twobits

It's totally unfair and undemocratic for some people to be able to print money and for the rest to not be able to. Gives the former huge advantage, and creates economic inequality.

That's what I have been thinking how the system should be.

Just print eg 3% more money each year. Give eg 30% of the new money to the state for its expenses, give the rest equally divided to all the population. End of story.

No need for IRS, no need for filling taxes, layers, tax accountants, tax checks. The amount would be insignificant (as a percent) for the rich, significant for the poor, thus helping them more. The only tax would be the specifc controlled inflation.

Looks to me as a very simple, nice system. ..Any thoughts anyone, why this would or wouldn't be a good idea, and / or how it could possibly be improved?

We don't know if all of them are victims of ISIS. We don't know if one in a thousand isn't ISIS, planning on attacking. ISIS actually has said they are doing that.

Indeed, but

a) you need to have the seed of having an open mind, that can help you later on. If you learnt to have a closed mind, then it's a fortress new ideas can't come in.

b) There is a upper limit of mixing proportions, above which the incoming mass of people is just too high, they stick together, and don't change / mix up with the existing population. This invasion is too big, too fast, for possible integration.

We don't know who is coming. I don't want to learn in the Paris way. And I think the probability for that kind of events is scarily high.

I didn't say they are "inherently evil". I say they are being taught since birth to be evil, and they naturally internalize it. "Being from somewhere else" being a problem, is totally irrelevant, I didn't say or believe that, and you are distracting from the real issue of what are their learnt since birth values and beliefs.

"We are all humans." Well, my VM is running Linux. Maybe I should try win 3.11. After all, "they are all OSes". Maybe I should try to "improve" and "integrate" it. Or maybe I will continue running Linux.

Did you actually see the pics on the link? Do you think a person indoctrinated since birth to hating / wanting to kill the infidels, can be "fixed" 2 or 3 decades later? I think it's a losing game, at the extremely very best.

As for the quality of the daily mail, I don't know, but those photos have been posted on various news sites around the net. They are not disputed at all.

"we're all just human beings"

Do you think these kids will "integrate": http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3362342/Babes-arms-I...

?

..Of course we are all humans, but that doesn't say anything about what you have been taught since birth, what you believe to be true, your values, etc.

This is not "immigration". It's invasion by 80% military age young men with unknown past, and very questionable beliefs.

"obnoxiously large clouds"

Yes, I don't like winter either.

"In my experience, walking twenty paces behind a vaper vaping is even more unpleasant than walking four paces behind a cigarette smoker smoking."

That's psychological issue of yours. You think that, so you "feel" that.

How many cars were upwind of that poor doorman throughout the day? Did he survive?!

That's demonstrably not true. Experiments have been done on this with animals. There have also been experiments with filling a space with ecig vapor, and calculating how much nic was is the air. It was extremely low. You don't know what you are talking about.

"If someone is driving a SUV down the sidewalk I would probably call the police"

That's just obnoxious.

"the default is not dump whatever you want into the air."

Lol. Pass the news to industry. And seriously, with your attitude, you should be living a 100 miles away from the nearest car.

As you said, "what you signed up to do", and "you volunteered to lose sleep".

And you do that, because evolutionarily, you kind of like your kids. Like a lot.

But without kids, under duress, try to not sleep for 3+ days.

Not funny at all.

I meant olives, with extra salt on top of them. Salt, to immediately kick you off, (with no real nutritious support), and olives, for their fat and iron, and nutrients to sustain and feed you. In this case they were greek, but I suppose that doesn't really matter.

"So ultimately, we learned that you can go for 9 months without sleeping before you die"

My "high score" is 3 days without sleeping. Think young, healthy, pretty physical, 1st year in university, while red alert 1 was hot. And I "kind of liked" red alert.

Outcome:

After that time, I layed on bed about noon, and woke up next day early afternoon. ~24+h later. Btw, I hadn't eaten the previous time. I managed to go to the uni restaurant with a friend, and there I semi collapsed, laying flat on 2 chairs, closed eyes, open mouth, slow breath. I was half a step from being rushed to the hospital, and one and a half steps from some serious life threatening situations. Didn't even have the energy to eat the food in front of me. What "saved" me, was that a concerned manager came, asked what's going on, and I asked for salted olive oils. He brought them in a hurry. I had barely enough energy to scrap the skin of the first one, and taste the juice. The first, took some time. And the second. After the third, I ate around 10 like there was no tomorrow. And then I had the energy to eat the food in front of me.

So, basically, IMHMO, no way you can survive 9 months without sleeping.

Anyone can argue anything.

The actual q is, how isn't this torture?

And the answer is, of course it is.

But when Merkel wins in 2013 with 41.5% with a voting age population turnout of 66%, with 1.5% invalid, it's ok, eh?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/merkel-wins-thir...

http://www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?CountryCode=DE

Well, not exactly. You get a better context if you say that the two countries have a sweet little history going back to byzantium, where turks invaded, greeks invaded, turks invaded, greeks invaded, turks invaded,...

PS: And yes, it was the ottoman empire, etc, but that's semantics.

I'd define it as me paying 90% taxes last year, while my country is still getting worse.

About immigration, you should read about the "Dublin 2" treaty, and be amazed at the EU's hypocrisy.

So your solution is for greece to start WW3?

No, the greeks don't demand more money. They want to make the debt viable, in order to be able to pay it.

But they were lending greece. And getting nice profit. When TSHTF, politicians made that private debt public.

You are not paying for greece. You (and all european tax payers) are paying for Deutsche Bank.

Private debts were made public. You should ask Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Schauble, why you should pay for debts that were private.

The basic idea:

BMW wants to sell more cars to greeks. Greeks don't have enough money so they can't buy. Deutsche Bank (DB) gives "free money" in loans. (And of course DB knows that greece isn't exactly "strong" economically.) We are talking about a greek population that never ever had a loan before, while the prime minister talks about the "powerful (economically) greece". They also thought that the world "stock markedt" was some kind of chinese recipe. Greeks, with "free money", buy BMWs. BMW is happy. Profits. Eventually, of course, TSHTF.

And then, would you expect that?

THE PRIVATE DEBTS BECOME PUBLIC.

That means the bad loans of DB become the burden of all the taxpayers of europe. Germans pay, greeks pay (decimated basically, with ~-20+% GDP, +5x taxation, etc), italians pay, french pay, etc. The TAXPAYERS.

To put it simply:

BWM: Happy. DB: Happy. Europe's taxpayers: F*cked.

The billions that greece "got" as "help", it never saw. They went ~98% back to foreign creditors.

Basically:

The politicians (cue, under the table payments for Mrs. Merkel, Mr. Schauble, Mr. who-was-PM-of-greece-then), took money from all european taxpayers, and gave profits to BMW and DB. (With their cut.) Now, they sell a nationalistic "those southern states are lazy".

PS: It was german and french private banks, and german and french industries. It's just that DB was the biggest, and BMW is big and symbolic.

"I don't want a world where every move I make is being watched"

That's already the case. There is (near) total transparency for the population. The only way to fight back, is to have total transparency for the powerful few too.

But they make the rules, and have the money and the power, so this ain't happening.

I totally agree with this. Privacy is a lost war. We have to turn this on its head. Seems paradoxical, but anyone who doesn't like the surveillance state, having lost the war for privacy, should be FOR surveillance and accessibility to it for all. Equalize the power.

"When the message is condensed and communicated in a way that everyone understands (even if that means highlighting some relatively trivial effects because they're more universally digestible), it becomes easier for Joe Public to identify with."

And nothing of importance changes. And it's too late.

"I do not understand why countries want to give up so much power to foreign corporations?"

Because: a) "Countries" don't give up those things. The corrupted and bribed politicians do. b) If you are not corrupted, you can't get elected. The system rejects you from the start. If you are somehow magically elected, you are threatened. If that's not enough, the USA "brings democracy" to your country.

PS: All high level politicians are corrupted, in every country.

Because we are slaves.