Comment Re:Corruption? In Russia? (Score 2) 94
So just how badly are you trying to lose this argument?
And - in response to the inevitable follow-up comment "give me an example" - you are more than capable of finding them on your own - there's no shortage.
No, give me an example. We can make this about my refusal to do your work for you, or we could make it about this alleged evidence you speak of.
Seriously I do feel awful badly for those folks. I hate when bad things happen to anyone, even if they hate me with a passion.
I agree. However, I am reminded of the story of the farmer who's trying to show someone how to train a mule. He starts by walking up to the mule and whacking it on the head with a club, knocking the mule out. When the pupil asked him, "Why did you do that?" the farmer said, "Well, first you have to get his attention."
One has to wonder if a theoretical compassionate God is trying to get Texas and Oklahoma's attention. But then, considering the annual number of tornadoes and other natural disasters that hit Texas and Oklahoma, you'd have think He'd just give up by now and smite the whole region and leave it to the armadillos.
How did you get "the tax goes from 3% to 4%" from "the state raises taxes on car dealers by 30%?"
About your other point, sure some of the dealers may only raise prices by 29% and absorb that other 1%, but you're still missing the point
Are you really that stupid? Do you understand the difference between raising taxes on dealers "by 30%" and raising the taxes on dealers "to 30%"?
Raising taxes from 3% to 4% is a 33% increase in taxes. Raising taxes from 6% to 8% would be a 33% increase in taxes. Raising taxes from 15% to 20% would be a 33% increase in taxes. But even the biggest of those increases, assuming there's no competition and no dealer decides to take a little less profit in order to increase market share, the largest pass-through to consumers would only have to be 5%.
If you don't think only consumers pay taxes...
I never said that. Consumers often pay taxes. In the case of Amazon, the consumers would be paying the sales tax, because up to now Amazon has been able to avoid taxes on the notion that the internet is some magical places where taxes should not exist because...computers or something.
Maybe you can understand it if I explain it another way. If you have ten apples and I take ten percent of them today, and tomorrow I raise the percentage of apples I take from you by 100%, it does not mean I'm taking 100% of your apples.
Here's a nice tutorial on calculating percentage change with a calculator if you're still having trouble. If you need help turning on the calculator, you'll have to ask someone else.
Seen any suspicious rainbows lately? This might fill you in on what the governmen is doing I hear it targets Christians:
Actually, there was a big stunning double rainbow over Dublin last week as the people of Ireland rejected the teachings of the Church and approved same sex marriage.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/u...
Texas, on the other hand, outlawed gay marriage and got deadly floods and tornadoes.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/26/...
Coincidence?
What is so hard to believe that we created the "god" myth? It's been done many times over the ages, so we have more proof of that than the other way around.
Yes, but all those other people who created gods were just making them up, whereas the god we made up is the Real Thing!
Maybe the anti-creationist, anti-Christian witch hunters set this bogus thing up, just to have an excuse to go after the Christians.
That's...plausible.
But maybe the Creationists set it up just to make it look like the anti-Christian witch hunters set it up so that then they could say, "Look how we're being made to look stupid and a little evil by the anti-Christian witch hunters who are all hiding in plain sight just steps away from the Christian churches that are on every other block throughout the United States.
The media in the USA is the most dishonest I've seen.
Then you haven't seen many medias. I'll just note that there was a very relevant society who once named their chief propaganda outlet, "Truth" which just happens to be "Pravda" in anglicized Russian.
I think it's the other way around. Rand probably based her antagonists on people against her or she is against philosophically (i.e people like GP). So it's not that GP sounds like a Rand antagonist, but Rand antagonists sound like people like GP.
If A is like B, then B is like A.
Dagney meanwhile is Rand's author insert. Atlas Shrugged is basically Rand's fantasy of defeating her ideological opponents.
I quite agree. But I think the book serves a purpose past just expressing Ayn Rand's fantasies. For example, notice dbiii's obsessive focus on nobility despite obvious problems with the assertion. Ayn Rand caricatures such beliefs intentionally and unintentionally in Atlas Shrugged.
It's not the French Revolution any more. If your beliefs are so immature, silly, and ancient that a hack writer like Rand can accurately portray them 50 years ago, then maybe you need to up your game.
Someone used a hammer to drive a screw. We should consider using more useful tools for the problem at hand.
Meetings can be made efficient. My meetings usually are. I invite people for their topic to the correct minute. Yes, minute. Give or take 5, but it's patently USELESS to have someone sit in a meeting for an hour if all the matters to him is about 10 minutes thereof. I don't need the design crew to discuss security matters, even though I do need them in the meeting in general. The meeting has an agenda and it has a time slice for every topic to be discussed. If you think you need more time, tell me in advance, but during the meeting, you will have your time slice and what you cannot get done in that slice will either have to wait 'til the next meeting or you will have to discuss it outside.
It took a few meetings for people to get a hang of it and it was a VERY fierce uphill battle (and I'm glad I had a lot of support from higher up or it would never have had a chance to fly), but now we get more done in a single 45 minute meeting than we used to do in a 4+ hour meeting. Yes, that also means that people have to come prepared and that they have to be PRECISELY on time. But their benefit is that instead of sitting around for hours and staring holes into the wall 'cause things are being discussed that are of no interest to them they come to the meeting, can talk about their topics with everyone they need and be gone again within less than 15 minutes.
Plus I now need much smaller meeting rooms since few people are going to be around during the whole meeting.
What? No graphics? No vanishing effect? How 90s!
In the average ITSM it should be good enough for a B rating, and that's usually good enough, most other departments struggle to get to a B anyway, so we needn't overdo it. Hammer away!
But then we'd notice that about 90% of the managers are useless. And please consider that most of them can't do anything else than create Power Point slides, you can't even retrain them, they ARE already at the bottom of the usefulness ladder. What would they do, especially in this economy?
Won't someone PLEASE think of the useless?
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
