Looks like an electric car isn't a good option for you, so you probably shouldn't get one. Aside of the initial cost, an electric car could be a workable alternative for my household. The same could be said for many other people I know. Most of my friends own their own homes, have garages, have more than one car in the family, and commute less than 30 miles one way to work. Something doesn't have to work for everyone in order for it to be a good solution for many. I think the current crop of EVs is going to fall short of the 100 mile range claim in hot or cold weather, but something that could reliably travel 100 miles on a full charge could be a viable transportation alternative for millions of people. And yeah, I'm fine with nuclear.
TV didn't lead, it followed. In the 1960s People were fascinated by the space program and the possibilities it presented, so TV executives decided to use characters that reflected that fascination . But then, most TV wasn't featuring intelligent people. It was featuring people like Gilligan,Gomer Pyle, Maxwell Smart or the Beverly Hillbillies. The public was interested in the space program because of the endless possibilities it presented. Once we landed on the moon a lot of that interest waned. The space shuttle, sky lab, and the international space station just didn't have the same cache as landing a person on the moon. Public interest in technology only arises when it's new and fresh. It's not to say that there is no interest after a while, but the mass appeal diminishes significantly.
The US space program didn't arise because of popular interest in science, it was born out of a perceived need to compete with the USSR in all spheres. If the Soviet Union had not gone into space, there's no telling how long it would have taken the US to land a person on the Moon. The space program came into being about 15 years after WW II, when people in the US still thought they could do anything. That can do confidence waned in the wake of the Vietnam war and Watergate.
There have to be productive places in the economy in which to invest it. The world was awash in liquidity in 2005 looking for a place to be invested. It found one. US mortgage backed securities. Or maybe all that money could have been invested in the very productive tech stock bubble of the late 1990s. US corporations are sitting on over $1 trillion looking for a productive place to invest it. If you added all the money paid into social security to that pile I'm not sure it would be any more productive. In the end, though, don't you end up with a different version of the same problem social security is facing? If the boomers own trillions and trillions of dollars worth of investments, who's going to buy all those investments from them so they can get their money back?
It might be able to complete transactions, but not in a timely manner. If social security checks didn't go out on time there'd be a political shit storm that would make the tea party seem tame.
You're offering only part of what defines a Ponzi scheme. Using that very brief and incomplete definition, most of what people invest their money in for retirement is a Ponzi scheme. Let's consider some other characteristics that define a Ponzi scheme.
Ponzi schemes offer large short term returns that are abnormally high or consistent. Social security doesn't.
Ponzi schemes require an ever increasing amount of money to continue paying off past investors. Social security has a temporary problem from the large number of boomers, but social security can be, and has been, modified in the past to reflect changes in the size of the taxpaying workforce and the number of beneficiaries. Once the boomer bump is over social security will stabilize.
Ponzi schemes don't reveal the method by which they generate their great short term results. Social security is transparent as to where the money is coming from, where it's invested and who receives benefits. It's what it claims to be, a mandatory transfer payment system under which current workers are taxed on their income, with no promise of huge payouts.
Ponzi schemes typically don't invest any of the money people invest in it. Money paid into social security is invested in U. S. government securities. Social security owns trillions of dollars of US securities. Social security owns more US government securities than China.
It's not a Ponzi scheme since there are viable alternatives for keeping the system solvent until the boomers are mostly dead. It's only a Ponzi scheme if it's impossible for it to be sustained. It isn't. You may not like the choices, but there are choices.
It's appropriate, since the entire "social security trust fund" is nothing but IOUs from a government that's deeper in debt than any other government has ever been in all of recorded history.
-jcr
But the US also has an economy that's larger than any other economy in recorded history. How large is the debt in proportion to the economy? How much of that debt is owed to the social security trust fund?
I DO NOT drive impaired. Yet I choose to Not drive on "DUI enforcement holidays" because I refuse to be cowed into "showing my papers" for the privilege for driving from point A to point B.
Your decision to change your behavior in order to avoid checkpoints is just another form of being 'cowed'. You've just chosen a different pasture to be fenced in. Not being cowed would be refusing to take the Breathalyzer and blood test and being willing to risk going to jail.
The financial requirements to starting a broadband ISP are so high that only a very tiny proportion of the population could consider starting an ISP that would have a chance against Comcast, TimeWarner, or other large ISPs. Back in the day, when dial up was prevalent, it was a lot easier to start an ISP, and lots of people did. Today, not so much. If individuals with very limited financial means and no connections in high places could start ISPs and compete against the corporate giants they would.
When was this golden age of swearing in broadcast? It's not like people were cussing up a storm on radio and television in the 60s,70s, and 80s. The FCC's reaction in 1973 to the broadcasting of a George Carlin album scared all broadcasters away from content to which the FCC objects. It's only of late that people have been uttering banned words on television and radio in ways that the FCC deems obscene. Whenever I hear people talk how bad censorship is these days, I have to wonder if they're aware of how bad it was before the 1970s. When performers could be arrested for obscenity for words and phrases they uttered on stage, that are today routinely tossed around in the media.
Many would draw a line between having sex with a sleeping person when the sleeping person and the other person had not been having sex, and a situation where the sleeping person and the other person were mutually and consensually naked in a bed where they had just spent the night having sex. The first situation strikes most people as criminal, the second as bad manners.
Finally, you apparently don't understand what went wrong with the financial crisis in 2007-2009. Here's the phrase that explains it all: "50 to 1 leverage". No security, no matter how regulated or safe, makes financial sense when you have. by hook or crook, that kind of leverage. Fortunately, government was around to bail all these greedy bankers and clueless investors. Of course, that means the market wasn't truly deregulated.
Regulation can restrict how much leverage banks can have. I think the financial reform bill passed last spring set it at 15 to 1. Many would like to have seen it lower, anywhere from 3 to 10 to 1. I have read, but can't cite where, that the nation’s founders limited bank leverage in their time to as low as 4-to-1.
Their stockholders got shafted, and no taxpayer funds were used to pay for anything.
Governments are huge consumers of electricity. Street lighting, water and sewage plants, schools, hospitals, police and fire stations, jails and prisons, and other governmental buildings consume a lot of electricity. Enron cost the state of California and its municipalities a great deal of money. I'd say a lot of government money went to Enron and the companies that colluded with it. When Pacific Gas & Electric went bankrupt because of Enron's market manipulation, the state needed to step in and prop up PG&E. Since the California power companies were technically bankrupt and had no buying power, the state stepped in to buy power at highly unfavorable terms on the open market. California agreed to pay $43 billion for power over the next 20 years.
I have not studied the issue, but I have seen credible arguments that the leak of the Pentagon Papers was ultimately destructive of the best interests of the American people. I do not have an opinion one way or the other at this point and the event happened far enough in the past that I am not going to do the study needed to decide. I will say that those who at that time promoted the idea that publishing the Pentagon Papers was a good idea were pushing a destructive political agenda.
Maybe you should take some time to study the issue. It could also be that the motivation of the people trying to suppress the publication was political. Maybe they knew that if the American public was aware of the real circumstances of the war it would rapidly lose support. Unlike subsequent wars, the Vietnam War relied on a draft to provide cannon fodder. Over two million Americans fought, more than 300,000 were wounded, more than 75,000 were permanently disabled, and nearly 60,000 killed. I'd say the American public had a right to know everything about why we became involved in Vietnam and what our long term odds of prevailing were. Daniel Ellsberg helped write the Pentagon Papers. He knew exactly what was in them and felt it was vital that the American people be aware of that information. He expected to spend the rest of his life in prison when he leaked them. He performed a great public service and was willing to sacrifice his freedom for the remainder of his life. Anyone that is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison in order to provide vital information to the public is a patriot in my eyes.
Considering that GM went bankrupt and its shareholders and bondholders lost their entire investment, and the CEO was canned, along with a lot of executives, I'm not sure how privatizing the profits worked in this particular situation. At this point it seems plausible that the federal government will at least break even on the GM bailout, perhaps even turning a profit.
If Bin Laden died the US would need to resurrect him. He's a boogeyman that's useful for reminding people why we spend an insane amount of money on the war on terror. For all I know the CIA has been producing all the Bin Laden videos since 2002.
Once you become famous in the US the press will quote your every word as if you have some special insight that the average person lacks. There are enough people that like Palin for reasons that have nothing to do with her intelligence or depth of insight that it guarantees coverage for every little inane thing that she says. I'm sure if Britney Spears did offer commentary on N Korea it would get wider coverage in the popular press than opinions about N Korea provided by the head of the US senate foreign relations committee. If the chair of the US senate foreign relations committee wanted his statements on N Korea to carry as much weight with the public as Britney Spears he'd first have to get caught in a major sex scandal. Then he'd be newsworthy.
Palin was on the board of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commision. It doesn't have anything to do with taxes paid by the oil industry to the state. The commission does not determine how much tax the oil companies pay to the state. What she was responsible for as governor was raising taxes on the oil companies in 2007. This permitted the state to increase the amount of money given to residents from $1200/yr to $2000/yr. Does redistributing wealth in this manner make Palin a socialist?
Because the Clinton candidacy was strong when he chose Palin, and McCain assumed (with good reason) that if Clinton got the Democratic nomination that the election would end up being about opening up a new era of equality in politics with regards to female candidates.
McCain didn't choose Palin until mid-August 2008. Obama had nearly enough pledged delegates to secure the Democratic nomination by early June. Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama in June, 2008.
Daniel Ellsberg, the person released them, helped write them and knew what was in them. The only thing comparable between what wikileaks does and what Ellsberg did is that they both release classified documents. Wikileaks doesn't have any idea whether the documents they release are relevant, irrelevant, dangerous or harmless.
Dick Chenney's job right before becoming VP was CEO of Haliburton, and Cheney pushed the war on terror as hard as anyone in the Bush administration. I'm not saying he profited financially, but his ties to Haliburton could have influenced his decisions as VP.
Outside of the $20 billion dollar escrow account that BP established after meeting with Obama, and the over $500 million that BP has so far paid for cleanup costs, what other aspects of financial responsibility in this incident did you have in mind? The federal government is in court trying to lift the normal $75 million statutory limit on fines for oil spills. The Obama administration is contending that the cap cap is inapplicable in this case. Obama's 2010 campaign received $71, 000 dollars from BP employees, 0.01% of the total contributions that the campaign received, I don't think his presidential campaign received any corporate PAC money from BP. Despite your sarcasm about hope and change, I'm not convinced that $71,000 in individual campaign contributions to a $710 million dollar campaign buys much influence post election.
She ran through an entire house's worth of money, plus existing cash?
For a person moving from somewhere like Syracuse, NY, to San Francisco or NYC, the existing equity in a house may not be enough to cover a down payment. Especially if a person bought right before the real estate bubble popped.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like an electric car isn't a good option for you, so you probably shouldn't get one. Aside of the initial cost, an electric car could be a workable alternative for my household. The same could be said for many other people I know. Most of my friends own their own homes, have garages, have more than one car in the family, and commute less than 30 miles one way to work. Something doesn't have to work for everyone in order for it to be a good solution for many. I think the current crop of EVs is going to fall short of the 100 mile range claim in hot or cold weather, but something that could reliably travel 100 miles on a full charge could be a viable transportation alternative for millions of people. And yeah, I'm fine with nuclear.
TV didn't lead, it followed. In the 1960s People were fascinated by the space program and the possibilities it presented, so TV executives decided to use characters that reflected that fascination . But then, most TV wasn't featuring intelligent people. It was featuring people like Gilligan,Gomer Pyle, Maxwell Smart or the Beverly Hillbillies. The public was interested in the space program because of the endless possibilities it presented. Once we landed on the moon a lot of that interest waned. The space shuttle, sky lab, and the international space station just didn't have the same cache as landing a person on the moon. Public interest in technology only arises when it's new and fresh. It's not to say that there is no interest after a while, but the mass appeal diminishes significantly.
The US space program didn't arise because of popular interest in science, it was born out of a perceived need to compete with the USSR in all spheres. If the Soviet Union had not gone into space, there's no telling how long it would have taken the US to land a person on the Moon. The space program came into being about 15 years after WW II, when people in the US still thought they could do anything. That can do confidence waned in the wake of the Vietnam war and Watergate.
There have to be productive places in the economy in which to invest it. The world was awash in liquidity in 2005 looking for a place to be invested. It found one. US mortgage backed securities. Or maybe all that money could have been invested in the very productive tech stock bubble of the late 1990s. US corporations are sitting on over $1 trillion looking for a productive place to invest it. If you added all the money paid into social security to that pile I'm not sure it would be any more productive. In the end, though, don't you end up with a different version of the same problem social security is facing? If the boomers own trillions and trillions of dollars worth of investments, who's going to buy all those investments from them so they can get their money back?
It might be able to complete transactions, but not in a timely manner. If social security checks didn't go out on time there'd be a political shit storm that would make the tea party seem tame.
You're offering only part of what defines a Ponzi scheme. Using that very brief and incomplete definition, most of what people invest their money in for retirement is a Ponzi scheme. Let's consider some other characteristics that define a Ponzi scheme.
Ponzi schemes offer large short term returns that are abnormally high or consistent. Social security doesn't.
Ponzi schemes require an ever increasing amount of money to continue paying off past investors. Social security has a temporary problem from the large number of boomers, but social security can be, and has been, modified in the past to reflect changes in the size of the taxpaying workforce and the number of beneficiaries. Once the boomer bump is over social security will stabilize.
Ponzi schemes don't reveal the method by which they generate their great short term results. Social security is transparent as to where the money is coming from, where it's invested and who receives benefits. It's what it claims to be, a mandatory transfer payment system under which current workers are taxed on their income, with no promise of huge payouts.
Ponzi schemes typically don't invest any of the money people invest in it. Money paid into social security is invested in U. S. government securities. Social security owns trillions of dollars of US securities. Social security owns more US government securities than China.
It's not a Ponzi scheme since there are viable alternatives for keeping the system solvent until the boomers are mostly dead. It's only a Ponzi scheme if it's impossible for it to be sustained. It isn't. You may not like the choices, but there are choices.
It's appropriate, since the entire "social security trust fund" is nothing but IOUs from a government that's deeper in debt than any other government has ever been in all of recorded history.
-jcr
But the US also has an economy that's larger than any other economy in recorded history. How large is the debt in proportion to the economy? How much of that debt is owed to the social security trust fund?
A lot of those aren't so much new laws as modifications to existing laws or regulations. How many truly new laws were there?
I DO NOT drive impaired. Yet I choose to Not drive on "DUI enforcement holidays" because I refuse to be cowed into "showing my papers" for the privilege for driving from point A to point B.
Your decision to change your behavior in order to avoid checkpoints is just another form of being 'cowed'. You've just chosen a different pasture to be fenced in. Not being cowed would be refusing to take the Breathalyzer and blood test and being willing to risk going to jail.
All of this seems to be made up. Can you cite reliable sources, please?
The financial requirements to starting a broadband ISP are so high that only a very tiny proportion of the population could consider starting an ISP that would have a chance against Comcast, TimeWarner, or other large ISPs. Back in the day, when dial up was prevalent, it was a lot easier to start an ISP, and lots of people did. Today, not so much. If individuals with very limited financial means and no connections in high places could start ISPs and compete against the corporate giants they would.
When was this golden age of swearing in broadcast? It's not like people were cussing up a storm on radio and television in the 60s,70s, and 80s. The FCC's reaction in 1973 to the broadcasting of a George Carlin album scared all broadcasters away from content to which the FCC objects. It's only of late that people have been uttering banned words on television and radio in ways that the FCC deems obscene. Whenever I hear people talk how bad censorship is these days, I have to wonder if they're aware of how bad it was before the 1970s. When performers could be arrested for obscenity for words and phrases they uttered on stage, that are today routinely tossed around in the media.
Many would draw a line between having sex with a sleeping person when the sleeping person and the other person had not been having sex, and a situation where the sleeping person and the other person were mutually and consensually naked in a bed where they had just spent the night having sex. The first situation strikes most people as criminal, the second as bad manners.
Finally, you apparently don't understand what went wrong with the financial crisis in 2007-2009. Here's the phrase that explains it all: "50 to 1 leverage". No security, no matter how regulated or safe, makes financial sense when you have. by hook or crook, that kind of leverage. Fortunately, government was around to bail all these greedy bankers and clueless investors. Of course, that means the market wasn't truly deregulated.
Regulation can restrict how much leverage banks can have. I think the financial reform bill passed last spring set it at 15 to 1. Many would like to have seen it lower, anywhere from 3 to 10 to 1. I have read, but can't cite where, that the nation’s founders limited bank leverage in their time to as low as 4-to-1.
Their stockholders got shafted, and no taxpayer funds were used to pay for anything.
Governments are huge consumers of electricity. Street lighting, water and sewage plants, schools, hospitals, police and fire stations, jails and prisons, and other governmental buildings consume a lot of electricity. Enron cost the state of California and its municipalities a great deal of money. I'd say a lot of government money went to Enron and the companies that colluded with it. When Pacific Gas & Electric went bankrupt because of Enron's market manipulation, the state needed to step in and prop up PG&E. Since the California power companies were technically bankrupt and had no buying power, the state stepped in to buy power at highly unfavorable terms on the open market. California agreed to pay $43 billion for power over the next 20 years.
I have not studied the issue, but I have seen credible arguments that the leak of the Pentagon Papers was ultimately destructive of the best interests of the American people. I do not have an opinion one way or the other at this point and the event happened far enough in the past that I am not going to do the study needed to decide. I will say that those who at that time promoted the idea that publishing the Pentagon Papers was a good idea were pushing a destructive political agenda.
Maybe you should take some time to study the issue. It could also be that the motivation of the people trying to suppress the publication was political. Maybe they knew that if the American public was aware of the real circumstances of the war it would rapidly lose support. Unlike subsequent wars, the Vietnam War relied on a draft to provide cannon fodder. Over two million Americans fought, more than 300,000 were wounded, more than 75,000 were permanently disabled, and nearly 60,000 killed. I'd say the American public had a right to know everything about why we became involved in Vietnam and what our long term odds of prevailing were. Daniel Ellsberg helped write the Pentagon Papers. He knew exactly what was in them and felt it was vital that the American people be aware of that information. He expected to spend the rest of his life in prison when he leaked them. He performed a great public service and was willing to sacrifice his freedom for the remainder of his life. Anyone that is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison in order to provide vital information to the public is a patriot in my eyes.
Considering that GM went bankrupt and its shareholders and bondholders lost their entire investment, and the CEO was canned, along with a lot of executives, I'm not sure how privatizing the profits worked in this particular situation. At this point it seems plausible that the federal government will at least break even on the GM bailout, perhaps even turning a profit.
If Bin Laden died the US would need to resurrect him. He's a boogeyman that's useful for reminding people why we spend an insane amount of money on the war on terror. For all I know the CIA has been producing all the Bin Laden videos since 2002.
Once you become famous in the US the press will quote your every word as if you have some special insight that the average person lacks. There are enough people that like Palin for reasons that have nothing to do with her intelligence or depth of insight that it guarantees coverage for every little inane thing that she says. I'm sure if Britney Spears did offer commentary on N Korea it would get wider coverage in the popular press than opinions about N Korea provided by the head of the US senate foreign relations committee. If the chair of the US senate foreign relations committee wanted his statements on N Korea to carry as much weight with the public as Britney Spears he'd first have to get caught in a major sex scandal. Then he'd be newsworthy.
Palin was on the board of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commision. It doesn't have anything to do with taxes paid by the oil industry to the state. The commission does not determine how much tax the oil companies pay to the state. What she was responsible for as governor was raising taxes on the oil companies in 2007. This permitted the state to increase the amount of money given to residents from $1200/yr to $2000/yr. Does redistributing wealth in this manner make Palin a socialist?
Because the Clinton candidacy was strong when he chose Palin, and McCain assumed (with good reason) that if Clinton got the Democratic nomination that the election would end up being about opening up a new era of equality in politics with regards to female candidates.
McCain didn't choose Palin until mid-August 2008. Obama had nearly enough pledged delegates to secure the Democratic nomination by early June. Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed Obama in June, 2008.
Daniel Ellsberg, the person released them, helped write them and knew what was in them. The only thing comparable between what wikileaks does and what Ellsberg did is that they both release classified documents. Wikileaks doesn't have any idea whether the documents they release are relevant, irrelevant, dangerous or harmless.
Dick Chenney's job right before becoming VP was CEO of Haliburton, and Cheney pushed the war on terror as hard as anyone in the Bush administration. I'm not saying he profited financially, but his ties to Haliburton could have influenced his decisions as VP.
Outside of the $20 billion dollar escrow account that BP established after meeting with Obama, and the over $500 million that BP has so far paid for cleanup costs, what other aspects of financial responsibility in this incident did you have in mind? The federal government is in court trying to lift the normal $75 million statutory limit on fines for oil spills. The Obama administration is contending that the cap cap is inapplicable in this case. Obama's 2010 campaign received $71, 000 dollars from BP employees, 0.01% of the total contributions that the campaign received, I don't think his presidential campaign received any corporate PAC money from BP. Despite your sarcasm about hope and change, I'm not convinced that $71,000 in individual campaign contributions to a $710 million dollar campaign buys much influence post election.
She ran through an entire house's worth of money, plus existing cash?
For a person moving from somewhere like Syracuse, NY, to San Francisco or NYC, the existing equity in a house may not be enough to cover a down payment. Especially if a person bought right before the real estate bubble popped.