Your reply assumes that everyone has the money. This is not always the case outside the country you live in.
My advice to you would be to get the hell out of the Philipines and go somewhere where you can earn a decent living. You seem to be intelligent enough to get a decent job elsewhere, how about giving that a try before you bellyache about how poor you are?
Reasonable Person: "we have this indoor toilet, it's a convenient way to eliminate waste, but there are small water and sewer costs..."
Grishnakh: "why would I want to pay water and sewer fees associated with an indoor toilet when I can just use my outhouse?"
And regarding the key in the wallet move, most car keys nowadays have integrated fob-type plastic bulbs that do not work well on your wallet. Unless, that is, you keep your wallet in one of those manpurse fannypack fagbag things, which I suspect could be a possibility. But after reading your post, I think it more likely that you're probably just too cheap to buy a vehicle manufactured within the past 15 or 20 years and wouldn't have had to deal with the fob-type keys. So just go upstairs and look at your mom's keys, you'll see what the rest of us use.
I have to disagree. I have a couple of computers setup to transmit over USB 2.0 thru NetBEUI to each other since I don't have firewire and only have a 10mbit NIC.
Only a 10mb nic? Have you been frozen for the pat 15 years, or are you just cheap?
Do you actually know any able bodied human being who cannot afford $140 per year, or $2.69 per week, for a phone? Base level POTS service is more expensive than that.
And what about those who either choose not to have a cellphone, or can't afford one?
With the availability of pay-as-you-go mobile phones a person would have to be virtually penniless to not be able to afford a cell phone. People that destitute will probably not have very many people to call, anyway. So for a majority percentage of the sane adult population in the US, to not have a cell phone is definitely a choice. And with the demise of the pay phone, if you make a choice to eschew the cell phone you've essentially made a choice to be incommunicado.
That said, there are still many small towns in America where there is no cell service, and in these towns pay phones make sense and are used pretty frequently - my town just received a cell tower 4 months ago, there are three pay phones in this town of 750.
After almost a trillion dollars and 4000 US deaths, it damn well better have.
What did we get out of it? Gas is more expensive then ever. There are now 25,000+ soliders who are crippled. Country can't even see the top of the hole we buried ourselves into financially.
One trillion dollars is about 1/60th of US GDP over the time period in question. Put another way, it's like a person making $50,000 per year paying for a $4,200 television set over a 5 year period. A trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but compared to US GDP it's pretty insignificant.
As for 4,000 dead and 25,000 wounded military, you need to keep these numbers in perspective. Considering the number of rotations into and out of Iraq over the course of nearly 5 years (more than 800,000 I'd wager) the chances of being hurt in any way, as a result of anything, including traffic accidents and other things, is about 1 in 32 per rotation. The chances of actually dying as a result of combat or accident is about 1 in 200.
Put another way, normal civilian mortality in the United States runs at a rate of about 8.2 deaths per 1,000 population per year. If military mortality in Iraq were on par with civilian mortality back in Mayberry, USA, there would have been over 6,500 dead military at this point - and if I may remind, there is no combat in Mayberry.
The point is that while a trillion bucks may seem like a lot of money, compared to GDP it's certainly not. And as for blood and guts, the Iraq war has been the most antiseptic conflict in the history of human warfare and conflict. Will it have been worth it when it's all said and done? It depends on the value you assign to things like fostering a paradigm shift in the Middle East. I believe that if we are successful in assisting in the creation of a relatively free, open, and democratic Iraq - smack dab in the middle of one of the most geopolitically important regions on the planet - then it certainly will have been worth every penny and every drop of blood.
Imagine what giving them just 0.5% more of the US budget would do in comparison to how little the last few additions of 0.5% did to improving the situation in Iraq.:-/
Last time I checked the situation in Iraq has improved substantially. It appears that it's time for you to bark up some other tree.
Anyway, I think a better thing to imagine would be taking the 14-odd percent of every American's paycheck (including the employer's contribution) that is currently being pissed away into the ponzi scheme we call Social Security and instead allow the worker to invest it into private retirement accounts. That way, instead of getting a measly $900 or $1,000 per month to buy beans and raman noodles, even the lowest paid workers would be able to live better than they did while they were working. More money to spend means more economic activity, which means more tax revenue, which means more money for things like sending some folks to Mars.
No, they are still as deadly, it is just that if a hidden guy with a wireless laptop could trick a nearby MBT crew to fire on their own troops, it would be bad news.
Odds are good that it wouldn't be bad news to pembo13.
Those of us forced to work in companies where the IT department is so incompetent and risk averse that they won't look beyond Microsoft products. It's a cascading effect; they choose Exchange for a messaging solution, it all takes a big, loose, smelly dump from there.
Further to the other responses on this - I think you're also omitting something else from your calculations - the cost of your own time.
He didn't omit it - if he's got the spare cycles to sit around building computers in order to save a couple of hundred bucks, his time is pretty close to worthless.
Yes, like Symbian and Windows Mobile phones have had for many years.
The web browsing experience on my Apache and the Treo 700wx I had before it SUCK SHIT ALL DAY LONG, and the PDF viewing is worse. You don't have a single clue wtf you speak of. If I lived in an area serviced by GSM I'd have an iPhone in a split second.
Look, you mental midget, not only did you not understand my post in any way, it appears, since in my sarcastic post even minimum wage earners would get the $10 per year (effectively doubling their income), it's obviously not possible to shut down HHS and SSA now - my post was an attempt to illustrate how far afield we've gone from the limited government envisioned by the framers, and to try to drive home exactly how much is spent on these two bloated behemoths. Discounting payments on the national debt, more than half the federal budget is consumed by these two departments, the responsibilities of which are not enumerated in the constitution.
If it's not in the Constitution, the federal government's not allowed to do it, fancy that.
Well if that's the case I hope we can shut down the Dept. of Health and Human Services along with the Social Security administration, both of which fall far outside the scope of what the framers intended, and combined account for over $1.3 Trillion of the $2.8 Trillion 2007 federal budget.
There were 133,092,565 tax returns filed last year, which means if we shut down HHS and SSA each and every taxpayer could be refunded $9,768.00. Think you can fund your own health care insurance and retirement with $10k per year? Absolutely.
Name another. You lefty moonbats continually gripe about Bush detaining US citizens w/o due process, but AFAIK, more than 6 years after 9/11, Padilla is the only example. One example does not constitute systematic abuse.
Brother, a word of advice: if you don't know for sure what "market cap" means, you should not opine about market share or any other thing that relates to business metrics. To do so effectively lays bare your ignorance, and worse, it takes up space on the tubes...
You're certainly an angry fellow. You might try taking a walk once in a while, or perhaps adding fiber to your diet... And no, cheetos are not a good source of fiber.
The reason I'm not using Mac OS X nor Vista is the cost. When I have Ubuntu so readily available, why would I want to use anything else?
The reason I don't eat at a restaurant is cost. When I have the dumpster behind McDonalds so readily available, why would I want to use anything else?
I'm only half joking with that line. If you have the time and inclination to noodle around with linux, more power to you, but the majority of us (first world dwellers) find the cost of entry for either OSX or Windows to be a non-issue. If a few hundred bucks is the salient factor in your computer platform decision making process, then you're either a cheapskate of the highest order, or you feed the McDonalds dumpster that feeds me....;)
Pot...nobody ever kills anybody while high on weed.
No shit, that's because you're all so listless and burnt out you have a hard time holding a cogent thought much less mustering enough energy and drive to off someone. Look, I work at an organic foods cooperative, I'm literally surrounded by pot heads all day long. I've never seen so many looney-toon, morose, mentally scattered people in one place in all my life. You can sit there and tout the use of pot all you like, but I see how it affects people long term, and it ain't pretty, buddy.
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Your reply assumes that everyone has the money. This is not always the case outside the country you live in.
My advice to you would be to get the hell out of the Philipines and go somewhere where you can earn a decent living. You seem to be intelligent enough to get a decent job elsewhere, how about giving that a try before you bellyache about how poor you are?
Reasonable Person: "we have this indoor toilet, it's a convenient way to eliminate waste, but there are small water and sewer costs..."
Grishnakh: "why would I want to pay water and sewer fees associated with an indoor toilet when I can just use my outhouse?"
And regarding the key in the wallet move, most car keys nowadays have integrated fob-type plastic bulbs that do not work well on your wallet. Unless, that is, you keep your wallet in one of those manpurse fannypack fagbag things, which I suspect could be a possibility. But after reading your post, I think it more likely that you're probably just too cheap to buy a vehicle manufactured within the past 15 or 20 years and wouldn't have had to deal with the fob-type keys. So just go upstairs and look at your mom's keys, you'll see what the rest of us use.
I have to disagree. I have a couple of computers setup to transmit over USB 2.0 thru NetBEUI to each other since I don't have firewire and only have a 10mbit NIC.
Only a 10mb nic? Have you been frozen for the pat 15 years, or are you just cheap?
Do you actually know any able bodied human being who cannot afford $140 per year, or $2.69 per week, for a phone? Base level POTS service is more expensive than that.
And what about those who either choose not to have a cellphone, or can't afford one?
With the availability of pay-as-you-go mobile phones a person would have to be virtually penniless to not be able to afford a cell phone. People that destitute will probably not have very many people to call, anyway. So for a majority percentage of the sane adult population in the US, to not have a cell phone is definitely a choice. And with the demise of the pay phone, if you make a choice to eschew the cell phone you've essentially made a choice to be incommunicado.
That said, there are still many small towns in America where there is no cell service, and in these towns pay phones make sense and are used pretty frequently - my town just received a cell tower 4 months ago, there are three pay phones in this town of 750.
After almost a trillion dollars and 4000 US deaths, it damn well better have. What did we get out of it? Gas is more expensive then ever. There are now 25,000+ soliders who are crippled. Country can't even see the top of the hole we buried ourselves into financially.
One trillion dollars is about 1/60th of US GDP over the time period in question. Put another way, it's like a person making $50,000 per year paying for a $4,200 television set over a 5 year period. A trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but compared to US GDP it's pretty insignificant.
As for 4,000 dead and 25,000 wounded military, you need to keep these numbers in perspective. Considering the number of rotations into and out of Iraq over the course of nearly 5 years (more than 800,000 I'd wager) the chances of being hurt in any way, as a result of anything, including traffic accidents and other things, is about 1 in 32 per rotation. The chances of actually dying as a result of combat or accident is about 1 in 200.
Put another way, normal civilian mortality in the United States runs at a rate of about 8.2 deaths per 1,000 population per year. If military mortality in Iraq were on par with civilian mortality back in Mayberry, USA, there would have been over 6,500 dead military at this point - and if I may remind, there is no combat in Mayberry.
The point is that while a trillion bucks may seem like a lot of money, compared to GDP it's certainly not. And as for blood and guts, the Iraq war has been the most antiseptic conflict in the history of human warfare and conflict. Will it have been worth it when it's all said and done? It depends on the value you assign to things like fostering a paradigm shift in the Middle East. I believe that if we are successful in assisting in the creation of a relatively free, open, and democratic Iraq - smack dab in the middle of one of the most geopolitically important regions on the planet - then it certainly will have been worth every penny and every drop of blood.
Imagine what giving them just 0.5% more of the US budget would do in comparison to how little the last few additions of 0.5% did to improving the situation in Iraq. :-/
Last time I checked the situation in Iraq has improved substantially. It appears that it's time for you to bark up some other tree.
Anyway, I think a better thing to imagine would be taking the 14-odd percent of every American's paycheck (including the employer's contribution) that is currently being pissed away into the ponzi scheme we call Social Security and instead allow the worker to invest it into private retirement accounts. That way, instead of getting a measly $900 or $1,000 per month to buy beans and raman noodles, even the lowest paid workers would be able to live better than they did while they were working. More money to spend means more economic activity, which means more tax revenue, which means more money for things like sending some folks to Mars.
No, they are still as deadly, it is just that if a hidden guy with a wireless laptop could trick a nearby MBT crew to fire on their own troops, it would be bad news.
Odds are good that it wouldn't be bad news to pembo13.
"can you hear me now, bitches?"
If you carry that jamming device in your front pocket you'll be saying that to your nutz sometime soon.
...but who even uses Windows Mobile?
Those of us forced to work in companies where the IT department is so incompetent and risk averse that they won't look beyond Microsoft products. It's a cascading effect; they choose Exchange for a messaging solution, it all takes a big, loose, smelly dump from there.
Go peruse the Leopard:networking section of the Apple Support Discussion groups and you'll find that you're in the minority.
That's what happens. I installed Leopard on day 1. And I'm happy.
Don't connect to any SMB shares, do you? Give it a whirl and come back. We'll wait. You'll not be happy.
Good for you! It looks like you'll make a very nice wife someday!
Further to the other responses on this - I think you're also omitting something else from your calculations - the cost of your own time.
He didn't omit it - if he's got the spare cycles to sit around building computers in order to save a couple of hundred bucks, his time is pretty close to worthless.
The web browsing experience on my Apache and the Treo 700wx I had before it SUCK SHIT ALL DAY LONG, and the PDF viewing is worse. You don't have a single clue wtf you speak of. If I lived in an area serviced by GSM I'd have an iPhone in a split second.
Look, you mental midget, not only did you not understand my post in any way, it appears, since in my sarcastic post even minimum wage earners would get the $10 per year (effectively doubling their income), it's obviously not possible to shut down HHS and SSA now - my post was an attempt to illustrate how far afield we've gone from the limited government envisioned by the framers, and to try to drive home exactly how much is spent on these two bloated behemoths. Discounting payments on the national debt, more than half the federal budget is consumed by these two departments, the responsibilities of which are not enumerated in the constitution.
Well if that's the case I hope we can shut down the Dept. of Health and Human Services along with the Social Security administration, both of which fall far outside the scope of what the framers intended, and combined account for over $1.3 Trillion of the $2.8 Trillion 2007 federal budget.
There were 133,092,565 tax returns filed last year, which means if we shut down HHS and SSA each and every taxpayer could be refunded $9,768.00. Think you can fund your own health care insurance and retirement with $10k per year? Absolutely.
Yeah, but does it have a "fatal flaw" accessible via a portal the size of a Tatooine Wamp Rat?
Name another. You lefty moonbats continually gripe about Bush detaining US citizens w/o due process, but AFAIK, more than 6 years after 9/11, Padilla is the only example. One example does not constitute systematic abuse.
Brother, a word of advice: if you don't know for sure what "market cap" means, you should not opine about market share or any other thing that relates to business metrics. To do so effectively lays bare your ignorance, and worse, it takes up space on the tubes...
You're certainly an angry fellow. You might try taking a walk once in a while, or perhaps adding fiber to your diet... And no, cheetos are not a good source of fiber.
but Krugman's economic views are widely respected
you forgot the "/sarcasm" tag there, vtcodger.
Now that's a block of gibberish! Really, celle, I'm literally laughing at you.
The reason I'm not using Mac OS X nor Vista is the cost. When I have Ubuntu so readily available, why would I want to use anything else?
;)
The reason I don't eat at a restaurant is cost. When I have the dumpster behind McDonalds so readily available, why would I want to use anything else?
I'm only half joking with that line. If you have the time and inclination to noodle around with linux, more power to you, but the majority of us (first world dwellers) find the cost of entry for either OSX or Windows to be a non-issue. If a few hundred bucks is the salient factor in your computer platform decision making process, then you're either a cheapskate of the highest order, or you feed the McDonalds dumpster that feeds me....
Pot...nobody ever kills anybody while high on weed.
No shit, that's because you're all so listless and burnt out you have a hard time holding a cogent thought much less mustering enough energy and drive to off someone. Look, I work at an organic foods cooperative, I'm literally surrounded by pot heads all day long. I've never seen so many looney-toon, morose, mentally scattered people in one place in all my life. You can sit there and tout the use of pot all you like, but I see how it affects people long term, and it ain't pretty, buddy.