What a relief. Now I can walk into my local grocery store, and when they charge me $3 a pound for ground beef instead of $2 a pound like last year, I can just tell them it's all hogwash and only pay them $2. Because the BLS told me there's no inflation.
According to the formula used before Carter revised it in 1980, Inflation last year was 11.6%. Beef prices are up over 20% year over year, gas is up at 50% a year, Milk up 11%, Chicken up 4%. But, yeah, keep believing the CPI, which is almost entirely staying low because of the massive decline in durable goods prices.
Food and Fuel are going sky high, and you think there's no inflation. March to that drum little lemming. Ignore the cliff ahead of you.
8,000,000 people in the US not working and not getting paychecks hasn't been a serious issue to the Congress and the White House for two years, so why should I cry when 10% of the federal workers suddenly feel the pain too?
Obama *saying* that the democrats agreed to $33B in cuts doesn't make it so. John Boehner seemed quite surprised on Tuesday to hear Obama said that since he hadn't even met with Boehner, and the House Minority Leader had only agreed to $4B in cuts in the actual meetings with Boehner.
Ahh, the age of News by Sound-bite (and reporters who do zero fact checking.) Gotta love it.
You're confusing the Discretionary Budget and Mandatory Spending. Continuing Resolutions can ONLY affect discretionary spending. Things like Social Security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, etc. are all part of the mandatory expenditures, and can't be cut in budget bills, only by passing new laws to revise their growth rate. Right now, the mandatory spending exceeds revenues, so whether the Tea Party wants to cut them or not (and they do) there's no way to touch them, and they would amount to a nearly $200B deficit *on their own*.
So, even if they zeroed all discretionary budgets -- kind of like a total shutdown of all the things you're hearing demagogued at the moment -- they still would be running a deficit.
America is broke, and it's getting worse. Bernanke is printing money like a crack addict with a credit card. Inflation is on pace to top 20% by next year. If you're not scared to death by the economics of the situation, then you're not paying attention. Go read what happened to the Wiemar Republic.
$40 Billion, $70 Billion, none of it will make a difference. Call me when they're cutting Trillions from the budget.
Then he would have been stuck in a dead-end position as a glorified draftsman being told by his superiors that, "you can't do that." His econ degree let him see how to make PayPal work, his dabbling in physics inspired him to go ask "why not" when told it couldn't be done. The money he made from PayPal let him put his arguments to the test (his money where his mouth is.) Had he gone into technology... we would still be buying stuff on ebay with money orders, and the Constellation project would be $15B over budget and 8 years late.
For the life of me I don't see why this is so hard to figure out. Sane copyright is simple. You get 5 years, free of charge to keep your work under copyright, then, once a year, you must send in $100 per year the work is past 5 years to maintain the copyright. So, the sixth year is a $100 fee, the 10th year it's $500, and so on.
That lets the big companies like Disney, who don't want to see Mickey fall out of copyright saddled with big payments to keep their whole 70 year old catalog copyrighted, but it lets a simple author who wants to publish a book for 5 years to get to sell it for that length. If it still makes money after 5 years, he can pay the $100 to keep it copyrighted.
Asimov would be paying about $6500 a year to keep each of the original Foundation books copyrighted, but he'd be making $50K a year on royalties, so it's worth it. On the other hand, the stuff that's only selling 20 copies a year fall to the public domain.
Look, I just solved the whole argument. Simple, easy, and it pays for copyright enforcement out of the people who are paying to keep their old crap "safe."
I pulled the image and inverted the colors. It looks sort of like the windows logo, but it's missing the trailing dots. It may just be a four-diamond type logo, not a windows logo. Hard to say with how hard it is to see though.
Uh, these are adult (induced pluripotent) stem cells -- the ones that xtian evangelists have no problem with, as no embryos were destroyed to create them. In fact, they come from skin scrapings.
But it's good to see that you're living up to the ideal image of the "tolerant left" as opposed to the "bigoted right". It's not like you were calling for people to die and burn in hell or suffer a lifetime of paralysis for holding a belief.
Oh, wait...
But at least you didn't say anything about hypocrites...
Just make a disc fifty feet wide, using optimal golomb ruler placed microphones in a full hemispherical phased array of around 10,000 microphones, hang it from a tethered helium balloon, and now you can pick out any conversation in an entire city-sized area.
Going by the values on Wikipedia and NASA's GOES web site, a C3 CME is a total influx of about 3 micro-watts per square meter. For reference, normal solar insolation is about 360 watts per square meter. So, the answer to your rhetorical statement is, "Yes, this is being massively overhyped, because the sun hasn't done diddly squat over the last five years and someone has to justify paying billions of dollars for solar observing satellites."
Before anyone gets all pissy... yes, the CME comes in the form of energized protons and pico-wave X-Rays, so they are more destructive to human tissue than normal sunlight. But given that the Earth survived a Y+ level (1000-10,000 times more powerful) in 1859 with no one keeling over dead, I think we're safe.
And why would black people have a problem with the word niggardly? It's derived from the same place we get the word nigger.
Wow, you're over-sensitive and ignorant. The words are not etymologically related. Two seconds of research could have told you that. Niggardly comes from the same root words as "niggling details", Niggle comes from the Old Norse word "Nigla" which means, "To fuss about small matters."
However, the more inflamatory term comes from the Latin "niger," meaning "black".Although it is more likely to come from the Americanization of the Spanish version of "negro", namely negero.
Not only do they not come from the same source, they don't even come from the same root language.
Do Italians get to declare a racist epithet when someone yells out "Swap" because it's close to the sound of "wop"? I'm of German descent, can I complain when someone talks about their "route" because it's close to "kraut"?
Words mean things, and even the head of the NAACP said that people who take "niggardly" as a racial slur need to be given a dictionary.
Unfortunately for your point, one of the few legitimate roles of government is the protection of their citizens from external enemies. Now, if I thought that laying down our weapons and holding hands singing Kum-Bai-Yah would be just as effective as building big-ass ships with frickin' lasers on them, then I'd be the first one to say that we should revoke the government's right to spend money on defense.
However, the world is a big, nasty, brutish, ugly place, and thus this is one of the few things that the government really has the right of collecting taxes for. It's all the handing out of free money to people who've done nothing to earn it that I resent.
Government is established to protect us from others. It becomes tyranny when it attempts to protect us from ourselves.
So, you don't believe that those who excel should be rewarded? Should we drive spikes into the feet of runners who can run faster so that it's "fair" to those who can't? If you'd bother to learn anything about history, you'd know that individuals who concentrate wealth create the largest number of jobs and free benefits for those who have no wealth. And consider that less than 1% of any wealth they amass survives three generations in their families.
I'm sorry, but I want there to be the opportunity to become fantastically rich in this country. Even if I never personally get to take advantage of it, if that ability is taken away, then what is the point of trying.
but you can go on punishing the productive members of society and think that you're making the world a better place. It worked so well in the Soviet block, and in post-revolution France, and in Greece, and in... well, there's over 170 examples I can list.
Besides, those "ultra-rich" are the only reason your system of social welfare works. You do know that 45,000 people pay for 70% of the social programs of New York State. If they left, the entire state government would collapse.
The top 1% of earners pay 40.42% of all taxes collected yet earn only 22.83% of the money. The top 10% pay 71.22% of all taxes, yet earn only 48.05% of the wages. The top 50% of earners pay 97.11% of all taxes (Figures from 2007 - the last year for which data is available). It's currently estimated that 47% of the wage earners in America effectively pay no federal income taxes.
Under Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" (2001-2007) the proportion of taxes paid by the richest 10% increased from 67% to 72%, while the proportion paid by the lowest 50% of earners went from 3.91% to 2.89%.
Before labeling people as "un-American" -- please check your data.
Sorry, I know people in Verizon IT, and they refer to their job as "the Death March" and their building as the "Tower of Doom". According to their (admittedly anecdotal) observations, they see 3-5% turnover in their groups every week.
I think Verizon must have offered a $500 bonus for filling in the survey as "happy world".
The machine they built winds the film onto reels, and then plays it back in front of a light source, that's shining onto some sort of photocell that re-creates the sound. The sound is clearly put into a digital computer feed (note the obvious sound wave on the monitors in the background of the video.) Likely, each reel was only run through once, or maybe twice, and converted into a useful, digital version.
In other words, they scanned the film and then decoded it.
In fact, I wouldn't doubt that they duplicated it from the 80 year old film to fresh film before running the fresh film through the playback machine. That would be a typical archival move to save the original.
Okay, 150,000PSI is 10,444 atmospheres of pressure. Granite has an ultimate compressive strength of around 2775 atmospheres. In other words, at 10K atmospheres, granite would be flowing like water. There's no possible way the oil is coming out at that pressure. And if it was, it sure as heck would be flowing faster than 4 bbl/s. This guy is tossing out some serious BS numbers.
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What a relief. Now I can walk into my local grocery store, and when they charge me $3 a pound for ground beef instead of $2 a pound like last year, I can just tell them it's all hogwash and only pay them $2. Because the BLS told me there's no inflation.
Stop confusing government reports with reality.
According to the formula used before Carter revised it in 1980, Inflation last year was 11.6%. Beef prices are up over 20% year over year, gas is up at 50% a year, Milk up 11%, Chicken up 4%. But, yeah, keep believing the CPI, which is almost entirely staying low because of the massive decline in durable goods prices.
Food and Fuel are going sky high, and you think there's no inflation. March to that drum little lemming. Ignore the cliff ahead of you.
8,000,000 people in the US not working and not getting paychecks hasn't been a serious issue to the Congress and the White House for two years, so why should I cry when 10% of the federal workers suddenly feel the pain too?
Obama *saying* that the democrats agreed to $33B in cuts doesn't make it so. John Boehner seemed quite surprised on Tuesday to hear Obama said that since he hadn't even met with Boehner, and the House Minority Leader had only agreed to $4B in cuts in the actual meetings with Boehner.
Ahh, the age of News by Sound-bite (and reporters who do zero fact checking.) Gotta love it.
You're confusing the Discretionary Budget and Mandatory Spending. Continuing Resolutions can ONLY affect discretionary spending. Things like Social Security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, etc. are all part of the mandatory expenditures, and can't be cut in budget bills, only by passing new laws to revise their growth rate. Right now, the mandatory spending exceeds revenues, so whether the Tea Party wants to cut them or not (and they do) there's no way to touch them, and they would amount to a nearly $200B deficit *on their own*.
So, even if they zeroed all discretionary budgets -- kind of like a total shutdown of all the things you're hearing demagogued at the moment -- they still would be running a deficit.
America is broke, and it's getting worse. Bernanke is printing money like a crack addict with a credit card. Inflation is on pace to top 20% by next year. If you're not scared to death by the economics of the situation, then you're not paying attention. Go read what happened to the Wiemar Republic.
$40 Billion, $70 Billion, none of it will make a difference. Call me when they're cutting Trillions from the budget.
Then he would have been stuck in a dead-end position as a glorified draftsman being told by his superiors that, "you can't do that." His econ degree let him see how to make PayPal work, his dabbling in physics inspired him to go ask "why not" when told it couldn't be done. The money he made from PayPal let him put his arguments to the test (his money where his mouth is.) Had he gone into technology... we would still be buying stuff on ebay with money orders, and the Constellation project would be $15B over budget and 8 years late.
For the life of me I don't see why this is so hard to figure out. Sane copyright is simple. You get 5 years, free of charge to keep your work under copyright, then, once a year, you must send in $100 per year the work is past 5 years to maintain the copyright. So, the sixth year is a $100 fee, the 10th year it's $500, and so on. That lets the big companies like Disney, who don't want to see Mickey fall out of copyright saddled with big payments to keep their whole 70 year old catalog copyrighted, but it lets a simple author who wants to publish a book for 5 years to get to sell it for that length. If it still makes money after 5 years, he can pay the $100 to keep it copyrighted. Asimov would be paying about $6500 a year to keep each of the original Foundation books copyrighted, but he'd be making $50K a year on royalties, so it's worth it. On the other hand, the stuff that's only selling 20 copies a year fall to the public domain. Look, I just solved the whole argument. Simple, easy, and it pays for copyright enforcement out of the people who are paying to keep their old crap "safe."
A tension trebuchet is commonly called a Scorpion. (Sometimes spelled skorpion.)
I pulled the image and inverted the colors. It looks sort of like the windows logo, but it's missing the trailing dots. It may just be a four-diamond type logo, not a windows logo. Hard to say with how hard it is to see though.
Wow, I got modded down to a score of zero, for a comment that pre-dated XKCD by several days...
Question: Isn't the secret membership list of Anonymous exactly the sort of thing that WikiLeaks would publish?
Just pointing out the irony...
Uh, these are adult (induced pluripotent) stem cells -- the ones that xtian evangelists have no problem with, as no embryos were destroyed to create them. In fact, they come from skin scrapings.
But it's good to see that you're living up to the ideal image of the "tolerant left" as opposed to the "bigoted right". It's not like you were calling for people to die and burn in hell or suffer a lifetime of paralysis for holding a belief.
Oh, wait...
But at least you didn't say anything about hypocrites...
Just make a disc fifty feet wide, using optimal golomb ruler placed microphones in a full hemispherical phased array of around 10,000 microphones, hang it from a tethered helium balloon, and now you can pick out any conversation in an entire city-sized area.
Nope, nothing to be afraid of here...
It left an isotopic signature in the ices of Greenland that can still be measured today.
Going by the values on Wikipedia and NASA's GOES web site, a C3 CME is a total influx of about 3 micro-watts per square meter. For reference, normal solar insolation is about 360 watts per square meter. So, the answer to your rhetorical statement is, "Yes, this is being massively overhyped, because the sun hasn't done diddly squat over the last five years and someone has to justify paying billions of dollars for solar observing satellites."
Before anyone gets all pissy... yes, the CME comes in the form of energized protons and pico-wave X-Rays, so they are more destructive to human tissue than normal sunlight. But given that the Earth survived a Y+ level (1000-10,000 times more powerful) in 1859 with no one keeling over dead, I think we're safe.
And why would black people have a problem with the word niggardly? It's derived from the same place we get the word nigger.
Wow, you're over-sensitive and ignorant. The words are not etymologically related. Two seconds of research could have told you that. Niggardly comes from the same root words as "niggling details", Niggle comes from the Old Norse word "Nigla" which means, "To fuss about small matters."
However, the more inflamatory term comes from the Latin "niger," meaning "black".Although it is more likely to come from the Americanization of the Spanish version of "negro", namely negero.
Not only do they not come from the same source, they don't even come from the same root language.
Do Italians get to declare a racist epithet when someone yells out "Swap" because it's close to the sound of "wop"? I'm of German descent, can I complain when someone talks about their "route" because it's close to "kraut"?
Words mean things, and even the head of the NAACP said that people who take "niggardly" as a racial slur need to be given a dictionary.
Unfortunately for your point, one of the few legitimate roles of government is the protection of their citizens from external enemies. Now, if I thought that laying down our weapons and holding hands singing Kum-Bai-Yah would be just as effective as building big-ass ships with frickin' lasers on them, then I'd be the first one to say that we should revoke the government's right to spend money on defense.
However, the world is a big, nasty, brutish, ugly place, and thus this is one of the few things that the government really has the right of collecting taxes for. It's all the handing out of free money to people who've done nothing to earn it that I resent.
Government is established to protect us from others. It becomes tyranny when it attempts to protect us from ourselves.
Hey, they've managed to get it right 10 times in 32 years of shows...
So, you don't believe that those who excel should be rewarded? Should we drive spikes into the feet of runners who can run faster so that it's "fair" to those who can't? If you'd bother to learn anything about history, you'd know that individuals who concentrate wealth create the largest number of jobs and free benefits for those who have no wealth. And consider that less than 1% of any wealth they amass survives three generations in their families.
I'm sorry, but I want there to be the opportunity to become fantastically rich in this country. Even if I never personally get to take advantage of it, if that ability is taken away, then what is the point of trying.
but you can go on punishing the productive members of society and think that you're making the world a better place. It worked so well in the Soviet block, and in post-revolution France, and in Greece, and in... well, there's over 170 examples I can list.
Besides, those "ultra-rich" are the only reason your system of social welfare works. You do know that 45,000 people pay for 70% of the social programs of New York State. If they left, the entire state government would collapse.
The top 1% of earners pay 40.42% of all taxes collected yet earn only 22.83% of the money. The top 10% pay 71.22% of all taxes, yet earn only 48.05% of the wages. The top 50% of earners pay 97.11% of all taxes (Figures from 2007 - the last year for which data is available). It's currently estimated that 47% of the wage earners in America effectively pay no federal income taxes.
Under Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" (2001-2007) the proportion of taxes paid by the richest 10% increased from 67% to 72%, while the proportion paid by the lowest 50% of earners went from 3.91% to 2.89%.
Before labeling people as "un-American" -- please check your data.
See here (all data from tables 1 and 6, which are direct reprints of IRS supplied data).
Sorry, I know people in Verizon IT, and they refer to their job as "the Death March" and their building as the "Tower of Doom". According to their (admittedly anecdotal) observations, they see 3-5% turnover in their groups every week.
I think Verizon must have offered a $500 bonus for filling in the survey as "happy world".
The machine they built winds the film onto reels, and then plays it back in front of a light source, that's shining onto some sort of photocell that re-creates the sound. The sound is clearly put into a digital computer feed (note the obvious sound wave on the monitors in the background of the video.) Likely, each reel was only run through once, or maybe twice, and converted into a useful, digital version.
In other words, they scanned the film and then decoded it.
In fact, I wouldn't doubt that they duplicated it from the 80 year old film to fresh film before running the fresh film through the playback machine. That would be a typical archival move to save the original.
Because no government program, started with good intentions, has ever led to making it worse.
Okay, 150,000PSI is 10,444 atmospheres of pressure. Granite has an ultimate compressive strength of around 2775 atmospheres. In other words, at 10K atmospheres, granite would be flowing like water. There's no possible way the oil is coming out at that pressure. And if it was, it sure as heck would be flowing faster than 4 bbl/s. This guy is tossing out some serious BS numbers.