The reason people hate it so much is the government's insistence on getting these damn things for cops and TSA officials.
These people could WALK and save the government hundreds of millions of dollars nation-wide.
I'm so liberal i'd be considered the extreme left of the canadian NDP, and democrats are just republican 2.0 for me, but if I saw this on a budget bill for the TSA i'd hold that bill up until ti was stricken!
3 out of 3, and the recession at the end of the clinton administration happened as a result of policies rammed down clintons throat by a massive republican congressional majority.
The fuel economy part has a very real impact on disposable incomes for people who gain the most from this program.
Cutting the number of times you need to fill up by 50% will save you enough money to: go out for dinner, subscribe to something, pay down credit debt, and much much more...
My take is that "fundamentally flawed" businesses make up only a small part of failures in businesses older than a couple of years.
someone hasn't seen the record industry
f the owner has diverse investments, they can weather more bad luck and off years in their business than someone who has all their assets tied up in the business.
if their business is viable, they can get loans to weather it, their personal assets have no bearing on the durability of their business. If their personal assets are inextricably tied with their business they are not managing it properly and DESERVE to go out of business.
No, this isn't the issue. We're discussing whether the owner hoards the money in the business or outside the business. Nothing else.
No, you're claiming the diversity of the owner's PERSONAL ASSETS somehow have a bearing on the viability and sustainability of a business. Allow me to link that chart making the case for increasing piracy to combat global warming.
Bull. What happens to the profits? They don't go in a jar under the bed. They get sent one way or another to other job producing businesses.
no they dont, they go into luxury cars for huge investment bank executives, or float around in bond markets making capital gains income for people who will never spend it.
Money spent on standard goods goes further to stimulating the economy than money spent on luxury goods.
Here's my take. It's still a bad idea since you're throwing away good cars, rewarding people who made bad decisions, doing so to support government owned businesses which shouldn't be government owned, and the program is still underfunded. The funding tripled and that money probably has been spent. Doesn't matter what my ideology is.
Saying they're good cars is intellectually dishonest. The replacements these people are buying are not free, thus it follows if they were good cars they would hang onto them rather than spend significant sums of money on replacements.
Additionally, it's not proper application of the broken window fallacy. The "new windows" are more efficient than the "old windows", and will produce a significant net savings in energy costs over the long term.
A tank of gasoline costs about 35 bucks right now, and topped 55 before the markets collapsed. 35 bucks a week to the number of people we're talking about is enough to provide revenue for a whole new restaurant in a given suburban area, or allow them to pay off debts and make the banks less "toxic".
It does matter because despite your eloquence you're still being blinded by ideology, thus your generalizations about keynsians, and my subsequent rebuttal against the polar opposite ideology you seem to be trumpeting.
Just because they underestimated the demand for the program doesn't mean "the government can't craft policy".. I suppose nintendo is utterly incompetent too for failing to make enough wii's on their first production run... so if neither government or private industry are competent, I guess we need to get the flying spaghetti monster to craft economic policy!
Drop the GOP propaganda. We have 50 years economic theory and real-life proof that cutting taxes is not the best way to stimulate the economy. If you're serious about wanting the best bang-for-the-buck stimulus investment, rally for increased food stamp benefits.
Late 80's economic boom under Reagan is a counterexample to the assertion that cutting taxes is not the "best way" to stimulate the economy. My take is that not collecting taxes (that is, funding government solely on bonds) for a year would have had a more profound effect than bailing out businesses and "stimulus" spending. And it'd result in a similar sized deficit.
the late 80's economic boom under reagan had nothing to do with his tax policies and everything to do with getting inflation under control.
Once inflation was under control the economy grew DESPITE tax policies which re-distributed money from the poor to the rich and contributed heavily to the destruction of inner cities.
These policies of course did catch up with us, and caused the recession that killed the first bush presidency.
Ever since that time, every republican administration has been punctuated by a massive recession resulting from policies which attack consumption by putting downward pressure on middle-class wages.
Only until government wants that money. Here's my key question. Why would the small business owner want to "hoard money" in personal investments rather than "hoard money" in their business? As I see it, we have an example of tax law forcing small business owners to make economically inefficient decisions (namely, less diverse investments). Now maybe that does mean more jobs overall, but I doubt it. First, it increases the risk of a small business dying since the owners have less diversity in their assets.
Since when has the fate of a small business had anything at all to do with the diversity of the assets its owner controls? A properly incorporated small business is a separate economic entity, and it doesn't matter what the owner has in his stock portfolio, it wont save a fundamentally flawed business from failure.
How exactly is it more economically efficient to have one person hoarding money vs 2-3 people earning and spending it?
And it's not a maybe, it DOES mean more jobs overall, because if the money held by the company is not re-invested into growing the business it becomes taxable as pure profits.
Without government bailouts, the worst a private company can do is to piss away their own money (and that of their clients who have hopefully done their risk-management homework) and go out of business.
and take hundreds of thousands of people down who are innocent of any wrong-doing and would have virtually no recourse.
I repeat - private industry is unaccountable.
Now, if you want to introduce regulation which is actually effective at cutting systematic risk like this out of the picture i'm all ears, but we both know that won't happen.
More lies from the echo chamber, it began when, under the montra of "government regulation is bad 'mmkay" they repealed the very laws which were put in place after black tuesday specifically to prevent the great depression from happening again.
I suppose next you'll blame the CRA, which only made red-lining illegal, not denial of loans based on credit history.
I think the concern in this recession is that rich folks would simply buy "safe" investments like treasuries with any tax cuts, which wouldn't stimulate anything.
Top bracket taxpayers are overwhelmingly small business owners paying their business taxes on their personal tax returns. Cutting taxes means more money to reinvest in small businesses that produce most new jobs in America and providing less discouragement for workaholic small business owners to keep working when they really don't have to. Yes, it's unfortunate that limousine liberals get the tax cuts too but they still help on balance (the cuts, not the liberals).
Since small business owners are overwhelmingly Republican and the UAW bankrolls the Democratic Party the "Cash for Clunkers" program made more political sense than tax cuts. Tax cuts also mean less government control over the economy and that would be double plus ungood.
This is the same, tired, republico-libertarian snow-job.
my entire family owns small businesses and this is NOT how it works.
Properly managed businesses are incorporated, meaning they are protected by the same tax law as the giants everyone loves to vilify.
As such, whenever taxes threaten their personal income, they just keep the money in their business and claim less income, even though they earn the same in their net worth through re-investment in their business.
In other words, RAISING taxes, not lowering them, encourages small business owners to re-invest in their business rather than claim more income and hoard money in personal investments.
They estimated that $1 billion would be enough. They figured that would last for six months time.
It barely lasted 2 weeks.
This is why central economic planning doesn't work, and why shortages ran rampant throughout the Soviet Union and eastern communist countries. Simply put - Government politicians are no good at running an economy. They don't have the necessary skills.
I suppose all those executives at lehman brothers and AIG were so much better right? and I suppose robber barrons, cartels, MAFIAA, and health insurance firms are providing so very well for the populace at large!
There is only one real difference between public and private management of the economy: The government is, at least mildly,ACCOUNTABLE.
This was on NPR national coverage earlier this week.
Within 24 hours of the news getting out that the program was out of money congress rushed a pre-recess bill to the floor to make sure 2 billion they had in reserve for this program was authorized for disbursement.
Hate to put a damper on all the anti-government diatribes, but congress realized this form of stimulus has worked, and have been swift to see it continues.
'next generation' will be defined by software and services, not hardware
yeah, that's the ticket, online distribution with the exact same price point as physical distribution, but without that pesky "game stop" factor getting in the way.
It's quite simple, when i drink standard milk i get horrible stomach cramps and other nasty digestive effects. When I drink organic milk (NOT SOY) I have none of that.
I wonder how the statistics were made to fit into the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" category Disraeli so famously quoted, and how much the multi-national conglomerates responsible for all the chemicals and hormones in our food paid for it.
I know damn well that there is something substantially chemically different when one substance has the same name as another, but the non-organic version causes horrible pain.
For the record, i'm not some organo-nazi, I happened to discover this when i was slipped some organic milk at a friend's house.
A) Space currently is not a commercial venture in 2009. The fact that Virgin Galactic doesn't have a base on the moon is proof of that. Currently you need a ton of funding to even get a single person in space.
B) It currently costs a -ton- of money to get someone to a stable orbit that won't decay in a few years. Even the space shuttle can't even make it that high.
C) You also fail to see that what you consider "permanent" generally isn't. Even a simple thing such as a broken hose can be a matter of life or death. Eventually things start to wear out and they aren't easy to replace.
Space stations are designed for one thing, for scientific experiments. They are a huge labyrinth of wires, hoses, scientific instruments, etc. And the fact that they can't be cleaned is another big difference. You can't exactly just decide one day to bring it back and scrub it out.
A - America is not a commercial vendor in 1492, the fact that the dutch east india company is not trading there is proof of that.
B - it currently costs a TON of money to establish a colony in america that can actually become sustainable in the next decade.
c - you also fail to see that what you consider "permanent" generally isn't. It takes a long time for a colony to reach the point it can become truly independent, and we, the spanish crown, simply can't afford that.
see the parallels i'm trying to illustrate now? without initial government intervention to establish real footholds in space, there will NEVER be commercial activity or viable colonization.
If the attitude which prevails today were the norm in 1492 the US would still belong to the indians and hitler would rule the rest of the world.
Every space station is temporary. Eventually things start to fail (see MIR) and end up becoming very expensive to maintain or unsafe to keep sending missions.
This is not how commercially viable megastructures work though! and that's my point!
Modern commercial structures are bipartite, consisting of a permanent shell and a modular interior. Think of any modern office building or strip mall. When one company moves out its a matter of simple retrofitting to get the next tenant company at home and functioning.
This is how a space station SHOULD work. It should have a permanent shell capable of containing life support, modular, easily replaced apparatus for essentials (air and water supply/purification), and an interior which is easily fitted and re-fitted as necessary.
Doubleplusgood points for artificial gravity through rotation to prevent bone loss of employees for future commercial tenants.
Can someone please explain to me why they're spending such vast sums and not taking the necessary steps to insure permanence?
You don't settle something by building tents, you build crude wooden structures, add to them, modernize them, then one day you look around you and its a bustling township.
Space will not become commercially viable until the government funded projects provide permanent way-points.
Imagine building a second ISS nearby, anchoring the two together, and setting them spinning to provide artificial gravity. Then you would have a healthier permanent environment with the capacity to add zero-g modules at the central point for research.
Its not like theyre bribing people to use their services with "30% cash back" for using them as a referral for purchases.
Do keep spewing their party line about google being some evil empire though. Maybe their bribery of us officials to investigate them for trust activity will bear fruit. The new standard oil is here, with tentacles so deep it can now leverage the government as its anti-competitive club.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason people hate it so much is the government's insistence on getting these damn things for cops and TSA officials.
These people could WALK and save the government hundreds of millions of dollars nation-wide.
I'm so liberal i'd be considered the extreme left of the canadian NDP, and democrats are just republican 2.0 for me, but if I saw this on a budget bill for the TSA i'd hold that bill up until ti was stricken!
I think you've forgotten that they were acting on behest of the Congressional mandate to "sell more houses to the poor,
bullshit.
the CRA was against "red-lining", denying people loans based on GEOGRAPHIC AREA rather than actual credit history.
They were penalizing otherwise responsible people for NOT being pretentious and opting to live in areas most people snubbed.
We dropped atomic
bombs on Japan and now we are their strongest ally.
well clearly we have the answer!
we nuke iraq, iran, and north korea, and they'll absolutely love us!
3 out of 3, and the recession at the end of the clinton administration happened as a result of policies rammed down clintons throat by a massive republican congressional majority.
The fuel economy part has a very real impact on disposable incomes for people who gain the most from this program.
Cutting the number of times you need to fill up by 50% will save you enough money to: go out for dinner, subscribe to something, pay down credit debt, and much much more...
My take is that "fundamentally flawed" businesses make up only a small part of failures in businesses older than a couple of years.
someone hasn't seen the record industry
f the owner has diverse investments, they can weather more bad luck and off years in their business than someone who has all their assets tied up in the business.
if their business is viable, they can get loans to weather it, their personal assets have no bearing on the durability of their business. If their personal assets are inextricably tied with their business they are not managing it properly and DESERVE to go out of business.
No, this isn't the issue. We're discussing whether the owner hoards the money in the business or outside the business. Nothing else.
No, you're claiming the diversity of the owner's PERSONAL ASSETS somehow have a bearing on the viability and sustainability of a business. Allow me to link that chart making the case for increasing piracy to combat global warming.
Bull. What happens to the profits? They don't go in a jar under the bed. They get sent one way or another to other job producing businesses.
no they dont, they go into luxury cars for huge investment bank executives, or float around in bond markets making capital gains income for people who will never spend it.
Money spent on standard goods goes further to stimulating the economy than money spent on luxury goods.
3 fords sold employs more workers than one lexus.
Here's my take. It's still a bad idea since you're throwing away good cars, rewarding people who made bad decisions, doing so to support government owned businesses which shouldn't be government owned, and the program is still underfunded. The funding tripled and that money probably has been spent. Doesn't matter what my ideology is.
Saying they're good cars is intellectually dishonest. The replacements these people are buying are not free, thus it follows if they were good cars they would hang onto them rather than spend significant sums of money on replacements.
Additionally, it's not proper application of the broken window fallacy. The "new windows" are more efficient than the "old windows", and will produce a significant net savings in energy costs over the long term.
A tank of gasoline costs about 35 bucks right now, and topped 55 before the markets collapsed. 35 bucks a week to the number of people we're talking about is enough to provide revenue for a whole new restaurant in a given suburban area, or allow them to pay off debts and make the banks less "toxic".
It does matter because despite your eloquence you're still being blinded by ideology, thus your generalizations about keynsians, and my subsequent rebuttal against the polar opposite ideology you seem to be trumpeting.
Just because they underestimated the demand for the program doesn't mean "the government can't craft policy".. I suppose nintendo is utterly incompetent too for failing to make enough wii's on their first production run... so if neither government or private industry are competent, I guess we need to get the flying spaghetti monster to craft economic policy!
Drop the GOP propaganda. We have 50 years economic theory and real-life proof that cutting taxes is not the best way to stimulate the economy. If you're serious about wanting the best bang-for-the-buck stimulus investment, rally for increased food stamp benefits.
Late 80's economic boom under Reagan is a counterexample to the assertion that cutting taxes is not the "best way" to stimulate the economy. My take is that not collecting taxes (that is, funding government solely on bonds) for a year would have had a more profound effect than bailing out businesses and "stimulus" spending. And it'd result in a similar sized deficit.
the late 80's economic boom under reagan had nothing to do with his tax policies and everything to do with getting inflation under control.
Once inflation was under control the economy grew DESPITE tax policies which re-distributed money from the poor to the rich and contributed heavily to the destruction of inner cities.
These policies of course did catch up with us, and caused the recession that killed the first bush presidency.
Ever since that time, every republican administration has been punctuated by a massive recession resulting from policies which attack consumption by putting downward pressure on middle-class wages.
Only until government wants that money. Here's my key question. Why would the small business owner want to "hoard money" in personal investments rather than "hoard money" in their business? As I see it, we have an example of tax law forcing small business owners to make economically inefficient decisions (namely, less diverse investments). Now maybe that does mean more jobs overall, but I doubt it. First, it increases the risk of a small business dying since the owners have less diversity in their assets.
Since when has the fate of a small business had anything at all to do with the diversity of the assets its owner controls? A properly incorporated small business is a separate economic entity, and it doesn't matter what the owner has in his stock portfolio, it wont save a fundamentally flawed business from failure.
How exactly is it more economically efficient to have one person hoarding money vs 2-3 people earning and spending it?
And it's not a maybe, it DOES mean more jobs overall, because if the money held by the company is not re-invested into growing the business it becomes taxable as pure profits.
uuuh.. you do realize the program applies to ALL cars sold in the US, not just those by "GM and Chrysler".
Apparently you don't watch TV at all, every channel is smeared with ads by *gasp* TOYOTA trumpeting this program.
As for keynsians and the broken window fallacy, how about the mizez zealots and their willful ignorance of moral hazard?
Without government bailouts, the worst a private company can do is to piss away their own money (and that of their clients who have hopefully done their risk-management homework) and go out of business.
and take hundreds of thousands of people down who are innocent of any wrong-doing and would have virtually no recourse.
I repeat - private industry is unaccountable.
Now, if you want to introduce regulation which is actually effective at cutting systematic risk like this out of the picture i'm all ears, but we both know that won't happen.
More lies from the echo chamber, it began when, under the montra of "government regulation is bad 'mmkay" they repealed the very laws which were put in place after black tuesday specifically to prevent the great depression from happening again.
I suppose next you'll blame the CRA, which only made red-lining illegal, not denial of loans based on credit history.
I think the concern in this recession is that rich folks would simply buy "safe" investments like treasuries with any tax cuts, which wouldn't stimulate anything.
Top bracket taxpayers are overwhelmingly small business owners paying their business taxes on their personal tax returns. Cutting taxes means more money to reinvest in small businesses that produce most new jobs in America and providing less discouragement for workaholic small business owners to keep working when they really don't have to. Yes, it's unfortunate that limousine liberals get the tax cuts too but they still help on balance (the cuts, not the liberals).
Since small business owners are overwhelmingly Republican and the UAW bankrolls the Democratic Party the "Cash for Clunkers" program made more political sense than tax cuts. Tax cuts also mean less government control over the economy and that would be double plus ungood.
This is the same, tired, republico-libertarian snow-job.
my entire family owns small businesses and this is NOT how it works.
Properly managed businesses are incorporated, meaning they are protected by the same tax law as the giants everyone loves to vilify.
As such, whenever taxes threaten their personal income, they just keep the money in their business and claim less income, even though they earn the same in their net worth through re-investment in their business.
In other words, RAISING taxes, not lowering them, encourages small business owners to re-invest in their business rather than claim more income and hoard money in personal investments.
They estimated that $1 billion would be enough. They figured that would last for six months time.
It barely lasted 2 weeks.
This is why central economic planning doesn't work, and why shortages ran rampant throughout the Soviet Union and eastern communist countries. Simply put - Government politicians are no good at running an economy. They don't have the necessary skills.
I suppose all those executives at lehman brothers and AIG were so much better right?
and I suppose robber barrons, cartels, MAFIAA, and health insurance firms are providing so very well for the populace at large!
There is only one real difference between public and private management of the economy: The government is, at least mildly,ACCOUNTABLE.
This was on NPR national coverage earlier this week.
Within 24 hours of the news getting out that the program was out of money congress rushed a pre-recess bill to the floor to make sure 2 billion they had in reserve for this program was authorized for disbursement.
Hate to put a damper on all the anti-government diatribes, but congress realized this form of stimulus has worked, and have been swift to see it continues.
correction, there is no ECONOMICAL way to make it run linux.
it's quite hackable, its simply less expensive now to build a PC with the same capabilities from fresh components.
adjusting for inflation its much cheaper to do this than it was when the original xbox hit store shelves.
since hacking is mostly about utility, and expense is part of utility, there simply isnt the effort being put into it.
imagine a cult classic like akira or green legend ran butchered by 3d conversion..
anime is by its nature a 2d medium, it's part of its artistic flavor... i dont WANT to see it in 3d.
'next generation' will be defined by software and services, not hardware
yeah, that's the ticket, online distribution with the exact same price point as physical distribution, but without that pesky "game stop" factor getting in the way.
Sounds like they're trying to turn the console into a locked-down PC.
Close. They tried with the original Xbox. With the 360, they did, and did it fairly well.
except that part where they didn't, as evidenced by the billion xbox360 iso's floating around p2p networks.
I've noticed this as well.
Organic milk lasts considerably longer.
It's quite simple, when i drink standard milk i get horrible stomach cramps and other nasty digestive effects. When I drink organic milk (NOT SOY) I have none of that.
I wonder how the statistics were made to fit into the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" category Disraeli so famously quoted, and how much the multi-national conglomerates responsible for all the chemicals and hormones in our food paid for it.
I know damn well that there is something substantially chemically different when one substance has the same name as another, but the non-organic version causes horrible pain.
For the record, i'm not some organo-nazi, I happened to discover this when i was slipped some organic milk at a friend's house.
There are a few problems with that.
A) Space currently is not a commercial venture in 2009. The fact that Virgin Galactic doesn't have a base on the moon is proof of that. Currently you need a ton of funding to even get a single person in space.
B) It currently costs a -ton- of money to get someone to a stable orbit that won't decay in a few years. Even the space shuttle can't even make it that high.
C) You also fail to see that what you consider "permanent" generally isn't. Even a simple thing such as a broken hose can be a matter of life or death. Eventually things start to wear out and they aren't easy to replace.
Space stations are designed for one thing, for scientific experiments. They are a huge labyrinth of wires, hoses, scientific instruments, etc. And the fact that they can't be cleaned is another big difference. You can't exactly just decide one day to bring it back and scrub it out.
A - America is not a commercial vendor in 1492, the fact that the dutch east india company is not trading there is proof of that.
B - it currently costs a TON of money to establish a colony in america that can actually become sustainable in the next decade.
c - you also fail to see that what you consider "permanent" generally isn't. It takes a long time for a colony to reach the point it can become truly independent, and we, the spanish crown, simply can't afford that.
see the parallels i'm trying to illustrate now?
without initial government intervention to establish real footholds in space, there will NEVER be commercial activity or viable colonization.
If the attitude which prevails today were the norm in 1492 the US would still belong to the indians and hitler would rule the rest of the world.
Every space station is temporary. Eventually things start to fail (see MIR) and end up becoming very expensive to maintain or unsafe to keep sending missions.
This is not how commercially viable megastructures work though! and that's my point!
Modern commercial structures are bipartite, consisting of a permanent shell and a modular interior. Think of any modern office building or strip mall. When one company moves out its a matter of simple retrofitting to get the next tenant company at home and functioning.
This is how a space station SHOULD work. It should have a permanent shell capable of containing life support, modular, easily replaced apparatus for essentials (air and water supply/purification), and an interior which is easily fitted and re-fitted as necessary.
Doubleplusgood points for artificial gravity through rotation to prevent bone loss of employees for future commercial tenants.
Can someone please explain to me why they're spending such vast sums and not taking the necessary steps to insure permanence?
You don't settle something by building tents, you build crude wooden structures, add to them, modernize them, then one day you look around you and its a bustling township.
Space will not become commercially viable until the government funded projects provide permanent way-points.
Imagine building a second ISS nearby, anchoring the two together, and setting them spinning to provide artificial gravity. Then you would have a healthier permanent environment with the capacity to add zero-g modules at the central point for research.
Its not like theyre bribing people to use their services with "30% cash back" for using them as a referral for purchases.
Do keep spewing their party line about google being some evil empire though. Maybe their bribery of us officials to investigate them for trust activity will bear fruit. The new standard oil is here, with tentacles so deep it can now leverage the government as its anti-competitive club.