champu

I'm not sure we're talking apples to apples anymore. My plot was based on 2009 tax brackets not 1997, but I don't think even then that you could go from single filing individually to married filing jointly and pay MORE when you made anywhere near as low as 20K. Maybe they are talking about the penalty for married filing individually? (not why you'd do this) I strongly doubt income disparity is monotonically increasing with combined income. My guess is you'd see a lot of disparity where one person makes 50K or less and the other makes very little and a lot of disparity where one person makes 250K+ and the other person doesn't work. But in between I'd expect there are a lot of couples each having a similar salary between 75K and 150K. This happens to be right in the range where the marriage penalty is likely to hit you the worst. Ah yes, this is another thing I forgot to mention in post #96. When I was in this situation I actually paid more in taxes on the imputed income, over five times as much in fact, than I did for my share of the coverage in the first place.

Well, not quite. What you can see from the plot is that the government encourages couples with highly disparate incomes to get married and discourages couples on equal economic footing from getting married. It also says that until the couple earns over 137K, getting married and filing jointly can only help you. The plot actually understates the marriage penalty for higher gross incomes do to the roll-off of deductions and tax credits. The AMT probably screws over upper-middle / lower-upper class couples too, but I have no desire to look into it.

You sir are correct. The penalty tends to affect lower income couples while the benefit tends to be seen by those with higher incomes. You sir, are incorrect.

For what it's worth, Spaceland refunded my team's incompleted jumps after the USPA Nationals in 2009. (see my posts from back then)

You're both correct (or both wrong if you intended your answers to be general.)

How do you figure? What I get out of that is that "marriage" is an artificial construct whose function is to provide a nuclear family for procreation. Traditionally and biologically this works out to include a male and a female. Since the Miracles of Modern Medicine have expanded upon quite who and what can produce offspring, some of these lines of demarcation have become blurred. In any event, since the idea of "marriage" is somewhat arbitrary, the goal is to put some limit on the number, gender, species and ages of participants in said institution. The theme of "adults of legal age of consent" and "for the purposes of having (or adopting) children to make for a nuclear family" extends without much effort from heterosexual marriage to homosexual marriage and, perhaps even, polygamy. To say his other examples are merely precarious dominos behind a fight against gay marriage is to equate homosexuals and gay marriage with sexual deviancy and nothing more. I think that's absurd.

Sorry if my post was confusing or if this was a quote/reply mix-up, but I was asking Mark what he thought the rationale of those of us who support gay marriage was. If he is under the impression that it could be applied to all of those other "activities", then he's obviously got the wrong idea.

What do you feel is the primary argument of those in favor of gay marriage and how do you feel that argument is applicable to those other four things (whereby they would fall like dominos)?

I think an affirmative action plan is necessary to make sure we indict equal numbers of people across all races and religions on terrorism charges. I demand a constant stream of self-assurance regarding whatever obscure choice I've made regarding what to lose sleep over.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ustream.html Side note: I have had Time Warner for several years now. My most recent experience with them was when I bought my house about a year ago. I scheduled them to come out the day I was moving in. They showed up in their time window and it took the guy about 15 minutes to get everything turned on and working. I haven't had a single problem with my service. I've been with AT&T wireless since 2004 before it was cingular and then back to AT&T wireless again. I've had two situations where I changed my service and the transient bill was screwed up, but I called them and they fixed it. Also, a few days ago on my way back from work, every single traffic light was timed perfectly and I didn't have to stop once (on my bicycle).

Public urination is against the law you know.

Yeah, I considered that, but by the time the gun has been fired, it's too late to determine that it can't get a good GPS signal or phone home successfully because those functions are being intentionally interfered with.

An interesting conops but still a few fatal problems... 1) You're presupposing a successful universal gun registry so when you go to the last coordinates and find a ditched firearm you can figure out who fired it. 2) Not sure if pre-emptively collecting volumes of this kind of data on people would be constitutional even if you promise not to look at it. It's not really the same as getting a warrant for phone records, bank statements, etc. as those have legitimate reasons to exist outside of law enforcement. 3) In order for the system to be at all useful the gun would have to fail-disabled (otherwise you could just intentionally exhuast the power supply) which creates all kinds of problems, some of which have already been talked about in the biometric safety discussions.

That... was awesome.

I was heading back to work after lunch and about a block away from an intersection in a residential area I noticed a crow standing on the edge of the curb. A half a block out he (or she) hopped into the crosswalk and slowly started walking across the street. I pulled up to the intersection (a four way stop) and stopped as the crow crossed directly in front of me. It didn't give me a second look and it kept the same pace the whole way across the street, staying in the crosswalk, before hopping up onto the sidewalk on the other side and continuing on its way. My friend from work shook his head slowly and said, "Only in California."

shutup.

Do you honestly believe the scientists and engineers working on that project didn't "learn the standard"? Don't be ridiculous. Anybody working at that level absolutely knows both. As someone who "works at that level" I will confirm that I encounter just about every unit in use today in my work depending on what discipline I'm dealing with. Sure you have to sweat the details to make that work, but you have to do that even if you're not mixing systems. Is this number dBm or dBW? Is it mA or uA? Is it m or km? is it ns or ps? There are scale conventions for a lot of things, but you always label your units anyway. And if it makes people cringe that I've used inches, kilometers, fahrenheit, kelvins, pounds, and miliwatts all in the same document well then too fucking bad. As an aside for all you decimal-point-moving people, we don't do pounds/ounces or inches/feet/yards or any of that nonsense. You say 160.3 inches or 4.5 pounds.

I'd suggest it's important to anyone who likes the lights to go on when they flick a switch. Anyone who uses a cell phone. Anyone who watches a flat screen TV. Anyone using a computer to read this forum. Anyone who uses a GPS. Anyone driving a hybrid car. Anyone who has had or may have a CAT or MRI scan. Anyone with a CYPRES in their rig.... They may not realize the importance, but ignorance IS curable. To what end in this instance?

Really? A sports car analogy?

Nah 25 is not middle aged....but 25 been around the block a dozen times walking around with a new born realizing the tools are going for the 21yo girls and well....one can get old rather quick. So she reached back.....WAY BACK......to a guy she would not give the time of day to and made it as if she was doing him a favor......and he fell for it. I'm sure he is happy, he finally "got the girl" but wouldn't it have been better if she has realized that he was a great guy back when he was 18? If the guy sat around alone pining over her for 7-8 years then the outcome of the relationship probably won't depend on when they got involved. If he had other relationships in the meantime then maybe he grew and that's why he finally "got the girl". Would it have been better? Meh. Maybe it would just better fit your relationship mold. Personally, I don't think I'd get involved with a woman who already has kids, but my reasons lie in our future not her past or what "plan" I happened to be.

25 is not middle aged and there was no "plan A".

As a joke, I was going to go on a run of just linking people back to threads where a discussion has already taken place. (I've been growing really tired of speakers' corner lately, if that wasn't obvious. I'm kinda dieseling out posts these days.) In this case I don't even need to because we already had this discussion in this thread. As I said 1.18 x 10^8 seconds ago back on page 3, your argument is lame and the ampere has a stupid magnitude.

I beg to differ.

Corollary: by the time the person who made the insightful reply gets back to the thread and attempts to salvage the discussion, the tangent(s) will have continued too long, and new readers won't even see the attempts in all the noise.

Speak for yourself.