If your spouse was a bureaucrat and you had to decrease household spending by 2.2%, the cut would be made by turning off the heat and electricity. The restaurant and entertainment budget that a sane person would cut first would not be touched. That way, the cuts would be as painful as possible so that you didn't DARE suggest a cut ever again.
This is actually a perfect analogy, except you missed slightly.
In this hypothetical household, both sides are arguing about cutting utilities vs. cutting entertainment, when the REAL problem is the fact they bought a house that is killing them on monthly payments, but they can't move. So while the actual problem expense is 10X bigger than anything they are looking at cutting, they go after crap like the monthly newspaper subscription and number of toiler paper rolls they buy.
the US is spending more money than it takes in, spending more money than it can print, even, and has been doing this for YEARS
Yeah, and in a perfect world if "we" wanted to get serious about balancing the books, a few things would have to happen:
1. Medicare would be able to negotiate bulk discounts on drugs. Yeah, for all the free-market capitalistic awesomeness magic unicorn sunny planet crap that one side spews out, they (meaning, the GOP) blocked the government's ability to negotiate pricing. Since health care expenses are growing so quickly this an enormous drag on future budget scenarios. So step one would be to decouple the ability of the big pharma to dictate their preferred profit margins to a captive audience. Or perhaps they can explain what part of a free market involves a prohibition on seeking better prices.
2. Tax reform. Close loopholes like the annual billions of dollar subsidies to oil companies, change taxes to be levied on where economic activity occurs, not where corporate shell companies funnel it to, etc. Levy a transaction tax on wall street, so they help offset the NEXT crisis they cause,
3. Scale back defense and our general presence all over the place. Sorry, but this isn't 1950 and the U.S. can't outdominate the rest of the world combined. Oh we can try, but economic ruin lies in that direction.
I mostly hate the attitude that entitlements, which may as well be called "earned benefits" since they didn't drop out of the sky and are generally funded by the people who will eventually use them, are responsible for the crisis, when a lot more blame can be assigned to greed and expectations that the consumer must somehow pay for a stable worldwide market.
Well that's one perspective, but since we lived through the 2004 re-election of Bush and the "mandate" the GOP screamed about from coast to coast, they can god damn well deal with what happened in 2012.
Those passed budgets were a sham, gutting services and preserving tax rates on the wealthy.
It all comes down to where the axe should fall, and given Obama was re-elected campaigning to raise taxes on the wealthy and preserve services for the middle and lower classes, the majority of the blame goes to the Republicans for ignoring what the MAJORITY of voters want to do.
But I do have to note that the Republican-controlled House has been passing budgets while the Dem-controlled Senate has not, which is why we've been running on continuing resolutions (and thus running up $1T per year in new debt).
Those "budgets" gutted various provisions of the ACA, which Republicans are ideologically opposed to. That, and the for-profit medical industry has their collective dicks in various congressional asses.
Basically, those budgets aren't really in good faith, cutting services (you know, services for the citizens that the taxes are ultimately drawn from) instead of drawing more revenue from places like the wealthy and wall-street (the biggest fraud perpetrators in the history of the world).
I have to note that the President has threatened to veto all of the ways the Republicans have proposed to avoid the sequester
Yes, because they are all total BS. I could also counter-note your note and observe the Republicans have failed to budge from their stance against taxing the wealthy. We're at loggerheads and while both sides are responsible, raising taxes on the wealthy was a specific platform of Obama's re-election and thus I would argue the Republicans are thwarting the will of the electorate in this matter.
Had the unions accepted a three percent pay cut and a reduction in benefits, most of those jobs would still be here.
How do you figure that? Wouldn't management just come back a few later and go through the whole thing again? Basically had they agreed the first time, they would have had another decade of paycut rounds and eventually had their jobs shipped overseas anyway.
We'll never get back what we have lost, and it all came about because steel workers were greedy.
Riiight, everything is entirely the fault of the workers, because they aren't willing to sacrifice everything in the name of management salaries, bonuses, and corporate profit margins. I mean, there's just no way ever that their jobs would have been lost to overseas competition eventually.
I mean maybe it's just me, but why is it ok for one entity to object multiple times to the same case and have it count as a a widespread rejection just because they've created several shell companies to espouse their ideas? i mean how many times have we seen "numerous" organizations write into a court case only to later find out they're all being paid by a single entity with a vested interest?
That's corporate America for you, using the interpretation that a corporation is legally a person. They're just cloning themselves in order to create more "people" on their side.
As such, the president's suggestion that space funding should be expanded, while the nation teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and loss of confidence with foriegn investors, is woefully irresponsible
No, what was woefully irresponsible was 2 bogus wars and tax cuts, e.g. Bush 43.
Infrastructure spending, creating the demand for STEM careers and so on - that's investing in the future. If there isn't money for it, raise it through taxes on fraud artists like Wall Street, close loopholes so corporations actually pax taxes or can't outsource their incomes overseas for low rates, etc.
There was a time computers cost tens of thousands of dollars. Hell, I remember when Apple introduced the LISA and its price tag was $9995. Prices will come down as volume picks up, etc.
The log does show that rated range remaining dropped at the 400 mile mark very sharply. I wonder what happened. Did Broder just park the car and leave it on overnight? The battery charge did drain quite a bit without making any distance.
Maybe he left the lights on and the radio on too, in order to further sabotage the car's battery performance! That way his willfully ignorant recharging would lead (faster) to the dead battery "gotcha" conclusion he was angling for all along.
Soon we'll have a new verb: "broderize" - to intentionally sabotage a product, especially for the purpose of confirming a held bias.
The actual facts are that President Obama more than tripled the worst President Bush deficit - and has seen those deficits hold over his entire first term.
Well if the previous administration hadn't set the country on fire AND taken a dump on the world WHILE cutting taxes for the wealthy, maybe the problems that required deficits to solve wouldn't have happened.
That's exactly what the first link says is the reason:
it [maintaining Presto] ends up taking up a lot of resources - resources that could have been spent on innovation and polish instead
and
Not only will it [switching to Webkit] free up significant engineering resources at Opera and allow us to do more innovation instead of constantly trying to adapt to the web
I'm a notebook fan - need the portability for various reasons - and have bought from a few places.
If you want Windows, try Velocity Micro http://www.velocitymicro.com/ and look into their NoteMagix line. I just checked and you can pick between various Windows 7 and 8 flavors.
Or perhaps Sager Notebooks http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php I bought a gaming notebook from them 3 years ago and it is still going strong (although I upgraded it to Windows 8 and swapped the HD for an SSD since then).
Or try System76, I bought a linux notebook from them and was happy with it. http://www.system76.com/
Back to the USA, there are already some interesting private/public delivery programs that promise to keep service costs low, too. As an example, Smartpost is an economical FedEx service that uses the USPS to deliver the last mile. Expect more of this stuff in the future.
That last mile is where the bulk of the delivery expense is. Are you sure those other low cost delivery services aren't basically externalizing their unprofitable business expenses onto, I mean taking advantage of, the Post Office?
Right... but the point is look at the investigative time and effort put into even putting Clinton is the position of being able to commit perjury.
Then look at the similar effort put into bringing Cheney or Bush up for malfeasance concerning the Iraq War, exposing Plame as a CIA employee, hell any number of other things. Republicans so quick to crucify Clinton apparently lost their principles when it was their guys doing far worse.
Or, if universities limited foreign students, maybe your physics lab would have been just one section with 5 times as many students. Do you think that would have been better?
Well, that's the free market in action. It doesn't optimize for the best results, it optimizes for profit, which may or may not produce a good result as a side effect. It was more profitable for companies to ignore security issues.
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If your spouse was a bureaucrat and you had to decrease household spending by 2.2%, the cut would be made by turning off the heat and electricity. The restaurant and entertainment budget that a sane person would cut first would not be touched. That way, the cuts would be as painful as possible so that you didn't DARE suggest a cut ever again.
This is actually a perfect analogy, except you missed slightly.
In this hypothetical household, both sides are arguing about cutting utilities vs. cutting entertainment, when the REAL problem is the fact they bought a house that is killing them on monthly payments, but they can't move. So while the actual problem expense is 10X bigger than anything they are looking at cutting, they go after crap like the monthly newspaper subscription and number of toiler paper rolls they buy.
the US is spending more money than it takes in, spending more money than it can print, even, and has been doing this for YEARS
Yeah, and in a perfect world if "we" wanted to get serious about balancing the books, a few things would have to happen:
1. Medicare would be able to negotiate bulk discounts on drugs. Yeah, for all the free-market capitalistic awesomeness magic unicorn sunny planet crap that one side spews out, they (meaning, the GOP) blocked the government's ability to negotiate pricing. Since health care expenses are growing so quickly this an enormous drag on future budget scenarios. So step one would be to decouple the ability of the big pharma to dictate their preferred profit margins to a captive audience. Or perhaps they can explain what part of a free market involves a prohibition on seeking better prices.
2. Tax reform. Close loopholes like the annual billions of dollar subsidies to oil companies, change taxes to be levied on where economic activity occurs, not where corporate shell companies funnel it to, etc. Levy a transaction tax on wall street, so they help offset the NEXT crisis they cause,
3. Scale back defense and our general presence all over the place. Sorry, but this isn't 1950 and the U.S. can't outdominate the rest of the world combined. Oh we can try, but economic ruin lies in that direction.
I mostly hate the attitude that entitlements, which may as well be called "earned benefits" since they didn't drop out of the sky and are generally funded by the people who will eventually use them, are responsible for the crisis, when a lot more blame can be assigned to greed and expectations that the consumer must somehow pay for a stable worldwide market.
Well that's one perspective, but since we lived through the 2004 re-election of Bush and the "mandate" the GOP screamed about from coast to coast, they can god damn well deal with what happened in 2012.
Those passed budgets were a sham, gutting services and preserving tax rates on the wealthy.
It all comes down to where the axe should fall, and given Obama was re-elected campaigning to raise taxes on the wealthy and preserve services for the middle and lower classes, the majority of the blame goes to the Republicans for ignoring what the MAJORITY of voters want to do.
But I do have to note that the Republican-controlled House has been passing budgets while the Dem-controlled Senate has not, which is why we've been running on continuing resolutions (and thus running up $1T per year in new debt).
Those "budgets" gutted various provisions of the ACA, which Republicans are ideologically opposed to. That, and the for-profit medical industry has their collective dicks in various congressional asses.
Basically, those budgets aren't really in good faith, cutting services (you know, services for the citizens that the taxes are ultimately drawn from) instead of drawing more revenue from places like the wealthy and wall-street (the biggest fraud perpetrators in the history of the world).
I have to note that the President has threatened to veto all of the ways the Republicans have proposed to avoid the sequester
Yes, because they are all total BS. I could also counter-note your note and observe the Republicans have failed to budge from their stance against taxing the wealthy. We're at loggerheads and while both sides are responsible, raising taxes on the wealthy was a specific platform of Obama's re-election and thus I would argue the Republicans are thwarting the will of the electorate in this matter.
Thanks for the detailed post! Really interesting to read about the various issues from somebody battling it out in the trenches, so to speak.
Had the unions accepted a three percent pay cut and a reduction in benefits, most of those jobs would still be here.
How do you figure that? Wouldn't management just come back a few later and go through the whole thing again?
Basically had they agreed the first time, they would have had another decade of paycut rounds and eventually had their jobs shipped overseas anyway.
We'll never get back what we have lost, and it all came about because steel workers were greedy.
Riiight, everything is entirely the fault of the workers, because they aren't willing to sacrifice everything in the name of management salaries, bonuses, and corporate profit margins. I mean, there's just no way ever that their jobs would have been lost to overseas competition eventually.
I mean maybe it's just me, but why is it ok for one entity to object multiple times to the same case and have it count as a a widespread rejection just because they've created several shell companies to espouse their ideas? i mean how many times have we seen "numerous" organizations write into a court case only to later find out they're all being paid by a single entity with a vested interest?
That's corporate America for you, using the interpretation that a corporation is legally a person. They're just cloning themselves in order to create more "people" on their side.
Last year, Amazon Web Services' cloud came out on top, but this year Microsoft Azure outperformed AWS in performance and reliability measures.
Well, the difference is last year there was a leap day, which took Azure down for half the day, and this year there wasn't!
As such, the president's suggestion that space funding should be expanded, while the nation teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and loss of confidence with foriegn investors, is woefully irresponsible
No, what was woefully irresponsible was 2 bogus wars and tax cuts, e.g. Bush 43.
Infrastructure spending, creating the demand for STEM careers and so on - that's investing in the future. If there isn't money for it, raise it through taxes on fraud artists like Wall Street, close loopholes so corporations actually pax taxes or can't outsource their incomes overseas for low rates, etc.
There was a time computers cost tens of thousands of dollars. Hell, I remember when Apple introduced the LISA and its price tag was $9995.
Prices will come down as volume picks up, etc.
The log does show that rated range remaining dropped at the 400 mile mark very sharply. I wonder what happened. Did Broder just park the car and leave it on overnight? The battery charge did drain quite a bit without making any distance.
Maybe he left the lights on and the radio on too, in order to further sabotage the car's battery performance! That way his willfully ignorant recharging would lead (faster) to the dead battery "gotcha" conclusion he was angling for all along.
Soon we'll have a new verb: "broderize" - to intentionally sabotage a product, especially for the purpose of confirming a held bias.
When did the definition of tyranny become "Government doing something I don't like"?
Whenever Democrats are in charge, Republicans suddenly start screaming about tyranny.
Considering that polls consistently show that more U.S. citizens oppose Obama's policies than support them
Huh? What polls, the ones FOX runs where they poll their moron analysts?
The actual facts are that President Obama more than tripled the worst President Bush deficit - and has seen those deficits hold over his entire first term.
Well if the previous administration hadn't set the country on fire AND taken a dump on the world WHILE cutting taxes for the wealthy, maybe the problems that required deficits to solve wouldn't have happened.
That's exactly what the first link says is the reason:
it [maintaining Presto] ends up taking up a lot of resources - resources that could have been spent on innovation and polish instead
and
Not only will it [switching to Webkit] free up significant engineering resources at Opera and allow us to do more innovation instead of constantly trying to adapt to the web
I'm a notebook fan - need the portability for various reasons - and have bought from a few places.
If you want Windows, try Velocity Micro http://www.velocitymicro.com/ and look into their NoteMagix line. I just checked and you can pick between various Windows 7 and 8 flavors.
Or perhaps Sager Notebooks http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php I bought a gaming notebook from them 3 years ago and it is still going strong (although I upgraded it to Windows 8 and swapped the HD for an SSD since then).
Or try System76, I bought a linux notebook from them and was happy with it. http://www.system76.com/
I can name one off the top of my head: Darrell Issa, chair of the Oversight Committee. He definitely wants to gut the USPS.
Back to the USA, there are already some interesting private/public delivery programs that promise to keep service costs low, too. As an example, Smartpost is an economical FedEx service that uses the USPS to deliver the last mile. Expect more of this stuff in the future.
That last mile is where the bulk of the delivery expense is. Are you sure those other low cost delivery services aren't basically externalizing their unprofitable business expenses onto, I mean taking advantage of, the Post Office?
I have my own ideas about patents
You should hurry up and patent those ideas...
demand for a tablet-laptop halfbreed
Aha! What would make these things sell is a better name for them: the tabtop? Or the laplet?? ;)
Right... but the point is look at the investigative time and effort put into even putting Clinton is the position of being able to commit perjury.
Then look at the similar effort put into bringing Cheney or Bush up for malfeasance concerning the Iraq War, exposing Plame as a CIA employee, hell any number of other things. Republicans so quick to crucify Clinton apparently lost their principles when it was their guys doing far worse.
Or, if universities limited foreign students, maybe your physics lab would have been just one section with 5 times as many students. Do you think that would have been better?
OP is talking about Windows Surface, where Win 8 or Win RT eats up a lot of storage.
Well, that's the free market in action. It doesn't optimize for the best results, it optimizes for profit, which may or may not produce a good result as a side effect.
It was more profitable for companies to ignore security issues.