You're missing the loophole in the law. The U.S. Mint is authorized to print money, and there is an exception for PLATINUM coins - it can mint them in any denomination desired. This obviously is meant for commemorative coins for collectors, special issues, etc. But the law is worded vaguely, and would let the Treasury Secretary mint a platinum coin he/she declares to be worth any amount he wants.
That's why military spending is such a sacred cow.
Well then Republicans should stop going on and on about how government spending is wasteful, government spending does create jobs, etc. How many times did those retards mention in the recent Presidential campaign that the government doesn't create jobs?
The fact is, many corporations are symbiotically tied to a government (i.e. public) trough of money. At least be honest about it.
All the benefits you list also apply to corporations. Highways, roads, fire department, police, etc. Sure people benefit, but so do corporations with even more expensive assets and infrastructure requirements.
And on top of that, corporations benefit more from defense spending which helps them gather resources from halfway around the world and ship it back here without getting it stolen by pirates (real pirates, as in guys with guns on a boat seizing property).
Under this logic, corporations should be funding a hell of a lot more than they do. The nominal tax rate is 30% or whatever, but they REALLY pay more like 0% to 10%. For a crapload of benefits.
Lets say top end rates go back to some of the historically high ones that have existed.. say 70% to 90% on income above $X, what possible incentive would there be to earn that money in the US? Someone with the ability to earn that money will choose to do it in a region where its not taxed like that.
Look at Google, Starbucks, etc, that are doing just that by taking that income in places like Ireland. So no they dont say "I just wont make more", they do it outside the US where they dont pay taxes on it and that money leaves our economy.
This is a loophole that needs to be closed. Corporations should pay taxes based on the citizenship of their customers. Sorry Google and Starbucks and everybody else, if you book your money through Ireland or some Caribbean island, that's where your customers should be from. If the money come from the U.S. or Europe or wherever, you should pay taxes to that country.
If you want to talk about "fairness" - how about letting private citizenship incorporate themselves overseas? I mean, if it's so critical for corporations to do this, how about me? I want to live/work in the U.S. but collect my money in Luxembourg and pay much lower taxes. Oh, I'm screwing over wherever I live? Isn't that true of corporations? Why do they get a pass?
It's a crying shame how much the system is abused, and how it will continue to be abused until a good, hard long look is taken at the abuse, and the ones enabling it get punished for their crimes.
Wait, are you talking about people abusing entitlements, or banks getting bailout money for their incompetence? Run some numbers... that dollar amount of abuse from the first group is roundoff error of the amount of abuse from the second group.
So yeah. Unfortunately, there will always be people voting as often as they can to have a life that is work free, provided by a government that cares. It's sad, but it's happening, and I don't believe it's sustainable in any run.
So, are you talking about welfare for people, or corporations buying politicians so their industries are propped up by the government?
It gives benefits to the old/sick people at the expense of the young/healthy people. That's the whole point of forcing everyone to buy the insurance, whether they want/need it or not.
Except for the first sentence, the same could be said of car insurance. In fact, that's the entire business model of insurance in general - shared/pooled risk.
I'm sure that even you, anonymous coward, would have no problem drawing benefits even if you grudgingly pay in.
If you want statistical data, just look for it and you will find it. Choose any field, anything at all, anywhere, at any time of human civilization, at the top women are from rare to non existent. Do you need more evidence than that?
Come on, this is something only a stupid man would come up with.;)
As for the actual "statistical" proof here, throughout the vast majority of history, women haven't received equal education/study opportunities. I doubt there are significant differences in the innate intelligence of men vs. women.
capitalism is the best system ever devised for creating wealth
I can agree with this part of your sentence
and a higher standard of living for a population
But not so much this part. Think mid-19th century industrial revolution, where people worked long hours, with no benefits, no labor restrictions (rampant child labor), no concern for safety, etc. Unrestrained capitalism isn't so great for the workers. It leads to sweatshop conditions we see in other countries.
Yes. Private citizens (so long as they can store them safely) should be allowed the same arms that the government has. Although, the sheer price of such things would keep them off the street (how many people do you know can afford to buy a $200,000+ tank?). Indeed, if people are willing to pay the price to license them most weapon can be bought.
$200K? Mitt Romney can afford to buy 1250 of those...? Sure there aren't many billionaires compared to the average population, but if you are setting the bar at $200K keeping them off the street, you are deluded.
Instead the second amendment was written to allow private citizens to own the same weapons that the government had access to, therefore assuring that if the republic would turn to tyranny the citizens could stage an armed revolt and change the government.
So citizens can have the same drones, tanks, missiles, nuclear, chemical, biological weapons, etc? What could possibly go wrong?
The fact terrorism kills more than mass shootings basically comes down to the numbers a single huge event (9/11), and leaving out the "normal" annual deaths from gun violence. If you counted homicides, deaths from gun violence would outnumber 9/11 every year.
Yes it does. It's the 'metro' interface which has exactly ONE app on screen at any one time (apparently random times too!).
I was just farting around with my work Win 8 machine, and found you can force a Metro app to share the desktop with desktop apps. I hadn't seen that before.
I knew you could have 2 metro apps up, splitting the screen 75%-25%, and from there I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL (unfortunately the keyboard I have attached to my Win 8 machine has a busted Windows key, grrrr) and picked "Task Manager". What I got was a desktop taking up 75% of the screen, and my previous Metro app on the rest. It looks weird.
All the other improvements I can think of, are "under the hood" kernel type stuff regular people aren't going to care about, or be able to make sense of.
Windows 8 improves ASLR, allows NX non-paged pool driver memory allocations. It introduces some security features like ELAM (well ok, that one might be a double-edge sword that slices the user more than it protects them), etc. There is a new integrity below "low", called "app container", which basically applies to Metro apps and contains them in their sandbox, restrict r/w access to parts of the OS, etc.
Improvements are there, along with Metro. They just aren't really marketable to normal users.
This is what I do as well - spend 95% of my time in the normal desktop mode, and tolerate TIFKAM (The Interface Formerly Known As Metro).
It's occasionally frustrating; for example I'll look at screenshots I take by navigating to the folder from the desktop. Double click and I get a "metro tile flip" to metro and see my screenshot. Then I have to hit the Windows key to get back to TIFKAM and then click desktop to get back to desktop. It kinda sucks.
If I start the picture viewer from the Metro side, it can't find any screenshots. That's because very few (any?) games save their stuff into the correct folder that the sandboxed Metro image viewer can see.
I'm trying to install as little as possible onto the system (I clean installed Windows 8 over my previous Windows 7 setup) and I'm probably going to break down and get some kind of regular image viewer to avoid going to Metro. Or maybe I can fix that by re-associating images with mspaint or something (ugh).
Anyway, I can put up with this as my Windows 8 machine is literally only for games. The only thing I have besides games installed is Google Chrome. I can imagine regular people might be quite disoriented with the desktopmetro flipping and trying to figure out why the Metro half of the OS can't find the files the desktop half can.
And if guns make people kill, why don't we see these rich guys mowing people down in malls?
Guns don't make people kill... but if somebody is mentally disturbed and wants to go out taking lots of others, they reach for a suitable weapon that will let them do that. The rich people that are unbalanced actually get the mental care they need.
Your first quote concerns 1992, back then? WTF that was 20 years ago. Second quote about Israel and Switzerland and allowable guns. What year is that from? Here's some info less than a week old about these supposed gun-toting utopias: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/291278_Mythbusting-_Israel_and_Switze In both countries you NOW actually need a reason for a gun, and they are often kept stashed with a quartermaster (or equivalent) depot. Not exactly like the US where, for example, you can be mentally ill and on the goddamned terrorist watch list and still purchase firearms.
Third quote, published "last year" - how about some context? Last year from when, 1980?
I get that gun nuts can spin lots of stories. The bottom line is many gun control advocates, including NRA members, would approve of SOME (not fascist crackdowns like gun fans would have you believe) tighter restrictions on various classes of weapons. We aren't talking about controlling rifles and/or handguns, even semi automatics. I for one don't see why 30+ clip magazines and automatic-fire assault rifles are as freely available as they are.
And as for the touch experiment, why the hell would you want touch on a Kindle? I actually know people who went out of their way not to get the Kindle touch
I have a non-touch Kindle, and if I weren't just going to ditch it in favor of other tablets I own, I'd definitely want a touch model. I hate using the joystick to move up/down (e.g. when I place a book into a category) because that is slow as hell, especially when it always starts at the top and I have to scroll/nudge down a half dozen times. Also, I don't type on the little circular-key keyboard often enough to want it sucking up the bottom 20% of the space available. You may be mystified by people that want touch as much as I am mystified by people that don't.
Do you have one? My experience is first hand, I've wanted something other than the joystick thumb 5 position controller and keyboard since about one week after getting a touch smartphone.
I don't see that as a make-or-break feature for the vast majority of consumers. Basically the flaw here is... most people don't read outside for 4 hours straight. The ones that do aren't doing it often enough to care.
I have a Kindle (2nd gen), Nexus 7, and iPad Mini. The Kindle is gathering dust and literally its only advantage is the free 3G whispersync. I'm going to gift it to a friend who wants one but lives on a really tight budget.
It has been conclusively shown again and again that the purpose of the second amendment is not to fight zombies, but to resist tyranny.
If that's the purpose, then I hate to break it to you, but you've lost. Do you seriously think you can resist tyranny with the second amendment? If the government were seriously committed to tyranny, they've got a military that can drawn upon drones, hellfire missiles , tanks, nukes, chem/bio weapons, air strikes, etc. You and your assault rifle would be hamburger ground up from the smoking crater that used to be the house you lived in.
That software written before or built on software predating Metro might not be Metro? I know, I'm still waiting for Excel 2.0 to be a 32-bit Windows NT application.
I would say if they want serious buy-in from developers, then they need to actually show some faith in their own products. Waiting for some ancient version of a product to be ported is stupid, like your example, but expecting a 32 bit version to come out eventually isn't.
Same thing with Metro - if this is the awesome interface of the future they are invested in, then let's see something in addition to little applets and Internet Explorer.
But now people treat all the days as vacation days - so they come in when they're sick because they don't want to blow a vacation day on it.
This happened at a previous employer as well - we had separate sick and vacation time, then after a corporate merger it became a pool of PTO - result was people coming in deathly ill anyway, because they didn't want to eat up their vacation days since it drew from the same pool.
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You're missing the loophole in the law. The U.S. Mint is authorized to print money, and there is an exception for PLATINUM coins - it can mint them in any denomination desired. This obviously is meant for commemorative coins for collectors, special issues, etc. But the law is worded vaguely, and would let the Treasury Secretary mint a platinum coin he/she declares to be worth any amount he wants.
That's why military spending is such a sacred cow.
Well then Republicans should stop going on and on about how government spending is wasteful, government spending does create jobs, etc. How many times did those retards mention in the recent Presidential campaign that the government doesn't create jobs?
The fact is, many corporations are symbiotically tied to a government (i.e. public) trough of money. At least be honest about it.
All the benefits you list also apply to corporations. Highways, roads, fire department, police, etc. Sure people benefit, but so do corporations with even more expensive assets and infrastructure requirements.
And on top of that, corporations benefit more from defense spending which helps them gather resources from halfway around the world and ship it back here without getting it stolen by pirates (real pirates, as in guys with guns on a boat seizing property).
Under this logic, corporations should be funding a hell of a lot more than they do. The nominal tax rate is 30% or whatever, but they REALLY pay more like 0% to 10%. For a crapload of benefits.
Lets say top end rates go back to some of the historically high ones that have existed.. say 70% to 90% on income above $X, what possible incentive would there be to earn that money in the US? Someone with the ability to earn that money will choose to do it in a region where its not taxed like that.
Look at Google, Starbucks, etc, that are doing just that by taking that income in places like Ireland. So no they dont say "I just wont make more", they do it outside the US where they dont pay taxes on it and that money leaves our economy.
This is a loophole that needs to be closed. Corporations should pay taxes based on the citizenship of their customers. Sorry Google and Starbucks and everybody else, if you book your money through Ireland or some Caribbean island, that's where your customers should be from. If the money come from the U.S. or Europe or wherever, you should pay taxes to that country.
If you want to talk about "fairness" - how about letting private citizenship incorporate themselves overseas? I mean, if it's so critical for corporations to do this, how about me? I want to live/work in the U.S. but collect my money in Luxembourg and pay much lower taxes. Oh, I'm screwing over wherever I live? Isn't that true of corporations? Why do they get a pass?
It's a crying shame how much the system is abused, and how it will continue to be abused until a good, hard long look is taken at the abuse, and the ones enabling it get punished for their crimes.
Wait, are you talking about people abusing entitlements, or banks getting bailout money for their incompetence?
Run some numbers... that dollar amount of abuse from the first group is roundoff error of the amount of abuse from the second group.
So yeah. Unfortunately, there will always be people voting as often as they can to have a life that is work free, provided by a government that cares. It's sad, but it's happening, and I don't believe it's sustainable in any run.
So, are you talking about welfare for people, or corporations buying politicians so their industries are propped up by the government?
It gives benefits to the old/sick people at the expense of the young/healthy people. That's the whole point of forcing everyone to buy the insurance, whether they want/need it or not.
Except for the first sentence, the same could be said of car insurance. In fact, that's the entire business model of insurance in general - shared/pooled risk.
I'm sure that even you, anonymous coward, would have no problem drawing benefits even if you grudgingly pay in.
I think there will be always a conflict in that regards between the FOSS world and the normal consumer.
Basically, the conflict between what actually survives in the market, and what some people think should survive in the market.
If you want statistical data, just look for it and you will find it. Choose any field, anything at all, anywhere, at any time of human civilization, at the top women are from rare to non existent. Do you need more evidence than that?
Come on, this is something only a stupid man would come up with. ;)
As for the actual "statistical" proof here, throughout the vast majority of history, women haven't received equal education/study opportunities. I doubt there are significant differences in the innate intelligence of men vs. women.
capitalism is the best system ever devised for creating wealth
I can agree with this part of your sentence
and a higher standard of living for a population
But not so much this part. Think mid-19th century industrial revolution, where people worked long hours, with no benefits, no labor restrictions (rampant child labor), no concern for safety, etc. Unrestrained capitalism isn't so great for the workers. It leads to sweatshop conditions we see in other countries.
Yes. Private citizens (so long as they can store them safely) should be allowed the same arms that the government has. Although, the sheer price of such things would keep them off the street (how many people do you know can afford to buy a $200,000+ tank?). Indeed, if people are willing to pay the price to license them most weapon can be bought.
$200K? Mitt Romney can afford to buy 1250 of those...? Sure there aren't many billionaires compared to the average population, but if you are setting the bar at $200K keeping them off the street, you are deluded.
Instead the second amendment was written to allow private citizens to own the same weapons that the government had access to, therefore assuring that if the republic would turn to tyranny the citizens could stage an armed revolt and change the government.
So citizens can have the same drones, tanks, missiles, nuclear, chemical, biological weapons, etc?
What could possibly go wrong?
They're significantly more innocent than the violent assholes threatening them.
Agreed... basically the gun nuts here are arguing that it's okay to threaten others. They're what is wrong with the U.S.
Who said anything about mass shootings? Only you. Mass shootings kill about as many people in this country as terrorism. They are that rare
Rare? That word doesn't mean what you think it means. The U.S. is averaging a mass shooting every 6 months, over the last 20 years:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data
The fact terrorism kills more than mass shootings basically comes down to the numbers a single huge event (9/11), and leaving out the "normal" annual deaths from gun violence. If you counted homicides, deaths from gun violence would outnumber 9/11 every year.
They are kinda pricey for a 2 year degree that gets you technician work.
According to their tuition chart:
http://www.devry.edu/assets/pdf/uscatalog/US-Catalog-tuition-chart.pdf
That's about $45K.
So it isn't a scam, but grads need to balance degree cost vs. earning power. Maybe your company pays their technicians awesome salaries or something.
Unfortunately, he mispeld.
Hilarious (emphasis mine)!!
Yes it does. It's the 'metro' interface which has exactly ONE app on screen at any one time (apparently random times too!).
I was just farting around with my work Win 8 machine, and found you can force a Metro app to share the desktop with desktop apps. I hadn't seen that before.
I knew you could have 2 metro apps up, splitting the screen 75%-25%, and from there I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL (unfortunately the keyboard I have attached to my Win 8 machine has a busted Windows key, grrrr) and picked "Task Manager". What I got was a desktop taking up 75% of the screen, and my previous Metro app on the rest. It looks weird.
All the other improvements I can think of, are "under the hood" kernel type stuff regular people aren't going to care about, or be able to make sense of.
Windows 8 improves ASLR, allows NX non-paged pool driver memory allocations. It introduces some security features like ELAM (well ok, that one might be a double-edge sword that slices the user more than it protects them), etc. There is a new integrity below "low", called "app container", which basically applies to Metro apps and contains them in their sandbox, restrict r/w access to parts of the OS, etc.
Improvements are there, along with Metro. They just aren't really marketable to normal users.
This is what I do as well - spend 95% of my time in the normal desktop mode, and tolerate TIFKAM (The Interface Formerly Known As Metro).
It's occasionally frustrating; for example I'll look at screenshots I take by navigating to the folder from the desktop. Double click and I get a "metro tile flip" to metro and see my screenshot. Then I have to hit the Windows key to get back to TIFKAM and then click desktop to get back to desktop. It kinda sucks.
If I start the picture viewer from the Metro side, it can't find any screenshots. That's because very few (any?) games save their stuff into the correct folder that the sandboxed Metro image viewer can see.
I'm trying to install as little as possible onto the system (I clean installed Windows 8 over my previous Windows 7 setup) and I'm probably going to break down and get some kind of regular image viewer to avoid going to Metro. Or maybe I can fix that by re-associating images with mspaint or something (ugh).
Anyway, I can put up with this as my Windows 8 machine is literally only for games. The only thing I have besides games installed is Google Chrome. I can imagine regular people might be quite disoriented with the desktopmetro flipping and trying to figure out why the Metro half of the OS can't find the files the desktop half can.
And if guns make people kill, why don't we see these rich guys mowing people down in malls?
Guns don't make people kill... but if somebody is mentally disturbed and wants to go out taking lots of others, they reach for a suitable weapon that will let them do that. The rich people that are unbalanced actually get the mental care they need.
Looks a little cherry picked there.
Your first quote concerns 1992, back then? WTF that was 20 years ago.
Second quote about Israel and Switzerland and allowable guns. What year is that from? Here's some info less than a week old about these supposed gun-toting utopias:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/291278_Mythbusting-_Israel_and_Switze
In both countries you NOW actually need a reason for a gun, and they are often kept stashed with a quartermaster (or equivalent) depot. Not exactly like the US where, for example, you can be mentally ill and on the goddamned terrorist watch list and still purchase firearms.
Third quote, published "last year" - how about some context? Last year from when, 1980?
I get that gun nuts can spin lots of stories. The bottom line is many gun control advocates, including NRA members, would approve of SOME (not fascist crackdowns like gun fans would have you believe) tighter restrictions on various classes of weapons. We aren't talking about controlling rifles and/or handguns, even semi automatics. I for one don't see why 30+ clip magazines and automatic-fire assault rifles are as freely available as they are.
And as for the touch experiment, why the hell would you want touch on a Kindle? I actually know people who went out of their way not to get the Kindle touch
I have a non-touch Kindle, and if I weren't just going to ditch it in favor of other tablets I own, I'd definitely want a touch model. I hate using the joystick to move up/down (e.g. when I place a book into a category) because that is slow as hell, especially when it always starts at the top and I have to scroll/nudge down a half dozen times. Also, I don't type on the little circular-key keyboard often enough to want it sucking up the bottom 20% of the space available. You may be mystified by people that want touch as much as I am mystified by people that don't.
Do you have one? My experience is first hand, I've wanted something other than the joystick thumb 5 position controller and keyboard since about one week after getting a touch smartphone.
I don't see that as a make-or-break feature for the vast majority of consumers. Basically the flaw here is... most people don't read outside for 4 hours straight. The ones that do aren't doing it often enough to care.
I have a Kindle (2nd gen), Nexus 7, and iPad Mini. The Kindle is gathering dust and literally its only advantage is the free 3G whispersync. I'm going to gift it to a friend who wants one but lives on a really tight budget.
It has been conclusively shown again and again that the purpose of the second amendment is not to fight zombies, but to resist tyranny.
If that's the purpose, then I hate to break it to you, but you've lost. Do you seriously think you can resist tyranny with the second amendment? If the government were seriously committed to tyranny, they've got a military that can drawn upon drones, hellfire missiles , tanks, nukes, chem/bio weapons, air strikes, etc. You and your assault rifle would be hamburger ground up from the smoking crater that used to be the house you lived in.
That software written before or built on software predating Metro might not be Metro? I know, I'm still waiting for Excel 2.0 to be a 32-bit Windows NT application.
I would say if they want serious buy-in from developers, then they need to actually show some faith in their own products. Waiting for some ancient version of a product to be ported is stupid, like your example, but expecting a 32 bit version to come out eventually isn't.
Same thing with Metro - if this is the awesome interface of the future they are invested in, then let's see something in addition to little applets and Internet Explorer.
But now people treat all the days as vacation days - so they come in when they're sick because they don't want to blow a vacation day on it.
This happened at a previous employer as well - we had separate sick and vacation time, then after a corporate merger it became a pool of PTO - result was people coming in deathly ill anyway, because they didn't want to eat up their vacation days since it drew from the same pool.