Hey, better late than never. Good link and submission. Goes with what I feel is one of the primary causes of economic woes, that quarterly outlook...when that is as far as they ever look.

They may have been a one trick pony, but dayum, that one trick sure was fun and *interesting* at the time. Especially when you had the option of taking your ..err.. "research" snapshots to the drugstore for developing..or having it develop in the *privacy* of your own home %^)

I think we are seeing false flag attacks already with this latest undies bomber and the apparent mind controlled zombie aspect. The feds are sure ignoring/denying the extra people involved that were reported by eyewitnesses who are sticking to their stories. The one that gets me is the guy who apparently was videoing the half ass attack. This has poof disappeared off all the regular bilderberger main stream media reports. Looks like a control to gauge passengers reactions/ something they can view and study later.

Back at ya!

Flying cars...don't like the idea. Worst of both worlds.

Flying *motorcycles* though, love the idea and I really think you could make it both work, and turn out to be the cheapest way for people to get into practical flying. I see a ton of these motorized hang glider contraptions, they are always (illegally, this airport is closed) landing here all the time and they just don't cut it, no range, no power, can't carry cargo, etc and still expensive. I looked into getting one and went no way, and even my boss who is a flight nut says they are stupid and dangerous, he sold them for awhile then quit, didn't want to make money off of people cracking them up.

    And those are today the cheapest way to get into flying and still cost what an expensive new midrange non exotic car cost. Nuts. And forget cessnas and so on, typical entry level "normal" planes, I see how they are built, and I am an old gearhead, I don't want one. They are raw bleeding edge *1930s* tech. It is like time stands still "wow vern, lookee! they got some of that new fangled aluminum and they use *rivets*!!1!

I mean that's the cheap crappy way to do auto bodywork, slap sheet metal together with rivets.

Nuts...and they want stupid insane amounts of FRNs for them as well.

    I did some drawings of some prototypes back in tthe 70s. Motorcycles are way more suited for a hybrid land/air vehicle than cars. Much lighter weight, air cooled engines common, very good horsepower/torque to weight ratios, etc.

My idea was to have a decent powerful roadbike with full fairing as the main transpo, (back then in those days probably a suzuki 1000 or an RE5)(much lighter and better bikes now), so that once attached to the flight unit that was the rest of the plane, the wings and tail and so on, which had the upper half of a cockpit, you had a full enclosed cabin (well..almost fully enclosed, call it enclosed enough). A power takeoff drive wheel that cranked down and used friction that ran off the rear wheel to an overhead and rear prop or two used for the motive power. Attach unit, fold down the flight controls, take off, fly to destination, unbolt it, drive away. Additional bonus vertical stability from that rear wheel spinning. The front forks would be part of activating the rudder and flaps for turns, again, via an attachment to the front wheel. I think you could probably do all or most of it with cam locks then locking pins, making it fast and easy to do the conversion.

Yes, I am aware of that and no I don't think it is always done. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The industry has also been having a hard time with sub par counterfeit parts, something they don't like to mention out loud much. Then you have examples like the above mentioned F-22 flight crossing the international date line. These are top of the line "new" extremely expensive and what might *think* really looked at designs..yet that snafu still occurred. And you still see fleet groundings when new unexpected problems show up, unfortunately usually after a crash.

When they *really* want to and they really do the work, and the original design was over built really smart and strong, yep, they can keep planes flying and working a long time, past their original estimated service life, like the buffs, by doing continual upgrades. Like I said though, it is all ludicrously expensive. Ain't a single dang thing cheap and easy on airplanes, and this includes very limited production runs of new model avionics.

So, I will stand by my prediction that just like y2k there will be a lot of last minute upgrades done.

Speaking of which, although I am not an IT guy, I was made aware of the y2k date thing in *85* by a friend of mine, an ex IBM mainframe guy. When it hit 97 and 98 and it surfaced in the popular press, I was certainly amazed that it was still a problem....some shops were still coding with the date bug in, while others were just starting to think about maybe looking at it and doing some remediation. Private business and government did in fact mostly wait until near the last minute to do repairs. I know a ton of computer guys were telling me this back then, even my state's head IT honcho told me this, that even though they as the engineers knew a lot of stuff needed fixing, they didn't get permission/funding until the suits started getting harangued by their spouses and customers and shareholders and the press in general, asking how their y2k repairs were going. "Last minute" more or less repairs took place then, at a higher cost than what was needed (due to what you guys call the mythical man month), precisely because they waited so long to do it. As it was, most stuff got fixed just swell, but it certainly cost them a lot extra to do it by waiting.

    The one really good thing to come out of the y2k "last minute" fix scene was a huge surge in just "fuck it, we'll just buy new equipment", which really resulted in a well needed boost to the computer industry as a whole, and a radical dropping of prices across the board for computer-stuff because of a lot more competition and economies of scale efficiencies.

Planes are *ludicrous* expensive. They get milked out to the max before they are replaced. I imagine there will be a lot of last minute expensive and complex avionics swaps near to 2038, just like a lot of code and so on got fixed real close to Y2K and not before, it had to wait to hit near panic mode first before the suits took it seriously.

Business, like government, tends to be stupidly reactive just as much as pro active, pretty much a good mixed bag there. Witness hurricane Katrina and adequate level levee building. Everyone knew the problem existed, yet they "couldn't afford" to fix it in advance of failure. So then it cost a lot of lives and ten times the cost.

Let's dance!

At least you are consistent! HAHAHAH1

I can't believe you really *believe* that. heheheheh

Here's a hint, all those rural folks WERE ALREADY OUT THERE far from the cities before there were even telephones. Government mandated universal service had nothing to do with people moving rural. Of course you can keep believing that was the reason.

As to subsidies, hell ya, let's end all of them! All for it! I agree! Total complete nothing eliminated free market! Let's have all private toll roads, and folks in the cities can also now go shopping around and pay full open market price for such things as pipeline delivered water, which is taken from the rural areas now, with no recompense to the actual owners, and given at chump change nearly fully subsidized prices to the urban areas. Yee hah let's do it! Let's have totally unregulated electricity markets, oooh, how about unregulated natural gas markets, and all these private corporations have to negotiate *individual* right of way transit fee contracts with all the rural landowners for those water pipelines, roads to carry coal or uranium, roads to carry food, natural gas pipelines, all of it. Backbones? Why yes, we'll negotiate with you to run your "backbones" across our properties for your broadband internet, same as we do for the water sellers and the natural gas sellers.

So, we are agreed, we do this and then see what shit REALLY costs, and who gets more "subsidies" and government help in order to enjoy their "lifestyle".

  Nifty experiment, I can't wait, please urban folks, lobby as hard as you can, demand, march in demonstrations, flood the switchboards, fax, do flash mobs, all of the above, use your overwhelming Blue state and Blue urban area vote, end *all* subsidies, let's go all private, free market rules, for every-single-thing.

Demand to pay free market full competition price, demand to end all the "commons", because there is no "common good" now with all them pesky demanding hicks, why all them dad blamed rural folks is just sucking down all our monies! Wah! We support them, we subsidize all their life, it ain't fair, we shouldn't have to pay anything for them! How dare they want to live out there with all our lektricity we gives them and so on!

Oh man that would be sweet! Let's try it for say..a full year, see how that goes.

  I'm serious, let's do it, like to see it happen once and for all so we can get this urban versus rural stuff sorted out better, to see what is really worth what, to see what the real free market, no government subsidy or coerced takings price is of things.

  Everything, hold nothing back, all free market, you in the cities pay what the market will bear, no subsidy, no government intervention, no Public Utility Commissions, no municipal water, all of it, and we do exactly the same. End all subsidies and government takings. No more "eminent domain" and all aspects of private property go back to said owners of private property. You want access and rural stuff, you pay what is demanded from the private property owners, and that's it, no government intervention to keep your prices lower or give you unfettered access at greatly reduced rates. Just the free market. Wall Street free market rules, your glorious biggest city, the crown jewel or urban existence, the very bluest of the blue, the hippest and most modern, the home of all that it urban-holy, the epicenter of the anti-rural.

Oh, by the way...just in case you guys really do this..most likely we rural folks aren't going to be taking your printed up pieces of nonsense paper "money", we will want something really *worth* something. Time to start thinking about that.

  So not sure exactly how you plan on paying for our stuff, if we even decide to sell it that is, but we'll just sit on it under free market urban rules until you come up with something better than your phony baloney "urban money" you create out of nothing. We want real stuff of worth from you for our real stuff, and little sheets of paper..sorry, but no...we got our own kindling, thanks anyway.

Tasty electrons!

the why is because it is supposed to be government service, a job to provide "governing" to the tax payers as whole. Right off the bat whatever that governing service is, it is not a wealth production job, it is a wealth rearrangement job, where the wealth is taken from the producers, given to the governmental worker, who then tells the producers what they can and cannot do. There's ZERO incentive to be efficient there on the government side, or even provide a necessary service, because that money is more or less forcefully taken due to threats of "committing a crime" if you refuse to enter into this contract. Having to not only deal with the day to day cost of this "valuable" governing service, you then get the privilege of paying a lifetime pension to the same worker.

That's why..it's a dang rip. I contend the service ain't even close to what it would be worth, let alone paying a pension on top of that. Hardly any of it really.

  In the private sector, you are producing wealth, or servicing produced wealth, whereas the government job is another layer on top of that that doesn't provide wealth, nor does it provide a service to produced wealth, it is a further fee associated with the former two, an additional "on top of" fee that in a lot of cases is of dubious merit or really adds nothing to the economy, in fact, it just strips wealth from the economy. Some is necessary, a lot isn't. It becomes a self perpetuating "fees are needed" excuse to take more and more and more and more. They create some bureaucracy X, then because they now have all these employees and buildings, etc expense, they "need" more money taken from the private sector. So next week they come up with another governing job, which in turn they can say they now need more money given to them. then another, then another, then another, then another.....

At what point does this end? At what point are these artificially created wealth transference "jobs" enough? This is a variation of the "broken windows fallacy" form of economics.

A governmental worker term limits and no pension proposal would be at least an attempt to find an endpoint there, to keep those expenditures within a saner level that won't harm the real wealth producing part of the economy. As it is now..there is none, doesn't exist, government just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, with every step of the way being used as the reason and excuse why they need more money, including life time jobs with full pensions and bennies. Next week, they do it again. And so on.

That's why there needs to be some new rule or way to limit total expenditures out of the wealth production non governmental side of the economy. and if NO ONE is a full lifetime governmental worker, there would be ample incentive to keep governmental costs down and more reasonable. As it is, we have an "us versus them" deal, which was reflected in that poll that shows the governmental workers ...just...don't...get it on why we already have too much government and just can't afford them in these lifetime jobs and pensions, etc.

    If you don't install some way of stopping this uncontrolled governmental growth, it will reach a point where it collapses the wealth production side of the economy.

It's simple basic economics, not even complex.

Here it is in a nutshell, about as simple as I can put it.

Olden days, five guys all working fixing the road, because they needed a road

Some generations later, now that we are comfortably governed and the government has had a chance to really grow, we have three guys working fixing the road, one government overseer to make sure all the permits are correct, etc, plus now we have one wall street corporate "trader"/investment banker(which is now a quasi part of government, although they claim they are private, their employees are now running the currency creation, setting interest rates, etc) to take a cut from the cash that floats around this project

Today we have one guy fixing the road, two government overseers, two wall street skimmers. And the one guy fixing the road, is really the only one providing a wealth production good or service, and his taxes and fees go to pay the much higher salaries of the government and wall street overseers. this is right now, today. How much more is that one guy fixing the road supposed to pay for all this alleged service?

We are at the point of collapse now because that's the scene, check the headlines the past year, emergency OMG bailouts, etc, the combination of the wall street speculator scheme and whopper bailouts, plus the legions of "governing jobs" folks who just *take*. they have sucked the economy dry, we have *very* few people actually producing wealth any more.

"He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance."

That's why we need government jobs term limits, so they don't "eat out their sustenance" from the wealth production class of the non governmental workers.

Not to say during a ten year period a government worker couldn't get raises, I think they should, but it should always be "government service" first, not an unlimited open ended jobs program. Because if it remains this open ended no limits jobs program, it WILL collapse the economy. therer is ZERO fiscal responsibility evident in government, none whatsoever, just they want more and more and more and more..and dang it has to come from somewhere. Millions laid off, losing everything, every wealth production job shipped overseas from the combined actions of governing and wall street skimming....so the remaining few pitiful real wealth producers should keep paying bonuses, huge salaries and lifetime pensions to the same exact people who did that? I'll turn it around, why is that?

Personally, I think it has collapsed, we are in the dregs of the "good old days", and the only thing keeping it afloat now is the huge sum of FRNs floating around outside the nation. As those folks figure out the best way to get rid of them and still retain at least some worth, as they are doing so right now this second, they eventually won't bother even taking tnew ones, because they will be pretty much worthless.

Your 19 year and counting head schmoo in the government shop will be getting his last check, worth about as much as the zimbabwe dollar is, then a pension check worth even less, when it comes to getting real human needed goods and services, because they would have killed off, through wealth blood letting and having more and more and more government takings, all of that necessary private business that has to be done in order to have enough left over to pay the government workers. But see, he could have been content with only a decade work in government, then back to the private sector for many more years where he added to the wealth production of the economy rather than removing wealth, and maybe we wouldn't be as bad off.

Once you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, and eat it, you get no more golden eggs, nor goose meat. You can yell at that goose farmer all day long, send a dozen goose tax collectors, re adjust your goose production databases, send up your nasa goose observation satellites, invade fifteen other nations looking for a golden goose, send out the goose police to look, set up roadblocks to check vehicles for the goose, issue 193 new laws demanding that golden geese exist, give all your goosemanagement team huge raises and tell them work harder governing the goose monitoring situation, make sure all the little kids in the schools know that the goose had full multicultural rights..but once that goose is gone, that's it, your system collapses.

If that's what you want, heck, that's what you'll get, and it sure is headed that way now, this is exactly the way the system is set up, so I expect you'll see it.

And that's why giving them lifetime jobs of goose collecting and whacking is such a bad idea. Eventually there is no goose, no golden eggs, no goose meat, just a herd of people who sort of remember what it was like when everyone was content to live within the one golden egg a day budget, and not get greedy or stoopid about it.

Look what they did in rhodesia/zimbabwe. Went from the largest food exporting nation in africa to total poverty, people literally eating mice, lucsts and tree leaves and even *dirt* just to put something in their bellies, because the government went apesquat, decide they could have as much government as they cared to because they controlled the official guns and order followers, taxed the hell out of the population of farmers, confiscated their lands, killed them if they resisted, set up any number of new governmental workers, etc..it collapsed, basket case, the nation is now a joke and *it didn't take very long* either..

  They then tried to just printing press their way out of that self created mess...just like the US is doing now...it didn't work. The government then DEMANDED that "wealth should be there, the goose is not dead!"

That didn't work either, no matter how many government workers,soldiers and police and tax collectors they threw at it. More laws, more bureuacrats at higher and higher pay, an expanded standing army and giant police force, more non wealth prodcuers as they drove all the farmers out of business.

Me, I know the whacking the goose for one last good feast is coming, I have no doubt at all, none whatsoever, that's why I went on a semi emergency crash lifestyle rearrangement that puts me in a position of being able to live good enough without having to rely on daily dropping in worth government paper. I think it already happened actually and is too late to resuscitate the whacked goose, heck, it is 3/4ths eaten already. They are running around now trying to bring that goose back from the dead, by throwing more laws and governing at it.

I don't think it will work, but apparently tons of folks still think it is possible.

As the saying goes here, "good luck with that". You can have the best most skilled in the world government goose wealth collectors and managers and permit issuers, etc, the fastest moving government lines ever, heck, issue them turbo roller skates to get through those lines, all of that that can possibly be accomplished within a human body..won't mean a thing once that goose is dead.

And to stick with the species, take a "gander" at the over gestalt of the economy. How many golden geese and geese farmers are really left, compared to the ones who demand golden eggs and unlimited goose meat? Lopsided as all get out now. Frylock nailed it, and why we are screwed, why it is probably too late to fix it, no matter what wild ass scheme they come up with now, what happened to the golden goose we used to have before nutso governmental and wall street bloat destroyed everything.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1491874&cid=30604516

We swapped wealth production for wealth rearrangment, wealth governing, wealth talking about it, wealth entertainment, wealth gambling, and gave or are trying to give all those non wealth producers pensions and all sorts of other bennies on top of that. Did that full switch in just thirty years or so.

Can't be done. They needed emergency bailouts and a slew of new emergency laws to try and fix the unfixable. They can try it for awhile, like they have been, but it won't last forever and it will crash hard, like all other failed similar attempts.

...as long as it is a fair trade, rural versus heavy urban. I'll take no broadband while living in the log cabin because it doesn't exist out in the sticks as long as the big cities, those folks living in a more "sensible" heavily packed high rise apartment means they get no food, because it doesn't exist there and has to be trucked in, which we will cut out then.

    Fair enough? You keep your 50 meg down high speed connection, we keep the food, seems totally fair to me, no reason to push one product or the other one way or the other when it doesn't exist there, just let folks live with what they have locally and be done with it. No need for commie subsidized and shared roads, nor commie subsidized and shared wires on poles then, everyone is happy, no urbanite pays for anything from or for the rural areas, no rural folks pay for anything from or for the urban areas. Even steven, complete split there. You got yours, we got ours, no one pays for the other guy's life in any manner.

err..good luck man, hope you like those tasty electrons....

So they're still not hiring zombie writers ? I find that hard to believe.