Yeah, safe to say, I'm not friends with those people.
Facebook is a great tool for networking with my friends and family, but why would I want to network with thousands of strangers who just hassle me with stories from "some guy they know"? I already have a /. account.

I'm assuming that taxes will have the same effect on rich people the always have: very little. Your assumption that returning to the tax rates of the previous century will break something (when dropping those taxes did nothing at all) is the one that requires further proof.

And yes, the republicans have filibustered most attempts at defining our spending over the last 4 years, but there's an act of congress that addresses spending and has budget in the name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_Control_Act_of_2011

I personally don't care for Obama much, but partisan hacks like yourself are exactly the reason this country is in trouble in the first place. You spend your time worshiping Bush rather than addressing real issues, which forces me to defend Obama rather than deal with his very real flaws. Attack him for something bad (drone strikes, wiretapping...) and we've can try to make progress. But continue to attack him for the mess Bush left and you're just wasting everyone's time.

But since all gas stations price it at 3.999 or 4.009, it no longer matters.

Microsoft sold me a zero-maintenance tablet, and then broke it, and you want me to fix it myself? This is why people still buy from Apple.

I'm not friends with anyone on facebook I don't know and like in real face-to-face situations.
If your experience is different, that's your choice.

I have no idea what point you are attempting to push for here, unless this is pedantry for its own sake.

1. I said debt, but I did not say national debt, and I also referred to it as spending in the same sentence. All spending is debt, until you offset it with revenue. If you fail to offset it, it will become deficit spending which contributes to the national debt, but that's really off-topic since we're talking about spending without regard to government revenue, only in comparison to household income.

2. I addressed the financial solvency of the federal government:
  A. We could immediately raise taxes to a 40% average (and let's argue whether we should get there by raising Romney's taxes to 45%, or by raising mine to 65%...)
    B. We could cut all military spending, which accounts for half our budget.
Implicit in this is the idea that we could actually use some mix of the two, where we raise taxes to repair the roads we've let rot over the last decade, and simultaneously draw-down military spending until we only outspend 4 or 5 of the next-most-powerful militaries, rather than the top 20 as we do now.

3. Your claim that the government is insolvent is belied by reality, where our government can still sell bonds at a lower interest rate than anyone else in existence. Why do they have a better credit rating than you can ever hope to achieve, if they understand math so much worse than you? We are deficit spending currently, but that was also the case the last time we had a Bush run up the bills, and Clinton turned that around. There is every indication that Obama is turning this around, even with Boehner doing his very best to prevent a recovery. Assuming that we can keep the pressure on to get millionaire tax rates matched to my tax rate, we should be able to increase revenue and decrease spending until we are again paying down the national debt rather than building it up.

Sorry for ruining the moment! I didn't get the reference because none of the most important words are the same, so I think we can classify it as "obscure."
Perhaps next time you can help a nerd out by citing Doc brown or something. That's probably the least quotable line in the whole trilogy to start with, because who even said, "heavy" beside McFly? I barely got the humor when I was watching the movie, let alone out of context.

And there are people who have propose shrinking matter as a valid hypothesis to replace expanding space, so there's no way to tell within a thread who thinks its funny, and who really believes in it. The math simply does not bear out when you look at how many forces are effected by particle size, unless you assume there is a constant (but changing over time) force linking weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force etc., but somehow not not gravity.

Yes, and as I said, it's an invalid comparison because they switched types of averages halfway through.
Government spending is 54K per household, while mean household income is 127K. Government spending per household is 40% of household income, not 105%.

Indeed, and what valid point about fairness or desirability do you draw from the fact that median income (the middle class, if you will) is so very, very far below mean income?

First, you're comparing median income, to mean debt. The mean debt per person is 20257.23, while the mean income is 48520.90, So government spending is roughly 40% of our money, not 105% of our money.
We are deficit spending in that we collect 13% taxes from folks like Mitt Romney, leaving a gap of 27% unpaid (my income is below median, so I pay 30% in taxes, leaving 10% unpaid).
But that's more an issue of accountability rather than out of control spending - we can pay 40% taxes to cover our spending, we just choose to borrow from China instead.

Besides which, the deficit spending can be traced to our multiple wars and our nuclear warhead bunkers and our troops idling in Europe and South America (not that they're not working, just, what are we accomplishing with bases in germany and panama, exactly?).

We could easily stay within the 20% collected, if we simply stopped spending half our money creating terrorist, without cutting roads or schools or social security.

True, but it is still interesting to note that all the people in power are old and white and male. Especially odd considering all that "reverse racism" that's been apparently going on the last few decades.

This is the USA we're talking about.
Most of my food comes from local farmers who, yes, use banks for their money but no, would not stop selling if the banks closed their doors - in power outages they just switch to cash only, a cyber 9-11 is just a really big outage.
Power outages suck, but I get them all the time, so I'd continue to lug in logs of wood for heat (I guess I'd have to stop using propane to cook eventually if the trucks really stop coming because there's no internet).
My water supply is upstream from me, this town had water before it had power, it just means they stop clorinating by machine which means boiling your drinking water for safety, but I've done that before.

Folks will probably die if the grid completely fails, but then again, folks will probably die if a big enough meteor hits - not like we should spend money preparing for that either.

Well, the terminology is dicey, since 1st world means USA/Europe, 2nd world means USSR/China, and third world means, everyone else...
I've lived in "third world" countries that had fully democratic elections, running water 24/7, electricity uptime to five nines...
Y'know: all stuff the USA simply does not have in most areas. But there was poverty too, and it was crippling bad.
Being poor in a developing country is deadly dangerous, but then again plenty of people freeze to death or starve to death in the USA every year as well, so the difference is more of percentages than type.

I'm pretty sure school shootings weren't a common thing before TV.
Still, your point that young white males were a danger to society before hollywood glamorized that behaviour is valid, indication correlation on a common cause, rather than causation.
So what causes young white males to think that killing people is the right thing to do?
What is it about this societal group that makes them into such an explicit threat to all other groups?
And, if we cannot prevent this violent behavior through other means, wouldn't it be best to simply recognize that all young white males are potentially violent criminals, and simply ban them from coming near weapons, or public spaces filled with other citizens?

I have 1024 public IPs, and I'm the only one who does anything with them: we won't have a network person until the hiring freeze is lifted (read: never).
There' was no NAT here, because that's not part of the IPv4 specs, and didn't even exist when this place was setup.

I've setup basic NAT, my wireless users are on it, and a few desktops, but I can't move everyone onto it because some directors like to print from home to work, and some people require access to a router-to-router VPN to another site that only works if you have a public IP address. I'd love to get a better handle on how access tables on these routers work, but if I did that I'd have to take time away from my day job, and really who wants to get yelled at for working harder?

I have no idea what I'm doing, but I can put anything I want on a public IP because there's literally no-one more knowledgeable to stop me. And I'm not gonna touch those printers because they're on a different subnet from my servers now, so screw it, they're literally not my job to secure.

They've been like that for 20+ years, how bad can it be?

I'm not sure where you get your stats, but currently more people are moving TO Mexico from the USA than from Mexico to the USA, because our economy sucks so badly.