Yes, most of the services are not available here either - and I'm less than a mile from Philly, so it isn't about being out in the boondocks.

Ooops. I'm not a contractor - that was meant to say "ASK a contractor...".

It's better at extortion than at unbiased advice.

As a contractor for the Angie's List literature that they send professionals. It is really slimy.

Huh? Why should you recover it? ISP fees, VPN, VPS - all of those are something that YOU pay for, because YOU want to be "out there". Why SHOULD you recover it?

Of course, you could do what so many others do. Put your paypal account on your home page, and solicit funds in the form of "donations". I've actually sent donations now and then. I block the ads though.

SCOTT offers a mask with a heads up TIC, and I'd imagine MSA does but I've never checked. The problem is, they're expensive. We can have one handheld TIC on each engine, ladder, and heavy rescue. If we were buying the masks with built in TIC units, we'd need to have one for every pack because they really can't be shared.

When we had that 90% tax rate, the tax code was nothing but loopholes. It's important to remember that the more you make, the more flexibility you have in how, where, and when you get compensated. Remember the Maryland millionaires tax? One year later, 1/3 of the people in that bracket went missing. If you own houses in two states, how hard is it to change your residency? France has a problem today with people leaving to avoid their recent high rates (also a 90% top rate IIRC).

But you're talking about an income tax, not a wealth tax. When it comes to non-property wealth, it takes a very small tax indeed to totally change the game, and create a huge disincentive to to business here (or at least to find some way to own US stocks from elsewhere, I guess). Large investment firms move will their assets around immediately for a 0.1% better guaranteed annual return. A 1% difference in property tax rates makes a big difference in affording a new house (and in a regressive way).

Maybe people are confused about how much overall property (wealth or otherwise) there is to begin with?

I have many more than just one quote. Hitler refers to the Christian God and Jesus many times in his various speeches; at one point the Nazis even tried to setup their own church. There were attempts to evict those Christian sects that were felt to be insufficiently Germanic, but the Nazis in general were a Christian group.

A more telling quote from historian Richard Steigmann-Gall is more telling:

The Nazis used the writings of Martin Luther in particular to support their beliefs; the party even held mass celebrations in support of his 450th birthday.

Also inarguable is the fact that 95+% of Nazis were brought up in Christian households with Christian values. None of which apparently did anything to stop them from perpetrating the worst injustices of the modern age.

I'd be careful using Wikipedia as a reference here. There are unfortunately many writings both for and against Hitler's belief or disbelief in 'God'; however the Nazi regime was much bigger than just Hitler. And as Mr. Steigmann-Gall alludes to in the above quote, many historians and writers since the end of WWII have tried to paint Hitler as being non-Christian, as they are unable to conceive how a Christian person could commit such atrocities, in "No True Scotsman" fashion. Regardless, Hitler wasn't brought up as an Atheist with modern Humanist values, and he certainly wasn't opposed to religion -- at the very least, everyone can pretty much agree that he was more than happy to use it as a useful tool in advancing his agenda.

Yaz

Since the rest of your post seems sane, I'm just assuming my sarcasm detector is on the fritz again with this line.

Sometimes people accuse progressives of wanting to punish success, to hurt the rich just for the sake of hurting. Your plan is why people say stuff like that.

In practice, when individual states start "taxing millionaires", the millionaires move to different states. We're just looking for a way to fund the government here, as a means to the end of improving everyone's standard of living. A plan that would cause the successful to move elsewhere might raise some funds for a while, but is a terrible long-term strategy for improving standard of living. (And I'm fully aware that some actually want to build a metaphorical wall around the nation to keep the successful from escaping - not the sort of nation I want to live in.)

Really? That's how you think about it? Carrying the car?

People drive cars though the walls of buildings all the time. Sometimes on purpose as a weapon, more often just by clumsy driving, or even just forgetting the parking break, as happened to a friend of mine. This is real danger in the real world, unlike fantasies involving flamethrower-wielding maniacs. And when something ruptures the gar's gas tank, that's extremely dangerous - there's a reason they'll close a freeway when that happens in an accident, until the fire department handles it.

Yes, everyone in science realizes this, believe it or not (though I'll grumble about string theorists). What else do you think the scientific method is?

I believe you've got that backwards., IIRC. GR was first published in 1915. Hubble discovered in 1929 that the universe was expanding, which GR didn't explain in any way (not it it contradict). Einstein tried a couple of approaches to reconcile the new data with GR, one of which along the way was the cosmological constant. Thus far, that still seems to b the bats model (and it has nothing to do with GR).

Sure - that's science. There's always an establishment trying to explain away new data, and many trying to make a name for themselves by overturning everything with their great new theory. Sometimes the same guy doing both. But GR doesn't come into conflict with dark energy theories, any more than it does with fluid dynamics or genetics - it just doesn't explain those things.

No, it really doesn't. There's no conflict at all between GR and dark matter, and in fact GR gives us one of the 3 sets of evidence for dark matter in the first place: gravitational lensing consistent with a large mass that we can't see. As far as QM, there's certainly more to learn, and I'd bet GR becomes a poor model at sufficiently small scale, as it assumes spacetime is smooth.

GR has so far successfully accurately predicted more far-fetched and surprising results than just about anything else in physics. It's the most well-tested of physical theories. There may well be a scale or conditions in which it fails, but skepticism of such claims is well justified.

Nazi Germany was not opposed to religion -- they were very specifically Christian. Hitler himself said: "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity ... in fact our movement is Christian.". 94% of the German population at the time of the war were Christians, as was the bulk of the Nazi party members.

Indeed, the SS specifically did not permit atheists in their ranks; the SS Oath went like so:

Hitler wasn't opposed to religion -- like many despots, he was opposed to potential political threats against his interests. There is a significant difference between the two.

Yaz

I'm quite amused by your post, as it can be read equally well as an argument for either side of the current debate - well done. Not everyone shares the same values, but everyone is convinced they're in the right, and anyone smart would agree with them. The whole point of a secular state is not to pick a particular group's values and enshrine them in law: that's a theocracy (even if the religion is "progressivism"). Instead, it is to make laws based on the smooth functioning of society, so that people with differing views can work together without violence.

The few religious leaders I respect want nothing to do with laws, as they also don't support theocracy. Instead, they work to change those deeply held beliefs (which may be a work of generations) so that the conflict vanishes.

It seems the progressives here want to force your system of values on others through the government's monopoly of force, instead of by winning in the marketplace of ideas (much as the religious right have done in generations past). The religious leaders I respect, from Jesus to the current Dalai Lama never cared for force, but were remarkably. good at presenting and defending their ideas, both to believers and to non-believers, without ever just asserting "I'm just right and to disagree with me is hate speech that should be banned".

(BTW, of course there was a Jesus, don't be silly. How important he was in his time, vs ideas attributed to him later is hard to say, but Christianity never could have started rolling in the first place without some sort of charismatic leader.)

Absolutely NO ONE cares that some individual blogger makes a dollar from his blogging. Not the readers, not the corporations, not your ISP/host, not even the government, NO ONE. None of us gives a small rat's ass. But, yes, you CAN negotiate with some advertiser whom you deem to be reputable, and not suck at the Google teat, or whatever. Host your own ads, or I won't see them, it's really that simple. All the big ad servers are blocked on my machines.

Reliable ad agency? Yeah, I gotta agree, that's kinda funny. It may even qualify as a full fledged oxymoron.

Thank you. I commented at length about this already -- but yeah, this kind of robot would be very little help in any configuration I can currently imagine. Thermal imagine is commonly used, but handheld units are more common than the very expensive ones built into SCBA masks. You can't share a mask between crew members so you'd have to be one per firefighter rather than one per crew, and they're not cheap. Most departments have a hard enough time getting budget to replace worn out hose lines, let alone thousand dollar thermal cameras.