people really need to start talking about the biggest money suckholes of them all: defense, and "borrowing" from medicare and social security, for which middle class people are taxed for their retirements.
FTFY.
Want to fix SS and Medicare? Just remove the income ceiling on it and stop moving its funds into the general treasury and you'll have a hell of a pile of cash.
Um, what? My phone handles email and the internet, does that make it a smartphone? I'm seriously confused here, I thought "smartphone" meant iPhone, Android, or Blackberry (and maybe Win 8).
I can call, text, watch youtube, email... you know, I really wish one of you guys would point to a feature Android has that would make it worth the money to me, but I don't see what an Android will do that my phone (a Motorola Blackberry clone) won't.
I really would like an excuse to buy one, but so far I won't let myself.
yeah. Also, what's with the elipsis (...) ? As in... From Space? I mean, that's kind of what you expect, right? I mean, he's a god-damn astronaut.
Astronauts spend far more time on earth than from space, so I think the "from space" is warranted, especially since I'd be really disappointed if the headline read "Astronaut takes picture of comet" and it was a picture he took from his hotel room in Florida.
I'm using kubuntu on a 1.8 mz chip with 750 megs of RAM, an old junker I put together from trash and spare parts, and it runs fine -- better than Windows. I have no idea why people seem to have issues with KDE, I was running Mandrake and Mandriva back in the 400 mz Celeron days, and it ran fine with them, too.
As to the GP, I can't figure out why he thinks saying something nice about KDE would get him modded down. I won't bother responding to him, because he's either logged out and won't ever see the response, or he's dumb enough to think that the "post anonymously" button protects your karma.
I have a TV, but no cable -- I use the TV for a big monitor, get my TV shows off the internet.
As to the topic, I'd like to have an Android, and I could afford the hardware, but I can't justify the cost of any carrier that lets me use one. I'm on Boost Mobile, flat $45 per month for talk, long distance, text, email, 411, walkie-talkie, and internet. I could justify the initial price of the toy, but not the $80 per month plus minutes a smart phone would cost (and when my daughters call, they talk a long time).
If Apple or Google want me to use their phones, they're going to have to buy out one of the cell carriers and stop the price-gouging the company they buy does now.
I just think outright legalization (i.e., regulating them like alcohol) of hard drugs would be much more of a gamble than legalizing soft drugs.
That's a reasonable position to take. However --
Certainly there are a ton of problems caused by their prohibition, but the problems that may occur from things like heroin and crack due to increased usage after legalization are a big unknown.
The "increased useage" is an unwarranted assumption and is likely incorrect; alcohol use rose during prohibition, but not after alcohol was legalized. Is the law all that's keeping you from shooting heroin? Not me, the effects of heroin itself does, and the law doesn't stop me or anyone else from smoking pot. I know a lot of people who don't smoke it because they just don't like the effects, but I have yet to hear anyone say "you know, if they legalized it I'd try it."
For example, although alcohol is very physically addictive, it isn't nearly as psychologically reinforcing as heroin and crack
I knew a woman who was an alcoholic crackhead. Her problems with alcohol were far worse. Yes, this is merely anecdotal, she could well be the exception. But I seem to see the same people at Felbers every time I go there. The only way their alcoholism affects me is if they drive home and put me in danger; I don't have to worry about Al Capone's gang machine gunning everybody in the bar because he's selling the wrong brand of beer, and that's what you get with illegal drugs.
The only time a drug abuser affects me at all is when they burglarize my house for dope money. It's said "cocaine is God's way of telling you you've got too much money." If their drugs were legal and affordable they wouldn't have to go to the trouble; I don't know any alcoholics who have to steal to support their habits.
I think we should clearly treat hard drug use and addiction more as a health problem than a crime problem.
Agreed. It is a health problem, and should not be a crime problem. If someone steals to support their habit, put them in jail for stealing. We'd have a lot more money to spend on treatment if we loosed all the non-violent drug criminals, who make up over half the prison population and closed half the prisons and laid off half the cops, prosecutors, and public defenders.
The US has the lowest percentage of people who actually put forth the effort to vote.
You know, I always vote but I often wonder why I bother. So you can vote for a Republican who wants to extend copyright lengths, and a Democrat who wants to extend copyright lengths. You can choose between a Republican who wants pot to stay illegal, and a Democrat who also wants pot to stay illegal. You have a Democrat who likes the PATRIOT act, and a Republican who likes the PATRIOT act. Meanwhile, corporations "donate" to both parties, the bribe is in and they get what they want.
Two thirds of voters want the rich to pay higher taxes. Half want pot legalized. Nobody wants the TSA scanners; why should a voter think his vote has any meaning whatever when government never, EVER listens to us?
Nothing prevents you from forming your own super PAC and collecting money to generate commercials to the public that promotes your political ideology.
Nothing except no connection to very many people with much money.
My vote is meaningless, yet I cast it anyway. Others refrain from going to the trouble because they know good and well that thier vote is meaningless.
It isn't apathy, it IS the system. How would I change it? A Constitutional amendment that said 1) no bill becomes law unless ratified by the House and Senate, signed by the President (or at least not vetoed), then put before the American voters; less than 50% of the voters vote "yes" and it doesn't become law. 2) a ten year limit on all Federal laws; after ten years, the law must be voted on again.
You're leaving out the biggest part of the equation -- cost. In 1973 a Cray Mark II, the world's fastest computer, was less powerful than today's iPhone. Today's PC software wouldn't have run on even a mainframe back then. In 1971 or 1972 (I don't remember) I was completely inside a computer that was designed to run a C-5A flight simulator. The computer was an entire building full of rows and rows of bookshelves filled with printed circuit boards. The cockpit view wasn't even computer-generated, it used 35mm film for the window display. You young folks have no idea how primitive things were back then.
Eight bit processors were developed because 1) 16 bits cost a whole lot more and 2) eight bits is enough for a lot of devices and functions. You don't pay for a semitractor when all you need is a small pickup truck.
The GUI only came around when hardware was powerful enough to run it and cheap enough to buy. Notice it was the middle to late '90s before most people started putting computers in their homes; cost was the factor. An new IBM PC was $4,000 in 1982 and didn't even come with disk drives!
Most guns are designed and sold to kill animals, not people. I've killed plenty of rabbits and squirrels in my time, but I've never pointed a gun at a human being (although I've had them pointed at me).
If you declared a law that everything over 200k a person makes would go to the government it would be about 2 trillion dollars or enough to run the country for less then 2 months
If you took away my tax liability completely it probably wouldn't run the country for two seconds, so by your logic I shouldn't be taxed at all.
The other consequence of raising taxes on the producers...
Producers of what? The middle class people on the factory floor produce the wealth, the CxOs merely aggregate and control it.
...is that those costs are embedded into the products they create or lowering the amount of capital available for investment.
Or the profits available to the shareholders or the extremely insane amounts of compensation the folks who run these companies get.
There are two solutions left lowering the federal tax exempt level so that more then 50% of the population will be paying federal taxes, or spending much less.
It isn't an either/or proposition. You want to tax the middle class more and the rich less? (looks to see if parent's user name is Ebeneezer... nope).
The military is [already] enacting 20% cuts to their budget if other programs did the same we wouldn't have a debt problem.
That 20% reduction should be fairly easy on them, considering we just finished one of the two longest and most expensive wars in US history, which is where most of the defecit comes from. What would you cut? Infrastructure? If you say "bridge to nowhere" I'm with you, there is far too much waste. If you say "legalize, tax, and regulate now-illegal drugs, lay off half the cops, close half the prisons and disband ATF and DEA and TSA and DHS" I'm with you there, too. Hell, that alone might solve the budget problems.
The easiest way out of the budget mess is fix the economy; that will raise far more revenue than any tax hike on anybody, or murderous cuts to our far more meager than other countries' social services.
It depends on who you tax. Taxing the poor could possibly be the worst, since the poor live paycheck to paycheck (yes, most of the poor work. Those food stamps subsidize Wal Mart's and McDonald's profits by allowing them to underpay their workers) and spend every penny they earn. Money they don't have is money they don't spend, meaning money someone else doesn't earn.
Raise middle class taxes and they will both spend less and save less, also harming the economy. That skipped haircut is a lost wage for the barber and lost revenue for the government.
The rich? Taxing them more (to a certain point, of course) does nothing whatever to or for the economy. They won't spend less, so there is no loss of tax revenue. It won't affect their hiring -- nobody hires production workers unless they're selling more than they can produce, and nobody lays off production workers unless they can't sell all that they produce.
America's poor are fat precicsely because of bad welfare. Healthy food is expensive. Fattening food is cheap. Pasta, potatos ($2 for a huge bag), macaroni and cheese... no matter what the food, if it's good for you it's expensive, bad for you if it's cheap.
You try eating on $40 a month; that's how much a person on SSI disability gets in food stamps, and she only gets $600 in cash.
But you go ahead living in your fantasy world where the only people without jobs are lazy and nobody ever goes hungry here.
Anyone who pays attention knows that we have to STOP the spending.
The Iraq war ended last week, that's a lot of huge stopped spending right there. Not enough, but we should have not spent a penny on Iraq. Oh yeah, they're still spending money on the Bridge to Nowhere and other boondoggles. But you tea partiers insist that we pay for two wars, the bridge to nowhere, tax breaks for the rich, and grants to the oil companies rather than pay the medicare and Social Security that was contracted decades ago.
The government takes in more as a percent of GNP that it has since WWII
And the rich are paying lower taxes than any time since, which tells you who's being a freeloader. Isn't it about time those damned rich freeloaders started paying their fair share?
And don't give any me bullshit about Bush
Who started those two expensive wars? Who started those expensive acronym agencies like TSA, DHS, and FEMA? Who bailed out the "too big to fail" banks first?
Who was the only President to ever leave office with fewer employed Americans than when he started? Who was Predident when the economy collapsed? You do realise that the defecit has grown so much faster under Obama because so much less tax revenue is being generated, because 10% of us are out of work and not paying taxes?
Obama took over after the worst President in American history; Bush left the country a shambles. Considering the mess he was left to clean up, I don't think he's done that bad a job. All I'd fault Obama for is health care, not raising taxes on the rich, not insisting that oil subsidies stop, and caving in to the radical, hypocritical Republicans in the House.
Of course I can see him in the book. Don't you get pictures and sounds in your head when you read? If you've seen anyone pop their glass eye out you know what Rooster looked like.
Most people I know who use crack started out snorting cocaine occasionally, then daily, then went for the smoked version's extra rush. None of them are in the least productive, they're all ate up with ruined lives.
There were (are?) a lot of different flavors of BASIC, all with minor syntactical issues. I don't remember seeing one that required an asterisk, and I used several, including Sinclair BASIC, MS BASIC, Apple IIe's BASIC (which iinm MS wrote), IBM BASIC and, um, what was the name of the XT's basic? GWBASIC?
What's the asterisk do, and why do you think it's needed?
Unless you are calling the US a war torn hell hole.
Well, the bar I drink in is pretty much in a war-torn hell hole. Its neighborhood is supposed to be the 3rd most dangerous in the country. Good fodder for a writer, though.
The US itself? Nah. I do fear the Republican budget cuts on the poor (more crime; my house was burglarized twice this year), but their insistance on raising middle class taxes and insistance that the rich's taxes are too high when they're lower than they've been since Truman was in office. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone making less than $300k/yr would vote Republican today; they used to be pretty moderate, but this century they've been so radically left wing, almost Facist, that it seems insane to me. Maybe that's because I'm getting so damned old. Young folks aren't old enough to remember before the Republicans became the UnAmerican Party.
I've also read the bigger problem is above ground wires taking up the energy and frying the gear in the homes and businesses those wires attach to.
More likely the fires are cause by short circuts in the power transistors or power supply diodes, causing high voltage to run through wires that just aren't big enough to hanle the voltage.
Semiconductors are extremely sensitive to heat and overvoltage, other components not so much at all.
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people really need to start talking about the biggest money suckholes of them all: defense, and "borrowing" from medicare and social security, for which middle class people are taxed for their retirements.
FTFY.
Want to fix SS and Medicare? Just remove the income ceiling on it and stop moving its funds into the general treasury and you'll have a hell of a pile of cash.
Um, what? My phone handles email and the internet, does that make it a smartphone? I'm seriously confused here, I thought "smartphone" meant iPhone, Android, or Blackberry (and maybe Win 8).
I can call, text, watch youtube, email... you know, I really wish one of you guys would point to a feature Android has that would make it worth the money to me, but I don't see what an Android will do that my phone (a Motorola Blackberry clone) won't.
I really would like an excuse to buy one, but so far I won't let myself.
yeah. Also, what's with the elipsis (...) ? As in ... From Space? I mean, that's kind of what you expect, right? I mean, he's a god-damn astronaut.
Astronauts spend far more time on earth than from space, so I think the "from space" is warranted, especially since I'd be really disappointed if the headline read "Astronaut takes picture of comet" and it was a picture he took from his hotel room in Florida.
I'm using kubuntu on a 1.8 mz chip with 750 megs of RAM, an old junker I put together from trash and spare parts, and it runs fine -- better than Windows. I have no idea why people seem to have issues with KDE, I was running Mandrake and Mandriva back in the 400 mz Celeron days, and it ran fine with them, too.
As to the GP, I can't figure out why he thinks saying something nice about KDE would get him modded down. I won't bother responding to him, because he's either logged out and won't ever see the response, or he's dumb enough to think that the "post anonymously" button protects your karma.
I have a TV, but no cable -- I use the TV for a big monitor, get my TV shows off the internet.
As to the topic, I'd like to have an Android, and I could afford the hardware, but I can't justify the cost of any carrier that lets me use one. I'm on Boost Mobile, flat $45 per month for talk, long distance, text, email, 411, walkie-talkie, and internet. I could justify the initial price of the toy, but not the $80 per month plus minutes a smart phone would cost (and when my daughters call, they talk a long time).
If Apple or Google want me to use their phones, they're going to have to buy out one of the cell carriers and stop the price-gouging the company they buy does now.
So it's plural for a horse's tail? One for bone, one for muscle, one for hair?
I just think outright legalization (i.e., regulating them like alcohol) of hard drugs would be much more of a gamble than legalizing soft drugs.
That's a reasonable position to take. However --
Certainly there are a ton of problems caused by their prohibition, but the problems that may occur from things like heroin and crack due to increased usage after legalization are a big unknown.
The "increased useage" is an unwarranted assumption and is likely incorrect; alcohol use rose during prohibition, but not after alcohol was legalized. Is the law all that's keeping you from shooting heroin? Not me, the effects of heroin itself does, and the law doesn't stop me or anyone else from smoking pot. I know a lot of people who don't smoke it because they just don't like the effects, but I have yet to hear anyone say "you know, if they legalized it I'd try it."
For example, although alcohol is very physically addictive, it isn't nearly as psychologically reinforcing as heroin and crack
I knew a woman who was an alcoholic crackhead. Her problems with alcohol were far worse. Yes, this is merely anecdotal, she could well be the exception. But I seem to see the same people at Felbers every time I go there. The only way their alcoholism affects me is if they drive home and put me in danger; I don't have to worry about Al Capone's gang machine gunning everybody in the bar because he's selling the wrong brand of beer, and that's what you get with illegal drugs.
The only time a drug abuser affects me at all is when they burglarize my house for dope money. It's said "cocaine is God's way of telling you you've got too much money." If their drugs were legal and affordable they wouldn't have to go to the trouble; I don't know any alcoholics who have to steal to support their habits.
I think we should clearly treat hard drug use and addiction more as a health problem than a crime problem.
Agreed. It is a health problem, and should not be a crime problem. If someone steals to support their habit, put them in jail for stealing. We'd have a lot more money to spend on treatment if we loosed all the non-violent drug criminals, who make up over half the prison population and closed half the prisons and laid off half the cops, prosecutors, and public defenders.
The US has the lowest percentage of people who actually put forth the effort to vote.
You know, I always vote but I often wonder why I bother. So you can vote for a Republican who wants to extend copyright lengths, and a Democrat who wants to extend copyright lengths. You can choose between a Republican who wants pot to stay illegal, and a Democrat who also wants pot to stay illegal. You have a Democrat who likes the PATRIOT act, and a Republican who likes the PATRIOT act. Meanwhile, corporations "donate" to both parties, the bribe is in and they get what they want.
Two thirds of voters want the rich to pay higher taxes. Half want pot legalized. Nobody wants the TSA scanners; why should a voter think his vote has any meaning whatever when government never, EVER listens to us?
Nothing prevents you from forming your own super PAC and collecting money to generate commercials to the public that promotes your political ideology.
Nothing except no connection to very many people with much money.
My vote is meaningless, yet I cast it anyway. Others refrain from going to the trouble because they know good and well that thier vote is meaningless.
It isn't apathy, it IS the system. How would I change it? A Constitutional amendment that said 1) no bill becomes law unless ratified by the House and Senate, signed by the President (or at least not vetoed), then put before the American voters; less than 50% of the voters vote "yes" and it doesn't become law. 2) a ten year limit on all Federal laws; after ten years, the law must be voted on again.
You're leaving out the biggest part of the equation -- cost. In 1973 a Cray Mark II, the world's fastest computer, was less powerful than today's iPhone. Today's PC software wouldn't have run on even a mainframe back then. In 1971 or 1972 (I don't remember) I was completely inside a computer that was designed to run a C-5A flight simulator. The computer was an entire building full of rows and rows of bookshelves filled with printed circuit boards. The cockpit view wasn't even computer-generated, it used 35mm film for the window display. You young folks have no idea how primitive things were back then.
Eight bit processors were developed because 1) 16 bits cost a whole lot more and 2) eight bits is enough for a lot of devices and functions. You don't pay for a semitractor when all you need is a small pickup truck.
The GUI only came around when hardware was powerful enough to run it and cheap enough to buy. Notice it was the middle to late '90s before most people started putting computers in their homes; cost was the factor. An new IBM PC was $4,000 in 1982 and didn't even come with disk drives!
Most guns are designed and sold to kill animals, not people. I've killed plenty of rabbits and squirrels in my time, but I've never pointed a gun at a human being (although I've had them pointed at me).
If you declared a law that everything over 200k a person makes would go to the government it would be about 2 trillion dollars or enough to run the country for less then 2 months
If you took away my tax liability completely it probably wouldn't run the country for two seconds, so by your logic I shouldn't be taxed at all.
The other consequence of raising taxes on the producers...
Producers of what? The middle class people on the factory floor produce the wealth, the CxOs merely aggregate and control it.
Or the profits available to the shareholders or the extremely insane amounts of compensation the folks who run these companies get.
There are two solutions left lowering the federal tax exempt level so that more then 50% of the population will be paying federal taxes, or spending much less.
It isn't an either/or proposition. You want to tax the middle class more and the rich less? (looks to see if parent's user name is Ebeneezer... nope).
The military is [already] enacting 20% cuts to their budget if other programs did the same we wouldn't have a debt problem.
That 20% reduction should be fairly easy on them, considering we just finished one of the two longest and most expensive wars in US history, which is where most of the defecit comes from. What would you cut? Infrastructure? If you say "bridge to nowhere" I'm with you, there is far too much waste. If you say "legalize, tax, and regulate now-illegal drugs, lay off half the cops, close half the prisons and disband ATF and DEA and TSA and DHS" I'm with you there, too. Hell, that alone might solve the budget problems.
They should also end insanity like this.
The easiest way out of the budget mess is fix the economy; that will raise far more revenue than any tax hike on anybody, or murderous cuts to our far more meager than other countries' social services.
It depends on who you tax. Taxing the poor could possibly be the worst, since the poor live paycheck to paycheck (yes, most of the poor work. Those food stamps subsidize Wal Mart's and McDonald's profits by allowing them to underpay their workers) and spend every penny they earn. Money they don't have is money they don't spend, meaning money someone else doesn't earn.
Raise middle class taxes and they will both spend less and save less, also harming the economy. That skipped haircut is a lost wage for the barber and lost revenue for the government.
The rich? Taxing them more (to a certain point, of course) does nothing whatever to or for the economy. They won't spend less, so there is no loss of tax revenue. It won't affect their hiring -- nobody hires production workers unless they're selling more than they can produce, and nobody lays off production workers unless they can't sell all that they produce.
America's poor are fat precicsely because of bad welfare. Healthy food is expensive. Fattening food is cheap. Pasta, potatos ($2 for a huge bag), macaroni and cheese... no matter what the food, if it's good for you it's expensive, bad for you if it's cheap.
You try eating on $40 a month; that's how much a person on SSI disability gets in food stamps, and she only gets $600 in cash.
But you go ahead living in your fantasy world where the only people without jobs are lazy and nobody ever goes hungry here.
Anyone who pays attention knows that we have to STOP the spending.
The Iraq war ended last week, that's a lot of huge stopped spending right there. Not enough, but we should have not spent a penny on Iraq. Oh yeah, they're still spending money on the Bridge to Nowhere and other boondoggles. But you tea partiers insist that we pay for two wars, the bridge to nowhere, tax breaks for the rich, and grants to the oil companies rather than pay the medicare and Social Security that was contracted decades ago.
The government takes in more as a percent of GNP that it has since WWII
And the rich are paying lower taxes than any time since, which tells you who's being a freeloader. Isn't it about time those damned rich freeloaders started paying their fair share?
And don't give any me bullshit about Bush
Who started those two expensive wars? Who started those expensive acronym agencies like TSA, DHS, and FEMA? Who bailed out the "too big to fail" banks first?
Who was the only President to ever leave office with fewer employed Americans than when he started? Who was Predident when the economy collapsed? You do realise that the defecit has grown so much faster under Obama because so much less tax revenue is being generated, because 10% of us are out of work and not paying taxes?
Obama took over after the worst President in American history; Bush left the country a shambles. Considering the mess he was left to clean up, I don't think he's done that bad a job. All I'd fault Obama for is health care, not raising taxes on the rich, not insisting that oil subsidies stop, and caving in to the radical, hypocritical Republicans in the House.
The newer film, from 2010, could easily have CGIed the eye.
The Koala bear eats shoots and leaves.
The Koala bear eats, shoots, and leaves.
Of course I can see him in the book. Don't you get pictures and sounds in your head when you read? If you've seen anyone pop their glass eye out you know what Rooster looked like.
Well, you can't compile Fortran with an assembler, and you can't execute BASIC from FORTRAN, even if they are similar in many ways.
Oops, brain fart. I meant to say radical right wing (and almost did it again now)
Not any more,
Bashki was also responsible for the abortion that was Cool World
Heh, I liked that movie. His LOTR was a disapointment, but when when he made it they didn't have the tools Peter Jackson did.
Most people I know who use crack started out snorting cocaine occasionally, then daily, then went for the smoked version's extra rush. None of them are in the least productive, they're all ate up with ruined lives.
There were (are?) a lot of different flavors of BASIC, all with minor syntactical issues. I don't remember seeing one that required an asterisk, and I used several, including Sinclair BASIC, MS BASIC, Apple IIe's BASIC (which iinm MS wrote), IBM BASIC and, um, what was the name of the XT's basic? GWBASIC?
What's the asterisk do, and why do you think it's needed?
Unless you are calling the US a war torn hell hole.
Well, the bar I drink in is pretty much in a war-torn hell hole. Its neighborhood is supposed to be the 3rd most dangerous in the country. Good fodder for a writer, though.
The US itself? Nah. I do fear the Republican budget cuts on the poor (more crime; my house was burglarized twice this year), but their insistance on raising middle class taxes and insistance that the rich's taxes are too high when they're lower than they've been since Truman was in office. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone making less than $300k/yr would vote Republican today; they used to be pretty moderate, but this century they've been so radically left wing, almost Facist, that it seems insane to me. Maybe that's because I'm getting so damned old. Young folks aren't old enough to remember before the Republicans became the UnAmerican Party.
I've also read the bigger problem is above ground wires taking up the energy and frying the gear in the homes and businesses those wires attach to.
More likely the fires are cause by short circuts in the power transistors or power supply diodes, causing high voltage to run through wires that just aren't big enough to hanle the voltage.
Semiconductors are extremely sensitive to heat and overvoltage, other components not so much at all.