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The Free Talk Live BBS
Profile of Sam Gunn (since nobody got Admiral Naismith)
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17
General / What beer are you drinking?
« on: August 18, 2011, 01:46:29 PM »
Newcastle Werewolf. This beer is freakin bomb. That is all.
18
General / Please read! The apocalypse is near!
« on: August 18, 2011, 01:04:10 PM »
I don't normally ask people to repost things, but this is very important to me.
PLEASE repost this everywhere you can if you know someone who has been eaten by Penguins. Penguins are nearly unstoppable and, when hungry, also breathe fire. 71% of people won't copy this into their status because they have already been eaten by Penguins. Another 28% won't because they are hiding in their showers with fire extinguishers awaiting the coming Penguin apocalypse.
PLEASE repost this everywhere you can if you know someone who has been eaten by Penguins. Penguins are nearly unstoppable and, when hungry, also breathe fire. 71% of people won't copy this into their status because they have already been eaten by Penguins. Another 28% won't because they are hiding in their showers with fire extinguishers awaiting the coming Penguin apocalypse.
21
General / No Trespassing!
« on: June 21, 2011, 03:49:49 PM »
How do you guys feel about this law:
CALIFORINA PENAL CODE 602.2
Any ordinance or resolution adopted by a county which requires written
Permission to enter vacant or unimproved private land from either the owner,the owners agent,or the person in lawful possession of private land ,shall not apply unless the land is immediately adjacent and contiguous to residential property or enclosed by fence or under cultivation ,or posted with signs forbidding trespass,displayed at intervals of not less than three to a mile,along all exterior boundaries and at all roads and trails entering the private land
CALIFORINA PENAL CODE 602.2
Any ordinance or resolution adopted by a county which requires written
Permission to enter vacant or unimproved private land from either the owner,the owners agent,or the person in lawful possession of private land ,shall not apply unless the land is immediately adjacent and contiguous to residential property or enclosed by fence or under cultivation ,or posted with signs forbidding trespass,displayed at intervals of not less than three to a mile,along all exterior boundaries and at all roads and trails entering the private land
22
General / Kid's Rock
« on: June 09, 2011, 10:08:27 PM »
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5R8gSgedh4[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5R8gSgedh4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5R8gSgedh4
25
General / Offer You Can't Refuse
« on: May 07, 2011, 11:29:42 AM »
I'd like to make you a business offer.
Seriously. This is a real offer. In fact, you really can't turn me down, as you'll come to understand in a moment...
Here's the deal. You're going to start a business or expand the one you've got now. It doesn't really matter what you do or what you're going to do. I'll partner with you no matter what business you're in as long as it's legal..
But I can't give you any capital you have to come up with that on your own. I won't give you any labor that's definitely up to you.
What I will do, however, is demand you follow all sorts of rules about what products and services you can offer, how much (and how often) you pay your employees, and where and when you're allowed to operate your business. That's my role in the affair: to tell you what to do.
Now in return for my rules, I'm going to take roughly half of whatever you make in the business each year. Half seems fair, doesn't it? I think so. Of course, that's half of your profits.
You're also going to have to pay me about 12 percent of whatever you decide to pay your employees because you've got to cover my expenses for promulgating all of the rules about who you can employ, when, where, and how. Come on, you're my partner. It's only "fair."
Now ... after you've put your hard-earned savings at risk to start this business, and after you've worked hard at it for a few decades (paying me my 50 percent or a bit more along the way each year), you might decide you'd like to cash out to finally live the good life.
Whether or not this is "fair" some people never can afford to retire is a different argument. As your partner, I'm happy for you to sell whenever you'd like ... because our agreement says, if you sell, you have to pay me an additional 20 percent of whatever the capitalized value of the business is at that time.
I know, I know. You put up all the original capital. You took all the risks. You put in all of the labor. That's all true. But I've done my part, too. I've collected 50 percent of the profits each year. And I've always come up with more rules for you to follow each year. Therefore, I deserve another, final 20 percent slice of the business.
Oh ... and one more thing..Even after you've sold the business and paid all of my fees, I'd recommend buying lots of life insurance. You see, even after you've been retired for years, when you die, you'll have to pay me 50 percent of whatever your estate is worth.
After all, I've got lots of partners and not all of them are as successful as you and your family. We don't think it's "fair" for your kids to have such a big advantage. But if you buy enough life insurance, you can finance this expense for your children.
All in all, if you're a very successful entrepreneur, if you're one of the rare, lucky, and hard-working people who can create a new company, employ lots of people, and satisfy the public, you'll end up paying me more than 75 percent of your income over your life.
Thanks so much.
That's the offer America gives its entrepreneurs. And the idiots in Washington wonder why there are no new jobs.
Seriously. This is a real offer. In fact, you really can't turn me down, as you'll come to understand in a moment...
Here's the deal. You're going to start a business or expand the one you've got now. It doesn't really matter what you do or what you're going to do. I'll partner with you no matter what business you're in as long as it's legal..
But I can't give you any capital you have to come up with that on your own. I won't give you any labor that's definitely up to you.
What I will do, however, is demand you follow all sorts of rules about what products and services you can offer, how much (and how often) you pay your employees, and where and when you're allowed to operate your business. That's my role in the affair: to tell you what to do.
Now in return for my rules, I'm going to take roughly half of whatever you make in the business each year. Half seems fair, doesn't it? I think so. Of course, that's half of your profits.
You're also going to have to pay me about 12 percent of whatever you decide to pay your employees because you've got to cover my expenses for promulgating all of the rules about who you can employ, when, where, and how. Come on, you're my partner. It's only "fair."
Now ... after you've put your hard-earned savings at risk to start this business, and after you've worked hard at it for a few decades (paying me my 50 percent or a bit more along the way each year), you might decide you'd like to cash out to finally live the good life.
Whether or not this is "fair" some people never can afford to retire is a different argument. As your partner, I'm happy for you to sell whenever you'd like ... because our agreement says, if you sell, you have to pay me an additional 20 percent of whatever the capitalized value of the business is at that time.
I know, I know. You put up all the original capital. You took all the risks. You put in all of the labor. That's all true. But I've done my part, too. I've collected 50 percent of the profits each year. And I've always come up with more rules for you to follow each year. Therefore, I deserve another, final 20 percent slice of the business.
Oh ... and one more thing..Even after you've sold the business and paid all of my fees, I'd recommend buying lots of life insurance. You see, even after you've been retired for years, when you die, you'll have to pay me 50 percent of whatever your estate is worth.
After all, I've got lots of partners and not all of them are as successful as you and your family. We don't think it's "fair" for your kids to have such a big advantage. But if you buy enough life insurance, you can finance this expense for your children.
All in all, if you're a very successful entrepreneur, if you're one of the rare, lucky, and hard-working people who can create a new company, employ lots of people, and satisfy the public, you'll end up paying me more than 75 percent of your income over your life.
Thanks so much.
That's the offer America gives its entrepreneurs. And the idiots in Washington wonder why there are no new jobs.
26
General / Bikini Girls With Machine Guns
« on: May 03, 2011, 04:52:39 PM »
[youtube]8fyr0zbaFyE[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fyr0zbaFyE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fyr0zbaFyE
27
General / Don't Let Debt Limit Get In The Way Of The Party
« on: May 03, 2011, 03:29:52 PM »
Don't Let Debt Limit Get In The Way Of The Party
By MARK STEYN
Posted 04/29/2011 05:49 PM ET
The other day Paul O'Neill said that ...
Oh, wait. I suppose I ought to explain who Paul O'Neill is. A decade ago, he was George W. Bush's first Treasury secretary. I have no very clear memory of him except that he toured Africa with Bono and they were photographed in matching tribal dress looking like Col. Gadhafi's Mini-Me twins at a Tripoli sleepover. Other than the dress-up fun, I've no idea why they were in Africa, but you paid for it, so I'm sure there was a good reason.
Anyway, Secretary O'Neill popped up the other day on Bloomberg Television to compare debt-ceiling holdouts to jihadists. "The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling," he said, "are our version of al-Qaida terrorists. Really."
Really?
Absolutely.
"They're really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50% of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk."
But hang on, generally speaking, when you hit your "debt ceiling," your credit is at risk. If you've got a $10,000 credit card, and you run it up to the limit, but you need a couple more grand right now, pronto, because you outspend your earnings by 50% every month and you have no plans to change that anytime soon, well, the bank might increase the limit to $15,000, or $20,000. Or they might not. There is a question mark over your credit because there is a question mark over your creditworthiness: It is at risk.
Paul O'Neill seems to regard that attitude as unhelpful. So does Timothy Geithner, his successor at what is still laughingly known as the United States Treasury. Geithner says that even to be discussing the debt ceiling is "a ridiculous debate to have."
Ridiculous?
Absolutely.
"I mean, the idea that the United States would take the risk that people would start to believe we won't pay our bills," continued Geithner, "is a ridiculous proposition, irresponsible, completely unacceptable."
The best way to persuade people to believe we'll pay our bills is to borrow up to our limit, and then increase the limit and borrow a whole bunch more. This would be the 75th increase in the debt ceiling in the last half-century. Let's just get it done, and resume the party.
But if Geithner thinks that even discussing the question is "ridiculous," then, as my colleague Jonah Goldberg put it, why have a debt limit at all? What's the point?
Well, because it gives us more credibility with our creditors, right? Even if we set the debt ceiling way up in cloud-cuckoo land to a bazillion trillion gazillion dollars and 83 cents, even a debt limit entirely unmoored from reality still gives the impression we haven't quite flown the coop.
Yes, but why does the U.S. government need to maintain credibility with its creditors when increasingly it's buying its debt from itself? Every month there's more and more U.S. Treasury debt and fewer and fewer people who want it. The Chinese are reducing their exposure. The investment behemoth Pimco, which manages the world's largest mutual fund, recently dumped U.S. Treasuries entirely.
To avoid the failure of U.S. bond auctions, or an increase in interest rates to make them more attractive to rational lenders, the U.S. government's debt is bought by the U.S. government's Federal Reserve.
I tried up above to come up with a real-world comparison for the debt ceiling — imagine you've got a credit card limit of 10K, etc. — but it's harder to do that with the Fed's policy: Imagine your left hand issues an IOU to your right hand in return for an email with a large number on it ... oh, never mind, it'll only make your head hurt.
"Quantitative easing" is extremely quantitative if not terribly easing, so raising the debt ceiling would enable us to issue more debt for us to buy from ourselves. You can see why Secretary Geithner thinks that's a no-brainer.
While Jonah Goldberg was asking why have a debt limit at all, Michael Kinsley took it to the next stage: "If the national debt doesn't matter, why have taxes at all?" Particularly when you no longer have to "print" money, you can just quantitatively ease yourself into it.
Once we raise the old debt ceiling, we'll be pretty much at the point where the U.S. government is spending four trillion but only taking in two trillion: For every dollar we raise in taxes, we spend two.
No surprise there: The "poorest" half of the population pay no federal income tax. They're not exactly poor as the term would be understood in almost any other country, but in federal revenue terms they're dependents, so in order to fund government services for the wealthiest "poor" people on the planet we borrow money from a nation of subsistence peasants where pigs are such prized possessions they sleep in the house.
But, if you can spend four trillion of which two trillion is borrowed, why not borrow three and make even more Americans dependent? Hell, why not borrow the whole lot? After all, the sums we're borrowing right now — $188 million every hour of every day — are unprecedented.
Wouldn't it be easier if we just made them even more unprecedented? That way we could have a federal budget of six trillion, of which, say, five trillion is raised by issuing Treasury bonds for the Federal Reserve to buy. That would stimulate the economy by creating 17 jobs for any remaining Americans who still feel the need to leave the house every morning.
Now that I think about it, I seem to remember Secretary O'Neill and Bono were swanking around Uganda and Ethiopia in tribal garb as part of the Irish rocker's campaign for African debt forgiveness. Now there's an idea. And, if it works for Africa, why not closer to home? After all, Bono supported the IMF's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, and America is way more "heavily indebted" than Uganda will ever be.
Under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day the government of the United States spends a fifth of a billion dollars it doesn't have.
Who does have it?
Er, the Federal Reserve?
A few years ago, I raised the ceiling on my own house. You can do that — up to a point. It depends on whether your foundation is solid and your framing is structurally sound. But, even if they are, you take it too high and the roof falls in. We're structurally about as screwed up as you can get, and the foundation is badly cracked. But hey, let's just jack the roof up a little higher one more time. What could go wrong?
At this stage, nothing does more damage to our "full faith and credit" than business as usual. If you're going to bandy glib, witless al-Qaida analogies, the conventional wisdom Paul O'Neill represents is the real suicide bomb here. Men like O'Neill and Geithner think they're quantitatively easing American decline. They're not. They're quantitatively accelerating American collapse.
Onward and upward.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=570635&p=1
By MARK STEYN
Posted 04/29/2011 05:49 PM ET
The other day Paul O'Neill said that ...
Oh, wait. I suppose I ought to explain who Paul O'Neill is. A decade ago, he was George W. Bush's first Treasury secretary. I have no very clear memory of him except that he toured Africa with Bono and they were photographed in matching tribal dress looking like Col. Gadhafi's Mini-Me twins at a Tripoli sleepover. Other than the dress-up fun, I've no idea why they were in Africa, but you paid for it, so I'm sure there was a good reason.
Anyway, Secretary O'Neill popped up the other day on Bloomberg Television to compare debt-ceiling holdouts to jihadists. "The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling," he said, "are our version of al-Qaida terrorists. Really."
Really?
Absolutely.
"They're really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50% of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk."
But hang on, generally speaking, when you hit your "debt ceiling," your credit is at risk. If you've got a $10,000 credit card, and you run it up to the limit, but you need a couple more grand right now, pronto, because you outspend your earnings by 50% every month and you have no plans to change that anytime soon, well, the bank might increase the limit to $15,000, or $20,000. Or they might not. There is a question mark over your credit because there is a question mark over your creditworthiness: It is at risk.
Paul O'Neill seems to regard that attitude as unhelpful. So does Timothy Geithner, his successor at what is still laughingly known as the United States Treasury. Geithner says that even to be discussing the debt ceiling is "a ridiculous debate to have."
Ridiculous?
Absolutely.
"I mean, the idea that the United States would take the risk that people would start to believe we won't pay our bills," continued Geithner, "is a ridiculous proposition, irresponsible, completely unacceptable."
The best way to persuade people to believe we'll pay our bills is to borrow up to our limit, and then increase the limit and borrow a whole bunch more. This would be the 75th increase in the debt ceiling in the last half-century. Let's just get it done, and resume the party.
But if Geithner thinks that even discussing the question is "ridiculous," then, as my colleague Jonah Goldberg put it, why have a debt limit at all? What's the point?
Well, because it gives us more credibility with our creditors, right? Even if we set the debt ceiling way up in cloud-cuckoo land to a bazillion trillion gazillion dollars and 83 cents, even a debt limit entirely unmoored from reality still gives the impression we haven't quite flown the coop.
Yes, but why does the U.S. government need to maintain credibility with its creditors when increasingly it's buying its debt from itself? Every month there's more and more U.S. Treasury debt and fewer and fewer people who want it. The Chinese are reducing their exposure. The investment behemoth Pimco, which manages the world's largest mutual fund, recently dumped U.S. Treasuries entirely.
To avoid the failure of U.S. bond auctions, or an increase in interest rates to make them more attractive to rational lenders, the U.S. government's debt is bought by the U.S. government's Federal Reserve.
I tried up above to come up with a real-world comparison for the debt ceiling — imagine you've got a credit card limit of 10K, etc. — but it's harder to do that with the Fed's policy: Imagine your left hand issues an IOU to your right hand in return for an email with a large number on it ... oh, never mind, it'll only make your head hurt.
"Quantitative easing" is extremely quantitative if not terribly easing, so raising the debt ceiling would enable us to issue more debt for us to buy from ourselves. You can see why Secretary Geithner thinks that's a no-brainer.
While Jonah Goldberg was asking why have a debt limit at all, Michael Kinsley took it to the next stage: "If the national debt doesn't matter, why have taxes at all?" Particularly when you no longer have to "print" money, you can just quantitatively ease yourself into it.
Once we raise the old debt ceiling, we'll be pretty much at the point where the U.S. government is spending four trillion but only taking in two trillion: For every dollar we raise in taxes, we spend two.
No surprise there: The "poorest" half of the population pay no federal income tax. They're not exactly poor as the term would be understood in almost any other country, but in federal revenue terms they're dependents, so in order to fund government services for the wealthiest "poor" people on the planet we borrow money from a nation of subsistence peasants where pigs are such prized possessions they sleep in the house.
But, if you can spend four trillion of which two trillion is borrowed, why not borrow three and make even more Americans dependent? Hell, why not borrow the whole lot? After all, the sums we're borrowing right now — $188 million every hour of every day — are unprecedented.
Wouldn't it be easier if we just made them even more unprecedented? That way we could have a federal budget of six trillion, of which, say, five trillion is raised by issuing Treasury bonds for the Federal Reserve to buy. That would stimulate the economy by creating 17 jobs for any remaining Americans who still feel the need to leave the house every morning.
Now that I think about it, I seem to remember Secretary O'Neill and Bono were swanking around Uganda and Ethiopia in tribal garb as part of the Irish rocker's campaign for African debt forgiveness. Now there's an idea. And, if it works for Africa, why not closer to home? After all, Bono supported the IMF's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, and America is way more "heavily indebted" than Uganda will ever be.
Under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day the government of the United States spends a fifth of a billion dollars it doesn't have.
Who does have it?
Er, the Federal Reserve?
A few years ago, I raised the ceiling on my own house. You can do that — up to a point. It depends on whether your foundation is solid and your framing is structurally sound. But, even if they are, you take it too high and the roof falls in. We're structurally about as screwed up as you can get, and the foundation is badly cracked. But hey, let's just jack the roof up a little higher one more time. What could go wrong?
At this stage, nothing does more damage to our "full faith and credit" than business as usual. If you're going to bandy glib, witless al-Qaida analogies, the conventional wisdom Paul O'Neill represents is the real suicide bomb here. Men like O'Neill and Geithner think they're quantitatively easing American decline. They're not. They're quantitatively accelerating American collapse.
Onward and upward.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=570635&p=1
28
Is this song about the Porcupine Freedom Festival?
[youtube]5KsvStAf5L0[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KsvStAf5L0
[youtube]5KsvStAf5L0[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KsvStAf5L0
29
General / My Thoughts on Vegetarianism Summed Up In One Song
« on: May 03, 2011, 01:28:57 PM »
[youtube]to2gdfQ6R8c[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to2gdfQ6R8c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to2gdfQ6R8c