RTFA. This is a special "tax rebate." Amazon would still be able to keep a portion of the sales tax collected to recover their "costs" to collect state sales tax. If that was all then these cities would not need to negotiable special deals like this one.
Good point. If the cities were not competing against each other, Amazon would have eventually had to pick one of them and pay full state sales tax. It's like two salespeople at the same company dropping their price two or three times, bidding against each other, so they can win a sale from just one customer. Most well-run organizations have systems in place to prevent "bidding against yourself". Cities are not for-profit organizations, so there's no anti-trust regulation to prevent them from organizing and cooperating for mutual benefit. Imagine if all governmental agencies, local to federal, took advantage of their collective bargaining power. It would make government leaner and more efficient. Such close collaboration could reveal redundancies that the agencies could re-organize for mutual benefit. Given that the current system leads the majority of the taxpayers to cover the taxes of a few, why aren't the tea baggers screaming against this?
To really offend the Iranians, they should call it the "Gulf of Bush". Oh, wait, that would offend just about everyone here on Slashdot as well, including myself.
There are a few other advantages to being a Delaware entity. For one, Delaware is the only state in the union that does not have a provision in its laws for a judgment creditor to levy a debtors bank accounts. The caveat is that to take advantage of this one would need to deposit at a bank that does not have any branches outside the state. Otherwise, creditors could have your account levied by executing on the branch outside of Delaware, and thanks to the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution, the Delaware branch would have to turn over the assets. There are many other laws on the books in Delaware that provide special protections to corporations and trusts as well.
They threatened "legal action" but that doesn't mean they have to file suit in US courts. Iran is a sovereign nation and they follow Sharia law. The Ayatollah can issue a Fatwa to "all believers" to murder Google execs anywhere they are found.
I have a problem with that case regarding the arson. There was not sufficient evidence to convict, and for sure a death sentence prevents any future chance of exoneration. But that does not mean there was sufficient evidence that the fire WAS an accident. I feel the same about OJ Simpson - there was not enough evidence to convict and it was the right thing to let him go - but we all know he did it.
That was Louisiana, dipshit! In Texas the Asian kid has to put at least one foot part way through your mantle before you can legally blow them to Kingdom Come.
They should change their name from IRAN to IRAA. Then we would be scared of their threats. Next thing North KORAA will be taking legal action against the New York Times for referring to them as a "Stalinist dictatorship " [1.]
Taxes are for the poor and the ignorant. The tax laws are written by wealthy law-degree wielding politicians and their corporate campaign contributors. There are no "accidental" loopholes. If you are middle class, live frugally all your life, you are sooner or later going to be in for a rude awakening. If you are an emerging rap star, athlete, lottery winner, or you inherit your great uncle's farm, you are going to get nailed. But if you come from wealth, or if you come into wealth through scheming, nepotism, and bribery, then you likely know how important it is to have a good wealth management company, tax advisor, and asset protection attorney. This is why you read about rich people declaring bankruptcy and then buying out some multi-million dollar company in just the next year. At some point your wealth grows to such an extreme point that you must protect it from the greedy masses of democratic societies. This is the world where you
incorporate in the Cook Islands bank in the Cayman Islands maintain residence in Monaco maintain citizenship in Switzerland register your yacht in the Bahamas spend most of your time traveling the Caribbean and Pacific Islands
It doesn't hurt to befriend a lonely and isolated dictator or two.
In such a world war type scenario, just make sure you're on the same team as China. A world war in our time might not necessarily be decided by nuclear weapons any more than WWII was decided by use of gas. The deterrent force held by both sides could deter both sides from ever using them against each other, leaving them with conventional means to destroy each other.
They don't have to. Most sitting judges these days want to get paid more by working for the private arbitration firms, and the best way to land one of those gigs is to have a steady track record of screwing consumers and siding with business in every ruling. Consumers never insist that their corporate suppliers of goods and services include binding arbitration clauses in their contracts. Arbitrators work for business, not consumers, and everybody knows it.
Don't knock these outsource support services. There's no way I could post as often on Slashdot and maintain my good Karma without a lot help from my virtual team based in Calcutta.
You have to watch out for those "legitimate" news outlets. I clicked on an app for News of the World and they started recording and rebroadcasting all the calls going through my cell phone.
The self-appointed experts who got on national TV news programs or in other ways to advise the public at-large that they will not have enough money to retire unless they invest in the stock market should have to answer for their false claims. Even Bob Dole got on the radio with a public service announcement to say that "markets rebound, they always do". Most of his retired audience at the time have now died broke and penniless. Ed McMahon is a sad example. When I first had a salary and money to invest the "irrefutable" advice of the time was to buy-and-hold. Those who regularly dropped bad stocks for better stocks were the butt of jokes because grandma just bought ten companies, held them for 30 years, and retired better than all those stock traders. Now look and see who's pimping the buy-and-hold theory these days. Nobody. But Dave Ramsey says that any half-wit investor can average out a 12% return over the course of five years or so. And don't get me started on Cramer, Orman, Trump, or Kiyosaki. Though I would give Kiyosaki credit for warning that a home is not an asset years before so many people overspent on their homes with the speculative presumption that their salaries would increase as well as their house values. So many of the people at the peak were panic buyers, convinced that in just a few more years house prices would be so great that they would not have a chance in the future to even buy their own homes. Where were the experts then to calm them down? They were silent, or at least there wasn't enough airtime to squeeze them in between the best-selling authors.
The greatest trick of all time was taking away the pensions of the working class and telling them they had to invest in a 401k for retirement. Most of these 401k plans still lack essential investment options, like a gold or precious metals fund, or a commodities fund, or even an affordable cash fund. In most cases a money market account in a 401k is going to lose value over time due to the high maintenance costs compared to the low returns. By having no choice but to pick between 6 to 10 fund options, most working Americans were stuck holding the bag of confusing and sub-prime investments and most still don't even know it. If that's not bad enough, when was the last time you voted as a stockholder for the stocks that were held in your 401k? It's like handing your money to a complete stranger and then saying, "no we don't need a contract. Spend it however you like. I just assume it will come back with a return." The inmates were running the asylum and we gave them the keys!
So, working Americans were duped into believing they could compete in the stock market even though they were limited to one trade per month when the day-traders were taking advantage of price fluctuations that lasted for less than one second. Most Americans had no way to understand the investments on the same level as their Goldman Sachs counterparts. Even when a few 401k investors were willing to educate themselves they were limited to macro-scale investments, such as index funds or managed growth funds, for which the economic fundamentals cannot be as easily explored as owning an equally diversified portfolio of ten individual stocks. But America's employed workforce will continue to follow the delusion that they are "investors" until forty years from now they do the math and find out they would have been better off owning hard assets like the house they live in with enough land to grow their own food supply and sufficient guns and ammo to defend it. Or they could have pooled their savings with their peers to lobby Congress like their corporate overlords did to pass things like caps on malpractice suits, bankruptcy "reform", and mandatory health coverage without a public option or the teeth to make insurers actually pay for medically necessary care.
This is evidence that, as suggested by Aristotle thousands of years ago, rocks have free will. They are not pulled to the center of the earth by an "invisible" force as was suggested by Newton, but the rocks prefer to be closer to larger rocks, of which our planet is a colony of closely connected rocks. The rocks in Ireland are most likely moving inland of their own free will so they can self-assemble into structures such as the one found at Stonehenge in England. Even when faced with clear and convincing evidence, the unbelievers grasp at straws and try to make up absurd explanations for the truth that is revealed in front of them. Everybody knows that there is no mechanical means that early humans could have used to drag stones hundreds of miles to Stonehenge. The same is true for the stones that assembled into the pyramids at Egypt. Now we are supposed to believe that storm waves are moving the stones, against all plausible logic or liklihood - AND WITHOUT EVIDENCE. A pure hypothesis of those who refuse to believe. It is time for all humanity to pull their heads out of the sand and embrace the reality that rocks have free will and are the dominant life form on this planet. I, for one, welcome our ancient geologic overlords!
I don't think you understand the mindset of today's Republican Party:
1. The only fair tax is a flat tax, and the only purpose of government should be to push that tax rate as close to 0% as possible. Charging fees for government services is OK. For example, national forests do not manage themselves, so those who visit should have to pay a fee to cover the costs of managing the national forests. 2. Building and maintaining the roads and bridges you drive on should be the responsibility of private corporations. The state should auction off all public roadways and use the proceeds to pay off all public debt. The new owners should be allowed to collect tolls, and by the magic of the free and unregulated market, any roads worth maintaining will be maintained. 3. Law enforcement should not be a financial strain on tax payers. Private security firms like Academi, previously known as Xe Services LLC, Blackwater USA and Blackwater Worldwide, do the job of maintaining law and order for efficiently that government agencies like the local police department, state troopers, FBI, CIA, or US Army. Under the current system tax payers still have to fund the hiring of these firms, but ideally individuals who care about law and order will contract with such firms to patrol their neighborhoods and keep skittle-toting thugs away from their property. 4. The US court system is bloated, backlogged, and too expensive to maintain. Private arbitration firms can dish out justice more efficiently. Eventually all of the US courts can be privatized, especially the meddlesome US Supreme Court that is still stacked with FDR appointed activist judges who constantly trample on the Constitution. 5. The original signed copies of the US Constitution should not be preserved in bloated and wasteful tax-payer funded government agencies such as the National Archives, Library of Congress, or national institutes/museums. The Constitution has such a high value that it should be auctioned off to the highest bidder, along with the holdings of all these other government agencies. Private depositories and wealthy collectors can preserve our national treasures more efficiently. Museums that house such artifacts should be entirely self-funding from ticket sales and the private sale of over-priced artifacts, such as the Declaration of Independence. Those who cannot remain solvent should be allowed to fail. 6. Fire departments should not be tax supported. Those who wish to have fire protection should pay fees to the fire and rescue company of their choice. Here is a great example of an efficient operation: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pay-no-spray-firefighters-let-home-burn/ 7. Sovereign-provided privileges, immunities, rights and services should not be the responsibility of a tax-supported government. All privileges, immunities, rights and services should be treated as commodities to be auctioned off and/or privatized so that the delivery of such privileges, immunities, rights and services will be more efficient.
Bottom line: Asking tax payers to pay for anything is morally reprehensible.
Ya, dat dus suck. All dat reeding, riting, litterature, english, and term papers. you can leev out all dat filler and fluff classes cus the only skilz you need to suckseed are programs skilz. And its about time I get payed what dos MSCS and "software enginers" guys get paed.
It's a shame that those of us who are returning to growing our own food, for a variety of reasons (economical, quality, nutritional, sustainable, etc.) face obstacles that were not in place a few decades ago. Even with a full acre of suburban property, a home owner might be allowed to have a horse for recreation, but city ordinances, HOAs, and deed restrictions often prohibit raising small flocks of fowl, goats, or a milking cow. Furthermore, many HOAs have punished home owners for hanging laundry on a clothes line, forcing them to buy an appliance they don't need and waste energy just to dry their clothes. Or the HOAs highly restrict what can be grown in a garden, often excluding anything edible. In the meantime, the most irrigated crop in the USA isn't soybeans or corn, its lawn grass.
I am fortunate that I don't live in an HOA, but I am still restricted to only two hens in my (very large) back yard. I don't want to start a chicken farm, but a flock of one or two dozen chickens is commonly found in the back yards of most countries, even our own a few decades ago. In fact, raising backyard chickens was "patriotic" in WWII. If I ever wanted to slaughter one of my chickens for food, I could be arrested, as I am not allowed to slaughter my own livestock - I have to take it to a meat processor or drive out past the county line. Now, I certainly have sympathy for my neighbors, and I would agree that most people would be annoyed by the constant crowing of a rooster, so I can understand the need for some restraints, but if neighbors don't object why should there be so many restrictions?
These are restrictions placed on a full-time engineer with enough money to get by without growing my own food. For me it's a matter of preference, and maybe somewhat of a hobby, but heaven forbid that one day I lose all of my money. There is no coherent system of support in the US to guarantee that I can be feed a proper meal each day unless I go to prison. While there are food stamps and many other programs, qualifying can take time and most people who receive food stamps cannot rely on the stamps alone to procure all the food they need to survive, and there is the ever-present threat of budget cuts. What food they can buy and afford is typically high in starch and fat, and low in protein and nutrients. This is just one reason why impoverished populations of the US tend to have higher rates of diabetes and heart disease. I'm willing to bet that many of this country's poor and homeless would rather have a small homestead that they could use for subsistence farming. While some US cities have experimented with community gardens, they pale with what I have seen in other countries, especially in Europe where allotment gardening is popular and originally began as "gardens for the poor". Here in the US, cities may at times build shelters or hand out food, but those in power are not going to let people live naturally and sustainably, as this would deprive their coffers of property tax, sales tax, and income tax. Today we are seeing such incredible cuts in services to the poor, and now more and more cities are literally criminalizing homelessness by passing laws against sleeping in public. If homeless pitch a tent or build a small shack from discarded pallets, the police will haul it off, even if it is well hidden from public view on unused or abandoned property. You aren't even allowed to "live off the land" in national forests or public land anymore. If you stay more than 14 days you get evicted. The wild areas are now only reserved for well-to-do sportsman looking to mount another trophy on their wall. Give a homeless man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and now he'll be prosecuted for fishing without a license. A license that a homeless person would find it difficult to afford. There are only two morally correct options for our society to proceed: either loosen the restrictions that keep people from providing for their own welfare, or institute a comprehensive nationwide support system
Thousands of people are protesting daily, getting arrested for their cause, and they are trying everything they can to change the system. You can't ask them to work any harder than they already are. Yet they have been completely unsuccessful. It is apparently clear that US and state congressmen will not support legislative changes unless the proposed laws are written by private industry trade organizations and presented to them by millionaire lobbyists.
So how long before we start to see roadside strip searches of Occupy protestors? And just last week we were criticizing Egypt for their "virginity testing", which in practical terms, is almost the same procedure as a cavity search in the US.
Since when does the arresting police officer become judge and jury to convict citizens of crimes? The people being detained, strip searched, and incarcerated in jails have not been convicted of any crime, as their trial has not yet taken place.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA. This is a special "tax rebate." Amazon would still be able to keep a portion of the sales tax collected to recover their "costs" to collect state sales tax. If that was all then these cities would not need to negotiable special deals like this one.
Good point. If the cities were not competing against each other, Amazon would have eventually had to pick one of them and pay full state sales tax. It's like two salespeople at the same company dropping their price two or three times, bidding against each other, so they can win a sale from just one customer. Most well-run organizations have systems in place to prevent "bidding against yourself". Cities are not for-profit organizations, so there's no anti-trust regulation to prevent them from organizing and cooperating for mutual benefit. Imagine if all governmental agencies, local to federal, took advantage of their collective bargaining power. It would make government leaner and more efficient. Such close collaboration could reveal redundancies that the agencies could re-organize for mutual benefit. Given that the current system leads the majority of the taxpayers to cover the taxes of a few, why aren't the tea baggers screaming against this?
And we all know you can't be a good techie without a Masters in Computer Science.
To really offend the Iranians, they should call it the "Gulf of Bush". Oh, wait, that would offend just about everyone here on Slashdot as well, including myself.
There are a few other advantages to being a Delaware entity. For one, Delaware is the only state in the union that does not have a provision in its laws for a judgment creditor to levy a debtors bank accounts. The caveat is that to take advantage of this one would need to deposit at a bank that does not have any branches outside the state. Otherwise, creditors could have your account levied by executing on the branch outside of Delaware, and thanks to the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution, the Delaware branch would have to turn over the assets. There are many other laws on the books in Delaware that provide special protections to corporations and trusts as well.
They threatened "legal action" but that doesn't mean they have to file suit in US courts. Iran is a sovereign nation and they follow Sharia law. The Ayatollah can issue a Fatwa to "all believers" to murder Google execs anywhere they are found.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatwas
What can you expect from a state where the long arm of Capone's "Outfit" reaches all the way to the Governor's Mansion.
I have a problem with that case regarding the arson. There was not sufficient evidence to convict, and for sure a death sentence prevents any future chance of exoneration. But that does not mean there was sufficient evidence that the fire WAS an accident. I feel the same about OJ Simpson - there was not enough evidence to convict and it was the right thing to let him go - but we all know he did it.
That was Louisiana, dipshit! In Texas the Asian kid has to put at least one foot part way through your mantle before you can legally blow them to Kingdom Come.
They should change their name from IRAN to IRAA. Then we would be scared of their threats. Next thing North KORAA will be taking legal action against the New York Times for referring to them as a "Stalinist dictatorship " [1.]
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/02/international/asia/02CND-KORE.html?ex=1380513600&en=a29d7f1e49aabee0&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
Taxes are for the poor and the ignorant. The tax laws are written by wealthy law-degree wielding politicians and their corporate campaign contributors. There are no "accidental" loopholes. If you are middle class, live frugally all your life, you are sooner or later going to be in for a rude awakening. If you are an emerging rap star, athlete, lottery winner, or you inherit your great uncle's farm, you are going to get nailed. But if you come from wealth, or if you come into wealth through scheming, nepotism, and bribery, then you likely know how important it is to have a good wealth management company, tax advisor, and asset protection attorney. This is why you read about rich people declaring bankruptcy and then buying out some multi-million dollar company in just the next year. At some point your wealth grows to such an extreme point that you must protect it from the greedy masses of democratic societies. This is the world where you
incorporate in the Cook Islands
bank in the Cayman Islands
maintain residence in Monaco
maintain citizenship in Switzerland
register your yacht in the Bahamas
spend most of your time traveling the Caribbean and Pacific Islands
It doesn't hurt to befriend a lonely and isolated dictator or two.
In such a world war type scenario, just make sure you're on the same team as China. A world war in our time might not necessarily be decided by nuclear weapons any more than WWII was decided by use of gas. The deterrent force held by both sides could deter both sides from ever using them against each other, leaving them with conventional means to destroy each other.
They don't have to. Most sitting judges these days want to get paid more by working for the private arbitration firms, and the best way to land one of those gigs is to have a steady track record of screwing consumers and siding with business in every ruling. Consumers never insist that their corporate suppliers of goods and services include binding arbitration clauses in their contracts. Arbitrators work for business, not consumers, and everybody knows it.
Don't knock these outsource support services. There's no way I could post as often on Slashdot and maintain my good Karma without a lot help from my virtual team based in Calcutta.
You have to watch out for those "legitimate" news outlets. I clicked on an app for News of the World and they started recording and rebroadcasting all the calls going through my cell phone.
The self-appointed experts who got on national TV news programs or in other ways to advise the public at-large that they will not have enough money to retire unless they invest in the stock market should have to answer for their false claims. Even Bob Dole got on the radio with a public service announcement to say that "markets rebound, they always do". Most of his retired audience at the time have now died broke and penniless. Ed McMahon is a sad example. When I first had a salary and money to invest the "irrefutable" advice of the time was to buy-and-hold. Those who regularly dropped bad stocks for better stocks were the butt of jokes because grandma just bought ten companies, held them for 30 years, and retired better than all those stock traders. Now look and see who's pimping the buy-and-hold theory these days. Nobody. But Dave Ramsey says that any half-wit investor can average out a 12% return over the course of five years or so. And don't get me started on Cramer, Orman, Trump, or Kiyosaki. Though I would give Kiyosaki credit for warning that a home is not an asset years before so many people overspent on their homes with the speculative presumption that their salaries would increase as well as their house values. So many of the people at the peak were panic buyers, convinced that in just a few more years house prices would be so great that they would not have a chance in the future to even buy their own homes. Where were the experts then to calm them down? They were silent, or at least there wasn't enough airtime to squeeze them in between the best-selling authors.
The greatest trick of all time was taking away the pensions of the working class and telling them they had to invest in a 401k for retirement. Most of these 401k plans still lack essential investment options, like a gold or precious metals fund, or a commodities fund, or even an affordable cash fund. In most cases a money market account in a 401k is going to lose value over time due to the high maintenance costs compared to the low returns. By having no choice but to pick between 6 to 10 fund options, most working Americans were stuck holding the bag of confusing and sub-prime investments and most still don't even know it. If that's not bad enough, when was the last time you voted as a stockholder for the stocks that were held in your 401k? It's like handing your money to a complete stranger and then saying, "no we don't need a contract. Spend it however you like. I just assume it will come back with a return." The inmates were running the asylum and we gave them the keys!
So, working Americans were duped into believing they could compete in the stock market even though they were limited to one trade per month when the day-traders were taking advantage of price fluctuations that lasted for less than one second. Most Americans had no way to understand the investments on the same level as their Goldman Sachs counterparts. Even when a few 401k investors were willing to educate themselves they were limited to macro-scale investments, such as index funds or managed growth funds, for which the economic fundamentals cannot be as easily explored as owning an equally diversified portfolio of ten individual stocks. But America's employed workforce will continue to follow the delusion that they are "investors" until forty years from now they do the math and find out they would have been better off owning hard assets like the house they live in with enough land to grow their own food supply and sufficient guns and ammo to defend it. Or they could have pooled their savings with their peers to lobby Congress like their corporate overlords did to pass things like caps on malpractice suits, bankruptcy "reform", and mandatory health coverage without a public option or the teeth to make insurers actually pay for medically necessary care.
This is evidence that, as suggested by Aristotle thousands of years ago, rocks have free will. They are not pulled to the center of the earth by an "invisible" force as was suggested by Newton, but the rocks prefer to be closer to larger rocks, of which our planet is a colony of closely connected rocks. The rocks in Ireland are most likely moving inland of their own free will so they can self-assemble into structures such as the one found at Stonehenge in England. Even when faced with clear and convincing evidence, the unbelievers grasp at straws and try to make up absurd explanations for the truth that is revealed in front of them. Everybody knows that there is no mechanical means that early humans could have used to drag stones hundreds of miles to Stonehenge. The same is true for the stones that assembled into the pyramids at Egypt. Now we are supposed to believe that storm waves are moving the stones, against all plausible logic or liklihood - AND WITHOUT EVIDENCE. A pure hypothesis of those who refuse to believe. It is time for all humanity to pull their heads out of the sand and embrace the reality that rocks have free will and are the dominant life form on this planet. I, for one, welcome our ancient geologic overlords!
I don't think you understand the mindset of today's Republican Party:
1. The only fair tax is a flat tax, and the only purpose of government should be to push that tax rate as close to 0% as possible. Charging fees for government services is OK. For example, national forests do not manage themselves, so those who visit should have to pay a fee to cover the costs of managing the national forests.
2. Building and maintaining the roads and bridges you drive on should be the responsibility of private corporations. The state should auction off all public roadways and use the proceeds to pay off all public debt. The new owners should be allowed to collect tolls, and by the magic of the free and unregulated market, any roads worth maintaining will be maintained.
3. Law enforcement should not be a financial strain on tax payers. Private security firms like Academi, previously known as Xe Services LLC, Blackwater USA and Blackwater Worldwide, do the job of maintaining law and order for efficiently that government agencies like the local police department, state troopers, FBI, CIA, or US Army. Under the current system tax payers still have to fund the hiring of these firms, but ideally individuals who care about law and order will contract with such firms to patrol their neighborhoods and keep skittle-toting thugs away from their property.
4. The US court system is bloated, backlogged, and too expensive to maintain. Private arbitration firms can dish out justice more efficiently. Eventually all of the US courts can be privatized, especially the meddlesome US Supreme Court that is still stacked with FDR appointed activist judges who constantly trample on the Constitution.
5. The original signed copies of the US Constitution should not be preserved in bloated and wasteful tax-payer funded government agencies such as the National Archives, Library of Congress, or national institutes/museums. The Constitution has such a high value that it should be auctioned off to the highest bidder, along with the holdings of all these other government agencies. Private depositories and wealthy collectors can preserve our national treasures more efficiently. Museums that house such artifacts should be entirely self-funding from ticket sales and the private sale of over-priced artifacts, such as the Declaration of Independence. Those who cannot remain solvent should be allowed to fail.
6. Fire departments should not be tax supported. Those who wish to have fire protection should pay fees to the fire and rescue company of their choice. Here is a great example of an efficient operation: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pay-no-spray-firefighters-let-home-burn/
7. Sovereign-provided privileges, immunities, rights and services should not be the responsibility of a tax-supported government. All privileges, immunities, rights and services should be treated as commodities to be auctioned off and/or privatized so that the delivery of such privileges, immunities, rights and services will be more efficient.
Bottom line: Asking tax payers to pay for anything is morally reprehensible.
Ya, dat dus suck. All dat reeding, riting, litterature, english, and term papers. you can leev out all dat filler and fluff classes cus the only skilz you need to suckseed are programs skilz. And its about time I get payed what dos MSCS and "software enginers" guys get paed.
They wouldn't just own us, they'd own the whole world.
It's a shame that those of us who are returning to growing our own food, for a variety of reasons (economical, quality, nutritional, sustainable, etc.) face obstacles that were not in place a few decades ago. Even with a full acre of suburban property, a home owner might be allowed to have a horse for recreation, but city ordinances, HOAs, and deed restrictions often prohibit raising small flocks of fowl, goats, or a milking cow. Furthermore, many HOAs have punished home owners for hanging laundry on a clothes line, forcing them to buy an appliance they don't need and waste energy just to dry their clothes. Or the HOAs highly restrict what can be grown in a garden, often excluding anything edible. In the meantime, the most irrigated crop in the USA isn't soybeans or corn, its lawn grass.
I am fortunate that I don't live in an HOA, but I am still restricted to only two hens in my (very large) back yard. I don't want to start a chicken farm, but a flock of one or two dozen chickens is commonly found in the back yards of most countries, even our own a few decades ago. In fact, raising backyard chickens was "patriotic" in WWII. If I ever wanted to slaughter one of my chickens for food, I could be arrested, as I am not allowed to slaughter my own livestock - I have to take it to a meat processor or drive out past the county line. Now, I certainly have sympathy for my neighbors, and I would agree that most people would be annoyed by the constant crowing of a rooster, so I can understand the need for some restraints, but if neighbors don't object why should there be so many restrictions?
These are restrictions placed on a full-time engineer with enough money to get by without growing my own food. For me it's a matter of preference, and maybe somewhat of a hobby, but heaven forbid that one day I lose all of my money. There is no coherent system of support in the US to guarantee that I can be feed a proper meal each day unless I go to prison. While there are food stamps and many other programs, qualifying can take time and most people who receive food stamps cannot rely on the stamps alone to procure all the food they need to survive, and there is the ever-present threat of budget cuts. What food they can buy and afford is typically high in starch and fat, and low in protein and nutrients. This is just one reason why impoverished populations of the US tend to have higher rates of diabetes and heart disease. I'm willing to bet that many of this country's poor and homeless would rather have a small homestead that they could use for subsistence farming. While some US cities have experimented with community gardens, they pale with what I have seen in other countries, especially in Europe where allotment gardening is popular and originally began as "gardens for the poor". Here in the US, cities may at times build shelters or hand out food, but those in power are not going to let people live naturally and sustainably, as this would deprive their coffers of property tax, sales tax, and income tax. Today we are seeing such incredible cuts in services to the poor, and now more and more cities are literally criminalizing homelessness by passing laws against sleeping in public. If homeless pitch a tent or build a small shack from discarded pallets, the police will haul it off, even if it is well hidden from public view on unused or abandoned property. You aren't even allowed to "live off the land" in national forests or public land anymore. If you stay more than 14 days you get evicted. The wild areas are now only reserved for well-to-do sportsman looking to mount another trophy on their wall. Give a homeless man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and now he'll be prosecuted for fishing without a license. A license that a homeless person would find it difficult to afford. There are only two morally correct options for our society to proceed: either loosen the restrictions that keep people from providing for their own welfare, or institute a comprehensive nationwide support system
Thousands of people are protesting daily, getting arrested for their cause, and they are trying everything they can to change the system. You can't ask them to work any harder than they already are. Yet they have been completely unsuccessful. It is apparently clear that US and state congressmen will not support legislative changes unless the proposed laws are written by private industry trade organizations and presented to them by millionaire lobbyists.
So how long before we start to see roadside strip searches of Occupy protestors? And just last week we were criticizing Egypt for their "virginity testing", which in practical terms, is almost the same procedure as a cavity search in the US.
Since when does the arresting police officer become judge and jury to convict citizens of crimes? The people being detained, strip searched, and incarcerated in jails have not been convicted of any crime, as their trial has not yet taken place.
Everybody knows you can read data right off a SIM card with an electron microscope, no password required.