Kshartle, I think their points are more along the lines of: * If such a society is truly ideal, why has it never even been tried, let alone successful, * Does the non-existence of such societies imply an inherent fragility in favor of other societies, * What's the point of describing a society which...

To be fair, we're not talking about a patrol cop's uniform.  We're talking about the "I'm going to shoot you right now" paramilitary thing.

This is confusing correlation And causation. The downgrade of LTs and subsequent price rise is not sufficient to prove that downgrades of LTs cause the price to rise. First off the idea is ludacris. A downgrade implies lower credit worthiness. We know that credit worthiness is something of value so...

I'm picturing a Monty Python-esque scene where a man walks into a vet clinic claiming to be a dog and demands to be treated like a dog. There was a Seinfeld just about like that.  Kramer got a cough, so he found a dog that had the same cough and took it to the vet.  Jerry caught him taking pills fr...

The vet clinics in my community are nicer than the human clinics, but you have to pay upfront. It has crossed my mind more than once about how cool it would be if you could just go to a vet for simple ailments with obvious treatments.  You would have a lower bill and you could pick up your medicati...

I had a full beard for a few months several years ago.  It never let it get long or anything, but there was enough to hold a pencil in.  Which was pretty convenient from time to time.

A year or two ago I tried again, but gave up before getting there because I felt trapped in my own face.

moda0306 wrote: Bahahaha.  Pissing into a floor duct in your sister's room. That's hilarious.

I really enjoyed that story too!  I'm sure it wasn't quite as fun having to deal with it as a parent, though.

There's got to be more to the story than this.  Even if this is what actually happened, there must be more to it. The story I heard was that their insurance policy covered up to $10,000 in cash in the registers.  So whenever they got close to $10,000 in cash at the store, they'd go and deposit just...

Craig, that is awesome!  I'll have to add southeast Idaho to my list of places to visit.

Kind of a shame...  I didn't see things going that direction.  I was actually hoping to hear from doodle about it!  (Even though I disagree with him on most things.)  The point was that the "cliffs" seemed to me to be invoking doodle's future re: people's working hours.

Parts 1 and 2 of this article are relatively brief and fascinating: 1: http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamacares-cool-calculator-work-disincentives-like-weve-never-seen-before/?singlepage=true 2: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-wedding-tax/?singlepage=true Obamacare is full of "cliffs" where $1 addit...

You can't win by only appealing to the base and ignoring independents who dislike extremism. The ranks of those independents grow year by year, so appealing to them becomes more, not less important. I don't think the republican party has quite learned this lesson yet. Really?  It seems that they ke...

I mean....you gain less money with rebalancing than you would by letting it run but obviously you cut down on the volitility you'd experience after a few years of letting it run. A thought experiment: let's say that the long-term returns of all four assets is zero.  That is, gold, bonds, stocks, an...

That doesn't necessarily demonstrate lack of mobility; it only (if true) demonstrates lack of motion.

Don't forget the utter disconnect between prices and the people who receive services.

MediumTex wrote:I would have said that it was irreverent, irrelevant, and moronical.

And it may well be some or all of those things, but regardless, it describes how our monetary system in fact functions.

If the rich Christians really took the message of Christ to heart, then we could probably eliminate government welfare programs I think that's exactly backwards.  If we got rid of the government welfare programs, then it would allow rich people to take the message of Christ to heart and help people...

I don't think it's genocide that's going on there.  I think the major international issue is the use of chemical weapons.  The argument is that if chemical weapons are blatantly used for all to see, and the world ignores it, then the taboo against their use will go away. Are you saying that you thi...

I don't think it's genocide that's going on there.  I think the major international issue is the use of chemical weapons.  The argument is that if chemical weapons are blatantly used for all to see, and the world ignores it, then the taboo against their use will go away.

I think the issue with SSDs and encryption is that SSDs have a lot more storage than is exposed to the computer.  In SSDs, reading and writing are fast, but erasing is slow.  So, for example, when the operating system requests that a particular piece of data be overwritten, rather than actually over...

Gumby wrote:This is by no means a persuasive argument.  It is condescending like many of your previous posts on other threads

I think we have to assume that Gumby is right, since you haven't actually been able to point out where anything he says has been wrong.

stuper1 wrote:Obama is worried that Assad will gas thousands, and he'll be blamed for letting it happen.

That being the case, he should publicly call on Congress to debate and decide what to do.  That way if they decide against, he's totally off the hook.

absolutely.. it's every officials duty who takes an oath to defend the constitution, but they don't... i don't think the supreme court should be the "only" arbiter but they are unless i am mistaken the "final" arbiter.  should all officials and and the system of checks and balan...

The very premise that a state can just arbitrarily decide when it will and will not obey Federal laws renders the entire Federal Government as little more than the political equivalent to tits on a bull. I disagree.  The Feds exist to provide common defense, to mediate disputes between states, all ...

It would be treason if this were a union of force, where states had surrendered their sovereign powers.  Fortunately this is a voluntary union, where sovereign powers are delegated and can be recalled at any time. (That's the theory, anyway; in reality, the states have been conquered by an occupying...