champu

Easy question . . . When I saw the boobies. Haha, I hear ya. But let's not kid ourselves, that's just when we first knew we were straight.

If I recognize the acronym "lmgtfy" without clicking the link does that mean we can laugh together about my laziness? /edited to add: you're supposed to at least mask the url as seen here

Thought experiment: If homosexuality is a lifestyle choice then when did you choose to be straight?

google or youtube search "louis ck the n word"

Unfortunately for discussions regarding viewpoint favoritism, maintaining faith neutrality in public situations kinda necessitates "not bringing it up" because there's simply an indefinite number of things to have faith in. It happens that this arrangement works out extremely well for atheists and agnostics because, quite frankly, we don't really have anything to talk about. If this is interpreted as active favoritism towards atheists and agnostics, I don't know that I have an answer for you that you want to hear. If you say, "everybody shutup!" and then someone says, "hey that's not fair, the person I was trying to talk to was giving me the silent treatment, if we all have to shut up that favors them!" that's kinda silly isn't it? Theists may be a poor choice of targets for aggression in a "don't hate the player, hate the game" sort of a way though. For example, it doesn't matter that so many people don't want to allow gays to get married because of their religious beliefs. What matters is protecting minorities from mob rule for any reason. Thankfully our system has a tendency to get things right (by "right" I mean enforcing the concept of one person's rights stop where the next's begin) in the long run and, again, if this is interpreted as active favoritism towards atheists and agnostics, I don't know that I have an answer for you that you want to hear.

[stuff other than laughter] Not an Ernie Hudson fan obviously.

Someone with the bility to actually think about justice rather than blindly accept what is written in an old book. jakee, when someone asks you if you're a god you say, "YES."

0/10 Doesn't even introduce a new twist. Would have scored one point for gluing the "omgz!!111 fractional bankingz" oldie with the contemporary "bankers stealin' teh bailoutz!!!1" but you gave it up by not including a link to some horrid blog somewhere.

Things would suck, and I would not welcome it, but it would not be like the Chinese nuking us or be the end of the world. When you already have nuclear warheads and ICBMs to deliver them, a special purpose conventional weapon that will propel you into all-out war when used in its singular capacity is a completely worthless investment. The Chinese are smart enough to understand that. In fairness to your argument, if the Chinese fired on the George Washington right now, who the hell knows what would happen? But I can envision scenarios where such an attack would be nearer the end of a global crisis than the beginning.

To be clear, I wasn't referring to your comments in my mention of bravado. I agree regarding the game of press release telephone. What's interesting to me is the number of directions people can go with their over-reactions.

True but, again, who said anything about sinking them? Conventional weapons have been fired in anger during limited engagements without the nations involved collapsing into all-out war, and it'll happen again too. Diplomacy didn't just suddenly replace war when nuclear weapons came along. Rather, nations have opted for a mix of diplomacy and what I'll euphemistically call "warm force projection" to get what they want. Why do you think we have all these aircraft carriers in the first place? Is this kind of weapon something both the departments of defense and state should keep in the back of their heads? Certainly. Does its development or even its use during an engagement sometime in the future necessitate escalation into an all-out war? No. The idea that we'd have to bring the world to an end over a boat has just as much bravado behind it as the "bring it, we're invincible!" comments.

Do you realize how many Billions of men are there in China? Yeah.. and there millions of them who are also frustrated sexually because there are less women because girl babies by the millions were aborted so that the "conservative" traditional parents wanted sones and not daughters because the government instituted population control. So perhaps not a good idea to fuck with the sexually frustrated?! The carrier has always had this flaw - it's a huge multi billion that is a risk to multi million dollar missiles that fly 50 times faster. But China shooting one down would be pretty close to China nuking a target. If it's firing them off, we're (the world) already in a lousy situation. It's always going to be cheaper to kill people and break things than it is to build things and protect them, entropy being as it is. Regarding potential reactions to the use of such a missile, I don't think they're looking to sink the carrier. If they were gonna do that, as you say, they may as well just nuke the whole battle group.

Like jet engines, lasers, GPS... He likes it! Hey Mikey!

An (admittedly probably underdeveloped) idea I was thinking about this morning relating to the dice analogy was how a conversation might go between two people who woke up at the head of a craps table with 100s of millions of dollars in chips in front of them, and neither could remember how they got there, where the money came from, or how to play craps. So one guy takes a few hundred bucks, plays a few rounds, and gets the hang of the game but loses the few hundred bucks in the process. So he turns to the other guy and says, "I don't know, I think someone must have come along at some point last night and just given us all this money."

Sure... as soon as you can debate this!

I can confirm his story. The jumper was Nick Batsch... Hint: It says "Speed" on the button. ...glad he's okay.

It's similar to the concept of having a tax on unrealized capital gains. Sure the value of properties and portfolios increase over time, but unless you liquidate it, that increase in value is meaningless. If the heir wants to sell some of the estate to get the money then yes, they should pay capital gains relative to the cost to the original owner, if they continue to produce income from the estate then yes, they should pay income tax on that. That is what could be considered their "fair share" that everyone keeps complaining isn't getting paid. Having to pay tax on unrealized capital gains would wreak havoc on long-term investing and just about any kind of real-estate ownership. Creating an estate to leave to your heirs is just an example of a really-long-term investment. But as I've said before, this isn't about "fair shares", this is about a loathing of the idea of "old money" and a mistrust of the always-ill-defined "super-rich". This is the same poor state of mind that brought us real gems like the AMT (which is completely and utterly broken at this point.)

If you're all simply tired of reading what I have to write just let me know. I'll be on my way.

surely it's then- As an aside regarding this first bit of your post, what you're about to write here doesn't follow from my post. But looking at it by itself: From the government's point of view, taxing non-economic activities doesn't create any kind of sustainable receipts, which is really what they need to be thinking about. What the government can actually afford to spend is a function of how well the economy is doing, and so having the government essentially get a cut of economic activity to work with makes a lot of sense. When they start reaching around that and grabbing for money just because, "hey, look over there! it's money!" I have to question whether they may be overstepping their bounds.

The government collects taxes to pay for things that are necessary for a functional society but that the people as a whole, when left to themselves, aren't very good at providing: public education, roads, air traffic control, a military, police and public safety, regulation for safe work places, legal protection of minority rights, etc. (all those things that several posters here ridiculously suggest people give up the instant an argument against any particular tax is brought up.) The majority of taxes are levied against economic activities: payroll tax, capital gains, sales tax, etc. This makes sense, you use the economy that the government helps make possible, you pay to support that government. I'm also in agreement with progressive tax structures. If you are generating more wealth, and are benefiting more than the average person, you need to be willing to pay more to keep a good thing going for yourself. This doesn't mean you must forfeit your right to speak out against wastefulness, but as a general concept, progressive structures shouldn't give you heartburn. Property taxes are an exception. They're owed simply because I happen to own a piece of dirt. But they go to the county and provide for things that go nicely with my piece of dirt: schools, fire departments, street cleaning, lifeguards on the beach, etc. So, again, while I can always pine for a more frugal local government, I'm on board with the concept. I think this idea of parity is important in lieu of trying to come up with something "fair". I'm against the inheritance tax for the same reason I'm against a tax anytime you move more than x dollars between two of your own bank accounts. It's not an economic activity, and it has nothing to do with anything the government provides. It's an unadulterated money grab. The arguments here in favor of the inheritance tax are based on a general dislike for the concept of old money, mistrust of the [always ill-defined] rich in general, and the fact that it doesn't affect most people and few if any on these boards. Suggesting that these are reasons enough to just stop thinking about a government practice is repulsive.

That song always reminds me of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tutxGpm0qaE Another great music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDe6MZQjpho Hell, any of the music videos by the Chemical Brothers.

You're begging the question.

Nah, that school has long since replaced all writing implements with ultra light-weight chalk spheres to be used on monolithic slate cubes as desks that are too heavy to lift. But as rehmwa said, the internet is like a sieve that filters out normalcy. Case and point, how many times have you heard someone say, "What's with blogging? Nobody wants to read about you buying coffee in the morning." Well guess what, thousands and thousands of school administrators just bought coffee that morning (and maybe commented on twitter about "how short the line happened to be that day, isn't that weird?") but one of them goes non-linear and bans candy canes and here we are.

Property and estate tax are, off the top of my head, the only two taxes that aren't taxing some kind of economic activity. The reason inheritance is taxed is because enough pe- oh wait I made this post a year and a half ago to this same thread and nobody gave a shit then either... nevermind.

It's interesting to note your own reaction to reading that. The first thing I did was think "so... 3.2% of returns were between 200K and 500K and paid 17% of the income tax." Statistics in that kinda range are a lot more interesting to me when discussing tax policy than either Warren Buffet or people sleeping on steam grates. There's a large group of people that pay little or no taxes and can vote in numbers and there's a small group of people with gobs of wealth that can get buddy-buddy with politicians... ...clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.