I like this:
Obama has created by executive order an 18-member fiscal reform commission that has been charged with coming up with a plan to shrink the deficit to 3 percent of the economy within five years. The plan is scheduled to be unveiled in December, after the midterm congressional elections.Three percent of the economy? The United States has a $15 trillion ($15,000 billion) economy. Three percent of that is $450 billion, which is about the same deficit we ran in 2008, and which was the largest deficit in US history before Obama became President. Which was already too damn big even before the Obama deficits hit.
You can bet your last dollar that this scheme is going to involve raising taxes. (It'll be your last dollar because the government will take everything else.) How do I know this plan will consist entirely of tax increases? Because they're planning to release it after the elections, that's why.
So: we're going to get ObamaCare, which will raise taxes; and if we don't throw out Democrats in record numbers this autumn, we're going to get another huge tax increase on top of that.
This works in the Democrats' favor:
The administration has maintained that the country must run large budget deficits until the economy has begun to grow at a sustainable pace that is bringing the unemployment rate down. Only then, the administration says, should the government focus on getting control of the deficits.All these tax increases will do what tax increases always do: push up unemployment. This policy of not controlling the deficit before unemployment decreases means unemployment will never decrease and deficits will continue to be high.
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Yes we're going to get ObamaCare. The Democrats are planning to "deem" that the Senate bill has passed the House, which neatly avoids their little problem of not actually having the votes they need to pass the thing.
Here is what I learned about the process when I was younger:
A bill is introduced in one or the other houses of Congress. That house debates the bill and then votes on it. If the bill passes, it goes to the other house where it is again debated and voted on. If the bill passes there, it goes to the President for either his signature or his veto. If the President vetos the bill, Congress can override the veto with a 2/3 majority voting for it.
Both houses can propose legislation for a program or law at the same time; if both houses pass different laws, the laws go into committee, where the differences are ironed out before the compromise bill goes to the President's desk.
In either case, both houses must pass the bill in question.
What Democrat Louise Slaughter proposes is for the majority in the House of Representatives to simply decide, "We passed the Senate bill."
Understand what this means: a few Democrats in the House of Representatives decide that a bill has been passed without anyone actually voting on it.
If they do this--if the Democrats make this thing into law this way--it is time for a revolution. It's time for a revolution because the people in charge are refusing to obey the Constitution, because they are turning into dictators, because the only thing you can do with a government which refuses to adhere to the rule of law is to take 'em all out back and hang the sons of bitches.
I'm not kidding. I'm not even exaggerating. If the Democrats make this thing law without the House of Representatives ever voting on it THEY ARE BREAKING THE LAW and setting a very, very dangerous precedent.
If the House of Representatives is allowed to get away with "deeming" legislation to be passed which cannot be passed by a vote, there is no limit to what they will try to make into law using this method. It cannot be allowed to stand, not if the United States is to remain a free country.
The "Slaughter solution" is unconstitutional, it is totalitarian, and it must not be allowed to stand.
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You know things are getting dire when I'm talking about revolution.
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We are already seeing some "soft" revolution in the form of people trying to pass laws which invoke the states' rights protections of the 10th Amendment. If push comes to shove the federal government will not allow this to stand.
In order to restore some balance and accountability to our government, power must shift away from Washington, D.C. and back to the state level. Unfortunately, Washington, D.C. is not about to take that lying down.
Again, revolution may be our only option.
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So much for the concept of "public record". A school district in Texas doesn't want the public to be able to request documents and information which is supposed to be available to the public on request.
Pitchforks, torches, and shotguns....
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Okay, enough of that. Let's talk about some fun stuff:
A powered snowboard. Finally you can snowboard uphill, and it only costs $2,500. Heck, buy two!
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Hummeroids are why the GM brand Hummer is falling by the wayside. Hummer is falling by the wayside because they're selling a $25,000 truck for $50,000. It's just a Chevy Suburban with a different, uglier body. Also, it's a d-bag-mobile.
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Hard drives are getting bigger but we're still using 512-byte sectors because that's what most computers expect to see.
The problem is, with FAT32 and NTFS you're limited to 232 sectors per partition. With 512-byte sectors, that pretty much means a 2 TB partition, even if the drive can store more data. You have to split the drive into smaller chunks. With 2 TB drives now commonly available, we're right up against the limit.
With 4,096-byte sectors, your partition can be 8 times bigger: 16 TB. It'll take us a few years before that becomes a problem.
What really gets me is the data density of hard drives: 400 gigabits per square inch. That's 50 gigabytes of data; to understand how much information that is, imagine a stack of 10 DVDs chock-full of information. That's 47 GB of data.
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A rhythm game from which you can actually learn to play guitar. That's cool, and it's enough to make me start thinking about getting a modern game console.
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Og relates a story from his younger days: "One more turn."
How much force does it take to break a 3" steel rod such that it ends up rocketing some distance over Lake Michigan? How much torque is exerted by a 120-lb impact wrench banging away for half an hour to get one turn out of a nut on the end of said rod? Holy crap.
People--self included--really have no conception of how industry works, you know?