I've only failed to get two that I filled out properly and followed the rules on and failed to send in one on time and by the rules- so 3 failed rebates- one for $50, the others for less.
On the other hand, the rebates are often big since a large percentage of other people fail to use them.
I used to dislike them until I got a system down that made doing them automatic.
I've noticed this on our talk station and now I change the station to songs at the:20 commercial break and come back at:35 after the hour when I know the mid hour break will be consistently over. So they consistently lose me for the 20-24 and 29-36 commercial breaks. I also flip off at:58 and don't flip back until:06 (or the end of the song so some times it is like:07 or:08.. or:24 if it's stairway to heaven. heheh)
When it reaches the point that 100 people can kill half the world, it will happen because somewhere there is a group of 100 extremist (be they religious or not) who thinks it would be a good idea to kill half the world.
A friend of mine, who was smarter than I am, used to think that we would reach that point within the next 50 years.
At that point, as you say, everyone becomes a threat.
The united states was a text book example of an institution built to prevent concentration of power. It did make it 200 years but I would say we have lost it since 1976.
Power always concentrates over time. Governments always fail.
Many families trade the joy of multiple children for a lot of neat stuff and personal experiences. A lot of folks making $40k per year have more than one child. If you are just going to have a basically healthy child and support it with a spare room and some inexpensive food until it takes off on its own, then you can do this very inexpensively.
If you want for the child to excel, then it can cost a lot more money. If your child is sickly, it can cost a lot more money.
A lot of people make that choice. I only had one child myself (tho five years later we divorced and she had one more child with her next husband so now that is 2 children for 3 of adults- a net reduction in the population).
Oddly, the two women I have known that had the most children (5 each) were both strippers and had to give most of their children up for adoption. Perhaps we are selecting for "high and irrational sex drive" as a gene propagation trait among women these days since the sensible intelligent ones are not reproducing at high rates. Give it a few hundred years and it may be all nympho heaven.
This is a temporary solution as the segments of the population that are growing will come to dominate the population (natural selection in action).
We need to stop providing any support for breeding parts of the world population (very harsh so it will not happen). We need to give everyone a reasonable shot at plentiful good food and entertainment if they do not have children (which is a large part of why western societies birth rate drops). We need to make sure the laws screw the hell out of either men or women who have children (in the west it is mostly men- which is why more young men are avoiding marriage and having children than in the past- you have not experienced true joy until you are paying for your ex wife AND her new boyfriend AND your kids child support which she is not spending on them and the new boyfriend believes in spanking and you do not, etc. etc.).
But seriously- get the population down to about 2 billion and our current earth would be a sustainable paradise.
The counter problem is that we have different religions that are willing to kill huge numbers of other humans if they are not a member of the same religion.
I only knew 50 years was coming up soon on some of the beatle's albums because they are lobbying to extend the british copyright laws so they would not go public domain. Looks like it is "please, please me" that is the album.
When there were 8 commercials per hour, it was not be worth people's time to skip the ads. With 22 commercials per hour, it is not worth the time to watch the show live.
That's okay- I can see the basis for that set of beliefs.
Sometimes, they work better than violence which just begets violence. Say- if your enemies are basically decent but have dehumanized you.
Sometimes, violence is the only answer and behaving that way will get you rounded up and exterminated in large numbers. Say- if your enemies enjoy killing you and seeing you suffer.
Personally, I feel we are at great risk of genocide to resolve some of our current problems since large groups of people just want other groups of people to suffer and die. We have held a lid on it for a while but I do not think it is going to last.
Some people are not just guilty or misguided- they are evil.
I say "The key is balancing their needs against the rest of society."
You say "the proper guidance for public policy is the maintenance of justice."
You seem to think these two statements contradict each other somehow.
I do not.
---
At the extreme, I see your position saying that if one person legally gains ownership of everything, then the rest of society would just have to starve since we must protect that one person's right to own everything (and not be forced to share it).
Clearly this is an insane and unrealistic position. Once a small enough group of people owns too much, the larger group will take it from them (legally or by force). So the small group of poeple damn well better balance their needs against the needs of society or they will lose everything (up to and including their lives).
The only way a small group can prevent this is through force and threat of harm/death. When things grow so extreme that the larger group doesn't care if they are harmed or killed then one of the two groups is toast.
We are not talking about being robbed. We are talking about for example putting every dime of your money in one bank and then being upset when they default on you.
You are not responsible for their criminal action, but you are responsible for your action of putting yourself in the position that they could take you for everything.
So the closest to your example would be putting all of your money into a ponzi scheme.
The only justification is that you don't have much to lose in the first place.
Anyone with 25grand or more should have it split into at least 5 places. And preferably diversified between different types of investments.
Until 25 grand, you are really stuck with 2 or 3 mutual funds and I can understand if you get screwed.
However, some of these people we are talking about had hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in Enron stock and it was close to 100% of their retirement. Unless they made all of it in the last year, they should have been balancing their portfolio at the end of each year.
It hasn't been since the corporations twisted copyright to be unreasonably long.
And it is not theft. It is infringment.
The original author still has their property, in the majority of cases does not lose sales to copyright infringment (because the infringers don't have enough money to pay the asking price) and in some cases gains sales they would not have otherwise had (the infringers decide they like the product enough to buy an official version or they get enough money to pay the asking price later in life and buy it then or they pass it on to someone else who likes it enough to buy it).
I disagree. If you kill a person, does it matter if you cut their knife with a throat or ruined them financially so they can't get medical care?
Ken Lay basically died of shame and being caught. I believe that many of his victims died similar deaths to him from his actions.
And I think you are ignoring the fact that Zarqawi probably only *personally* killed less than a hundred people (maybe less than fifty). The rest were all based on his organizations actions. We say he is responsible for the deaths caused by his organization-- I think we can extend deaths caused by corporate actions just as well.
When you knowingly pollute and cover it up and people die, they died. When you work people to death with excessive hours, they are still dead. When you take an excessive salary that means your people can't get medical care (which your salary would have covered) then you traded your happiness for their lives and they are still dead.
Historically, we have drawn a line that said if a person dies because of business, then it is not murder. Corporations have become so powerful and so corrupt, that I think it is time to redraw that line.
I agree with you on the idiocy of investing in one thing.
However, I would say that stocks grow in value because the people running them show they have and can expand a revenue stream.
Stock prices fly on rising earnings and likely rising future earnings.
Put it this way... You invest 10k in a company that produces 1k per year of earnings. They figure out how to be more profitable and are now producing 10k per year of earnings. What is your 10k of stock likely to be worth? Clearly, anyone on the planet would buy a stock for 10k that produces 10k per year in earnings so the price gets bid up to where the return on your stock is in line with other kinds of investments-- usually to about 2 to 3 % over a 'safe' kind of investment like CD's or bonds.
I'm sure if you could isolate out the data from california and those who lost money on enron, that Lay's total was well over 1,000 other people dead- some by suicide, some by heart attacks, some by illness (from stress), some from lack of medicine (because they didn't have the money to buy required medicine).
I'm not sure what Zarqawi's total was (at most 5,000 shared with the actual perpetrators executing his plans?) but Ken probably gave him a serious run for his money when it came to deaths of american citizens.
I will wish death on the human coming at me with a knife any day of the week and twice on sundays. I will wish death on the human about to kill one of my close relatives without hesitation. I will wish death on any human who is killing other undeserving humans. I would easily kill any of the "pirahna pack" children in south america if they came at me.
Less trivial cases... I will almost always wish death on any human who is torturing other undeserving humans. I will almost always wish death on any human that enslaves other unwilling humans.
There are plenty of other cases.
Ken Lay deserves empathy for the 55 years that he lead a decent life before going astray. But he destroyed a lot of people. He probably KILLED a lot of people (we just don't see news reports about all the people that died or commited suicide when they found out they had lost everything).
I wish he had not died. He DESERVED to suffer the humiliation of at least a decade of prison. His premature death has robbed those who lost so much of any sense of justice unless they realize that he almost certainly died prematurely because of his conviction.
When I got into programming, you walked in the door and 30 minutes later you were coding. You coded and debugged all day for multiple days in a row. Finally you did a bit of scheduling and installing. Then you had a couple days meetings on the next project and you went back to coding and debugging. It was fun, my skills at coding and debugging were top notch. Every bug I found was like a hit of heroin-- pure bliss.
At a large corporation, with sox, I am now down to 4 months of programming out of the last 18 months. The rest of the time is meetings, testing, forms (lots and lots of forms), auditing the forms, auditing other programmers forms, training about new forms. It's horrible. I got a chance to work on an actual bug last week and remembered why I used to like programming (problem solving).
I'm sliding over into project management lately. It's a higher skill set, yet has a lot less paperwork that is unrelated to what you are trying to do. I can see retiring to a small company or a private company where i actually get to code and debug again. I want to be set financially tho and that's 3 more years of grinding at this nearly meaningless activity before I can do so.
And yet... our executives can still cut 20k checks without even a cross signature and they can have outside consultants write and install new software without following our SOX procedures, standard installation procedures, standard documentation. Meanwhile changing one character on one line can require at least a 16 hour project budget for us.
You are always responsible for your actions unless you are being coerced (We will kill your dog unless you invest in our 401k plan).
Anyone who has over 10% of their retirement portfolio in one investment is an idiot.
If you are going to put it all one one roll of the dice, then stop yer bitchin when you lose.
I put 10% of my salary into company stock. I *sell* it at an immediate 10 to 20% profit every six months. This raises my pay an average of 1% per year after taxes.
Yes, Ken Lay and the rest were corrupt bastards. But Enron employees were also culpable and some of their "lost" stock money was ripped from the pockets of poor californians while Enron employees openly mocked those californians.
Slashdot Mirror
I love rebates.
I've only failed to get two that I filled out properly and followed the rules on and failed to send in one on time and by the rules- so 3 failed rebates- one for $50, the others for less.
On the other hand, the rebates are often big since a large percentage of other people fail to use them.
I used to dislike them until I got a system down that made doing them automatic.
The late 1990's talk-song "Wear Sunscreen" and the fact the benefits of sunscreen are not as good as we believed in the 90's.
I've noticed this on our talk station and now I change the station to songs at the :20 commercial break and come back at :35 after the hour when I know the mid hour break will be consistently over. So they consistently lose me for the 20-24 and 29-36 commercial breaks. I also flip off at :58 and don't flip back until :06 (or the end of the song so some times it is like :07 or :08.. or :24 if it's stairway to heaven. heheh)
Heck,
How would I know. But they are reporting it on BBC.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4724664.stm
So... my KARMA rating is excellent but I no longer get a Karma bonus for it.
And there appears to be no way to fix it. I guess I will just set up a new ID at some point or go to DIGG.
I agree.
When it reaches the point that 100 people can kill half the world, it will happen because somewhere there is a group of 100 extremist (be they religious or not) who thinks it would be a good idea to kill half the world.
A friend of mine, who was smarter than I am, used to think that we would reach that point within the next 50 years.
At that point, as you say, everyone becomes a threat.
The united states was a text book example of an institution built to prevent concentration of power. It did make it 200 years but I would say we have lost it since 1976.
Power always concentrates over time. Governments always fail.
It is a personal choice.
Many families trade the joy of multiple children for a lot of neat stuff and personal experiences.
A lot of folks making $40k per year have more than one child.
If you are just going to have a basically healthy child and support it with a spare room and some inexpensive food until it takes off on its own, then you can do this very inexpensively.
If you want for the child to excel, then it can cost a lot more money.
If your child is sickly, it can cost a lot more money.
A lot of people make that choice. I only had one child myself (tho five years later we divorced and she had one more child with her next husband so now that is 2 children for 3 of adults- a net reduction in the population).
Oddly, the two women I have known that had the most children (5 each) were both strippers and had to give most of their children up for adoption. Perhaps we are selecting for "high and irrational sex drive" as a gene propagation trait among women these days since the sensible intelligent ones are not reproducing at high rates. Give it a few hundred years and it may be all nympho heaven.
This is a temporary solution as the segments of the population that are growing will come to dominate the population (natural selection in action).
We need to stop providing any support for breeding parts of the world population (very harsh so it will not happen).
We need to give everyone a reasonable shot at plentiful good food and entertainment if they do not have children (which is a large part of why western societies birth rate drops).
We need to make sure the laws screw the hell out of either men or women who have children (in the west it is mostly men- which is why more young men are avoiding marriage and having children than in the past- you have not experienced true joy until you are paying for your ex wife AND her new boyfriend AND your kids child support which she is not spending on them and the new boyfriend believes in spanking and you do not, etc. etc.).
But seriously- get the population down to about 2 billion and our current earth would be a sustainable paradise.
The counter problem is that we have different religions that are willing to kill huge numbers of other humans if they are not a member of the same religion.
Good catch.
I only knew 50 years was coming up soon on some of the beatle's albums because they are lobbying to extend the british copyright laws so they would not go public domain. Looks like it is "please, please me" that is the album.
When there were 8 commercials per hour, it was not be worth people's time to skip the ads.
With 22 commercials per hour, it is not worth the time to watch the show live.
So it starts out ugly and then later they make the ability to speak Polish required to play it?
This is never going to fly.
That's okay- I can see the basis for that set of beliefs.
Sometimes, they work better than violence which just begets violence. Say- if your enemies are basically decent but have dehumanized you.
Sometimes, violence is the only answer and behaving that way will get you rounded up and exterminated in large numbers. Say- if your enemies enjoy killing you and seeing you suffer.
Personally, I feel we are at great risk of genocide to resolve some of our current problems since large groups of people just want other groups of people to suffer and die. We have held a lid on it for a while but I do not think it is going to last.
Some people are not just guilty or misguided- they are evil.
Not all humans are rational.
is going to looose.
I say "The key is balancing their needs against the rest of society."
You say "the proper guidance for public policy is the maintenance of justice."
You seem to think these two statements contradict each other somehow.
I do not.
---
At the extreme, I see your position saying that if one person legally gains ownership of everything, then the rest of society would just have to starve since we must protect that one person's right to own everything (and not be forced to share it).
Clearly this is an insane and unrealistic position. Once a small enough group of people owns too much, the larger group will take it from them (legally or by force). So the small group of poeple damn well better balance their needs against the needs of society or they will lose everything (up to and including their lives).
The only way a small group can prevent this is through force and threat of harm/death. When things grow so extreme that the larger group doesn't care if they are harmed or killed then one of the two groups is toast.
And exactly how many of those get a cut when I buy a copy of Abbey Road which was made over FIFTY years ago?
Most of them are DEAD man-- I wish my heirs would get paid for the rest of time for the work I do every day.
I support a reasonable copyright period. The current copyright period is not reasonable.
We are not talking about being robbed. We are talking about for example putting every dime of your money in one bank and then being upset when they default on you.
You are not responsible for their criminal action, but you are responsible for your action of putting yourself in the position that they could take you for everything.
So the closest to your example would be putting all of your money into a ponzi scheme.
The only justification is that you don't have much to lose in the first place.
Anyone with 25grand or more should have it split into at least 5 places. And preferably diversified between different types of investments.
Until 25 grand, you are really stuck with 2 or 3 mutual funds and I can understand if you get screwed.
However, some of these people we are talking about had hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in Enron stock and it was close to 100% of their retirement. Unless they made all of it in the last year, they should have been balancing their portfolio at the end of each year.
It's not that simple.
It hasn't been since the corporations twisted copyright to be unreasonably long.
And it is not theft. It is infringment.
The original author still has their property, in the majority of cases does not lose sales to copyright infringment (because the infringers don't have enough money to pay the asking price) and in some cases gains sales they would not have otherwise had (the infringers decide they like the product enough to buy an official version or they get enough money to pay the asking price later in life and buy it then or they pass it on to someone else who likes it enough to buy it).
Well said.
clap clap clap
I disagree. If you kill a person, does it matter if you cut their knife with a throat or ruined them financially so they can't get medical care?
Ken Lay basically died of shame and being caught. I believe that many of his victims died similar deaths to him from his actions.
And I think you are ignoring the fact that Zarqawi probably only *personally* killed less than a hundred people (maybe less than fifty). The rest were all based on his organizations actions. We say he is responsible for the deaths caused by his organization-- I think we can extend deaths caused by corporate actions just as well.
When you knowingly pollute and cover it up and people die, they died.
When you work people to death with excessive hours, they are still dead.
When you take an excessive salary that means your people can't get medical care (which your salary would have covered) then you traded your happiness for their lives and they are still dead.
Historically, we have drawn a line that said if a person dies because of business, then it is not murder. Corporations have become so powerful and so corrupt, that I think it is time to redraw that line.
I agree with you on the idiocy of investing in one thing.
However, I would say that stocks grow in value because the people running them show they have and can expand a revenue stream.
Stock prices fly on rising earnings and likely rising future earnings.
Put it this way... You invest 10k in a company that produces 1k per year of earnings. They figure out how to be more profitable and are now producing 10k per year of earnings. What is your 10k of stock likely to be worth? Clearly, anyone on the planet would buy a stock for 10k that produces 10k per year in earnings so the price gets bid up to where the return on your stock is in line with other kinds of investments-- usually to about 2 to 3 % over a 'safe' kind of investment like CD's or bonds.
I'm sure if you could isolate out the data from california and those who lost money on enron, that Lay's total was well over 1,000 other people dead- some by suicide, some by heart attacks, some by illness (from stress), some from lack of medicine (because they didn't have the money to buy required medicine).
I'm not sure what Zarqawi's total was (at most 5,000 shared with the actual perpetrators executing his plans?) but Ken probably gave him a serious run for his money when it came to deaths of american citizens.
Trivial case...
I will wish death on the human coming at me with a knife any day of the week and twice on sundays.
I will wish death on the human about to kill one of my close relatives without hesitation.
I will wish death on any human who is killing other undeserving humans.
I would easily kill any of the "pirahna pack" children in south america if they came at me.
Less trivial cases...
I will almost always wish death on any human who is torturing other undeserving humans.
I will almost always wish death on any human that enslaves other unwilling humans.
There are plenty of other cases.
Ken Lay deserves empathy for the 55 years that he lead a decent life before going astray.
But he destroyed a lot of people.
He probably KILLED a lot of people (we just don't see news reports about all the people that died or commited suicide when they found out they had lost everything).
I wish he had not died.
He DESERVED to suffer the humiliation of at least a decade of prison. His premature death has robbed those who lost so much of any sense of justice unless they realize that he almost certainly died prematurely because of his conviction.
When I got into programming, you walked in the door and 30 minutes later you were coding. You coded and debugged all day for multiple days in a row. Finally you did a bit of scheduling and installing. Then you had a couple days meetings on the next project and you went back to coding and debugging. It was fun, my skills at coding and debugging were top notch. Every bug I found was like a hit of heroin-- pure bliss.
At a large corporation, with sox, I am now down to 4 months of programming out of the last 18 months. The rest of the time is meetings, testing, forms (lots and lots of forms), auditing the forms, auditing other programmers forms, training about new forms. It's horrible. I got a chance to work on an actual bug last week and remembered why I used to like programming (problem solving).
I'm sliding over into project management lately. It's a higher skill set, yet has a lot less paperwork that is unrelated to what you are trying to do. I can see retiring to a small company or a private company where i actually get to code and debug again. I want to be set financially tho and that's 3 more years of grinding at this nearly meaningless activity before I can do so.
And yet... our executives can still cut 20k checks without even a cross signature and they can have outside consultants write and install new software without following our SOX procedures, standard installation procedures, standard documentation. Meanwhile changing one character on one line can require at least a 16 hour project budget for us.
Easy answer...it is STILL your fault.
You are always responsible for your actions unless you are being coerced (We will kill your dog unless you invest in our 401k plan).
Anyone who has over 10% of their retirement portfolio in one investment is an idiot.
If you are going to put it all one one roll of the dice, then stop yer bitchin when you lose.
I put 10% of my salary into company stock. I *sell* it at an immediate 10 to 20% profit every six months. This raises my pay an average of 1% per year after taxes.
Yes, Ken Lay and the rest were corrupt bastards. But Enron employees were also culpable and some of their "lost" stock money was ripped from the pockets of poor californians while Enron employees openly mocked those californians.