Actually we had a budget surplus during the Clinton years and then Bush ruined us. Also remembe that Bush signed the bailout, $700 billion TARP program, while Obama signed the Ecenomic Stimulous act (equally expensive).

damnit, theres a really good chart of federal spending and deficit that XKCD put out.. I cannot find it.. help please?

"Unbelievable. I really can't understand this reasoning. You ADMIT that the government is incompetent in how they spend the public's money ('while not providing any healthcare") while wanting to take a well working health care system and dismantle it and give it to the government to control! This is just insane thinking."

-I think some people view the individual mandate of the ACA as a half-ass solution. The real solution being national healthcare plan. Actually we already have this, medicare and medicaid are well managed and well priced for consumers. They already cover a good chunk of the population.

"There were far simpler and cheaper solutions than this monster. Pre-existing conditions? Maybe move them to Medicare coverage for JUST those conditions."

-That would make it all too easy for health insurers to drop anyone with a cronic condition. The list of "pre-existing" conditions is decided by each insurer, and is pretty vast. I was denied insurance because my migraines qualified as a pre-existing condition. So anyone the insurers think would loose money on, they would just kick over to the government. That would leave the taxpayers paying for all the expensive patients, and the insurers making money on all the cheap ones. How is that better than the ACA?

Your flame is pointed in the wrong direction! 1. Who the hell cares if some high-power bokerage shaved a few cents off the cost of a big transaction. Is that going to affect the unemployemnt rate or anything that you ranted on about? NO! If anything, some of those transactions actually made some money for some auto-workers retirement funds. Great! 2. Regarding your rant. How does someone making large amounts of money equate to kicking the poor? There is no mandate that rich people who use their wealth, political power, and intellegence to make more money are evil. In fact there are many who try to do good for their community. Of course their are some that abuse that power as well. The modern age has made educated people much more able to reap the benefits of that education. 3. Re: great empires fall. It's not just the elite that dont give a fuck about the poor. The poor dont give a fuck either. Just look at the voter regestration percentages. Only 57% of voters regestered in 2012 in the USA. Almost half of americans dont even care enough to decide their own fate. "Whateva" should be their motto. Reading the propositions and the candidate bios is just too much work! Its easier to just collect my unemployment check. Further proof: after 2008 financial crisis, what luxury did americans give up last? Their cable TV. Comcast shares went down, but their customer base just kept going up. Hey americans want their MTV. And that shit is expensive! Some plans rival a new car payment. -Walmart is another good example. Walmart did not brainwash people into buying their products. People flocked there because all people care about is me me me and the biggest TV they can afford on their credit limit. They didnt care if the as-seen-on-tv products really work, only bthat they saved $10!. They dont care if their imported vegetables were grown according to EPA standards cause they are only 99cents a pound!. 4. So yeah, the USA is in a downward trend, but thats to be expected, normal, and is even good in some respects. We made a ton of money by innovating, engineering factories and having a cheap labor force. We amassed a huge amount of money and have the luxury of buying many imported goods that no one else has access too. Now our currency is trading high so it makes it imposible to compete on manufactured goods. That is a great opportunity for other countries. Yeah some trade tarriffs wouyld have been nice to slow the decline but hey people want their cheap toaster, so everyone welcomed the 'free trade agreements'. yay. But things will normallize eventually as other countries become wealthy and start buying some of our stuff. Yeah it will suck for amny people but there is still a ton of opportunity in the US. It is still one of the best for human rights, infrastructure, environmental protection, and healthcare. I love this country and we should try to help each other personally, financially, or politically. Many ways to do each that accomplish more than raging about the rich.

One more thing.. after the initial release of Diablo iii, I expected the economy to collapse and the good gear would get reasonably priced. Instead, just the opposite happened. The gold got cheaper.. about 30 million for $10.. But the gear just inflated even more! -So say a wand that cost about 1 million gold during the first few months now costs 100 million.

Again, where are the economics teachers??

In Diablo, the real problem was the loot itself. They were all random drops, and even the named epic drops had random stats.

To put it in perspective, there were about 30 different random attributes. All builds require 4-5 of these attibutes.
All resist
str/dex/int depending on class
crit
crit damage
vitality
If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
Well what are the chances of finding an item with all these abilities? I estimate about 1 in 150,000 drops have all 5.
But also consider that each of these stats will havev a randomly generated value. So you may have All Resist +10 when you need +70. Consider about 1/10 of any needed stat has good values, and that is 1/10000 of 1/1500,000 drops will have usable equipment for the highest level play.

That is a shitload of grinding. It is much better to spend about 50$ and buy enough gold for the AH to buy your gear. Also, the top-end gear is hugely inflated! all farmers need to do is kep on the lookout for any end-level gear, buy it and then turn around and sell it for 100 times what they paid for it. There is not enough of the top-end gear to go around, so the market is crazy inflated. It is a great example of how a hyper-competitive market is bad for the consumer. Snipers with multiple accounts and bots leverage their strength to price things up to astronomical amounts. Some of these things cost billions of gold when my grinding yeilds a few thousand per drop. Economic teachers should use it as a case study.

BUT IS IT REALLY WORTH IT?
I mean really, after you grind away or spend your hard-earned cash to fully equip your character, what is your reward?
YOU GET TO GO THROUGH THE SAME CONTENT YOU ALREADY CLEARED OVER AND OVER AGAIN!
YAYYYY!!!!!

/Agree.. I think Obamacare did not go far enough. The truth of the matter is that healthcare is balloning and eventually it will burst, with or without obamacare, but everyone will blame it on obamacare anyway. Also.. how is insurance different than taxes? I pay money out of my hard earned salary to pay for the cancer, heart disease, and diabetes of others. My employer even pays for some of it.. sounds like a tax eh? Free market? LOL i get whoever my employer has contracted with. Get my own insurance? -dont get the subsidy from my employer, the plans are confusing and hard to compare, and i got denied anyway because of previous conditions (migrains).

Actually sugar would be cheaper than corn syrup if it was no longer subsidised. You can read about the gory details here. Maybe we should stop subsidising the local farmers for our own health?

HOLY FUCK YOUR MATH IS SHITTY!

"The truck burning 14.28 gallons of diesel generates about 145 grams of CO2. [1]"
-that's 145 Kilograms you fuck! And you have not included the return trip of the tanker as has been discussed already, making it 290 Kilograms of CO2!.

"The energy losses for the transmission line (considering it comes from coal) generates about 7 tonnes of CO2. [2]"
-Where the fuck do you get that from?? And it doesn't even make sense with your later comparisons!

"A BMW 5 Series 520i would be able to drive about 915.294 miles with that gasoline. [4] Driving these miles, it would release about 91 metric tonnes of CO2 (in the streets)."
-With 10,000 gallons of gasoline..
10000 * 3.78541 liters per gallon = 37854.1 liters * 7km per liter = 264,978.70 km *163 grams CO2 per km / 1000000 = 43,190 kg of CO2

43,190 kg + 290 kg = 43,480 kg or 43.480 metric tonnes of CO2
You have also forgotten that gasoline/petrol is refined from oil, and that the refining process uses some percentage of energy and releases CO2 and sulfur. I cannot find any info on the refining cost.

So how does that compare with the Tesla?
Lets make it easy by comparing the grams of CO2 produced for each km according to the BMW literature.. 163 grams/km.
From your own citations, the Tesla has a 60kW or 85 kW battery. -I know nothing about charging of batteries, but they are rated at 370km for the 60 and 480km for the 85. The 60kW is less efficient so I will use that.
60/370 = 0.162162 kW per km.
Accounting for transmission loss and charging loss, .162162 / .8 /.9925 = 0.204234461 kW per km if produced at a plant and transmitted (see previous discussions and citations)

So how much CO2 produced? 2.08 lbs per kW according to your source.
2.08 * 0.204234461 = 0.424807679 lbs CO2 per km
BUT WAIT! THERES MORE! lets convert the pounds to kg
0.424807679 lbs * 0.453592 kg per pound = 0.192689365 kg CO2 per km.

OUCH! According to this (which is highly subjective) A Tesla running on coal-powered electricity produces 19% more CO2 than the BMW.
-But to compare apples to apples.. an oil fired plant about matches the BMW.
And of course a Natural Gas fired plant allows the Tesla to net 30% less Co2 emissions.
We wont even get into carbon-free power sources like solar, wind, water, etc!

Also, I would think that the cost of upgrading IE6 or any outdated software increases as time goes by.

1. There would be increased compatibility issues.
2. Increasing training for major differences.
3. Increasing hardware requirements. -Lets face it, software gets more bloated as time goes on. Making a big change means you will have to upgrade a majority of systems.
4. Decreasing available knowledge. -Older systems are less well known by the general IT population.

I honestly believe in regular upgrades. But too frequent can also be problematic. And some major versions are painful to implement. (im pointing at you Vista)
Perhaps there is a moors law applicable to upgrades?

Of course aliens are not interested in us. Just look at this thread. Not one intelligent comment.

The author kinda rambles. But I think his point is that what we want from alien interaction right now is to learn lots of cool stuff.
That boils down into three categories.. 1. Super powerful energy sources. 2. Control of time, space, and gravity. 3. Unlimited life/food etc.

But an alien life form would already have these things, so why would they be interested at all in 'exploring the universe' when instead they could just sit on their fat happy asses and not worry about a thing ever? -Answer, they don't

Alternatively, in 1000 years (or more likely 10,000-100,000, if we survive that long), we will have all those cool gadgets. Then we will have no need of learning stuff from other aliens, so why would we care? -Answer, we won't.

On a side note, the whole idea of aliens coming to our planet to steal our 'resources' is ludicrous! If they have the technology for interstellar travel, creating unlimited amounts of air/water/etc will be easy. And if there is no real 'secret' to the universe, it would be much more economical to mine metals from asteroids and water from comets or rings. It takes way too much fuel to enter and exit the gravity of a planet.

Thats the PC term now. We dont want those humans feeling targeted by a bias.
So the term "Cyber Criminal" is used instead which is inclusive of bots, ai's, aliens, lawl cats, etc.

Doesnt 10 million euros seem like a very small amount for the city of munich to save?
What is that in percentage to their technology budget?

-I found a reference to their arts budget alone at over 160 million euros:
http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/home_en/Department-of-Arts-and-Culture/statistics_dates_facts

OH CRAP! He's talking about me!

Senator Roark: Power don't come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying. Lying big, and gettin' the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you've got 'em by the balls.