You couldn't get 100 people to agree to take 100 free $20 bills (some would feel they should get 2, some would feel they shouldn't get 1, etc.)
Since the author's *addressed it* thru the president and adama, I let it slip without dinging them.
But in reality, I think having 10% or so head off in their own ships would have been more realistic (but also taken another 15 to 20 minute dealing with them).
After the revolution, there may not have been much will to resist adama any more.
I prefer the entertainment to be pitched where I can understand it. Not where 17 people out of 3 million understand it.
And I think that they either
a) Mocked themselves for stating the obvious (Cavel to the black cylon) b) Didn't state the obvious.
Of course one question is... what good is the watchman song to current earth people? but...
a) Loved the fact they finally gave a reason why cylons and others would hear that song in some far off non-earth reality (guess we should have seen there would be a current day tie but I didn't until it came on the radio). b) Are the cylons and the humans the joker and the thief? Or is "god" and "god2" using the humans to try and find a way out of here? c) Did ron go shallow and stop after a few lines of the song- or are the rest of the lyrics buried in other parts of the show?
I am an atheist and I thought the use and treatment of religion in this storyline was excellent.
So many science fiction stories are essentially atheist/agnostic and that is really opposed to most of society (tho I read last week that lack of religion was growing- huzzah - tho it won't help me much in the bible belt).
It had a great ending.
The *only* thing I would change is that 4 to 5% of humanity probably would have chosen differently. You just never get 100% in real life so that rang false.
But the writers at least had the characters discuss how odd it was that 100% of folks agreed so I felt that was good enough for me.
The USA Today article below reveals the latest ugly trend in statist abuse against private property owners: government seizure of private homes and businesses through eminent domain for the purpose of generating higher property taxes on subsequent "redevelopment" of the property.
The planned displacement of over 5,000 residents - to be removed by physical force if they refuse to leave under the government's threat - from a middle class community in coastal Florida is one in a rash of cases in recent years in which municipal officials collude with large-scale developers to seize private property: The officials use government eminent domain powers to take private property and turn it over to their cronies, who in turn use the land for large scale development of their own. The naked extortion is rationalized as legally justified with the rhetoric of the "public good", nebulously claiming that the seizures will improve "the economy" and, more specifically, arguing that it meets the constitutional test of eminent domain for "public use" because it will raise more taxes.
USA Today reports that a viro, "Larry Morandi, the environmental program director for the National Conference of State Legislatures, says cities are using eminent domain to address financial problems. 'They are taking property they don't believe is generating enough tax revenue and turning it over to a developer who will generate more taxes,' he says."
---
And yes, we knew Obama sided with RIAA beforehand.
Voting for Obama was a complex decision. a) booting out corrupt republicans b) stopping their social agenda c) stopping the next 20 to 25 years being a "pro corporation, hyper socially conservative" court d) addressing racism
---
RIAA has overstepped, will continue to overstep, and ultimately to avoid them-- just don't buy their products. They can be reversed when they put enough grannies, dead people, and 17 year olds in prison. Every time Obama's team sides with them, he will waste a bit more of his political capital. Perhaps at some point he will wake up.
You can't really time the market, but you can avoid things like the break from 14,000. I sidestepped it easily.
However, the October 2008 drop sideswiped me because I went long (thinking we were at a bottom).
As far as investing goes tho, just watching the 180/300 dma's and the price action is enough to decided between "trading" mode and "buy and hold/investing" mode.
By 1933, it was pretty obvious that a long term uptrend was in place and you had plenty of warning to avoid 60% of the 50% decline in 37 after getting stung for 20%.
You can't predict when the govt changes the rules all the time of course.
But "Buy and hold", "Can't time the market" is partially propaganda pushed by companies that stand to benefit from you giving them money and walking away for 20 years.
If you did that in 2000 or in 2007, it may be 2020 before you are even again. I got out at 13,500, was short (in DUG) most of the summer, was up 50% going into october and then lost every penny of that- putting me back at where I was when I got out at 13,500. SPY, DIA, SH, DOG, SKF, DUG, others make trading short/long easy if you have an IRA. Not so easy if you have a 401k.
The problem is that the smartest people in the world are competing with you- and your emotions come into play a lot more than you realize.
You are blowing off a huge rally (450% gain ) from may of 1932 to january of 1937.
That's a little under half of the gain from 1932 to 1958 (1000%).
If you put $100,000 in the market at the bottom, you had $450,000 in 4 years and 8 months.
Our "May of 1932" is probably going to be February 2010. Just wait for the price to break the 180dma (as a heads up) and then the 300dma (as a confirmation) and then it's back to investment / buy and hold for a full cycle (5 years).
Given the crazy printing of 1 trillion dollars, I'm already investing (as opposed to trading) in commodities. They appear to have bottomed and devaluation of the dollar will preserve value.
A *normal* bear market loses 50% of the prior rallies gains. In a normal bear market we would have fallen from 14,000 to 7,000.
You can see the downward momentum is draining out on the long term charts.
The ultimate bottom is about 4500.
People will talk very darkly but it will happen and then we'll start a long term uptrend. There have been many financial panics before.
However- we can JUST as easily take away these bastards bonuses as they are taking away our pensions and the unions contracts. The fact is AIG was bankrupt.
I think the way they are doing it is unconstitutional- we'll see. A better way would be the mind numbingly through IRS baseline audits with maximum fines for every place where their taxes were incorrectly paid. And a promise to continue those audits on an annual basis for the next 6 years unless 75% of the money was turned down.
Bush was a pretty complete zero but he pushed the virtue of loyalty to a fault.
He was amazingly loyal to his team compared to any prior president in my lifetime (going back to about carter).
Obama let the congressional democrats walk all over him. I hope he changes that in round two- I voted for him. So far he is not doing as good a job as Clinton did in controlling congress and pushing his agenda. Unless his agenda is to spend money like a drunken sailor and destroy the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency through massive inflation.
Obama seems like a smart guy. He probably needs to show loyalty to and protect his team if he is going to do well long term. I was completely amazed with some of the crap Bush got away with through sheer assertion.
I subscribed to XM. I liked it a lot for about 6 months.
Lately- it seems like it has a lot of commercials (maybe 20% of your air time?) so I'm PAYING for a service that is then selling commercials.
Likewise, I liked it for a lot of songs and programming not available on regular radio. But over time, I've realized that the regular radio plays a lot of stuff that I like that Xm either doesn't play or plays very rarely.
So over the last few weeks, I've been tuning in to regular radio more.
I havn't bought a CD in years. DVD's only rarely. I think the last was Moulin Rouge.
They are too expensive, and I ran out of places to store new ones.
But the main thing was, I wasn't *watching* or listening to the ones I had. So I had two books cases of CD's and DVD's and their reuse rate was near zero.
There is more new entertainment available than I can keep up with (I hope to catch up on "lost" when it ends if folks say it has a good ending). Most entertainment, I see once and that is enough. The last thing I really liked was Moulin Rouge- saw it 17 times.
This is a good point. I am about 95% of the way through remodeling my kitchen.
It apparently cost me about 1/2 to 1/4 of a professional kitchen remodel (and 75% of my sanity btw).
There is no warranty. Last night, I installed a handle 1" to the left of where it should have been (I was tired- I'd measured it 3 times, used a template, and it wasn't even close to where it should have been). So now i have to buy a new drawer front.
I hired a professional to hang the cabinets and run the plumbing but otherwise did all the labor. Walkout cost for new tile, new cabinets, new built in microwave, new sink, and a million little specialty doo-dads (slamming drawer vs quiet closing drawer-- $5 extra) was under $5000.
But no warranty. And a ton of labor on my part (probably 80 hours).
Same goes for the new wood floor. $2000 to get it installed, but I'm doing it for "free". Again- no warranty if it goes bad in 2 years.
On rereading your post, perhaps you are missing my point and assuming that I mean that we take money allocated to the military budget and give it to the oil companies.
No of course not.
We just protect Kuwait, the Saudi's, and other countries with our military, including multiple air craft carriers, stealth bombers, and of course millions of dollars of grants. The *only* reason we do this is that they are oil countries.
It feels good to say that but it is the difference between 20 years of painful slow growth with 10% unemployment or 10 years of 25%+ unemployment, rioting in the streets, breakdown of social order and likely extremely ugly world war.
Hard choice.
A lot of the money paid to these bozo's should be clawed back and a lot of them should go to jail for fraud and face the irs most grueling audits to see other ways they scammed everyone.
I'd prefer to avoid another world war- it will be uncommonly ugly given how fragile and jit our entire system is.
The government doesn't need to artificially inflate oil. It just needs to present a bill for the military support. Oil is actually billions (trillions?) of dollars more expensive but that extra cost is hidden because we pay for the military through our taxes.
And as a bonus, we fund our enemies thru oil so we pay additional costs there too.
I'd studied it and concluded the same argument the link you posts posits.
We are well suited to living where we are because we wouldn't be alive otherwise.
However, the vast majority of the universe is actually quite hostile not just to our form of life but any form of life.
It is a much stronger argument that in a huge vast universe life came into being in a very tiny percentage of it (perhaps even only one planet of it) by pure random chance than that a creator who cared about as us a life form created an enormous universe which the speed of light makes impossible to reach and which is largely uninhabitable by us (even with severe protective gear) and then put is in a corner out in the arm of an unremarkable galaxy in one of many clusters of galaxies and created no other life.
When I die, I'm dead. I already had cancer and didn't have a religious conversion or particular panic over the thought of dying.
I've had a nice run. Lately, continuing to live sucks a lot more. I hope that changes in a year or two. But living can be very painful physically and emotionally.
I think religions are great for societies, and okay for a lot of people. I also think they are not true- not even possible really.
But if it makes you happy, as long as you don't force me to support your practices, you do what you want.
On the one hand, judges are known to be bored, angry, irritated, sleepy and lawyers are known liars, manipulators, and weasels.
Both the prosecution AND the defense has been caught lying so many times (and the prosecution suppressing evidence that proves innocence).
On the other hand, people can be *real* idiots, make snap decisions on bad information very early in the trial and not get the entire concept.
My one jury trial had one of the jurors arguing for about 20 minutes that "they didn't PROVE he was innocent!" Fortunately the other 11 of us were so obviously astonished at her stupidity that she shut up.
After the trial, the defense attorney told us that everyone knew the guy was innocent, including the prosecutor who bailed and handed it to a junior prosecutor. The only witness was a convicted felon who had a grudge and admitted on the witness stand to carrying a gun (illegal). The poor guy couldn't even make bail and had spent almost a year in jail waiting for his trial to come up.
---
I believe in jury nullification and I also believe if someone gets a fact that results in a correct verdict then I support it.
Slashdot Mirror
I must admit that I fast forwarded through some of the pure soap opera scenes in the prior two episodes.
There would be a problem with the fact that the holding location of that portion of the design was hit with multiple nuclear missiles.
I agree.
You couldn't get 100 people to agree to take 100 free $20 bills (some would feel they should get 2, some would feel they shouldn't get 1, etc.)
Since the author's *addressed it* thru the president and adama, I let it slip without dinging them.
But in reality, I think having 10% or so head off in their own ships would have been more realistic (but also taken another 15 to 20 minute dealing with them).
After the revolution, there may not have been much will to resist adama any more.
I agree.
I prefer the entertainment to be pitched where I can understand it. Not where 17 people out of 3 million understand it.
And I think that they either
a) Mocked themselves for stating the obvious (Cavel to the black cylon)
b) Didn't state the obvious.
Of course one question is... what good is the watchman song to current earth people? but...
a) Loved the fact they finally gave a reason why cylons and others would hear that song in some far off non-earth reality (guess we should have seen there would be a current day tie but I didn't until it came on the radio).
b) Are the cylons and the humans the joker and the thief? Or is "god" and "god2" using the humans to try and find a way out of here?
c) Did ron go shallow and stop after a few lines of the song- or are the rest of the lyrics buried in other parts of the show?
TOS had more than one religious show.
Remember.. they worship the Son.
Exactly.
They killed Cally intentionally so that it would end the way it did.
That's a looooong lead time.
I am an atheist and I thought the use and treatment of religion in this storyline was excellent.
So many science fiction stories are essentially atheist/agnostic and that is really opposed to most of society (tho I read last week that lack of religion was growing- huzzah - tho it won't help me much in the bible belt).
It had a great ending.
The *only* thing I would change is that 4 to 5% of humanity probably would have chosen differently. You just never get 100% in real life so that rang false.
But the writers at least had the characters discuss how odd it was that 100% of folks agreed so I felt that was good enough for me.
Didn't have to spend billions of dollars.
http://moosecove.com/propertyrights/taxes/eminentdomain-taxes-melist-usat-040401.shtml
The USA Today article below reveals the latest ugly trend in statist abuse against private property owners: government seizure of private homes and businesses through eminent domain for the purpose of generating higher property taxes on subsequent "redevelopment" of the property.
The planned displacement of over 5,000 residents - to be removed by physical force if they refuse to leave under the government's threat - from a middle class community in coastal Florida is one in a rash of cases in recent years in which municipal officials collude with large-scale developers to seize private property: The officials use government eminent domain powers to take private property and turn it over to their cronies, who in turn use the land for large scale development of their own. The naked extortion is rationalized as legally justified with the rhetoric of the "public good", nebulously claiming that the seizures will improve "the economy" and, more specifically, arguing that it meets the constitutional test of eminent domain for "public use" because it will raise more taxes.
USA Today reports that a viro, "Larry Morandi, the environmental program director for the National Conference of State Legislatures, says cities are using eminent domain to address financial problems. 'They are taking property they don't believe is generating enough tax revenue and turning it over to a developer who will generate more taxes,' he says."
---
And yes, we knew Obama sided with RIAA beforehand.
Voting for Obama was a complex decision.
a) booting out corrupt republicans
b) stopping their social agenda
c) stopping the next 20 to 25 years being a "pro corporation, hyper socially conservative" court
d) addressing racism
---
RIAA has overstepped, will continue to overstep, and ultimately to avoid them-- just don't buy their products.
They can be reversed when they put enough grannies, dead people, and 17 year olds in prison. Every time Obama's team sides with them, he will waste a bit more of his political capital. Perhaps at some point he will wake up.
You can't really time the market, but you can avoid things like the break from 14,000. I sidestepped it easily.
However, the October 2008 drop sideswiped me because I went long (thinking we were at a bottom).
As far as investing goes tho, just watching the 180/300 dma's and the price action is enough to decided between "trading" mode and "buy and hold/investing" mode.
By 1933, it was pretty obvious that a long term uptrend was in place and you had plenty of warning to avoid 60% of the 50% decline in 37 after getting stung for 20%.
You can't predict when the govt changes the rules all the time of course.
But "Buy and hold", "Can't time the market" is partially propaganda pushed by companies that stand to benefit from you giving them money and walking away for 20 years.
If you did that in 2000 or in 2007, it may be 2020 before you are even again. I got out at 13,500, was short (in DUG) most of the summer, was up 50% going into october and then lost every penny of that- putting me back at where I was when I got out at 13,500. SPY, DIA, SH, DOG, SKF, DUG, others make trading short/long easy if you have an IRA. Not so easy if you have a 401k.
The problem is that the smartest people in the world are competing with you- and your emotions come into play a lot more than you realize.
You are blowing off a huge rally (450% gain ) from may of 1932 to january of 1937.
That's a little under half of the gain from 1932 to 1958 (1000%).
If you put $100,000 in the market at the bottom, you had $450,000 in 4 years and 8 months.
Our "May of 1932" is probably going to be February 2010. Just wait for the price to break the 180dma (as a heads up) and then the 300dma (as a confirmation) and then it's back to investment / buy and hold for a full cycle (5 years).
Given the crazy printing of 1 trillion dollars, I'm already investing (as opposed to trading) in commodities. They appear to have bottomed and devaluation of the dollar will preserve value.
A *normal* bear market loses 50% of the prior rallies gains. In a normal bear market we would have fallen from 14,000 to 7,000.
You can see the downward momentum is draining out on the long term charts.
The ultimate bottom is about 4500.
People will talk very darkly but it will happen and then we'll start a long term uptrend. There have been many financial panics before.
However- we can JUST as easily take away these bastards bonuses as they are taking away our pensions and the unions contracts. The fact is AIG was bankrupt.
I think the way they are doing it is unconstitutional- we'll see. A better way would be the mind numbingly through IRS baseline audits with maximum fines for every place where their taxes were incorrectly paid. And a promise to continue those audits on an annual basis for the next 6 years unless 75% of the money was turned down.
Bush was a pretty complete zero but he pushed the virtue of loyalty to a fault.
He was amazingly loyal to his team compared to any prior president in my lifetime (going back to about carter).
Obama let the congressional democrats walk all over him. I hope he changes that in round two- I voted for him. So far he is not doing as good a job as Clinton did in controlling congress and pushing his agenda. Unless his agenda is to spend money like a drunken sailor and destroy the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency through massive inflation.
Obama seems like a smart guy. He probably needs to show loyalty to and protect his team if he is going to do well long term. I was completely amazed with some of the crap Bush got away with through sheer assertion.
I subscribed to XM.
I liked it a lot for about 6 months.
Lately- it seems like it has a lot of commercials (maybe 20% of your air time?) so I'm PAYING for a service that is then selling commercials.
Likewise, I liked it for a lot of songs and programming not available on regular radio. But over time, I've realized that the regular radio plays a lot of stuff that I like that Xm either doesn't play or plays very rarely.
So over the last few weeks, I've been tuning in to regular radio more.
I havn't bought a CD in years. DVD's only rarely. I think the last was Moulin Rouge.
They are too expensive, and I ran out of places to store new ones.
But the main thing was, I wasn't *watching* or listening to the ones I had. So I had two books cases of CD's and DVD's and their reuse rate was near zero.
There is more new entertainment available than I can keep up with (I hope to catch up on "lost" when it ends if folks say it has a good ending). Most entertainment, I see once and that is enough. The last thing I really liked was Moulin Rouge- saw it 17 times.
The main purpose of democracy is to avoid massive bloodshed and social unrest around changes of power.
Someone is *always* screwed. Some fringe people may be screwed their entire lives.
But the alternative is civil war.
It's a sucky system of government (until you compare it to others) as the old saw goes.
They can keep them tied to Word (it's still the "safe" choice) but they lose their fiat pricing ability.
Anytime their prices get too steep, you roll out a "test" project with some ODF competitors and microsoft cuts your prices by 50%.
This is a good point.
I am about 95% of the way through remodeling my kitchen.
It apparently cost me about 1/2 to 1/4 of a professional kitchen remodel (and 75% of my sanity btw).
There is no warranty. Last night, I installed a handle 1" to the left of where it should have been (I was tired- I'd measured it 3 times, used a template, and it wasn't even close to where it should have been). So now i have to buy a new drawer front.
I hired a professional to hang the cabinets and run the plumbing but otherwise did all the labor. Walkout cost for new tile, new cabinets, new built in microwave, new sink, and a million little specialty doo-dads (slamming drawer vs quiet closing drawer-- $5 extra) was under $5000.
But no warranty.
And a ton of labor on my part (probably 80 hours).
Same goes for the new wood floor. $2000 to get it installed, but I'm doing it for "free". Again- no warranty if it goes bad in 2 years.
No... but rule 34 applies.
On rereading your post, perhaps you are missing my point and assuming that I mean that we take money allocated to the military budget and give it to the oil companies.
No of course not.
We just protect Kuwait, the Saudi's, and other countries with our military, including multiple air craft carriers, stealth bombers, and of course millions of dollars of grants. The *only* reason we do this is that they are oil countries.
Dude... estimates are $3 trillion and 4,000 lives for the Iraqi war (so far).
Do you think we would have anything to do with the region if it were not important because of oil?
For example- consider the number of troops we have in many african countries numbers in dozens to zero.
It feels good to say that but it is the difference between 20 years of painful slow growth with 10% unemployment or 10 years of 25%+ unemployment, rioting in the streets, breakdown of social order and likely extremely ugly world war.
Hard choice.
A lot of the money paid to these bozo's should be clawed back and a lot of them should go to jail for fraud and face the irs most grueling audits to see other ways they scammed everyone.
I'd prefer to avoid another world war- it will be uncommonly ugly given how fragile and jit our entire system is.
The government doesn't need to artificially inflate oil. It just needs to present a bill for the military support. Oil is actually billions (trillions?) of dollars more expensive but that extra cost is hidden because we pay for the military through our taxes.
And as a bonus, we fund our enemies thru oil so we pay additional costs there too.
Dang. And I think this had a shot at being a new Slashdot meme.
Free speech meme, we hardly knew ye.
I'd studied it and concluded the same argument the link you posts posits.
We are well suited to living where we are because we wouldn't be alive otherwise.
However, the vast majority of the universe is actually quite hostile not just to our form of life but any form of life.
It is a much stronger argument that in a huge vast universe life came into being in a very tiny percentage of it (perhaps even only one planet of it) by pure random chance than that a creator who cared about as us a life form created an enormous universe which the speed of light makes impossible to reach and which is largely uninhabitable by us (even with severe protective gear) and then put is in a corner out in the arm of an unremarkable galaxy in one of many clusters of galaxies and created no other life.
When I die, I'm dead. I already had cancer and didn't have a religious conversion or particular panic over the thought of dying.
I've had a nice run. Lately, continuing to live sucks a lot more. I hope that changes in a year or two. But living can be very painful physically and emotionally.
I think religions are great for societies, and okay for a lot of people. I also think they are not true- not even possible really.
But if it makes you happy, as long as you don't force me to support your practices, you do what you want.
It's tough for me.
On the one hand, judges are known to be bored, angry, irritated, sleepy and lawyers are known liars, manipulators, and weasels.
Both the prosecution AND the defense has been caught lying so many times (and the prosecution suppressing evidence that proves innocence).
On the other hand, people can be *real* idiots, make snap decisions on bad information very early in the trial and not get the entire concept.
My one jury trial had one of the jurors arguing for about 20 minutes that "they didn't PROVE he was innocent!" Fortunately the other 11 of us were so obviously astonished at her stupidity that she shut up.
After the trial, the defense attorney told us that everyone knew the guy was innocent, including the prosecutor who bailed and handed it to a junior prosecutor. The only witness was a convicted felon who had a grudge and admitted on the witness stand to carrying a gun (illegal). The poor guy couldn't even make bail and had spent almost a year in jail waiting for his trial to come up.
---
I believe in jury nullification and I also believe if someone gets a fact that results in a correct verdict then I support it.
Or a save point.
Yea. Know what you mean.
Sounds like you had things a lot rougher.
Hopefully you will be a late bloomer and get the fun in reverse order.
Having a sense of purpose seems to help. It's my main issue- no sense of purpose any more.
I did everything I wanted to do, succeeded at my goals, and now I have nothing else I want to do.