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Comment Re:Most taxes are legalized theft (Score 2) 324

Property ownership starts with self ownership. To earn money one has to spend his own time and effort, one has to use his own health and life, the time not spent enjoying but working. Property is thus extension of our own bodies and time given to us to spend on this planet.

To deny people ownership of the fruits of their labour is to deny people self ownership and it is disgusting. Noone should be born into slavery.

Your hands and your head and legs and the rest of it belongs to you. The collective does not own you and it cannot own what you produce. You can trade with others for what they produce or give it away, but that is your choice, your life. Your body your choice, yes?

Well, not according to you. You would steal from those who produce but how is it different from taking their body away? Taking 1 of every 2 chairs away from a chair maker is somehow different from taking away 50% of his life on the planet? It is not. That 50% of life is gone from him and nobody can fix that.

Your ideology is also insane in another regard. If somebody can produce chairs and another person cannot you want to take away from the one who can. What if there are people with no eyes? Let us then make it 'fare' for them and take everybody's eyes out. Some people are missing limbs, lets hack everybody's arms and legs off. There were people who died...... let us just murder everybody to make it fair for those who are dead but also for all of those who never lived at all.

Your ideas are horrendous if someone takes 1 minute to examine them, they lead to slavery and murder while providing superficial justification for the feeble minded.

Comment Re:It's not really that bad (Score 1) 221

I would also add that the 52% fatality rate is much better than the 90% rate that other outbreaks have sufferred, and it suggests that the heroic medical intervention that is underway is having a beneficial effect.

The 90% figure is for the Zaire strain of Ebola,

The current strain is new but believed related to the Uganda strain that has a 50% fatality rate.

However this is still bad, diseases that we consider bad like Yellow Fever have a 20% mortality rate that reduces to 3% if treated early. If you travel to a South America, you need proof of a Yellow Fever vaccine to get back into Australia without issue.

Comment Re:More importantly (Score 1) 393

Heck. At 12-years on a BMW, there are any number of wearbale parts that replacement may exceed car value (tires, brakes (you have to replace the rotors with the pads on a BMW), etc).

You might as well have written "I dont know anything about cars". It would have been quicker and faster.

A set of racing spec brake pads and rotors (Project Mu) for my 14 yr old Nissan S15 cost A$1000, that's racing spec (800 degrees C) for sustained track use. A set of povo spec rotors and pads from Supercheap Auto will cost in the vicinity of $300 and this is Australia, one of the most expensive countries in the world.

Also you dont have to replace the rotors with the pads (whoever fed you that line was probably making a mint from you). A set of rotors should last several sets of pads unless you're doing a lot of track days on stock rotors and heating them up until they crack.

Even a replacement gearbox should only cost $2000 ish for most cars.

Now for average cars like a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla, these are dirt cheap to keep running and repair, not that they often need repairs. There is an abundance of aftermarket parts for them (and BMW's) so even if you blow a radiator, it's going to be $400-500 to replace, hoses and all and most of that would be labour. People try to kill Honda Civic's and fail.

Comment Re:More importantly (Score 1) 393

"and it costs $15k-$45k to replace,"
what? People dn't buy a new car becasue it's cheaper then buying an engine. They use the failing engine as an excuse to buy a new car.

Beyond this, an engine swap isn't going to cost $45K unless you're a complete idiot and are trying to fit an Aston Martin V10 (Aston V10's can be had for $30K).

A B series swap into a Civic will cost $10K at Australian rates if you get someone else to do the work. Less than this if you're swapping in the same model of engine.

Comment Re:More importantly (Score 1) 393

And neither does an internal combustion engine, either. Your point?

A ICE can be expected to outlast the car if it's from a decent manufacturer such as Toyota or Honda. You have 30-40 year old engines still running that have been repurposed into newer bodies (some from crappy manufacturers where engines failed like a GM or Ford, others into stock car frames and oversized go-karts). A battery is not expected to live for the lifetime of the car regardless. With a Honda Civic, the engine is going to outlast the rest of the car.

You're expected to need a battery replacement some time in the future, long before the things like engines, CV joints, drive trains, steering racks, door handles, electric mirrors, seat motors and so on fail. We know that Li-ion batteries degrade over time, your laptop battery in 3 years will not last as long as it does today so It's not unreasonable to want to know this cost in advance. With a prius or other hybrid, you can use that as a conventional fuel burning car after the battery fails, but not with a full EV.

Comment Re:Worse than it seems. (Score 1) 221

Sadly, I think that if it happened now, we would be in a situation where people staying home would end up causing them to loose their home due to a lack of income, and any calls to help those people would be met by Neo-Con hate.

I guess you ought to leave the thinking to grown ups. So why would "neo-cons" want to foreclose on a zillion underwater (in the sense that the debt owed is more than the price the home can be sold for) home loans? That turns a temporary shutdown of the loan repayment revenue stream into a large permanent loss. They haven't bankrupted themselves enough that month?

Comment Re:"forced labor" (Score 1) 183

Isn't that the GOAL of Capitalism??

Only if you ask a Republican.

Republicans freed the slaves.

And they've been going backwards ever since.

You cant rest on your laurels and talk about what happened 150 years ago (my descendants started freeing slaves in the 11th century, when the US was having it's civil war, they had the largest single fleet in the world dedicated to stopping the slave trade out of Africa, just for a bit of context). Its like Berlusconi claiming he is Caesar because Julius Caesar was Roman or Putin calling himself Peter the Great because he was also a Russian leader.

Comment Re:Lament the DC10 (Score 1) 112

While many plane enthusiasts lamented the exit of the DC-10 from passenger service, I did not.

That aircraft had an awful, awful 2-5-2 seat arrangement in economy. More often than not I ended up in the middle seat of that set of 5 and had to crawl over 2 people if I wanted to use the toilet in the middle of the night, and didn't get the compensation of a view out the window which at least makes up for it in aircraft with the 3-4-3 configuration). Inevitably, it would be a parent and a very noisy child occupying BOTH sides.

Good riddance, DC-10. You won't be missed.

A lot of B777's have the same configuration. The alternative used by a few airlines are 3-3-3. This is one of the reasons I prefer A330's over the B777, the A330 is usually in a 2-4-2 configuration unless you're flying a budget (or crappy) airline where they'll have 3-3-3.

Budget airlines are pushing for 10 on B787 and 11 abreast on the A380 lower deck.

Comment Re:Hmmm .... (Score 1) 112

I'm glad they've managed to take these old DC-10's and make them do something useful .. they're a pretty cool plane and a piece of aviation history, but that unfortunate defect in the cargo doors made them not really safe to fly in.

Thats kind of like saying it's a shame the DeHavilland Comet is not still flying. All things have their time.

However the DC10 is still in service with cargo carriers (notably fed-ex). Trijets are from a time where we didn't trust twinjets to make long flights. Since the A330 and B777 (two of the safest airliners in existence) and ETOPS 180 they've been completely redundant.

Comment Re:They're not honest (Score 1) 71

they just lost. That's all. I'm sure they fought mightily to avoid paying.

To be honest, would you pay tax that you didn't have to.

Don't get me wrong, I dont at all advocate tax evasion but you've got to be mad not to be trying to minimise your tax.

The big difference between Uber and AirBNB is that AirBNB tried to fight, yeah it was a forgone conclusion (I fought the tax dept and the tax dept won) but Uber is not even trying to fight the system at all, they're trying to ignore the system. This never works as the system won't ignore you. Its a toss up over whether Uber will go down for something like tax evasion or get sued into oblivion by insurance companies.

Comment Re: they will defeat themselves (Score 1) 981

I can see we will need to fund another MRRD kid.

Seriously, we are not the white people. Even if you do have to insist that the Mative American Indians were all peace loving (which they weren't) or they all were wiped out by the white guy (Which they weren't, an awful lot of them integrated with society and became not savage. This is what happened with most the eastern tribes), you cannot seriously be letting a little kid think this shit happened yesterday and she was part of it so she should feel guilty about it. That's beyond cruel and borders child endangerment. When your kid grows up with mental problems, I hope you look back and think about the guilt you unnecessarily put into her only because you wanted to push an fallacious political opinion. It will be your fault for not correcting your wife and setting the record straight. The shit that happened between the Indians and the white people happened generations before any of us were around or even thought of.

Comment Re:Most taxes are legalized theft (Score 2) 324

Nobody is stealing your money - you're paying taxes.

- wrong, income taxes are legalised theft of life, creativity, time on this planet. It is slavery imposed by the violence of the collective on behalf of those, who perceive it to be to their advantage, whether it is so or not and against those, who are in a minority. This is how income taxes started in USA in the first place, top 2% of people were forced to be paid up to 7% of their income in taxes so that the vast majority wouldn't have to pay alcohol and some import taxes anymore (of-course the result is that everybody pays insane amounts of taxes, both on income side and on consumption).

The rest of us will recognize your right to retain the rest of your property if you recognize your responsibility to help care for the indigent

- wrong, nobody has any responsibilities towards anybody unless they are your children, then you have responsibility to them.

If you don't do your part, then why should I recognize that you have any right to own property at all?

- because it is in your best interest to recognise that if I cannot own property, then neither can you.

That's what society used to be: very few people owned any property, everybody belonged to the select few, who had the so called 'birth right' to it. You couldn't earn property, you could only be born into it or be given it by somebody who was born into it.

Meritocracy is a much more fair system to everybody, except for those, who lost that birth right of-course.

But, call it theft if you like. It really doesn't change the fact that you have no choice but to comply.

- wrong. I do not comply, I use the 5 flag strategy to ensure that something like you has a very limited access to my property.

I imagine that you'd be a little less lofty in your views if you had one of those irresponsible parents. Heck, some kids don't have any parents/family at all.

- irrelevant.

The fact is that all the property/etc you've worked so hard to obtain is only yours as the result of you having been born to parents who raised you well, and who gave you genes that allow you to support yourself.

- parents, fine. That is none of anybody's business.

What you are born with physically is of nobody's business.

Absent either of those, and especially absent the latter, you'd be as well-off as an ape that shares 98% of your genetics.

- I am yet to see an ape that is forced to pay income taxes.

As a result, I certainly have no moral issues with requiring anybody with the ability to take care of themselves to spend some of their effort taking care of others, using force if they do not wish to do so.

- irrelevant what you have or have no moral issues with. I already know what your 'morality' is. Socialist/Marxis morality is violence and theft, nothing else. I have no qualms and no doubts about your level of 'morality' and thus I do what I can to avoid such as yourself.

Comment Re: Still pretty affordable (Score 2) 393

Our PPACA law is a sick joke.

We already have Medicare Part D, which while it is laudable that it helps retirees buy medicine, it stipulates that the US gov't pay FULL PRICE for these meds. Just to give you an example of what that's like, I was once asked to pay $80 to fill a prescription I normally pay $10 to have filled. I politely told them to shove it. Uncle Sam would have written a check for $80.

According to the official figures, the US gov't spends more money per capita on health insurance than countries that provide universal coverage. It is a sickening example of cronyism and thinly veiled bribery.

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