@RichardGadsden No. If you want some food, here's a freeway that needs the grass mowed; or a street that needs the trash picked up, or a plot of land and a bunch of trees that need planting.... or a million other remedial jobs that need doing.
@JimB Today we pay for past mistakes. I can only hope that people realize the reason they're paying and attempt to prevent such mistakes in the future.
@ChrisS Much better solution is actually to make it easier to get handouts. That way people who are getting them spend less time fighting the system and more time doing something else. Dependency runs in time as well as distance.
@Chis S , It wasn't and isn't a mistake to use oil as an energy source, what noone could have anticipated is the exponential growth in usage by the world, and a lack of will for the US to be self sufficient
Don't you think it's criminal that as a planet we know how to hardness the suns' energy for all and that in doing so we would be creating as many jobs as moving from oil would (different places/people I admit) but that this objective, surely one of mankinds' most worthy pursuits, is being actively blocked by a handful of selfish people who will be directly affected
Really I think the only solution is to go back to a more sustainable agrarian economy. But that means less population... and that means... not good things.
@ChrisS Because I do. I mean the handout would be a basic allowance, so if you want more than the basic, get a job. But if you don't, and you want to do something else with your life than work, why the heck not? It's not like we're so poor we can't afford it.
@ChrisS Um, the emphasis didn't come out right - because <b>I</b> want to work. I want to do something productive with my life, and the productive thing I want to do do happens to be something I get paid for. I think there are lots of other people like me. But there are others who want to do something that they won't get paid for.
@JimB Right; because we didn't have foresight, we never created a strategic oil reserve, the early 70s problems never happened. OPEC doesn't exist to artificially inflate prices..... nobody knows about any of this stuff.
@RichardGadsden You do realize we're running a $14 trillion debt right now, with $1.3 a year in deficit alone, right? In large part (but not all) because of government handout programs
And I don't feel like I need to hand over half or more of my money to the government, especially if they're just going to hand it to sumd00d who doesn't feel like he needs to work
@RichardGadsden I disagree - our problem is that once you're making high 6 to low 7 figure salaries your tax burden decreases. If we set a nice level tax on everyone we'd get quite a bit more cash...
OPEC control of ol prices was limited due to non arabic oil discoveries (russia and alaska being the most notable), and the 70's problem was due to an oil embargo, not supply and demand
Yeah, this really is not a discussion that will achieve anything. I'm a liberal socialist who lives in Europe, you're libertarians in America; our life experiences are completely different, the people we're accustomed to knowing are completely different.
It's hardly surprising we're talking past each other.
@RichardGadsden agreed -- I just feel that "perfectly normal percentage" should be evenly applied -- and it would be nice if corporations were taxed properly too but that's a separate argument :-)
@JimB True, but the "problem" isn't supply and demand; it's speculation thereof. You can't take the human factor completely out of economics, no matter how much Keynes would have liked to.
@JimB There's no government like no government. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go stockpile provisions in my secured datacenter with its nice backup generators :-)
I spent a large chunk of my childhood watching ex-coal miners with emphysema fight to get enough handouts to live off - and no, not my family, but I grew up in a coal-mining town.
And I don't see why "I can't work", said by someone who has been down a pit every day for 20 years, shouldn't be enough for someone who sits in an office and decides whether they are ill enough.
@RichardGadsden "Libertarians"? Yuck. I'm conservative socialist (sometimes accused of being a Mainstreet Republican). I most closely adhere to the ideas that there are public and private goods; government should supply the public ones, industry should supply the private ones. What falls into each category is somewhat more complicated.
@voretaq7 We have a charity called "Help for Heroes" to help out disabled military veterans. I contribute, but I'm disgusted that we need one. That's what I pay my ******** taxes for.
@ChrisS I take a far more simplistic approach which really resonates with most of my peers: "Government should be the people's prison bitch, not the other way around."
@voretaq7, you set up mins and max variation in price per day, or regulate the number of bids per day - there are any number of schemes that can regulate speculation on a commodity
@JimB Sort of; The problem is the the "regulation" normally in place is the chances of success/failure determine the reward you get. But Wallstreet rewards them either way; it's just more or less depending on success or failure. There is no possibility of substantive loss for the decision maker.
@RichardGadsden I'm all for the transaction tax - $1 or even $0.10 per trade. The people proposing per-share taxation (yeah they exist) are lunatics though...
Of course, that probably increases the amount of arbitrage, except that as long as the arbitrage profit is below the transaction tax threshold, there's not profit in it.. Welcome to economics.
The biggest problem I have with the way democratic politics works is that the feedback mechanisms are too slow. Imagine managing a server by reading the log files every two years and only getting to change the settings once every two years.
@RichardGadsden The biggest problem is the 200-foot-pole approach. The idea behind democratic republics is that people have the most direct connection to the government closest to them, but how many people in the US can name the members of their city council?
@MarkM The problem with politics: insufficient boobs. And the ones they've got you don't wanna see (Nancy Pelosi & Hillary Clinton in a jell-o wrestling match? DO NOT WANT!)
@RichardGadsden I've got a sister who's quite a bit like you. I really like that she wants to help people, I just feel that much of it is misguided effort to fix people who don't want to be fixed. We don't agree on a lot of things. =]
@hobodave I'm a socially liberal fiscal conservative. (I think the government exists to serve the needs of the people, and that it should not spend more money than it has in doing so)
I'm a Keynesian on economics, but I also think that the government should approximately balance the books. I was one of the few complaining that the goverment should have been running a big surplus in the boom years.
in terms of US political parties that means I vote mostly for Working Families/Democrat/Green/Libertarian candidates who seem to have a grasp on the concept of "If we spend more money than we have eventually the other countries will get mad and call in their loans"
@RichardGadsden Too cool. I'd like to get into politics, I just don't feel so very good about some of the huge compromises you have to make over here to get anywhere.
Until people essentially stop trading stock; or minimize their trading... Or better yet; they list their company on foreign exchanges to skirt your new tax and do what they want without paying anyway.
@ChrisS Sigh, I've spent a lot of time looking at the way that (our) benefits system works and doesn't. I've come to the conclusion that if you just assess how much a minimum need would be and give it to everyone that asks, you'd end up paying out less and you wouldn't need to employ as many people working it all out.
Every time you have a rule that makes it harder to claim benefits, you end up employing more staff who decide whether people are eligible or not. Which usually ends up costing more, and the people who are really fiddling the system are far too good at it.
@ChrisS Oh it's definitely not going to be an earth-shattering source of income, but the additional market stability has positive side effects (rational investing, giving companies the opportunity to raise capital through sound stock offerings, which in turn means more money for them to invest in R&D, hopefully leading to more profit which we can then tax :)
@RichardGadsden I do believe there needs to be an eligibility threshold/repayment requirement (easily established through the IRS here -- we know how much money you're making, we know how much we gave you as a "basic need" handout - If you're making "substantially" more than that it's reasonable to expect you'll pay the government back)
@Holocryptic I'm not a huge fan myself, but if the system is $X per adult, $Y (a bit less) per child, $Z (depending on location) for housing, and then extra for things like being in a wheelchair, then it should be hard to fix.
@ChrisS I'm trying to pay off my credit card right now, almost done. Just re-fi'd my private student loans to give me some temporary breathing room before beating that with a big stick too
@ChrisS @voretaq7 Rawlsian veil of ignorance, also they get much more benefits from government than most - the aristos are the ones that go to the guillotine when the government falls, remember.
@ChrisS @RichardGadsden hit it on the head - Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Also my premise that everyone owes the government the same duty (i.e. tax) regardless of income level -- you're paying for lots of services...
@ChrisS The only thing I'm not "overpaying" is my mortgage (Tasty tasty tax deduction!)
also bonus of living in a co-op (double-dip tax deduction: Once for my mortgage, once for the underlying mortgage on the building :-)
@Holocryptic you can still be a gentleman old school style and enjoy the fun part of going to the bar ... it's a fine line that gets wobbly with the tequella
@Holocryptic no need to excuse yourself :) you sir where enjoying life
I decided not to go when I realized that I still regularly see the people I want to and that it would be primarily for the "train wreck affect". I figured that made me a bad person.
I'm fairly sure my high school didn't have a 10 year reunion, and looking of the website the other HS in the district hasn't had their 10 year yet (they're going to have one over a full year late).
@ChrisS My school system doesn't sponsor reunions of any kind, so it's entirely up to the class. Which is part of what, I'm sure, made mine such a failure.
@ScottPack Same here; the class has an endowment for throwing their own parties (if they saved any money in the first place, which my class did); the district only helps informing people about it though, they don't organize or anything.
@ChrisS To the best of my knowledge that was not made available to us, so it was entirely through word of mouth and FB to track people down. Pretty crappy, really.
Humerously, in the days before FB I actually had a website that included the names and various contact information for my class. At one point I tried to expand it to the other classes in at the school but was met with fierce resistance from the school administrative staff.
"Show the average teenage male a condom and his mind will turn to thoughts of lust" "Show the average teenage male a *lug wrench* and his mind will turn to thoughts of lust!"
Yes, they are scary and complicated. If you go into their bathrooms, your feet burn, like a vampire in sunlight. I think it's from all the frilly bath salts and scented shampoos.
Your thought on building a new RAID 1 and cloning your existing install is correct, there really is no better way to do it.
You will either need to load the drivers for the new controller into the existing OS, or use an imaging product that supports alternate hardware restores.
EDIT: I mention...
@ChrisS I just need some more confidence is all. The past few years I've had things occur that don't inspire self-confidence. Hopefully will resolve those situations this year.
"QL is used to interact with your database's data. Access uses SQL for many tasks: whenever a query is run it uses SQL to filter the data; whenever a report is displayed SQL is used to gather the data to be displayed; SQL provides the data displayed on an Access form."
There are something like 64 different personalities in general. You're one of them, and you "match" with one or more of them. You need to meet someone who is one of the types you match, and who matches your type. Certain dating websites have figured this out and rely on it heavily because it generally works quite well.
Statistically it's not very hard to find a match, though you might not recognize that you've actually met each other; hence the "opportunity" part of my above statement.
Women are like computers. When you first talk to them they're all shiny and neat and you like their blinkies...eventually you get comfortable with them...then you get irritated by them but still want her around, like for nostalgia. Eventually you find she tends to be more interested in new batteries.
Really, though. Stop worrying about tits and sex and anything else. They're going to think you're odd just because of your hangups insisting they're different from you.
@BartSilverstrim Date people you can stand to be around. Have lots of sex. Use protection. Remember that the freaks tend to leave marks points at scar on right arm
@BartSilverstrim Celebrate our differences! (because man-boobs & facial hair are somehow not as mesmerizing)
@voretaq7 optionally employ the falcon punch after ... @Dynamo ahh excellent ... not only a bunch of server trolls giving out advice, but also organizing it WORLD DOMINIATION
There are women out there who hate other people too.
But at any rate, just meet new friends.
Have friends introduce you to girls and just talk to them. Don't seek out a relationship. Let one happen.
Soon you can put Pauska's sock back in the drawer for awhile after just finding a friend you like hanging out with and happens to have boobs. And is supposed to have boobs.
Also once you meet that person who you're a match with, and you have the opportunity to figure out that you're a match; you can't help the situation, you can only bruise the banana... Being obsessed with "weird" things will bruise the banana.
If your life is boring, you can use ashleymadison.com...that should add some interesting twists in your life. Especially if you want lots of excitement when they find you.
You have friends that you don't do anything with unless they're friends with benefits. But when you have them as "friends", they find it cute to hook you up with their friends that they think are matches for you.
I was just reading a white paper on that...wish I could remember where it was.
But at any rate, if you want some success, get yourself some friends of friends with vaginas, and have them just as friends start sharing other friends looking for a social life.
Go to a bar with them, too. Other women feel your "safe" if you have a girl with you.
Girls can help attract other girls because it's like a vetting process. She approves you, so other girls are warmer to the idea of talking to you.
OR (no offense intended to others here) go with a gay friend. Women feel safe with gay guys, they swarm my gay friends. And they'll probably be willing to hook you up with a nice girl too.
Honestly if you're going out just to look for other girls, your best chances come from other female friends and gay friends who know the social circles of girls looking for a nice guy, and they can act as a pre-selector to show you're a safe guy and not a douche.
Your thought on building a new RAID 1 and cloning your existing install is correct, there really is no better way to do it.
You will either need to load the drivers for the new controller into the existing OS, or use an imaging product that supports alternate hardware restores.
EDIT: I mention...
