Effectively, they have been. The Federal Reserve has been keeping interest rates at levels that should be causing significant inflation. The goal is to prevent a deflationary spiral by pumping up the money supply: when you can borrow lower than inflation, people should borrow and pay it back with tomorrow's less-valuable dollars.

They've been doing that for nearly a decade now, and it has successfully prevented the deflation, but it's a little baffling that it hasn't touched off more inflation than it has. The consumer confidence is hovering around 100, which should be a decent level for a stable economy. Unemployment is still higher than we'd like but it's well off the bust years.

My hypothesis is that people have gotten too used to boom economies. If people aren't getting triple-digit returns they don't want to invest. What we've got is a very stable economy, exactly the kind that people should be able to take risks in, but without a real estate boom or dotcom boom or other scheme to get people to dump their whole life savings and then borrow on margin, they just don't bother.

Stability means that those who have been left behind continue to be left behind. That's the worst thing that can be said about the economy. There just isn't an engine of growth.

There are a lot of other factors, I'm sure. Europe went mostly for less aggressive measures, and their economies haven't come out as well, meaning fewer markets there. China's growth has ceased to be ridiculous. Oil prices should have sparked some kind of boom, and I've got a nasty cynical feeling that Wall Street is ideologically predisposed not to invest in the emerging energies as much as they should.

But a lot of it is the catch-22 you mentioned. Consumers and investors each seem to be waiting for the other to go first. We've been technically out of recession for more than five years, and it's gotten past the point where the recovery could be called mere accounting. It's real. But America just hasn't gotten its feet back under it in the way that it usually does.

Seriously though, I don't see the level of cooperation required for this project persisting long enough to pull it off.

Of course given history, there will be disruptions, but it'll work out in the end. They are easily startled - but they'll be back, and in greater numbers.

"anti-vax moron" is the ad hominem argument you used.

1) That wasn't me. 2) No, it's still really not an ad hominem. Maybe this will help.

as well, a straw man argument would be alleging that i was grasping at highly improbable straws to make my point. your lightning in the rain argument is like that. I was pretty clear in saying the harmful effects listed in the product monographs are highly probable, not highly improbable.

If you want to refer to the probable ones as being probable, do that. If you want to refer to the improbable ones as being improbable, do that. But don't mention only an improbable one and then use the statistic for the probable ones. That's just dishonest. The 20% statistic you referred to includes such adverse reactions as "redness at the injection site" and "headache."

But of course, your argument would have a lot less of an impact if you said, "You have a 20% chance of redness at the injection site and a vanishingly small risk of death!" So you selectively mixed and matched your data to construct a sentence that was technically true but totally misleading. Not good. Don't do that if you want people to take you seriously as somebody who makes honest arguments.

aside from that, the product monographs give ample reason to not want to have the vaccine, irrespective of any religious claims. efficacy of vaccines is much less than 100%, 60% they say now, and the best case scenario for timespan of immunity is 3 years or so.

If you're going to use numbers from now on, I'd appreciate a specific reference to what you're referring to and how you got the information. It sounds like you're mixing and matching the worst case values for certain specific vaccines and then waving your hand vaguely at all of them. Given your last use of statistics, I'm inclined to believe that's intentional.

a large percentage of vaccine recipients are communicable for some weeks after the vaccine.

What is a "large percentage" and for which vaccines? Again, this sounds like you're taking one particularly rare result out of context in order to confuse people. Because I guarantee that even if this is the case for certain vaccines, it's not the case for all of them, or even a bare majority.

aids from a vaccine cultured in west africa green monkey cells?

Did you just casually throw out AIDS without bothering to supply any data or context? Of course you did.

Indeed. What they should have done was get the writer/director of the original film, who I gather had been trying to get a sequel made for over a decade, to come and write and direct the new one. Clearly whoever they got to write this didn't really understand Max's character at all.</sarcasm>

The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.

What do you mean by inadequately configurable? There's usually an option to disable while typing somewhere.

It's there. It's on. Didn't help. Don't know if it's that Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't support it properly on these two machines or if it doesn't do the job I want done.

What I'm looking for is NOT there: A threshold level for touch sensitivity. If you're going to put a BIG touchpad on a laptop's palm rest, you need to either put it where the palms won't brush it, or you need to make it possible to turn down the sensitivity so that a feather-light brushing of the pad doesn't register as a mouse motion or button click.

Two different manufacturers (Lenovo and Toshiba) have used exactly the same layout, and exactly the same hair trigger, non-adjustable, touchpad sensitivity. (Also exactly the same sort of wafer-thin flat tile keys, which is how we got into this digression.)

For rape and other sexual offenses, research did specifically find religion as a strong "before" factor.
I think there was a specific "before" finding for murder as well, but my recollection on that isn't 100%.

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Unlike those bronze age oral histories and iron age letters! /sarcasm

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I'll see your http://www.tempdatareview.org/ link and raise you a http://www.davidicke.com/forum... link.

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My first hit for "Global warming"+"times faster" yields this link: As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.

All the opinions you mentioned are, at best, poorly informed.

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The problem I have with current keyboards is not just the short travel and lack of clickyness, but the tiny height of the keys.

Instead of the tall keys with space between them for fingernail clearance, there are these thin squares maybe an eighth of an inch above a solid surface. If I don't keep all my fingernails cut short, when they go past the side of the key they hit the panel and the key doesn't "strike". Letters get dropped. (So I get to pick between typing well and playing the guitar. I pity those who must keyboard for a living but want long nails to maintain their social life.) The short travel means there's little margin for finger variation, so some letters, where my fingers don't depress the keys as far, normally, don't strike, while others, where I support the weight of my hands, do strike when they shouldn't, or strike multiply.

After over a year I haven't been able to adjust. You may have noticed that my spelling has gone to hell as a result: I have to do a lot more correction and sometimes miss fixing things up.

(The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.)

On the other hand, when the nails do hit the key, they quickly wear through the top level of black plastic, exposing the backlit transparent light below it. I replaced a laptop about a year ago and after about six months about a half-dozen heavily-used keys had their pretty letters obscured by the giant glow of the scoured away region.

I had been running on older thinkpads and toshibas, with classic keyboard-shaped keys, or at least the little fingertip cup and substantial fingernail clearance. Switching (in a two-dead-laptops-in-two-weeks emergency) to a lenovo z710, then to a company-supplied toshiba s75, both with the stupid "I'm so thin", square, low-travel, no-finger-cup keys has been a disaster.

ad hominem. read the product monographs. more than 20% of vaccine recipients report adverse reactions, including death.

Aside from the fact that that wasn't an ad hominem, that's a really weird way of phrasing things. It's like saying that 100% of people standing out in the rain experience rain-related effects, including being hit by lightning. It's technically true, but it's phrased in a way to imply that way more people get hit by lightning than actually do. The reality is that 100% of people get wet and a tiny fraction of a percent get hit by lightning. Lumping them together as "effects of rain" makes the statistic basically meaningless. Was that intentional?

Good. That's step 1 (although remember, VAERS is self-reported rather than records of actual confirmed cause-and-effect results). Step two is to ask how many vaccine doses were given over that time. For instance, they shipped over 150,000,000 doses of flu vaccine in 2015. Even if half of those doses go in the trash, that's a lot of doses. And that's just the flu vaccine, and just in one year. So how does the risk compare to, say, getting in a car and driving 100 miles?

People like to point to the vaccine fund and VAERS reporting database, but they pretty rarely run the numbers on what that data means. Assuming that 100% of the people who get paid out from the fund were really hurt by the vaccines and assuming that 100% of the self reporting in VAERS is accurate, run the numbers on what percentage of people who use those vaccines are harmed by them.

Just about every substance will cause an adverse reaction in some small percentage of the population. It's unfortunate but true. But if you give a million people a particular vaccine and the same million people a teaspoon of peanut butter and the peanut butter kills way more of your test subjects, that's a pretty good illustration of the point.

Actually, not quite. There are a number of voice votes, where they don't even take an exact count. They're supposed to be used only when it's unanimous or nearly unanimous, though every once in a while somebody will play silly buggers and put things to a voice vote just to hide who said what. (Usually, when both parties want to avoid having the exact count known, since in theory anybody can request a division, which requires an exact count which will be published.)

Most votes are actually voice votes. They're generally on workaday issues without a lot of controversy, so it doesn't actually matter all that much. So it is true that all of the *important* votes should be documented on the web sites, but I thought the distinction was worth pointing out.

lol - good old iPhone autocorrect!

Obviously: "fear mongering"... lol