The only one bluffing is you, because your proposal is a fantasy. Just pay your debts, please.
If the US gets to the point where it seriously considers defaulting on all those t-bills, everything will already be so fucked up that the rest of the world will already be in too bad of a shape to do anything about it.
How else can I hurt them except by defaulting on my debt?
Not much you can do except maximize the amount you default on.
I've been thinking that if someone really wanted to put the screws to the banks they could take on a massive amount of debt as they neared end of life - really max out all available credit, transfer the cash and any other property to friends and family and then die with absolutely no assets left in their estate.
PayPal processed 20 percent more transactions on Black Friday compared to last year.
I didn't buy anything this black friday, not even online. But I can certainly see how paypal's volume would be up - so many credit card issuer's are screwing themselves by jacking up the fees now that it makes more sense to use paypal to transfer directly from your checking account than it does to use a credit card.
The fee that pushed me over the edge are these new "foreign transaction fees" - not "foreign currency exchange fees" but simply "foreign transaction fees" - almost all the major banks are charging a couple of percent for any transaction even vaguely outside the local borders. I bought two things on ebay via paypal but with my credit card - the transactions were back to back on my statement and one of them had a ~$1 extra tacked on for this "foreign transaction fee" because the seller was in canada - even though the statement showed identical entries for the merchant field (paypal, there address in california and their phone number in california). Even though the auction and payment was in US dollars and through paypal - Bank of America slammed me with this ridiculous fee on one charge but not the other. The next week I purchased an online game subscription in us dollars, but apparently the parent company is in germany so wham another 50 cent fee out of nowhere.
When you can't tell at the point of sale what the total cost will be, then that is a huge incentive to move to a different method of payment where the costs are known up front. Dumbass Bank of America has lost the revenue from ~$1000 worth of monthly online purchases but they nailed me for just under $2 in abusrdist fees, hope it was worth it!
(And when I called to register a complaint, the dumbass service representative spent 15 minutes trying to convince me that the government has made these new fees mandatory and that it wasn't BoA's fault (which is utter bullshit, confirmed on sites like the consumerist and bankrate), when all I wanted him to do was write down that I was unhappy about the fees because there was no way to know up front if the fee would apply or not)
Used across a population 170% the size of the US, and yet the Euro is only slightly more valuable than USD.
Like the number of users has anything to do with currency valuation. If that argument held any water at all, you would see the obvious contradiction in claiming that the USD "remains the dominant world currency" - becuase that's just another way of saying its used by way more people than just those in the USA - probably even more people than use the Euro. Uh oh, must have it both ways...
As a plasma, the gas conducts electricity, which pretty much precludes it from being an arc of electricity
Really? Whether the medium is a plasma or some other form of gas, its still an electric arc. You can't have an electric arc in a pure vacuum - the ions gotta come from somewhere. Carbon arc lamps just vaporize the carbon to produce the plasma rather than relying on gas sealed in the bulb.
I deliberately chose not to cite wikipedia, but I think it is worth pointing out that there are at least 5 difference articles that confirm in one way or another that the fluorescents are arc lamps.
Yes it is. However, it is only one kind of civil disobedience which itself is only one form of activism. Direct action, such as the Boston Tea Party, is another form. Piracy is a type of nonviolent direct action which is an entirely legitimate form of activism.
Progress is being made, with the rapid death of DRM on music distributed via iTunes and Amazon.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that DRM was dropped because customers wanted it to be dropped. If ipods ever lose their market dominance, watch for DRM on music to make a comeback. The only reason DRM on music went away was because Apple held a monopoly on music DRM due to their ~90% marketshare for music players and used their control over DRM as powerful leverage in negotiations. The RIAA abhors a monopoly that's not under their control, and the only way to break Apple's monopoly was to drop DRM.
There is no such monopoly on DRM for video which is why you still see all the movies and videos on itunes and all other download services continue to be locked up tight, and its going to stay that way indefinitely.
Obama voted for it, and has made no attempt to scale it back or abolish it
Seems to me that he has - when initially implemented certain banks were FORCED to take TARP funds and any strings that came with it. From what I've read, this year, any bank that wants to return the funds and get loose from those strings has been permitted to do so.
Which is in direct contradiction to twiddlingbit's original claim:
Private Enterprise under attack from TARP and limits on pay.
Limits on pay only being proposed for TARP acceptors.
Second you prove the case because it says the geneva convention does not recognize terrorist organizations from being protected by ANY RIGHTS.
Wow. You apparently believe the world will end in 2012 because the Mayan calendar ends there too. Never mind that the reason the calendar doesn't say anything about 2013 is the same reason the modern 2009 calendar doesn't say anything about 2010.
In other words - the geneva convention does NOT say 'terrorist have no rights' it just says they don't get POW rights, which means they get the default set of rights which is that of civilians.
And ads for products like Purell and Lysol certainly don't help any.
Chuck Lorre (creator/writer for The Big Bang Theory and a bunch of other sitcoms like 2.5 Men, and amazingly a former scientologist) recently wrote that, "Purell is the new face of fear."
I would expect that this would place a strong selective pressure on immune function. As such, I would think that you would expect the trend to continue in the children of families from such areas and transplanted them into a cleaner culture.
Which sounds like a great argument in favor of mail-order brides - if you want healthy kids, get yourself a dirty woman. Or something like that...
The two are not mutually exclusive. Its common for companies not to bother to fix problems that just happen to work out in their favor. Sprint's cell phone division was well known for not giving a crap about their atrocious billing system because frequently the errors were in their favor and the only way for a customer to get them corrected was to go through voice-mail hell.
The point I was making was not of linguistic permutations or social whimsy.
Seems your loquaciousness has blinded you to the point. Your only justification for breaking the norms of vulgarity causing social breakdown is that vulgarity is a social construct. I've provided you a counter-example of a social construct for which breaking the norms has no such consequences, therefore your logic is fallacious.
If the definition of vulgarity relies purely upon a social collective, then it's natural, and reasonable, for violations of such a collective to recursively deteriorate social structure.
No, it is neither 'natural' nor 'reasonable.' You lack a sense of scale. Accents and even patois are purely the product of a social collective but when people drop their accent it doesn't deteriorate social structure to any significant degree. In fact, dropping a patois may do the opposite (as anyone who grew up speaking proper english and a patois knows) because it enables one to more easily move between different social collectives.
Okay, humor aside...Save tens of billions? Kali has a budget shortfall. Currently, the entirety of the American people are helping to prop up this '8th largest economy'.
Another poster has already listed the negative return on federal taxes on a per dollar basis. But what is very interesting is that california's budget shortfall of roughly $20B is just about equal to the total difference between federal taxes and what comes back into the state from the Fed. If california could eliminate all federal taxes by reverting to a territory, then they would probably clear up their budget problem with one fell swoop. Of course, it will never happen, that kind of thing causes civil wars...
without having to resort to the same bag of 10-15 words the rest of us overuse has proven themselves doubly
Without 'having to" or without deigning to? I used to play that game that eloquence equals intelligence. When I was a teenager. Then I started to see that almost universally, the people striving for eloquence in their insults were like the obnoxious kid who brags about being in mensa - so full of themselves that they are unable to realize that they are just talking to hear themselves talk.
To all of you who think that it's some kind of social repression to frown upon people who make a habbit of unashamedly expressing themselves in a vulgar and crass manner, I suggest you go see the movie Idiocracy, because it's about YOU.
Bull fucking shit. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. Vulgarity is just another means of expressing dissatisfaction. An insult written in obscenities is no worse than one written in flowery language, frequently its a lot better because it gets to the point that much quicker.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck.
But at least, as a buyer, I'm not blindsided by it.
The only one bluffing is you, because your proposal is a fantasy. Just pay your debts, please.
If the US gets to the point where it seriously considers defaulting on all those t-bills, everything will already be so fucked up that the rest of the world will already be in too bad of a shape to do anything about it.
You've been trolled. The guy clearly dislikes obama and was trying to parody his supporters.
How else can I hurt them except by defaulting on my debt?
Not much you can do except maximize the amount you default on.
I've been thinking that if someone really wanted to put the screws to the banks they could take on a massive amount of debt as they neared end of life - really max out all available credit, transfer the cash and any other property to friends and family and then die with absolutely no assets left in their estate.
PayPal processed 20 percent more transactions on Black Friday compared to last year.
I didn't buy anything this black friday, not even online. But I can certainly see how paypal's volume would be up - so many credit card issuer's are screwing themselves by jacking up the fees now that it makes more sense to use paypal to transfer directly from your checking account than it does to use a credit card.
The fee that pushed me over the edge are these new "foreign transaction fees" - not "foreign currency exchange fees" but simply "foreign transaction fees" - almost all the major banks are charging a couple of percent for any transaction even vaguely outside the local borders. I bought two things on ebay via paypal but with my credit card - the transactions were back to back on my statement and one of them had a ~$1 extra tacked on for this "foreign transaction fee" because the seller was in canada - even though the statement showed identical entries for the merchant field (paypal, there address in california and their phone number in california). Even though the auction and payment was in US dollars and through paypal - Bank of America slammed me with this ridiculous fee on one charge but not the other. The next week I purchased an online game subscription in us dollars, but apparently the parent company is in germany so wham another 50 cent fee out of nowhere.
When you can't tell at the point of sale what the total cost will be, then that is a huge incentive to move to a different method of payment where the costs are known up front. Dumbass Bank of America has lost the revenue from ~$1000 worth of monthly online purchases but they nailed me for just under $2 in abusrdist fees, hope it was worth it!
(And when I called to register a complaint, the dumbass service representative spent 15 minutes trying to convince me that the government has made these new fees mandatory and that it wasn't BoA's fault (which is utter bullshit, confirmed on sites like the consumerist and bankrate), when all I wanted him to do was write down that I was unhappy about the fees because there was no way to know up front if the fee would apply or not)
Used across a population 170% the size of the US, and yet the Euro is only slightly more valuable than USD.
Like the number of users has anything to do with currency valuation. If that argument held any water at all, you would see the obvious contradiction in claiming that the USD "remains the dominant world currency" - becuase that's just another way of saying its used by way more people than just those in the USA - probably even more people than use the Euro. Uh oh, must have it both ways...
As a plasma, the gas conducts electricity, which pretty much precludes it from being an arc of electricity
Really? Whether the medium is a plasma or some other form of gas, its still an electric arc. You can't have an electric arc in a pure vacuum - the ions gotta come from somewhere. Carbon arc lamps just vaporize the carbon to produce the plasma rather than relying on gas sealed in the bulb.
But if that's not good enough, here's some cites:
All arc lamps use current running through different kinds of gas plasma. A.E. Becquerel of France theorized about the fluorescent lamp in 1857. Low pressure arc lights use a big tube of low pressure gas plasma and include: fluorescent lights and neon signs.
Once the air is ionized it becomes conductive and allows the built-up charges to equalize in a spectacular display of plasma that we call lightning.
Indoors, both day and night, most of the light we work by comes from fluorescent lamps and high intensity arc lamps. In all these sources - every one of them - light is produced by plasma.
I deliberately chose not to cite wikipedia, but I think it is worth pointing out that there are at least 5 difference articles that confirm in one way or another that the fluorescents are arc lamps.
the light from an arc lamp is produced when the arc itself occurs, and no phosphor layer is required.
A bogus definition based on an irrelevant requirement. Without the arc of electricity in the tube there would be no light thus it is an arc light.
Anyone who has looked at a florescent tube running with a failing ballast knows there is an electric arc because it is plainly visible.
Although, would the arc lamp be considered lightning?
Yes. A florescent light is an arc lamp
Thats activism.
Yes it is. However, it is only one kind of civil disobedience which itself is only one form of activism.
Direct action, such as the Boston Tea Party, is another form.
Piracy is a type of nonviolent direct action which is an entirely legitimate form of activism.
So you give US civilian rights to someone who isn't a US citizen and has never been here?
Yes. Just like anyone else extradited to the US receives the exact same set of rights even if they are not a US citizen and has never been here.
with people like you, who needs immigration laws? All you have to do is blow up a few buildings and you get citizen rights!
The rule of law sucks doesn't it?
Progress is being made, with the rapid death of DRM on music distributed via iTunes and Amazon.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that DRM was dropped because customers wanted it to be dropped. If ipods ever lose their market dominance, watch for DRM on music to make a comeback. The only reason DRM on music went away was because Apple held a monopoly on music DRM due to their ~90% marketshare for music players and used their control over DRM as powerful leverage in negotiations. The RIAA abhors a monopoly that's not under their control, and the only way to break Apple's monopoly was to drop DRM.
There is no such monopoly on DRM for video which is why you still see all the movies and videos on itunes and all other download services continue to be locked up tight, and its going to stay that way indefinitely.
The stand is hypocritical: people should be boycotting instead of stealing, but boycotting is ineffective...
Public domain is the natural order. You can't steal what already belongs to you.
Obama voted for it, and has made no attempt to scale it back or abolish it
Seems to me that he has - when initially implemented certain banks were FORCED to take TARP funds and any strings that came with it.
From what I've read, this year, any bank that wants to return the funds and get loose from those strings has been permitted to do so.
Which is in direct contradiction to twiddlingbit's original claim:
Private Enterprise under attack from TARP and limits on pay.
Limits on pay only being proposed for TARP acceptors.
Don't use javascript. The comment was fully readable with a single click.
Slashdot's use of javascript is brain dead.
Second you prove the case because it says the geneva convention does not recognize terrorist organizations from being protected by ANY RIGHTS.
Wow. You apparently believe the world will end in 2012 because the Mayan calendar ends there too.
Never mind that the reason the calendar doesn't say anything about 2013 is the same reason the modern 2009 calendar doesn't say anything about 2010.
In other words - the geneva convention does NOT say 'terrorist have no rights' it just says they don't get POW rights, which means they get the default set of rights which is that of civilians.
And ads for products like Purell and Lysol certainly don't help any.
Chuck Lorre (creator/writer for The Big Bang Theory and a bunch of other sitcoms like 2.5 Men, and amazingly a former scientologist) recently wrote that, "Purell is the new face of fear."
I would expect that this would place a strong selective pressure on immune function. As such, I would think that you would expect the trend to continue in the children of families from such areas and transplanted them into a cleaner culture.
Which sounds like a great argument in favor of mail-order brides - if you want healthy kids, get yourself a dirty woman. Or something like that...
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Its common for companies not to bother to fix problems that just happen to work out in their favor.
Sprint's cell phone division was well known for not giving a crap about their atrocious billing system because frequently the errors were in their favor and the only way for a customer to get them corrected was to go through voice-mail hell.
The point I was making was not of linguistic permutations or social whimsy.
Seems your loquaciousness has blinded you to the point. Your only justification for breaking the norms of vulgarity causing social breakdown is that vulgarity is a social construct. I've provided you a counter-example of a social construct for which breaking the norms has no such consequences, therefore your logic is fallacious.
If the definition of vulgarity relies purely upon a social collective, then it's natural, and reasonable, for violations of such a collective to recursively deteriorate social structure.
No, it is neither 'natural' nor 'reasonable.' You lack a sense of scale. Accents and even patois are purely the product of a social collective but when people drop their accent it doesn't deteriorate social structure to any significant degree. In fact, dropping a patois may do the opposite (as anyone who grew up speaking proper english and a patois knows) because it enables one to more easily move between different social collectives.
Okay, humor aside...Save tens of billions? Kali has a budget shortfall. Currently, the entirety of the American people are helping to prop up this '8th largest economy'.
Another poster has already listed the negative return on federal taxes on a per dollar basis.
But what is very interesting is that california's budget shortfall of roughly $20B is just about equal to the total difference between federal taxes and what comes back into the state from the Fed. If california could eliminate all federal taxes by reverting to a territory, then they would probably clear up their budget problem with one fell swoop. Of course, it will never happen, that kind of thing causes civil wars...
Don't the power companies have a duty to protect their consumers privacy???
Does Wal-mart or Target have a duty to protect their consumers privacy?
without having to resort to the same bag of 10-15 words the rest of us overuse has proven themselves doubly
Without 'having to" or without deigning to? I used to play that game that eloquence equals intelligence. When I was a teenager. Then I started to see that almost universally, the people striving for eloquence in their insults were like the obnoxious kid who brags about being in mensa - so full of themselves that they are unable to realize that they are just talking to hear themselves talk.
To all of you who think that it's some kind of social repression to frown upon people who make a habbit of unashamedly expressing themselves in a vulgar and crass manner, I suggest you go see the movie Idiocracy, because it's about YOU.
Bull fucking shit. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Vulgarity is just another means of expressing dissatisfaction. An insult written in obscenities is no worse than one written in flowery language, frequently its a lot better because it gets to the point that much quicker.