'Like the notion that if the average Congressman knew that he had to depend on Social Security for his retirement, it would have been fixed (i.e. made sustainable) a long time ago."
What have you been smoking? In Congress-Critters had to rely on SS, it would have been made insolvent long ago as they would have larded it up with baubles for "next of kin" which would have included first, second, and third cousins and the family cat. Remember, a Congress-Critter feels an election cycle has been wasted if s/he cannot claim to have brought home a "project" for the locals to yokel about.
Of course Google thinks of Apple as competition, Google would like to control access to information and Apple makes the iPhone and iPad. I guess living in the real world isn't all its cracked up to be. Google thinks of MS as competition also and thought that long before Ballmer got the hots for Yahoo. Maybe you missed Google Docs and other Google software...real world, you should see it sometime.
I never said it was a sensible feeling for Jobs to feel double-crossed, merely that he felt double-crossed. It still had nothing to do with Apple not accepting competition.
Jobs wasn't whining about competition, he was whining about Google having a mole on Apple's board and an unwritten agreement that Apple wouldn't do search and Google wouldn't do phones. He felt double crossed and whine about it. Morons like you attached the "Apple doesn't like competition" to it.
I hear China is cornering the market by buying mod point mines. Most them are in China anyhow. The mod point shortage is coming, too bad you cannot save them for a rainy day.
PID stands for Proportional, Integral, Derivative, it is a type of feedback control. I'd be surprised if the vehicle didn't have one of these and it itself is the source of the problem.
I hope your idea catches on big time. It will provide the fuel my new company will need:
"Having trouble talking to a company phone drone about a technical problem? For $19.99 in small bills we'll send you our Talk Technical DVD. You will be able to throw terms like, 'your software is throwing error code 0x3423'.
Our Talk Technical course will teach you computer terms, phone terms, cable terms, and HD TV terms. There is no need to understand the complicated basis for these terms in order to use them like a pro.
I didn't say it was okay for professionals to screw up. The malpractice insurance rates are driving doctors out of the profession, though. And the tort laws are distorting medical care by making individual decisions wag the medical dog. This leads to the age old conundrum, we have a finite amount of money and if we spend x on kidney dialysis, we spent y - x on cancer prevention. If your boob job, tummy tuck, or fanny tuck don't take, do you get compensated as a failed heart valve replacement?
I contend the tort laws are out of whack and benefit mainly the lawyers. There does need to be compensation for victims, but the victims are not the lawyers.
Yes, I knew that when I wrote what I did. And I am sympathetic and wish I could do something about that. I think that older people should not so much retire as fade away. And younger people should fade in. This would ease both ends. I wish I could say mentor young people with old people and sometimes that works. It is not guaranteed to work, both can be so intolerant as to not learn from the other...but I do think it should be built into the system so that it is expected and not a novelty.
With advanced age, one also runs into age discrimination. That can happen at both ends of the age spectrum, but you have time to recover when you are younger. And age discrimination starts early. If you are not a star by 30-35, you will have to make yourself a star (self-employed). Not all of us have what it takes to do that.
Both age groups need to readjust their expectations. Youngsters will not get off on the same economic foot as the boomers. But boomers should not be allowed to waste their resources on themselves either.
Well, it is a pyramid scheme but the government isn't attempting to hide the lack of funding. There have been numerous reports. The difference is that you have no choice.
In retrospect to what I wrote above, I think benefits should start going away at income of $50,000 when you draw social security. And that number should not be fixed in stone but fluid to reflect the amount of money being paid in. It is drastic and it does make it difficult to people to make decisions. However, currently the only sensible decision one can make is to assume there will be no SS when they retire.
You are correct, nothing can guarantee the value of money over time. Even material collateral won't necessarily hold up. One of the best things to invest in, even at today's high prices, is education. And education should never, ever stop.
"Mostly, you can think of it as a payment from yourself now, to yourself later."
I don't think this is true. SS is paying beneficiaries now with money taxed now. It is not going into some magical pot with your name on it to be opened when you retire. If the tax money is not there when you retire, you and everyone that looks like you is screwed.
The problem with SS is that too many people have a straw in it. And it the boomers are going to make it all worse because the working population won't be large enough to support these whiners. They will whine because that's what they've always done. The government has taken one minor step, my retirement age is 66 + 3 months, not 65, according to the SS administration. But I'm at the tail end of the boomers. All boomers should be retiring much later, just as pay back for having to listen to them all these years if there is justice left in the world.
My retirement age should be later that than, say 70. And capping contributions to be made on only the first $105,000 or so of income (I think this cap is still there) is plain silly. You should pay SS on all income. And they need to cut the social contract in such a manner that if your retirement income is above, say, $60,000 per year, you slowly lose benefits until income $100,000 where you cease to get any distribution from SS. Unfair? Nope. It is merely the contribution you will make as citizen to the rest who are less well off and have not benefitted from living in the U.S. as long as you and continue to reap the rewards of a +$100,000 income.
I'm sure there are other adjustments that could be made. Whack the insurance companies and make health care run by nonprofit cooperatives. That is the way Blue Cross and Blue Shield started. In the 70's, insurance companies figured out they could make a killing in health care and have been killing us ever since. Reform the tort laws, it isn't Christmas just because some doctor or medical establishment screwed up.
It is true to a certain extent in Japan that societal harmony has more of a hold than in, say, America. Japan is very homogeneous and outsiders are seen as disrupting this. That may come about by simply having their own island for a very long time, somewhat like a house with a few cats when a new one is introduced.
I'm not sure about the other Asian countries. Culture is a touchy thing and I don't anyone would confuse the Chinese with the Japanese culture. It also is not clear to me that over time, the Japanese might not gravitate toward more individuality; it has not been that long since Emperor worship held sway.
While I agree in general, S. Korea and Japan don't have nearly the population China does. China could spend a long time as the low cost manufacturer simply because there are so many poor peasants to be put to work.
And because the U.S. had no standing Army to speak of, both wars were allowed to spiral into conflicts that required an immense effort in the U.S. to overcome.
How about you explain to the Chinese, Russians, French, etc. why millions of their people had to die because people like you have too many moral problems to permit the U.S. from preventing their deaths.
There's also no way you'll get any kind of coherent policy among the states for what is now handled by the federal government. It would be a U.S. run by corporations which would play off one state against another.
"assholishness" That's some argument style you have there.
yeah, that's it. The Obama Administration, on the backs of blaming the Bush Administration for all the foreign policy screwups, decided that they could get away with screwing the Chinese covertly. It must have been them, my gut tells me this. Just saying...
I rather imagine that China is willing to settle for domination. That allows them to control their largest market, something like a pet poodle. It also gives them leverage when the Chinese leaders decide that their penises would be larger were they to conquer the Greatest Living Empire That Ever Existed. I am speaking, of course, of Taiwan. It would confirm their belief that they have been smiled upon by the Heavens to take up their rightful mandate.
There is the possibility that the Chinese have hacked the mod-point generator and given their astroturfers oodles of points. The only way to settle this is to give everyone gobs of points and let the war begin. "We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in bed,..." well, I don't channel Winston Churchill very well but he certainly not stand for this.
And the founders had to go back and add a bill of rights; there were several amendments to the constitution also. The world isn't as it was back then, there's no reason to think that allowing no changes would have allowed the U.S. to continue its existence.
Not allowing for a standing army means no counter to WWI Germany, WWII Germany and Japan. No counter to Stalin.
The founders never found a reason for NiH, NSF, Social Security, FDA, NISTA, or any of the other alphabet soup of government arms we found necessary to protect us from the elements. They also never found a use for federally funded education or more recently, universal health care.
But we could always disband the U.S. Military because, y'know, the world is a bunny world where there are no goblins and everyone just wants to be happy.
The U.S. companies are not having their IP stolen. The Business School Product employed by U.S. companies are foolishly offshoring their companies' IP as fast as they can. These were the people you met in college that couldn't get through Engineering or Science or Liberal Arts degrees. They went to the Business School so they could become widgets. Then they turned on those of us who were busy producing and sold that IP and sometimes us to the highest overseas bidder. At last sighting, they were hawking their grandmothers for 20 pieces of silver.
Philosophy is not easy to bullshit your way through. Take a course on Satre or Kant sometime. Most quality philosophy curricula require 2 foreign languages as well.
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'Like the notion that if the average Congressman knew that he had to depend on Social Security for his retirement, it would have been fixed (i.e. made sustainable) a long time ago."
What have you been smoking? In Congress-Critters had to rely on SS, it would have been made insolvent long ago as they would have larded it up with baubles for "next of kin" which would have included first, second, and third cousins and the family cat. Remember, a Congress-Critter feels an election cycle has been wasted if s/he cannot claim to have brought home a "project" for the locals to yokel about.
Of course Google thinks of Apple as competition, Google would like to control access to information and Apple makes the iPhone and iPad. I guess living in the real world isn't all its cracked up to be. Google thinks of MS as competition also and thought that long before Ballmer got the hots for Yahoo. Maybe you missed Google Docs and other Google software...real world, you should see it sometime.
I never said it was a sensible feeling for Jobs to feel double-crossed, merely that he felt double-crossed. It still had nothing to do with Apple not accepting competition.
Jobs wasn't whining about competition, he was whining about Google having a mole on Apple's board and an unwritten agreement that Apple wouldn't do search and Google wouldn't do phones. He felt double crossed and whine about it. Morons like you attached the "Apple doesn't like competition" to it.
I hear China is cornering the market by buying mod point mines. Most them are in China anyhow. The mod point shortage is coming, too bad you cannot save them for a rainy day.
PID stands for Proportional, Integral, Derivative, it is a type of feedback control. I'd be surprised if the vehicle didn't have one of these and it itself is the source of the problem.
I hope your idea catches on big time. It will provide the fuel my new company will need:
"Having trouble talking to a company phone drone about a technical problem? For $19.99 in small bills we'll send you our Talk Technical DVD. You will be able to throw terms like, 'your software is throwing error code 0x3423'.
Our Talk Technical course will teach you computer terms, phone terms, cable terms, and HD TV terms. There is no need to understand the complicated basis for these terms in order to use them like a pro.
Don't be a patsy, get tough, get technical!"
I didn't say it was okay for professionals to screw up. The malpractice insurance rates are driving doctors out of the profession, though. And the tort laws are distorting medical care by making individual decisions wag the medical dog. This leads to the age old conundrum, we have a finite amount of money and if we spend x on kidney dialysis, we spent y - x on cancer prevention. If your boob job, tummy tuck, or fanny tuck don't take, do you get compensated as a failed heart valve replacement?
I contend the tort laws are out of whack and benefit mainly the lawyers. There does need to be compensation for victims, but the victims are not the lawyers.
Yes, I knew that when I wrote what I did. And I am sympathetic and wish I could do something about that. I think that older people should not so much retire as fade away. And younger people should fade in. This would ease both ends. I wish I could say mentor young people with old people and sometimes that works. It is not guaranteed to work, both can be so intolerant as to not learn from the other...but I do think it should be built into the system so that it is expected and not a novelty.
With advanced age, one also runs into age discrimination. That can happen at both ends of the age spectrum, but you have time to recover when you are younger. And age discrimination starts early. If you are not a star by 30-35, you will have to make yourself a star (self-employed). Not all of us have what it takes to do that.
Both age groups need to readjust their expectations. Youngsters will not get off on the same economic foot as the boomers. But boomers should not be allowed to waste their resources on themselves either.
Well, it is a pyramid scheme but the government isn't attempting to hide the lack of funding. There have been numerous reports. The difference is that you have no choice.
In retrospect to what I wrote above, I think benefits should start going away at income of $50,000 when you draw social security. And that number should not be fixed in stone but fluid to reflect the amount of money being paid in. It is drastic and it does make it difficult to people to make decisions. However, currently the only sensible decision one can make is to assume there will be no SS when they retire.
You are correct, nothing can guarantee the value of money over time. Even material collateral won't necessarily hold up. One of the best things to invest in, even at today's high prices, is education. And education should never, ever stop.
"Mostly, you can think of it as a payment from yourself now, to yourself later."
I don't think this is true. SS is paying beneficiaries now with money taxed now. It is not going into some magical pot with your name on it to be opened when you retire. If the tax money is not there when you retire, you and everyone that looks like you is screwed.
The problem with SS is that too many people have a straw in it. And it the boomers are going to make it all worse because the working population won't be large enough to support these whiners. They will whine because that's what they've always done. The government has taken one minor step, my retirement age is 66 + 3 months, not 65, according to the SS administration. But I'm at the tail end of the boomers. All boomers should be retiring much later, just as pay back for having to listen to them all these years if there is justice left in the world.
My retirement age should be later that than, say 70. And capping contributions to be made on only the first $105,000 or so of income (I think this cap is still there) is plain silly. You should pay SS on all income. And they need to cut the social contract in such a manner that if your retirement income is above, say, $60,000 per year, you slowly lose benefits until income $100,000 where you cease to get any distribution from SS. Unfair? Nope. It is merely the contribution you will make as citizen to the rest who are less well off and have not benefitted from living in the U.S. as long as you and continue to reap the rewards of a +$100,000 income.
I'm sure there are other adjustments that could be made. Whack the insurance companies and make health care run by nonprofit cooperatives. That is the way Blue Cross and Blue Shield started. In the 70's, insurance companies figured out they could make a killing in health care and have been killing us ever since. Reform the tort laws, it isn't Christmas just because some doctor or medical establishment screwed up.
I think, more accurately, Gates and Ballmer cannot sell what they've already sold.
It is true to a certain extent in Japan that societal harmony has more of a hold than in, say, America. Japan is very homogeneous and outsiders are seen as disrupting this. That may come about by simply having their own island for a very long time, somewhat like a house with a few cats when a new one is introduced.
I'm not sure about the other Asian countries. Culture is a touchy thing and I don't anyone would confuse the Chinese with the Japanese culture. It also is not clear to me that over time, the Japanese might not gravitate toward more individuality; it has not been that long since Emperor worship held sway.
That explains the headache I get every time I use MS Malware.
While I agree in general, S. Korea and Japan don't have nearly the population China does. China could spend a long time as the low cost manufacturer simply because there are so many poor peasants to be put to work.
And because the U.S. had no standing Army to speak of, both wars were allowed to spiral into conflicts that required an immense effort in the U.S. to overcome.
How about you explain to the Chinese, Russians, French, etc. why millions of their people had to die because people like you have too many moral problems to permit the U.S. from preventing their deaths.
There's also no way you'll get any kind of coherent policy among the states for what is now handled by the federal government. It would be a U.S. run by corporations which would play off one state against another.
"assholishness" That's some argument style you have there.
It isn't the rumors that are fliying, the device itself will have wings and fly. It will be truly revolutionary.
won't watch it, it needs sliverlight.
yeah, that's it. The Obama Administration, on the backs of blaming the Bush Administration for all the foreign policy screwups, decided that they could get away with screwing the Chinese covertly. It must have been them, my gut tells me this. Just saying...
I rather imagine that China is willing to settle for domination. That allows them to control their largest market, something like a pet poodle. It also gives them leverage when the Chinese leaders decide that their penises would be larger were they to conquer the Greatest Living Empire That Ever Existed. I am speaking, of course, of Taiwan. It would confirm their belief that they have been smiled upon by the Heavens to take up their rightful mandate.
There is the possibility that the Chinese have hacked the mod-point generator and given their astroturfers oodles of points. The only way to settle this is to give everyone gobs of points and let the war begin. "We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in bed, ..." well, I don't channel Winston Churchill very well but he certainly not stand for this.
And the founders had to go back and add a bill of rights; there were several amendments to the constitution also. The world isn't as it was back then, there's no reason to think that allowing no changes would have allowed the U.S. to continue its existence.
Not allowing for a standing army means no counter to WWI Germany, WWII Germany and Japan. No counter to Stalin.
The founders never found a reason for NiH, NSF, Social Security, FDA, NISTA, or any of the other alphabet soup of government arms we found necessary to protect us from the elements. They also never found a use for federally funded education or more recently, universal health care.
But we could always disband the U.S. Military because, y'know, the world is a bunny world where there are no goblins and everyone just wants to be happy.
Not really, most of the debt is non-military inspired debt. You cooked the books to make the military look worse.
The U.S. companies are not having their IP stolen. The Business School Product employed by U.S. companies are foolishly offshoring their companies' IP as fast as they can. These were the people you met in college that couldn't get through Engineering or Science or Liberal Arts degrees. They went to the Business School so they could become widgets. Then they turned on those of us who were busy producing and sold that IP and sometimes us to the highest overseas bidder. At last sighting, they were hawking their grandmothers for 20 pieces of silver.
Philosophy is not easy to bullshit your way through. Take a course on Satre or Kant sometime. Most quality philosophy curricula require 2 foreign languages as well.