Another thing to take into account is cash flows. It may take you a long time to pay back the capital investment of improving your insulation, however if you finance those improvements at a good rate you can improve your cash flow, maybe not your debt to asset ratio, but you may have more cash on hand each month from having a power bill 4x lower.
Thats what I did on my house, I bought a cheap house and doubled down on improvements, insulation, windows, tankless water heater (best thing I've ever bought in my life), appliances, etc. My mortgage on the house went from about $600 a month to $800 a month; however my electric bill went from $400 a month to under $100. This greatly improved my cash flow. I also plan on being in this house long enough that the improvements will be paid off then there will be a nearly $1200 change in monthly cash flow.
Lowering your monthly expenses in the form of Capital investments is a good long term strategy. If you plan on moving in 2-3 years you may not be able to recoup the saving in the sale price, however if you are the one paying the bills the change in cash flows can be dramatic.
to actually pay 1.5 Trillion in damages. It is a punitive damage meant to completely shut down the company and keep the liable parties from ever being in business again.
To answer your question: "How come it's always those who break the rules that complain the most about new techniques to uphold the rules?"
There are many rules which a large portion of society find necessary. Speed limits for instance. They are appropriate in School Zones, Business Districts, and your neighborhood. They however are not appropriate on all highways and interstates, especially in sparsely populated areas. Two problems occur: 1. The law isn't enforced uniformly, meaning you can speed everywhere but where that camera is and there is no harm no foul. Even if a police officer was to spend the time enforcing the law everywhere it is such a trivial thing to speed that it can't be enforced uniformly, only sporadically. 2. Not everyone agrees that speeding is in any way shape or form wrong.
Speed limits are political and financial. If this wasn't the case highway speed limits would be set somewhere around 80 to 90 MPH. There is also the myth that driving fast is dangerous. Some resources on speed limits. The real issues are tailgaters and weavers. Staying in your lane on the interstate when you have a two miles of visibility is perfectly safe, shifting lanes at 100MPH to weave through traffic is what causes accidents as you clip the car in front of you. However, if the lanes are clear and you slow down to the flow of traffic and wait for traffic to clear before increasing your speed again it is perfectly safe.
Just shut up and follow the rules!
No. There are so many bad rules I can't even begin to count them. I will lobby to change the rules, knowing full well that most of them won't ever be changed, and in the mean time I'll break them and challenge them in court. I'll also try my best to sway public opinion in order to have some chance of getting the rules changed.
Some examples of bad rules:
My son won't say "Hellboy" because it makes him nervous because his teachers and grandparents told him "hell" was a "bad word". That is a horrible rule. Censorship is always bad. I try and teach my kids to be polite, yet at the same time teach them how wrong censorship is. I don't scold them for using what other people might consider "dirty" words, because I don't believe the words themselves are dirty. However I try to correct the root issue, anger.
Drug laws. They are all bad laws. Drug use is a health issue, not something that should require law enforcement. Yes drugs do bad things to people, but so does anything in excess. Video games, food, hell even water if enough is consumed will kill you. The majority of people in the US take some form of drug daily, be it Caffeine or Alcohol or a swath of prescription drugs. Yet the only people serving jail time are the poor. If you have money you can get better drugs from your doctor.
IP laws. We really don't need them, people will produce without them. It still takes physical resources that will be hoarded to make anything to play them on, house them, distribute them on the network. There will always be information jobs in big, small, medium companies where the knowledge of how to use IP will be needed. That is the new digital economy. Its not about goods, its about service. It is about servicing the customers, be it the accounting department, or the person downloading a song. If you aren't servicing the customer you aren't making money. There is a group of IP thieves hoarding what centuries of technology and innovation from countless people have created. They are standing on the shoulders of the giants before them, then claiming they own the rights to that tune, that process, that idea. When actually, they don't. They then use their distribution channels and law enforcement to create an artificial scarcity that doesn't exist. There should be a completely free flow of information, there are so many niche areas that we don't have enough people on the planet to fully explore. There will always be ways to earn
As far as cable goes, they really need to get ale carte. Full catalog of every show ever made, on demand, with live sports packages per team. Different price points for "add supported", "add free", "add supported ale cart", "add supported unlimited", and "add free unlimited". Oh and prepaid metered and sports package only.
I do believe the hold up isn't coming from the ISP/Cable companies, but from the content producers. In the current model they sell packages, so you're paying for the shit programming nobody watches. If only the shows that people watched got funded there would be a lot less on TV. That could be both a good and bad thing.
A long time ago, maybe twenty years, I emptied one of those machines. It only happened one, I think the animals were stuffed in to loosely. Usually they pack them in tight, once they loosen up you can pull a bunch out.
No, I expect 400 million people to spend a few minutes researching it. If one of them is knowledgeable on the subject they usually call BS pretty quick. Then others in there 1-5 min of research confirm or deny, citing sources. Then what you have is a story, like here on slashdot and in the comments someone who is knowledgeable on the subject who either confirms or denies and then other back up the claims.
Obama's election wasn't driven by "small donations". It was driven by the fact that the country was sick of GWB and the GOP.
He had to get passed Hillary first, no easy task. If it wasn't for the small donations he wouldn't have gotten to run against the GOP fueled by anti GWB angst.
I don't know that I buy that excuse anymore. The "internet doesn't make it factual", but it does allow for millions of fact checkers and people are quick to disprove articles on the web. We aren't as trusting as you make us out to be, in fact I think the web has made people less trusting and quicker to do fact checking. People may get the information faster on the web, but take it with a grain of salt; then they research to find out if it is true. Most people I know assume its false then look for proof. The internet is pretty self correcting, something may be spread falsely for a day or two, but as soon as it hits a large enough audience it is pretty quickly debunked if false.
Now half-truths and slants on a factual story, that is a problem with the web. People can spin facts in their favor, that actual takes intellect to discern.
Just a note for those of you receiving traffic citations: You do have the right to have the officer follow you to a well lit and safe location. I always pull into a convenience store when pulled over. That way there are witnesses and video surveillance that is legally obtainable.
Well for starters it is a cultural reference. Second even good cops are not there to protect "us". True all of the blame can't be put on the police officers that enforce the law, since some idiot had to write it first. But arresting children for schoolyard brawls is not protecting anyone, it is ruining their lives. Arresting drug users who were otherwise productive members of society is ruining their lives. Stealing people's cars because an idiot passenger of theirs had drugs on them isn't protecting anyone. Sitting on the side of the highway taxing people at a whim isn't protecting anyone.
Police do more harm than good in society. The only good thing they do is act as a deterrent for really bad behavior. It is nice knowing that after someone murders me (which the police won't be able to stop) that IF that person is caught they may spend 10 years in jail. So they at least serve a purpose as a deterrent. Then again all that I've ever been on the "good" side of the law was when my house was robbed and they filled out a police report for insurance purposes. The time before that when my parents house was robbed, they accused me of doing it because when the officer questioned me I didn't look him in the eye. Ass holes.
I watched half my friends in High School serve time in Juvee for drug possession, they were honor roll students and turned out just fine. The cops do nothing but harass. Can't even jump off a freaking bridge into the river without the police showing up to harass people.
You know a lot of it isn't the officer's fault, I get that, but for God's sake sometimes its better to just leave people alone. I haven't even gotten into all the dirty shit they do, just the legit things that don't make sense.
Really if you don't have money to defend yourself the entire law enforcement system walks all over you. I've watched people all around me get abused by the system, luckily for me I've kept my head down and all my courtroom experience is for speeding. The poor people in the courtroom, they are clueless. The entire system is set up to get you to pay your fine as quickly as possible, the forms even threaten you with jail time if you're found guilty - for a speeding ticket. You've got to have a lot of balls and character to see an invalid ticket to the end. They threaten and harass you throughout the entire process, they delay hearings hoping you'll give up. It is a total sham. Police are modern highway robbers and thugs. Occasionally they'll hit you with a lesser charge to make it look like they are being the good guy, but they never just let you off. They always have to be proven right, even with minor charges.
Hell they even arrest good Samaritans, try to find the owner of one of the bait cars to prevent auto theft and actually enter the car and you're busted for auto theft. Doesn't matter that you called the police 4 times asking them to investigate the strange car left in front of your apartment.
So when I say "FUCK THE POLICE" I mean it. I have a lot of resentment for what I've seen as a systemic abuse of power and lack of common sense when dealing with the public and especially the socially challenged.
BTW - Since you think the police are their to protect you, if they ever knock on your door, be sure to let them right in. If they happen to see an antique shotgun, prescription pills, alcohol with children present, porography of 18 year old girls, you name it they will no longer be trying to protect you. Also when they question you at an accident, because you had a rolling stop at a stop sign, or the most common speeding (which they can apparently tell just by looking). Tell me that they are there to protect you. The police protect through fear and intimidation, nothing else. There are no carrots, only sticks, and sticks with minimum sentences, because judges and juries can't decide that a crime was an accident, but still a crime and should only have 6 months instead of 20 years. So yeah, FUCK THE POLICE.
Just because less than.001% of douche bags get a silver spoon ride through Yale doesn't negate class mobility. Also the political class, which might actually be the only walled class in the US is actually hard to get into, but economic mobility is one hundred percent based on how much effort you are willing to put into it.
Working 70 hours a week at McD's and Walmart does not a millionaire make. If that same person was willing to live on Ramen and PB&J and not buy TV's, XBOX's, etc and only spend 30-40 hours on the one job and the other 30-40 hours at night school, that person would have upward mobility. Hell even going to a technical school would give you upward mobility compared to fast food. A lot of the fast food chains even offer education, management training, and entrepreneurship through franchising. You can't blame people lack of effort and point to statistics showing lack of effort and claim there isn't mobility, because it isn't true. Stupidity and culture do no negate mobility, it does however show apathy.
Also your 1900 != 2010 totally misses the fact that 2 of the 3 stories were from after 1970 and culminated in the 1990's to 2000's. So if mobility ended in the last 10 years I must have missed it. There is opportunity everywhere, just most people are to lazy to take advantage of it. That or they are content with the toys they have.
You don't understand capital do you? There is more than enough of it to go around. If you want to join that elite group, you need to start investing in that capital instead of selling it off for toys. Buy stock, buy properties, start a business mowing lawns. Invest and grow your business, buy a lot, build a simple storage shed, hire employees expand. All it takes is hard work, all you gotta do is work harder than the next guy. It really isn't that complicated, it just takes effort. Grow, invest. Just don't live above your means, save and invest everything you can. Start with a used lawnmower, the first day you'll have the thing payed for. No reason to upgrade it, live in the ghetto paying $100 a month until you've grown your business. You'll be pulling in several hundred by yourself in a week, but since you're living on the cheap you can reinvest every cent on your business. Yes it will be hard (which is why so few people do it), but it'll pay off in the long run. Saved up enough for a new car? Buy a reliable used for a 4th the price and invest the other 3/4 back into your business. Hire more people, buy more inventory. Turn what you make into more capital. It is really easy to build capital. Just don't buy toys. Yeah I know that xbox is nice, so are those new LEDLCD HD TV's, but that gives your capital to that handful of rich and powerful. The reason they have it is because you choose to give it to them. You're happy with the life they provide for you. So stop your bitching about the monster you created and start taking your capital back.
Your comment is informative and insightful, but I cannot believe the extent to which an obviously educated person in denial about a very obvious class divide in the US.
FYI - Your full of shit and blind. There are separate classes in the US but there is no divide. People are in the class they are in because they choose to be there. All that it takes to move from one class to another in the US is hard work. The minimum requirement is enough math to be able to balance a checkbook. So far these have all been general statements, now for proof.
Where to start. I'll start with this past weekend. Ever heard the term "Mc Mansion"? Just this weekend I went to a wedding, the house that it was at was one of these Mc Mansions. The guy who owned it started out mopping the floors at a McD's. He became a fry cook, then got into the entrepreneurs program with McD's. A $60,000 loan and he had his first McD's. From there he grew his business and now has about 16 McD's and has his own "Mc Mansion" and is firmly in the upper middle to upper class. Complete mobility.
Next, my own family. My great grandfather got stuck in the US just as WWI broke out, he was on a German merchant ship and they wouldn't let him leave port. He immigrated to Chicago. During the great depression they helped out another family during hard times. Much like the current market downturn property prices plummeted. The family my great grandfather helped out managed to purchase a large part of what is now downtown Chicago. Fast forward 40 years, my father is trying to pay for medschool, that same family that my great grandfather helped during the great depression now has an opportunity to repay the favor. They pay for part of my fathers schooling. He still had to work for the schooling and get loans on the side, another 15 years pass and he finally pays of those loans and bought into a private practice, he now owns about 6 doctors offices. He is firmly in the upper middle to upper class. His family growing up, a pastor for a Dad who lived on the church property, about as poor as you can get.
Then there is me, you would think with an upper/upper middle class family that I'd be in the upper class as well; well I'm not. I'm too lazy. I'm firmly in the middle class and have no ambition for moving up, I just have enough drive to keep me from moving down.
True class mobility will not exist until elite education institutions in the US are as easily accessible to the lower and upper classes, based purely on merit.
Merit is enough to get you in, however those with connections still need merit, just not as much. What you and everyone else doesn't realize is how much work is actually involved in merit. I know how much work it would take to move up in class, and I choose not to do it, because I'm happy where I am and not willing to put in the extra work. What you don't realize is that there are lots of people happy to be in the lower class and could easily move up with little to no effort, but they choose not to.
Also the tech industry is full of rags to riches stories, hell even Wal-Mart is a rags to riches story. What it takes to succeed is drive, nothing more. It is just that most of the population lacks drive; you can't blame that on an economic system. That same lack of drive is why communism fails, people usually choose the easiest path, without a reward for choosing a harder path, even less people will take it.
What does resource management have to do with socialism? Are people really so blind that they can't look past the name Engels and then derive a capitalist viewpoint on resource management?
I believe cap and trade is a horrible method for managing resources, it creates an artificial market of artificial scarcity. To me a better method would be a direct tax on the resource so that its actual cost would be felt at the consumer level. A gas tax (I know taboo) or a coal tax (another taboo) directly taxes the resource that is already scarce and allows the consumer to feel its actual long term costs. How you invest the revenue from that tax is another debate. I'd lean towards a more efficient infrastructure and electric vehicles. I mean travel and HVAC are the two largest consumers of energy.
If it wasn't for the "porn pros" watermark on the video and the title "world's best deep throat" it would be just fine for work. The video itself is safe, it is just a fully clothed blonde eating a very large banana in one bite.
Are Jenna Jamenson video's illegal? She was only 17 when she started in the porn industry, but faked her age. I saw it on a VH1 special about her. So are all Jenna Jamenson fans pedophiles? If I looked for her first film would that be child pornography? I also probably spelled her name wrong, but I'm not about to Google her name to double check being at work and all...
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing to take into account is cash flows. It may take you a long time to pay back the capital investment of improving your insulation, however if you finance those improvements at a good rate you can improve your cash flow, maybe not your debt to asset ratio, but you may have more cash on hand each month from having a power bill 4x lower.
Thats what I did on my house, I bought a cheap house and doubled down on improvements, insulation, windows, tankless water heater (best thing I've ever bought in my life), appliances, etc. My mortgage on the house went from about $600 a month to $800 a month; however my electric bill went from $400 a month to under $100. This greatly improved my cash flow. I also plan on being in this house long enough that the improvements will be paid off then there will be a nearly $1200 change in monthly cash flow.
Lowering your monthly expenses in the form of Capital investments is a good long term strategy. If you plan on moving in 2-3 years you may not be able to recoup the saving in the sale price, however if you are the one paying the bills the change in cash flows can be dramatic.
to actually pay 1.5 Trillion in damages. It is a punitive damage meant to completely shut down the company and keep the liable parties from ever being in business again.
There are many rules which a large portion of society find necessary. Speed limits for instance. They are appropriate in School Zones, Business Districts, and your neighborhood. They however are not appropriate on all highways and interstates, especially in sparsely populated areas. Two problems occur: 1. The law isn't enforced uniformly, meaning you can speed everywhere but where that camera is and there is no harm no foul. Even if a police officer was to spend the time enforcing the law everywhere it is such a trivial thing to speed that it can't be enforced uniformly, only sporadically. 2. Not everyone agrees that speeding is in any way shape or form wrong.
Speed limits are political and financial. If this wasn't the case highway speed limits would be set somewhere around 80 to 90 MPH. There is also the myth that driving fast is dangerous. Some resources on speed limits. The real issues are tailgaters and weavers. Staying in your lane on the interstate when you have a two miles of visibility is perfectly safe, shifting lanes at 100MPH to weave through traffic is what causes accidents as you clip the car in front of you. However, if the lanes are clear and you slow down to the flow of traffic and wait for traffic to clear before increasing your speed again it is perfectly safe.
Just shut up and follow the rules!
No. There are so many bad rules I can't even begin to count them. I will lobby to change the rules, knowing full well that most of them won't ever be changed, and in the mean time I'll break them and challenge them in court. I'll also try my best to sway public opinion in order to have some chance of getting the rules changed.
Some examples of bad rules:
My son won't say "Hellboy" because it makes him nervous because his teachers and grandparents told him "hell" was a "bad word". That is a horrible rule. Censorship is always bad. I try and teach my kids to be polite, yet at the same time teach them how wrong censorship is. I don't scold them for using what other people might consider "dirty" words, because I don't believe the words themselves are dirty. However I try to correct the root issue, anger.
Drug laws. They are all bad laws. Drug use is a health issue, not something that should require law enforcement. Yes drugs do bad things to people, but so does anything in excess. Video games, food, hell even water if enough is consumed will kill you. The majority of people in the US take some form of drug daily, be it Caffeine or Alcohol or a swath of prescription drugs. Yet the only people serving jail time are the poor. If you have money you can get better drugs from your doctor.
IP laws. We really don't need them, people will produce without them. It still takes physical resources that will be hoarded to make anything to play them on, house them, distribute them on the network. There will always be information jobs in big, small, medium companies where the knowledge of how to use IP will be needed. That is the new digital economy. Its not about goods, its about service. It is about servicing the customers, be it the accounting department, or the person downloading a song. If you aren't servicing the customer you aren't making money. There is a group of IP thieves hoarding what centuries of technology and innovation from countless people have created. They are standing on the shoulders of the giants before them, then claiming they own the rights to that tune, that process, that idea. When actually, they don't. They then use their distribution channels and law enforcement to create an artificial scarcity that doesn't exist. There should be a completely free flow of information, there are so many niche areas that we don't have enough people on the planet to fully explore. There will always be ways to earn
As far as cable goes, they really need to get ale carte. Full catalog of every show ever made, on demand, with live sports packages per team. Different price points for "add supported", "add free", "add supported ale cart", "add supported unlimited", and "add free unlimited". Oh and prepaid metered and sports package only.
I do believe the hold up isn't coming from the ISP/Cable companies, but from the content producers. In the current model they sell packages, so you're paying for the shit programming nobody watches. If only the shows that people watched got funded there would be a lot less on TV. That could be both a good and bad thing.
A long time ago, maybe twenty years, I emptied one of those machines. It only happened one, I think the animals were stuffed in to loosely. Usually they pack them in tight, once they loosen up you can pull a bunch out.
No, I expect 400 million people to spend a few minutes researching it. If one of them is knowledgeable on the subject they usually call BS pretty quick. Then others in there 1-5 min of research confirm or deny, citing sources. Then what you have is a story, like here on slashdot and in the comments someone who is knowledgeable on the subject who either confirms or denies and then other back up the claims.
The scifi movie you are looking for is "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer".
Obama's election wasn't driven by "small donations". It was driven by the fact that the country was sick of GWB and the GOP.
He had to get passed Hillary first, no easy task. If it wasn't for the small donations he wouldn't have gotten to run against the GOP fueled by anti GWB angst.
I don't know that I buy that excuse anymore. The "internet doesn't make it factual", but it does allow for millions of fact checkers and people are quick to disprove articles on the web. We aren't as trusting as you make us out to be, in fact I think the web has made people less trusting and quicker to do fact checking. People may get the information faster on the web, but take it with a grain of salt; then they research to find out if it is true. Most people I know assume its false then look for proof. The internet is pretty self correcting, something may be spread falsely for a day or two, but as soon as it hits a large enough audience it is pretty quickly debunked if false.
Now half-truths and slants on a factual story, that is a problem with the web. People can spin facts in their favor, that actual takes intellect to discern.
Just a note for those of you receiving traffic citations: You do have the right to have the officer follow you to a well lit and safe location. I always pull into a convenience store when pulled over. That way there are witnesses and video surveillance that is legally obtainable.
How did this go over everyones head:
felony
4 to 15 years in prison
Something is wrong here. What on earth prompted such a heavy handed response, and why hasn't anyone done anything to stop it?
Well for starters it is a cultural reference. Second even good cops are not there to protect "us". True all of the blame can't be put on the police officers that enforce the law, since some idiot had to write it first. But arresting children for schoolyard brawls is not protecting anyone, it is ruining their lives. Arresting drug users who were otherwise productive members of society is ruining their lives. Stealing people's cars because an idiot passenger of theirs had drugs on them isn't protecting anyone. Sitting on the side of the highway taxing people at a whim isn't protecting anyone.
Police do more harm than good in society. The only good thing they do is act as a deterrent for really bad behavior. It is nice knowing that after someone murders me (which the police won't be able to stop) that IF that person is caught they may spend 10 years in jail. So they at least serve a purpose as a deterrent. Then again all that I've ever been on the "good" side of the law was when my house was robbed and they filled out a police report for insurance purposes. The time before that when my parents house was robbed, they accused me of doing it because when the officer questioned me I didn't look him in the eye. Ass holes.
I watched half my friends in High School serve time in Juvee for drug possession, they were honor roll students and turned out just fine. The cops do nothing but harass. Can't even jump off a freaking bridge into the river without the police showing up to harass people.
You know a lot of it isn't the officer's fault, I get that, but for God's sake sometimes its better to just leave people alone. I haven't even gotten into all the dirty shit they do, just the legit things that don't make sense.
Really if you don't have money to defend yourself the entire law enforcement system walks all over you. I've watched people all around me get abused by the system, luckily for me I've kept my head down and all my courtroom experience is for speeding. The poor people in the courtroom, they are clueless. The entire system is set up to get you to pay your fine as quickly as possible, the forms even threaten you with jail time if you're found guilty - for a speeding ticket. You've got to have a lot of balls and character to see an invalid ticket to the end. They threaten and harass you throughout the entire process, they delay hearings hoping you'll give up. It is a total sham. Police are modern highway robbers and thugs. Occasionally they'll hit you with a lesser charge to make it look like they are being the good guy, but they never just let you off. They always have to be proven right, even with minor charges.
Hell they even arrest good Samaritans, try to find the owner of one of the bait cars to prevent auto theft and actually enter the car and you're busted for auto theft. Doesn't matter that you called the police 4 times asking them to investigate the strange car left in front of your apartment.
So when I say "FUCK THE POLICE" I mean it. I have a lot of resentment for what I've seen as a systemic abuse of power and lack of common sense when dealing with the public and especially the socially challenged.
BTW - Since you think the police are their to protect you, if they ever knock on your door, be sure to let them right in. If they happen to see an antique shotgun, prescription pills, alcohol with children present, porography of 18 year old girls, you name it they will no longer be trying to protect you. Also when they question you at an accident, because you had a rolling stop at a stop sign, or the most common speeding (which they can apparently tell just by looking). Tell me that they are there to protect you. The police protect through fear and intimidation, nothing else. There are no carrots, only sticks, and sticks with minimum sentences, because judges and juries can't decide that a crime was an accident, but still a crime and should only have 6 months instead of 20 years. So yeah, FUCK THE POLICE.
Oh, and you be
They'll just replace it with x-factor, dancing with the stars, farmville, WoW, etc...
I'm surprised it hadn't been said yet.
Too bad its not science fiction. I personally know a group of scientists that create rabbit human embryos. Also there has been a lot of research in growing human organs in pigs". So we are already producing animal-human hybrids. Hell we even grow human ears on mice.
So when are they going to send 6 hot women to mars with a CCTV feed on 20 min time delay. That mission might just fund itself.
You're looking on the wrong planet. Try Venus.
Just because less than .001% of douche bags get a silver spoon ride through Yale doesn't negate class mobility. Also the political class, which might actually be the only walled class in the US is actually hard to get into, but economic mobility is one hundred percent based on how much effort you are willing to put into it.
Working 70 hours a week at McD's and Walmart does not a millionaire make. If that same person was willing to live on Ramen and PB&J and not buy TV's, XBOX's, etc and only spend 30-40 hours on the one job and the other 30-40 hours at night school, that person would have upward mobility. Hell even going to a technical school would give you upward mobility compared to fast food. A lot of the fast food chains even offer education, management training, and entrepreneurship through franchising. You can't blame people lack of effort and point to statistics showing lack of effort and claim there isn't mobility, because it isn't true. Stupidity and culture do no negate mobility, it does however show apathy. Also your 1900 != 2010 totally misses the fact that 2 of the 3 stories were from after 1970 and culminated in the 1990's to 2000's. So if mobility ended in the last 10 years I must have missed it. There is opportunity everywhere, just most people are to lazy to take advantage of it. That or they are content with the toys they have.
Oil is a renewable resource, just not in your lifetime.
You don't understand capital do you? There is more than enough of it to go around. If you want to join that elite group, you need to start investing in that capital instead of selling it off for toys. Buy stock, buy properties, start a business mowing lawns. Invest and grow your business, buy a lot, build a simple storage shed, hire employees expand. All it takes is hard work, all you gotta do is work harder than the next guy. It really isn't that complicated, it just takes effort. Grow, invest. Just don't live above your means, save and invest everything you can. Start with a used lawnmower, the first day you'll have the thing payed for. No reason to upgrade it, live in the ghetto paying $100 a month until you've grown your business. You'll be pulling in several hundred by yourself in a week, but since you're living on the cheap you can reinvest every cent on your business. Yes it will be hard (which is why so few people do it), but it'll pay off in the long run. Saved up enough for a new car? Buy a reliable used for a 4th the price and invest the other 3/4 back into your business. Hire more people, buy more inventory. Turn what you make into more capital. It is really easy to build capital. Just don't buy toys. Yeah I know that xbox is nice, so are those new LEDLCD HD TV's, but that gives your capital to that handful of rich and powerful. The reason they have it is because you choose to give it to them. You're happy with the life they provide for you. So stop your bitching about the monster you created and start taking your capital back.
Your comment is informative and insightful, but I cannot believe the extent to which an obviously educated person in denial about a very obvious class divide in the US.
FYI - Your full of shit and blind. There are separate classes in the US but there is no divide. People are in the class they are in because they choose to be there. All that it takes to move from one class to another in the US is hard work. The minimum requirement is enough math to be able to balance a checkbook. So far these have all been general statements, now for proof.
Where to start. I'll start with this past weekend. Ever heard the term "Mc Mansion"? Just this weekend I went to a wedding, the house that it was at was one of these Mc Mansions. The guy who owned it started out mopping the floors at a McD's. He became a fry cook, then got into the entrepreneurs program with McD's. A $60,000 loan and he had his first McD's. From there he grew his business and now has about 16 McD's and has his own "Mc Mansion" and is firmly in the upper middle to upper class. Complete mobility.
Next, my own family. My great grandfather got stuck in the US just as WWI broke out, he was on a German merchant ship and they wouldn't let him leave port. He immigrated to Chicago. During the great depression they helped out another family during hard times. Much like the current market downturn property prices plummeted. The family my great grandfather helped out managed to purchase a large part of what is now downtown Chicago. Fast forward 40 years, my father is trying to pay for medschool, that same family that my great grandfather helped during the great depression now has an opportunity to repay the favor. They pay for part of my fathers schooling. He still had to work for the schooling and get loans on the side, another 15 years pass and he finally pays of those loans and bought into a private practice, he now owns about 6 doctors offices. He is firmly in the upper middle to upper class. His family growing up, a pastor for a Dad who lived on the church property, about as poor as you can get.
Then there is me, you would think with an upper/upper middle class family that I'd be in the upper class as well; well I'm not. I'm too lazy. I'm firmly in the middle class and have no ambition for moving up, I just have enough drive to keep me from moving down.
True class mobility will not exist until elite education institutions in the US are as easily accessible to the lower and upper classes, based purely on merit.
Merit is enough to get you in, however those with connections still need merit, just not as much. What you and everyone else doesn't realize is how much work is actually involved in merit. I know how much work it would take to move up in class, and I choose not to do it, because I'm happy where I am and not willing to put in the extra work. What you don't realize is that there are lots of people happy to be in the lower class and could easily move up with little to no effort, but they choose not to.
Also the tech industry is full of rags to riches stories, hell even Wal-Mart is a rags to riches story. What it takes to succeed is drive, nothing more. It is just that most of the population lacks drive; you can't blame that on an economic system. That same lack of drive is why communism fails, people usually choose the easiest path, without a reward for choosing a harder path, even less people will take it.
What does resource management have to do with socialism? Are people really so blind that they can't look past the name Engels and then derive a capitalist viewpoint on resource management?
I believe cap and trade is a horrible method for managing resources, it creates an artificial market of artificial scarcity. To me a better method would be a direct tax on the resource so that its actual cost would be felt at the consumer level. A gas tax (I know taboo) or a coal tax (another taboo) directly taxes the resource that is already scarce and allows the consumer to feel its actual long term costs. How you invest the revenue from that tax is another debate. I'd lean towards a more efficient infrastructure and electric vehicles. I mean travel and HVAC are the two largest consumers of energy.
If it wasn't for the "porn pros" watermark on the video and the title "world's best deep throat" it would be just fine for work. The video itself is safe, it is just a fully clothed blonde eating a very large banana in one bite.
Are Jenna Jamenson video's illegal? She was only 17 when she started in the porn industry, but faked her age. I saw it on a VH1 special about her. So are all Jenna Jamenson fans pedophiles? If I looked for her first film would that be child pornography? I also probably spelled her name wrong, but I'm not about to Google her name to double check being at work and all...
Apparently someone doesn't watch dancing with the stars. Edyta Sliwinska has them on every week.