champu

Are you familiar with what a controlled experiment is? Gee, no; Indep variable, dep variable, standard.....not at all. Make a point. My point is that high or low taxes in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. Running large and extended deficits is what's bad. You keep pointing to situations and saying "see! taxes were low and that was the problem!" when in reality it was only part of the equation. Spending, whether on the military or social programs or whatever, can't just keep going up and up or the government will collapse under its own weight. All else aside, Clinton was the only fiscally responsible president we've had in the last 30 years. It sucks that politicians these days seem to simply argue back and forth about what we are going to spend ourselves into the ground on. I'm tired of you talking about the income tax structure like it's some sort of punitive damage system for people who make what you consider a lot of money. Balancing the corporate and personal income tax structure and the rates within those structures to produce good receipts and not adversely burden the economy is a dynamic process. I don't claim to be an expert on the methodology of assigning tax rates (and based on your posts about donation write-offs, I would recommend you not make that claim either.) All I ask is you admit that while in some situations high tax rates in the upper brackets is the right answer, you've gotten there for all the wrong reasons.

Are you familiar with what a controlled experiment is?

You: Billvon: You: You (earlier):

Uh... those are the same times Kevin posted...

There was a plan to fly a module with a rather large centrifuge on board but it was cancelled a while back. That was going to be for plants, rats, and such though, and wasn't big enough for people. I think it would be an interesting experiment to test how people reacted to a simulated gravity environment produced with a centrifuge. When you spin a centrifuge the acceleration felt is r*tan^2(w) and that "r" out front can cause headaches... Literally. Suppose the centrifuge was about 10 m in diameter (which would be a fairly large structure by today's standards) and was spinning at 9.1 rpm to achieve a 1g environment. If you were standing on the rotating deck, objects at your head level (such as your head) would weigh 2/3 of what they did at your feet. That actually makes me nauseous just thinking about it.

I think "up" and "down" are fairly well defined in the US/European/Japanese segment because the modules are mostly connected in a "flat" configuration and laptops and such are generally mounted on the "walls" and are oriented uniformly. JLP and PMM (when it gets there) are modules that stray from this but they're mainly for storage... kinda like an attic and a basement respectively. I imagine the Cupola and the robotics workstation they'll install in it will feel fairly "upside down" for a while and probably take some getting used to. As for the Russian portion of the station, every time I see a video of it I feel like I'm in a submarine tied in a knot. Especially when there are Progress and Soyuz docked all over the place.

Because you are wasting speakers corner bandwidth on silly shit? Are you actually suggesting that the silliness of thread topics or posts in this forum has a positive correlation with bandwidth usage?

I'd grease the wheels and get on the Expedition 32 crew.

Oh my, what bold-faced nonsense. The creation of new threads and bumping of the most convoluted ones available coincident with the abandonment of threads that aren't going well has been the MO of theorists all along. The reason one coherent thread cannot exist is that there is no one coherent conspiracy theory any more (if there ever was one.) Theorists latch on to something, make an incorrect claim about physics or misstate some piece of information, and assert that means there's "something wrong with the official story." When problems with these claims or misstatements are brought up, the conversation is steered towards an increasingly irrelevant detail of whatever it is they've latched onto and the importance of the detail and their inability to find information about it is played up as much as possible. If too many questions are brought up about what the ongoing argument means for the overall conspiracy and/or if the irrelevant detail trend terminates on something that favors the opposition the thread is retired. It doesn't matter if the thread goes off talking about air phones or gas station cameras, or debris plumes, or slag on columns, it's always the same. There's so little entropy in all this that I have half a mind to subject you to a Turing test before replying to you again.

Unless you can give away enough to fall below that point, or, if you're in the 80%, 70%, etc when they have that brkt, or whatever brkt you're in, you can give away enough to fall into a lower brkt. Either way, tax writeoffs for the rich are the key to life. Because of the somewhat-broken state of the AMT and the large number of tax credits these days that roll-off from one AGI to another (although I don't know off the top of my head if any of these overlap, you'd have to ask a CPA), there are some fairly high marginal rates one can see in the tax code. However, there's still no way for it to go over 100% (this would actually mean that earning another dollar would cost you more than one dollar in taxes... that doesn't happen.) As I said above, tax write-offs for donations can best be thought of as partial government matching for charitable donations. When someone donates and writes it off, a fraction of the donation equal to the person's marginal tax rate times the size of their total donation is effectively a government match. You said that without this in place donations would be a fraction of what they are now, and this is literally true. Any wild guesses as to what that fraction would be? How is Also, some donation is done for political reasons, esp when corporations do it. a vague assertion? Corporations donate to all kinds of charities and make it VERY publicly known for PR to the community. There are a couple problems with that statement that pull its teeth out ("Some" donation?) but I'll focus on the big one. "Political" is not simply a synonym for "devious". If a person or corporation donates money to a cause and makes a public statement out of it, and by calling attention to it raises awareness amongst voters and/or other contributors that the cause needs help, then you could say the reason for the donation was "political". Is that necessarily a bad thing though? So glad you live your life from Seinfeld cliches, now a lot of things you state seem more understandable. Life presents all kinds of humorous situations that repeat themselves and recognizing what's funny about them is what makes comedy writers good at what they do. This ability also helps temper other emotions and keeps you reasonable and pragmatic. I certainly don't live my life one sit-com quote at a time (as some do and I agree it can be annoying) but I laugh at myself, at others, and at situations quite frequently, and I consider that a good thing. Your milage may vary.

There's often a threshold where people need to fall below in order to not be taxed at a certain brkt. The taxpayer's accountant infirms the taxpayer of this and they donate where they want as much as the accountant says they need to. Even if you're running into AMT territory, there's no such thing as a marginal tax rate over 100% where you have to get rid of money to keep more in your pocket. Like I said before, tax breaks just allow you to donate more. Think of it as partial government matching program for donations. I suppose that's vague enough to be correct. Oh, isn't that cute, yes, people in capitalized countries do things out of the goodness of their hearts. Quit pretending capilatism has elements of compassion, you're confusing capitalism with socialism. That was a quoted conversation from Seinfeld making fun of the fact that Kramer didn't really understand how corporate accounting worked even though he tried to throw a buzzword into the conversation.

Haven't there been cases where someone forms a foundation, gives a bunch of money to it, puts their son in charge, and then uses that money to pay for the kid's travel, jet, and other goodies? Answer -yes, because I know of someone who did exactly that. Three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and people who find ways to cheat the latter until they succumb to the former. But you correctly left the word "donate" out of your scenario.

People donate money to help a cause they appreciate. People are able to donate more money because there is a tax write off available. Nobody donates money for a tax write off. That doesn't even make sense.

The winter olympics got me thinking about this for some reason. A free flyer has about 81 hp at his/her disposal, a belly flyer about 59 hp, and a downhill skier? A paltry 18 hp. Gives you an appreciation for free flying in a wind tunnel. It's kinda like riding a crotch rocket in a phone booth. (p.s. yes, I know but that was years ago.)

The heavier the traffic, the less it really matters what individuals do. Which has an interesting effect because when you're sitting in traffic you have all the time in the world to get frustrated and try to "do things" like tailgate the person in front of you or change lanes every four seconds because, "omg! that one is moving and mine isn't!" When traffic is flowing pretty well and the actions of individuals actually do have potential to affect traffic flow people pay less attention to what's going on around them because everyone seems to be getting where they are going just fine. This leads to people driving two or three (or however many lanes there are) abreast and people speeding through open stretches of the freeway only to join the clump ahead of them and start an accordion. I think it's this inverse relationship from situation to situation between the ability of the individual to do anything to improve traffic flow and the propensity to do anything that creates so much stress amongst drivers.

That list isn't bad... save for being highly redundant. Unfortunately, however, "E" and "I" are incompatible. "Reason" I take no issue with, but the kinds of things people are willing to adamantly claim (and be horribly horribly wrong about) citing "common sense" are baffling to me.

The reasonable expectation of privacy question is the core of this debate. Here are my thoughts... If the law enforcement officers ware going around with their own radio receivers and homing in on the location of someone who has a cellphone on them that is transmitting, I would agree with the "no reasonable expectation of privacy" argument. The fact that cell phones emit radio signals can be considered common knowledge, and I'd liken the use of equipment to track these signals to holding your hand up to your ear, listening for a distinctive exhaust note of a suspect's vehicle, and concluding, "hey, I think he's over there!" But communication between your cell phone and the phone companies' infrastructure, and derivatives of that communication (like phone location) are conducted for the purposes of providing you a service under a private contract with the phone company. Use of any information collected by the phone company for a purpose other than fulfilling your contract should be considered an infringement on your privacy and require a warrant. Drawing the line of privacy between the location of your phone calls and the contents of them is asinine, and would be like saying you can pull all bank transactions a person has made without a warrant, so long as you don't get the dollar amounts.

Pluto is flush because the IAU gave it the cold shoulder. ...word travels slowly.

There's an important prerequisite that must be satisfied before "hard-working" can be considered advantageous: competence. Plus, there's an old saying that if you want to find an easier way to get a job done, give it to a lazy person. Pretty much all the notoriety I've attained during my carrer is owed to an aversion towards hard work.

I've been jumping a PC-105 and a Rebel XT this whole time. If it ain't broke...

Just because it doesn't fit George Bush's definition, doesn't mean it's not the same. You don't have to tie a 4-year old to a rack to drown them. An adult can immobilize and drown a four-year old without all the accoutrements that the CIA used on their victims. Dunking someone's face in a basin of water isn't waterboarding. Neither is sitting someone up in a chair, putting a blindfold on them, and spraying them in the face wtih a garden hose. Yes, these are non-trivial distinctions. I'm against waterboarding, and I think it is a form of torture. I'm also against beating children and dunking their faces in basins of water. I'm also against reacting in the way the media would have you because they chose to use a particular term even though there are material problems with doing so. For example, the article in the OP goes off talking about waterboarding and how it was a CIA interrogation method and speculates about whether this guy was in Iraq or Afghanistan before it bothers to talk about the girl's condition or that she'd also been beaten. I think that's a messed up way to report the story.

Agreed. Media outlets who want to complain about waterboarding will continue to go off on tangents about it in every story that comes up involving water and military personnel for the foreseeable future.

Most trace vitamins and minerals would be fairly easy with additives. A good balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fat... not so much. Another problem you'll run into is that the balance of these things is going to change based on a person's age. You could get around this by making a "child/adolescent bar" and an "adult bar" though. To stay both sugar and gluten free and still supply needed carbohydrates you have potatoes, bananas, rice, and corn to choose from. I'm not sure what portion of soy carbs humans can digest. To stay vegan and nut free and still supply protein and fats you're looking at soy and avocados as potential major contributors. I know soy is missing an amino acid or two that humans need and sometimes they use additives, but I'm not sure what the additives are derived from and whether that would cause allergy problems. Avocados have the same perishability problems as bananas. You'd probably end up making some sort of banana/rice/soy flour paste with a fatty substance like safflower oil or olive oil used as a binder and then enriching it with various chemicals to fill in any missing trace nutrients. If you get rid of either the nut or gluten free requirements you have a lot more options that would probably taste better and provide more complete nutrition for the majority of people.

You're thinking of the Secret Service and they still are. They're under DHS now. /edited to add: CIA has always been independent, like the FCC or NASA.

Ah! But religion and politics are self correcting. For example..... Religion: "We can't explain it" is corrected by "God works outside man's scientific laws." Politics: "We screwed up" is corrected by "its for the best in the long run". Those aren't corrections. Those are each's MO. Politics is self-correcting eventually though. This process usually involves a violent revolution. Religion may very well have a monopoly on never getting things right.