I think you misread the comment. The differences are small. None of their actions are small matters. Every single American and Iraqi who dies is a tragedy.
But you must agree that Clinton presided over 1.2Million Iraqi deaths. He could have stopped it at any point, but didnt. That includes 500,000 children. The difference between killing 1.2Million Iraqi's via sanctions or killing iraqi via an invasion and inevitable civil war are not different in my book. One is a slow death. One is a quick death. They are both death. Neither Bush nor Clinton are different in this respect -- they both either wanted or had no choice in the matter of these mass atrocities.
In terms of medical research yes, they differ in their funding. Same for education. I dont state that they dont. But for issues like long term strategy, they were and are the same. They both ignored the national interest.
OK, they are different on small matters like their *approach* but no different to the big picture. Democrats may achieve their means through media manipulation and public humiliation rather than evesdropping & secret killings. Democrats prefer open death via sanctions rather than Republicans/Neocon secret death squads, etc. But at the end of the day, they all sell out America to greater powers.
Speaking of Iraq, President Clinton presided over the genocide of our age. From 1992 to 2000, almost 1,200,000 Iraqis were killed due to the genocidal sanctions on everything from pencils to milk. Granted, they were largely a cause of Bush I's destruction of Iraqi civilian infrastructure (water purification plants, electricity plants, etc.) But Clinton did not have the political will to save these 1.2Million lives. Either he didnt care or he was powerless to do so. Regardless, the last 16 years has been a mockery of "Never Again."
Finally, lobbying -- definitely on specific issues one party or another may favor an issue. A bridge to nowhere. Aid to peanut farmers here or there. But i'm talking about the big picture of old power and money. These things never change.
Silly Canadians. You have enormous oil reserves. Guess what that means? It means we Americans will find some "evidence" or another to invade your country and take all your resources. All that war booty inflow will help us pay the debt on our treasury bonds for decades to come.
Hearing WaMu gives me shivvers. I know its off-topic but a word of advice -- WaMu, in my experience, is an absolutely wreckless company.
They purchased my local bank in their buy-out binge. During the post merger integration, they converted my beneficiaries into account joint owners. The statement didnt reval this, but the beneficiaries all got tax notices for the interest. Worst, my brother lost his financial aid for having "too high a balance." Despite showing the records to WaMu, they refused to fix the issue or even write an explanatory letter on his behalf. We know someone who lost her social security benefits because her son (and thus her according to WaMu's filings) also had "too much" in the bank. Same bank's takeover.
To add insult to injury, WaMu also took over our mortgage company and lost the escrow account after the final payment. They kept saying "if you have an issue with a Fleet Mortgage account, call fleet." Dumb f*cks -- they purchased Fleet, I cant call fleet. It took 1.5yrs and a letter to the OCC to get the escrow payment. Luckily we had the liquidity to float that amount...or we'd fall behind on prop taxes!
In any case, dont take my word for it, look at Attorney General filings and BBB. I closed my WaMu accounts. I give the same advice to all my friends.
I know you guys dont get much interaction with women...but seriously, you must know *something* about the real world, no? Here is a more *realistic* view of driving:
- Teenager on the road drinking beer with one hand driving with other
- 25yr old on the road drinking coffee with one hand, smoking with other, driving with knees
- Mature woman on the road on cruise control, putting on mascara using rear view mirror, using cell phone with other hand
- Ape man using one hand to drive and other to shift gears and use phone, swapping the two as required
Seriously...do you REALLY think the average person on the road has a 2/5second reaction time?
If it wasnt bad enough get 10 to 15 stock "tips" via spam a day, in mid-December, i started getting the same stock spam via SMS! Yes, SMS! I got a burst of 6 one morning, then another 5 later in the day. Theres $1.10 of SMS fees courtesy of Cingular. I cancelled my SMS service (which they enable automatically) immediately. Wonder how many people are unknowing getting charged for these messages.
Starting January 07, Cingular will start charging 0.15/sms -- perahps a response to record SMS revenues:-) ?
If its not bad enough that your fellow passenger's blubber is on your arm-rest, and sometimes even on your arm, now we have people screaming "can you hear me now" ever other minutre as reception and drop-offs will obviously be a problem.
I get a single cold call a day, every single damn day, from DISH network resellers looking to sell me sattellite service. They call every single day for the past 4 months despite repeated requests to get off their list and despite me being on the Do Not Call List. Why? Because being in India, they simply do not care about the US Do Not Call List. Perhaps more expensive VoIP will make such telemarketing calls less prevalent? YES!
>>There is a Halal food-stand next to where I work, and they are quite popular during lunch hour -- their lamb is delicious. You think, every one of their customers is marked as a potential terrorist? Photographed and video-taped from "black helicopters" above?..
Ummm...no. Monitoring a halal stand in midtown manhattan is not the way to do that as plenty of nonMuslims eat there. You must be smart enough to realize this. No, best way is to go by surnames and meal preferences. Why? Because it is much more specific. Non-muslims rarely choose Halal meal options.
These restrictions are not meant to catch terrorists, they are meant to shame Muslims and Arabs in America and make their life so difficult that they consider moving away. Much like the yellow star Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. Except now its a boolean flag.
For example, I have to stand on a paper ticket like because I am on a selectee list EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME. No white person on my consulting assignment needs to do that. No, no black helicopters, just a boolean field switched on your profile to make life incredibly challenging whenever travelling.
They likely mean -- restrict the near-fraudlent types of loans in the market now. While everyone should have access to money, people shouldnt have access to money they cannot ever pay back. Option ARMs come to mind. You can now purchase a million dollar home with a 40k/yr salary. Unless you are one of the rare people who have salaries increasing by 40 to 50% a year, these loans almost by rule will put a borrower in default sooner or later. Yet widespread sales of these loans have allowed the housing market to continue into the stratosphere.
Good points. I dont pretend to have answers. I'm just stating why *I* wouldnt want to be a cosmonaut or any other scientist.
While i was at a Big-5 consulting firm, a Senior Manager allotted two weeks for "conversion" of HTML files to ASP. No, i'm not talking about refactoring or anything, all that had to be done was renaming of the file extension and a wrapper tag. Overbilling or stupidity? You decide. I suspect it would have happened even on a fixed fee project.
I am similarly a sellout. As a child, I wanted to be a physicist -- like Newton. Then I realized that my fate (PhD) would be in the hands of a person I dont necessarily trust for 8 years. After that, i would not be able to afford decent housing or much of anything (unless I made it to the top 5% of my field.) Keep im mind its not just my own fate, but also of my wife and kids.
Becoming a banker, programmer, consultant, whatever, was a decision to *not* save the world, but rather be able to find a job quickly whenever I needed and not have to worry about housing, childrens' wellbeing, etc.
Housing is the key issue. I think if it wasnt for the exorbitant cost of housing, many more careers would be open to people who truly want them. With housing in the mix though, you spend every penny of your earnings trying to pay off your house and have little time to really contribute to society.
Forget quotes about neural networks, program trading WORKS. Firms like Goldman Sachs have pulled in hundreds of millions in profits with program trading and will likely continue to do so. Its about replicating human trader behaviours, except with lightning-sharp reflexes.
What is wrong with you people? There are more important things in life than the lasest release of your software. I dont use drugs, but if I did, it sure as hell wouldnt be so I could make our release deadlines.
CHILL out. Work is not important, I dont care what you do. Your health is the most important thing.
But then again, menstruation has also evolved for a reason. Yet there are drugs now which limit a woman to 4 cycles a year. They are launching one which eliminates it alltogether. I'm not justifying sleep drugs, just saying that this trend started a while back...
"In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol... now you don't have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine..."
Ummm...so playing video games in the desolation of your house is somehow worse than drugs, which generally leads to robberies to support the expensive habit?
Even if his gross generalizations were correct, I'd say not knowing your neighbors is far better than robbing them to support a drug habit. What is O'Reilly smoking?
"You idiots seem to think that cops go around randomly tazoring foreign-looking people"
Umm...I would make this statement regardless of who got tased. Which is why I made no reference to ethnicity. Your bringing it up suggests that perhaps it was due to ethnicity, you appear to have subliminally admitted it!
Secondly, I didnt realize being a "jackass" was electrocutable. Perhaps the cops should visit a frat then, they will find plenty of potential targets.
I keep hearing people complaining "if he had just listened" or "all he had to do was get up." But seriously, think about it -- should he really have been tased repeatedly or simply arrested? 1. After being shocked repeatedly, could he even have been ABLE to "just" stand up? 2. After being shocked repeatedly, would be have been in a mental state to understand the cops' commands? 3. He was on the floor. An irritating act, but something deserving electrocution? 4. What if someone asks for a warrant, should they also get electrocuted. After all "all he had to do was let them search."
Put simply, this was WRONG. The kid deserves to be arrested, NOT electrocuted. To those of you who say "tasing is non-lethal," well, i dare you to do it to yourself. Post a video on YouTube to prove it.
If there was justice here, Rumsfeld -- who provided the cash and the means to Hussein to commit these atrocities -- would also be on traial. Along with the remainder of living Regean administration members.
I'm sure its easy to say unless you are one of the people misidentified. I used to work for a consulting company. Being misidentified and having to go through an hour-long security process each week (twice) while travelling for work was so bureaucratic that I just quit my consulting job. There was no way to get off the list. I just happen to be of arab ethnicity (born in USA though) and that was enough.
I tried for months to get off these darn lists. No luck. Imagine trying to book a vacation, or to visit a mother country to see a dying grandparent and being blocked by some month-long DHS project. Unacceptable.
Dont worry, influential systems integration companies such as Accenture will get multi-billion dollar contracts to build it out. After years of delays and bill padding, we will have a semi-working system and the contractor (Accenture of one of their cohorts) will be billions richer.
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I think you misread the comment. The differences are small. None of their actions are small matters. Every single American and Iraqi who dies is a tragedy. But you must agree that Clinton presided over 1.2Million Iraqi deaths. He could have stopped it at any point, but didnt. That includes 500,000 children. The difference between killing 1.2Million Iraqi's via sanctions or killing iraqi via an invasion and inevitable civil war are not different in my book. One is a slow death. One is a quick death. They are both death. Neither Bush nor Clinton are different in this respect -- they both either wanted or had no choice in the matter of these mass atrocities. In terms of medical research yes, they differ in their funding. Same for education. I dont state that they dont. But for issues like long term strategy, they were and are the same. They both ignored the national interest.
OK, they are different on small matters like their *approach* but no different to the big picture. Democrats may achieve their means through media manipulation and public humiliation rather than evesdropping & secret killings. Democrats prefer open death via sanctions rather than Republicans/Neocon secret death squads, etc. But at the end of the day, they all sell out America to greater powers. Speaking of Iraq, President Clinton presided over the genocide of our age. From 1992 to 2000, almost 1,200,000 Iraqis were killed due to the genocidal sanctions on everything from pencils to milk. Granted, they were largely a cause of Bush I's destruction of Iraqi civilian infrastructure (water purification plants, electricity plants, etc.) But Clinton did not have the political will to save these 1.2Million lives. Either he didnt care or he was powerless to do so. Regardless, the last 16 years has been a mockery of "Never Again." Finally, lobbying -- definitely on specific issues one party or another may favor an issue. A bridge to nowhere. Aid to peanut farmers here or there. But i'm talking about the big picture of old power and money. These things never change.
Silly Canadians. You have enormous oil reserves. Guess what that means? It means we Americans will find some "evidence" or another to invade your country and take all your resources. All that war booty inflow will help us pay the debt on our treasury bonds for decades to come.
Good luck. You'll have IBM, BeringPoint, Booz and Accenture overbidding you 300% and still winning the contracts.
Hearing WaMu gives me shivvers. I know its off-topic but a word of advice -- WaMu, in my experience, is an absolutely wreckless company. They purchased my local bank in their buy-out binge. During the post merger integration, they converted my beneficiaries into account joint owners. The statement didnt reval this, but the beneficiaries all got tax notices for the interest. Worst, my brother lost his financial aid for having "too high a balance." Despite showing the records to WaMu, they refused to fix the issue or even write an explanatory letter on his behalf. We know someone who lost her social security benefits because her son (and thus her according to WaMu's filings) also had "too much" in the bank. Same bank's takeover. To add insult to injury, WaMu also took over our mortgage company and lost the escrow account after the final payment. They kept saying "if you have an issue with a Fleet Mortgage account, call fleet." Dumb f*cks -- they purchased Fleet, I cant call fleet. It took 1.5yrs and a letter to the OCC to get the escrow payment. Luckily we had the liquidity to float that amount...or we'd fall behind on prop taxes! In any case, dont take my word for it, look at Attorney General filings and BBB. I closed my WaMu accounts. I give the same advice to all my friends.
I know you guys dont get much interaction with women...but seriously, you must know *something* about the real world, no? Here is a more *realistic* view of driving: - Teenager on the road drinking beer with one hand driving with other - 25yr old on the road drinking coffee with one hand, smoking with other, driving with knees - Mature woman on the road on cruise control, putting on mascara using rear view mirror, using cell phone with other hand - Ape man using one hand to drive and other to shift gears and use phone, swapping the two as required Seriously...do you REALLY think the average person on the road has a 2/5second reaction time?
And what happens when these snake robots get loose? Or jump into the toilet and get into our sewer system? Then what?
If it wasnt bad enough get 10 to 15 stock "tips" via spam a day, in mid-December, i started getting the same stock spam via SMS! Yes, SMS! I got a burst of 6 one morning, then another 5 later in the day. Theres $1.10 of SMS fees courtesy of Cingular. I cancelled my SMS service (which they enable automatically) immediately. Wonder how many people are unknowing getting charged for these messages. Starting January 07, Cingular will start charging 0.15/sms -- perahps a response to record SMS revenues :-) ?
If its not bad enough that your fellow passenger's blubber is on your arm-rest, and sometimes even on your arm, now we have people screaming "can you hear me now" ever other minutre as reception and drop-offs will obviously be a problem.
How Soon Before...my kids in high school start sniffing this stuff? Damn kids these days...
I get a single cold call a day, every single damn day, from DISH network resellers looking to sell me sattellite service. They call every single day for the past 4 months despite repeated requests to get off their list and despite me being on the Do Not Call List. Why? Because being in India, they simply do not care about the US Do Not Call List. Perhaps more expensive VoIP will make such telemarketing calls less prevalent? YES!
Me and my buddy darth are building a moon-sized space station. Its a WIP, but you can see photos here: http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/death-star-2.j pg
>>There is a Halal food-stand next to where I work, and they are quite popular during lunch hour -- their lamb is delicious. You think, every one of their customers is marked as a potential terrorist? Photographed and video-taped from "black helicopters" above?.. Ummm...no. Monitoring a halal stand in midtown manhattan is not the way to do that as plenty of nonMuslims eat there. You must be smart enough to realize this. No, best way is to go by surnames and meal preferences. Why? Because it is much more specific. Non-muslims rarely choose Halal meal options. These restrictions are not meant to catch terrorists, they are meant to shame Muslims and Arabs in America and make their life so difficult that they consider moving away. Much like the yellow star Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. Except now its a boolean flag. For example, I have to stand on a paper ticket like because I am on a selectee list EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME. No white person on my consulting assignment needs to do that. No, no black helicopters, just a boolean field switched on your profile to make life incredibly challenging whenever travelling.
They likely mean -- restrict the near-fraudlent types of loans in the market now. While everyone should have access to money, people shouldnt have access to money they cannot ever pay back. Option ARMs come to mind. You can now purchase a million dollar home with a 40k/yr salary. Unless you are one of the rare people who have salaries increasing by 40 to 50% a year, these loans almost by rule will put a borrower in default sooner or later. Yet widespread sales of these loans have allowed the housing market to continue into the stratosphere.
Good points. I dont pretend to have answers. I'm just stating why *I* wouldnt want to be a cosmonaut or any other scientist.
While i was at a Big-5 consulting firm, a Senior Manager allotted two weeks for "conversion" of HTML files to ASP. No, i'm not talking about refactoring or anything, all that had to be done was renaming of the file extension and a wrapper tag. Overbilling or stupidity? You decide. I suspect it would have happened even on a fixed fee project.
I am similarly a sellout. As a child, I wanted to be a physicist -- like Newton. Then I realized that my fate (PhD) would be in the hands of a person I dont necessarily trust for 8 years. After that, i would not be able to afford decent housing or much of anything (unless I made it to the top 5% of my field.) Keep im mind its not just my own fate, but also of my wife and kids. Becoming a banker, programmer, consultant, whatever, was a decision to *not* save the world, but rather be able to find a job quickly whenever I needed and not have to worry about housing, childrens' wellbeing, etc. Housing is the key issue. I think if it wasnt for the exorbitant cost of housing, many more careers would be open to people who truly want them. With housing in the mix though, you spend every penny of your earnings trying to pay off your house and have little time to really contribute to society.
Forget quotes about neural networks, program trading WORKS. Firms like Goldman Sachs have pulled in hundreds of millions in profits with program trading and will likely continue to do so. Its about replicating human trader behaviours, except with lightning-sharp reflexes.
What is wrong with you people? There are more important things in life than the lasest release of your software. I dont use drugs, but if I did, it sure as hell wouldnt be so I could make our release deadlines. CHILL out. Work is not important, I dont care what you do. Your health is the most important thing.
But then again, menstruation has also evolved for a reason. Yet there are drugs now which limit a woman to 4 cycles a year. They are launching one which eliminates it alltogether. I'm not justifying sleep drugs, just saying that this trend started a while back...
"In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol... now you don't have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine..."
Ummm...so playing video games in the desolation of your house is somehow worse than drugs, which generally leads to robberies to support the expensive habit?
Even if his gross generalizations were correct, I'd say not knowing your neighbors is far better than robbing them to support a drug habit. What is O'Reilly smoking?
"You idiots seem to think that cops go around randomly tazoring foreign-looking people" Umm...I would make this statement regardless of who got tased. Which is why I made no reference to ethnicity. Your bringing it up suggests that perhaps it was due to ethnicity, you appear to have subliminally admitted it! Secondly, I didnt realize being a "jackass" was electrocutable. Perhaps the cops should visit a frat then, they will find plenty of potential targets.
I keep hearing people complaining "if he had just listened" or "all he had to do was get up." But seriously, think about it -- should he really have been tased repeatedly or simply arrested?
1. After being shocked repeatedly, could he even have been ABLE to "just" stand up?
2. After being shocked repeatedly, would be have been in a mental state to understand the cops' commands?
3. He was on the floor. An irritating act, but something deserving electrocution?
4. What if someone asks for a warrant, should they also get electrocuted. After all "all he had to do was let them search."
Put simply, this was WRONG. The kid deserves to be arrested, NOT electrocuted. To those of you who say "tasing is non-lethal," well, i dare you to do it to yourself. Post a video on YouTube to prove it.
If there was justice here, Rumsfeld -- who provided the cash and the means to Hussein to commit these atrocities -- would also be on traial. Along with the remainder of living Regean administration members.
I'm sure its easy to say unless you are one of the people misidentified. I used to work for a consulting company. Being misidentified and having to go through an hour-long security process each week (twice) while travelling for work was so bureaucratic that I just quit my consulting job. There was no way to get off the list. I just happen to be of arab ethnicity (born in USA though) and that was enough. I tried for months to get off these darn lists. No luck. Imagine trying to book a vacation, or to visit a mother country to see a dying grandparent and being blocked by some month-long DHS project. Unacceptable.
Dont worry, influential systems integration companies such as Accenture will get multi-billion dollar contracts to build it out. After years of delays and bill padding, we will have a semi-working system and the contractor (Accenture of one of their cohorts) will be billions richer.
How do I know? I used to work for Accenture.