that regulation is not fungible. Regulation that raises barrier to entry and solidifies control in the hands of the megacorps is bad; regulation that protects the consumer and lowers barrier to entry without punishing megacorps just for being big but without directly aiding them is good. We have a mix of good with bad and a habit of throwing out the good and causing disasters.