Those aren't empty statements, but I won't belabor that point anymore. We clearly disagree.

Once welfare reform hit, a lot of people shifted over to Social Security - specifically the long-term disability part. It is exactly this kind of shuffling that makes it difficult to separate the programs. Social Security is not one thing - it is a retirement program for all wage earners (except some public unions), but it also contains a significant social welfare element. I don't mind separating them for whatever analysis you want to do - either way the amount of money spent has only gone up and poverty has not budged since those initial gains way back in the 60s.

Here's a decent write-up. I wish we could paste graphs in, but I'll do my best. First, look at the very first chart, which shows a dramatic decrease in the poverty rate in the first 10 years, followed by no progress over the remaining 40. The second chart addresses the criticism that the official poverty rate is not accurate, but it also shows only a slightly more optimistic trend. The last chart shows spending as a percentage of GDP, broken down into all programs and programs exclusively for the benefit of the poor - as you keep suggesting.

You can see from this chart that the initial ramp-up from 0.5 to 1% of the GDP corresponds to a reduction in the poverty rate from 22% to 12%. This represents an astounding success: for 0.5% of our total output, we cut poverty almost in half!

However, the ensuing years see us increase spending 4x, with little to show for it. I know that my analysis is simplistic. I know that much of the spending has been on health care, which has grown at a rate far in excess of the GDP. Nevertheless, it is a completely reasonable interpretation of the data to say that money is probably not the problem anymore. It certainly looks like it was in 1950, but you have to recognize that we reached a point of diminishing returns sometime in the early 70s.

An interesting correlation is the 2nd chart from the bottom, where black and Hispanic poverty took a nose-dive in the mid 90s. We were coming out of a recession and entering the dot-com era, and that probably explains some of it. But I think it is notable that this is when welfare reform started to kick in. Sometimes you can help the poor by doing something counter-intuitive.

Such a bullshit argument. People who believe this are speaking out of their assholes.

This would be the "penny wise, pound foolish" option. Even if that figure was accurate, which it's not even close, doing so would cause a wave of additional immigrants looking for that handout. Oh, and while we're at it, why not just pay everyone who's unemployed, and already in the U.S. that minimum wage?

You can "be sure", but you'd be incorrect. This isn't a classified program, and the people working on it don't have to hide what they do at all. There are too many individuals working it, and if you were correct that tidbit would quickly leak out. Just like with so many other conspiracy theories, when more than a handful of people are involved, everything inevitably comes to light.

I'd suggest that Russians are a bit cheaper labor. Conscripts don't cost nearly as much.

You're implying that there's less overhead with a fed? That's flat out incorrect. Yes, individual contractors typically make better wages, and the overhead is there. But, don't get me started on the size of govt. offices, and the overhead they bring. As for CEOs, they're a tiny fraction of the cost of doing business...though I won't argue that any of them are under-compensated (trying not to stroll off-topic). I've seen numerous govt. IT shops replaced by fewer than half as many contractor personnel.

FWIW, I've been on both sides for the last 38 years.

Yes, it's better to be a contractor because they typically bring skills to the table that govt. employees don't have. They're also typically fired at will, which is something you almost never see when a govt. employee's position is no longer needed, or if they're a screw up.

If it was unsolicited, actually, it does.
It's a widely recognized pricinple that unsolicited merchandise may be considered a gift.

In point of fact, sending email or sexts should be prosecuted every time because in practical terms they are quite clearly "unsolicited advertising material for the lease, sale, rental, gift offer or other disposition of any realty, goods, or services" without being designated as such.

Copyright belongs to the person who pressed the button to take the picture, which then poses even trickier questions if that person is not the subject. If it is the subject, then consent is clear, and sending the picture does in fact give them the picture for personal use but clearly not for commercial use. Implied consent is at play as well - if a person you're being intimate with takes your smiling picture, it's pretty clear you implied consent for the picture to be taken (which says nothing about any further usage).

Whether the subject is publicly recognizable matters as well (ie if it's just a close up of your cooter, you're going to have a hard time arguing that is 'publicly recognizable' except for the attention you yourself called to it).

Further, you're simply mistaken dragging moral 'rights' into the question at all. I agree with you that taking a nudie pic, and then later using it for revenge porn is shitty and immoral. But we're not arguing how the world SHOULD BE, we're discussing it as it IS.

And you misread me completely. Of course do whatever you want in private.
I just think that anyone RECORDING what they do in private - particularly with someone that they don't know extremely well - is a moron if they're surprised to find it on Reddit tomorrow.

My desktop system is about 5-6 years old and it's got a built-in IDE controller, I just never used it. My suggestion would be to look on his current system (or find someone with a previous-gen desktop ), I bet there's an IDE controller there. Just turn off, plug in the IDE cabling, and fire it back up, copy over.
Or am I the only one with a drawerful of IDE cables?

And the whole "IDE has tricky settings" is a canard: if you have a single IDE (like, I suspect, this one) leave the pins on 'master'.

I think you mis-state my position. I certainly do prefer people be self-sufficient. I think that situations like Katrina are not so much a failure of the government as they are inevitable when huge blocks of the population are completely dependent on the government. You had people stay below sea level in the path of an approaching hurricane, who took no emergency preparations whatsoever. They were fully of the opinion that the government would be there for them the next day. When only a shell of government was there, they complained that they were only getting cold meals as they were airlifted to higher ground. Some died, others were driven to salvaging food from flooded grocery stores. "George Bush hates black people" despite their fates having been decided decades earlier. (Note that I'm not defending the government response - it was generally terrible with some bright spots like the airlift... but the fact is that city should have been empty, so the failure came prior to the storm.)

With that said, I'm not expecting everyone to be resourceful enough to survive when society collapses. You have me wrong by saying that I want a bunch of MacGuyvers. Cities in particular are social beasts where everyone is dependent upon everyone else. I don't think the average Manhattan socialite is any more capable of surviving in post-flood New Orleans than the poorest inhabitant of a housing project there. What they do have is the incentive and ability to get the hell out of town when a hurricane is coming.

You saw the same thing with Sandy - occupants of the public housing projects stayed put, despite New York having dedicated resources to shelters and buses. Next time hopefully they'll have the sense to shut off the power ahead of time - but those people were one fire away from a total disaster. And a fire did wipe out a large swath of Queens, where thank God the residents were independent enough to evacuate.

Anyway, I want to emphasize once again that I have no problems spending public money to eliminate or reduce poverty. What I object to is pumping more money into programs that have failed - over a 50 year period - to do that. It's not about the amount of money being spent, it is how it is being spent. You act like I'm being an ideologue for demanding some evidence that a program is actually effective. I'm not talking about starving people into submission or putting time limits on benefits. I'm not even talking about drug testing recipients. I'm talking about using evidence based methods to reduce poverty, and not just blindly throwing money around. And certainly not berating people who see through the obvious ineffectiveness of our current social policy - the numbers speak for themselves.

The new machines lack LPT ports? WTF kind of machine did you buy without an LPT port? A laptop, sure, a desktop? You have to look hard, even today to find a machine that doesn't have a printer port.

Pretty much anything built in the last five or so years won't have serial or parallel ports. If you're lucky, you might have some headers on the motherboard that can be brought to the slot cage with connectors in brackets like what were common before ATX, but I've run across plenty of motherboards that don't even have those. Notebooks are even less likely to have them. This Dell Inspiron E1505 I'm typing on is a bit long in the tooth...main reason I'm keeping it going is its 15" 1680x1050 screen. No serial or parallel ports on it.

When I saw a sufficiently-old notebook come through my office a while back that had a serial port on it, I hung onto it for talking to our switches and routers. I forget what model of HP it is, but it's old enough that it runs on an Athlon XP. It's probably the better part of 10 years old at this point. The last emerge -uND world took a couple of days to run, but it's fast enough to run Minicom and Firefox, and to do traffic captures from the switch: serial connection to the management port to enable SPAN, Ethernet to the SPAN port for capture, and WiFi to talk to the whole thing from my office instead of the server room.

I just don't want the boss to be disrespectful to me when the estimate is not accurate. Get us some estimation training or something. Don't give me a lecture. I'm too old for lectures.

It's okay if we disagree - I just hope that you can see my point of view.

I worry about people who depend upon the government because the government can up and disappear from time to time. I don't mean that literally - the US is pretty stable and I don't expect to see it actually disappear. But I do expect swings in policy that leave people in a lurch. I do expect abandonment of promises, a la the Detroit pensioners. I think that making promises to people about a future that you do not control is immoral. And, yes, on a philosophical level, I do believe that people should be able to look after themselves to the extent that is possible.

The reason why America comes up with such high per capita is because we have such high GDP output, which is where our energy goes into.

The trade imbalance with China is because CHina manipulates their money illegally, along with dumps. What happens if they free their money the way that they were supposed to back in 2005? Well, it would overnight stop the imports.

Greed? You think that America is any more greedy than any other nation or their top ppl? Give me a fucking break. Our top 1% is just as greedy as your top 1%. The real difference is that our top 1% does not have regulations on them to keep the work at home. Nor do they have a gov that helps them keep it at home by manipulating money as well as massive subsidies for them to dump on other nations.

And being the largest consumer of resources? Not even close. Hell, CHina now burns 1/2 of all coal on this planet. They import and burn far more than America does.

It gets old when ppl make up BS about others with nothing to back it up.

And yeah, I think that you know that.

What happens when someone programs the AI to think that it is God?