The constitution restricts nothing. It grants powers to the government. Anything not explicitly granted is prohibited.
"Congress shall make no law," "shall not be infringed," "excessive bail shall not be required," etc, sure sound like restrictions to me.
Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium.
People called Romanes they go the house?
Move to suburbia. Even if the kid still doesn't make the cut for the gifted program, he'll receive a far higher quality education than he would in even the best of urban schools.
Complete bullshit. Just to pick a name that everybody knows, Bronx High School of Science is as good as, and maybe better than, any suburban schools, by any standard. There are some very good high schools in New York City, and every upscale parent knows which ones they are.
You're ignoring the fact that suburbs are expensive, and they self-select for wealthy families. That's often the reason people move to the suburbs.
Speaking as someone who went to Brooklyn Tech, I have a high respect for Bronx Science and find your description of it as "as good as, maybe better than any suburban school," to border on insulting. The specialized schools in NYC are some of the best in the country, hands down. That said, this in no way invalidates the point the GP was making--that suburban schools are, typically, of higher quality than large city schools. Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant are places where the entire school is in the "gifted program" and do not reflect the quality of city schools overall.
A police officer or firefighter can retire at 50 with 90% of their base pay...
And that was part of the compensation package the city agreed to pay them when they took their job. Retroactive compensation cuts are bullshit, fraud to the nth degree.
Apologies on one point, I misread part of your post, so my coming off as correcting you just looks dickish. That said, while I agree in principle that retroactive cuts are bullshit, I disagree that the cause of the problem was financial mismanagement. The real root cause is that the compensation packages were not viable from day one.
Bullshit. Some towns became insolvent because they entered into agreements to pay employees some money now and some at a later time, and then so badly mismanaged their finances -- largely through giving more and more tax breaks to the wealthy -- that they couldn't follow up on their obligation to pay people the agreed-upon compensation. Blaming unions for right-wing policies that benefit the 1% while screwing workers is ludicrous.
While on the high end for public sector employees, "Public Safety" pensions in California most certainly do not fall into your rant above. They are, frankly, obscene and are indeed a large part of why many municipalities have financial problems. A police officer or firefighter can retire at 50 with 90% of their base pay (which is usually considerable--a CHP officer earns between $68-84k per year not including overtime pay (which is $48-61 per hour). Their pension is calculated based on the 3 highest earning years.
Please note that the above numbers are BASE pay, and they can (and do) earn significantly more. See here for details. I would assume that CHP officers are probably paid more than a local sheriff's deputy, but my understanding is that many municipalities in CA are competitive with this structure.
To sum up: While the devil is in the details, it quite easy to make the statement the OP did and NOT be full of shit.
Bullshit. Whether or not you're unionized, you can thank unions for the 40 hour workweek (which is dying with the unions), weekends off, lunch breaks, coffee breaks, vacations... any working stiff who is against unions is an idiot that has fallen for the right wing's bullshit.
Because Henry Ford was a well known organizer of unions, and all...
Gotta love sense of proportion. You've got companies like Monsanto and Academi (formerly Blackwater) and a raft of multinationals polluting and doing bad stuff - but the one that causes the outrage? EA..
Bank of America vs EA:
1. Cratered the economy? ehhhh...
2. Botched launch of a time waster game? GET THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS!
I agree! For a 100mil we could get 2/3 of a F22. Think about it for a minute, in 10 years we could add another 6 to the 187 we already have.
Or we could, you know, borrow $100,000,000 less every year. I know that's outside the box thinking and all, but where the hell has this dichotomy come from where, when we have a spending problem, we always hear, "Well, it's better than spending $VALUE on $INITIATIVE?" Military and social spending BOTH have to come down, and revenue (somehow) has to come UP if we're to get out of the mess we're in. I'm all for basic research (as someone else up thread noted, nothing in history has paid dividends like it) but the barrel has a bottom, we have a crisis of unprecedented historical proportions, and no one in government seems to give a fuck about fixing it.
Spoken like someone who has never had to actually prep G-code, fixture a part or debug mill routing. CNC machining is a technical discipline requiring real skill and experience.\
...and once an expert builds out the program for the tool, any idiot can load it and run it.
Every once in a while, I find myself looking for the 'like' button on slashdot posts. This is one of those times.
They're called "mod points." If you posted logged in, you might receive some from time to time.
Whether or not you're into penis jokes it's, IMO, worth making a distinction between a talking loudly at a conference and a twitter mention. IIRC, her twitter post was semi-private, being automatically visible to the intended recipient (and potentially mutual followers) but nobody else. Someone could see that she posted that, but they'd have to go looking. Not only that, but twitter is a medium for both professional and casual postings. OTOH, if you're talking loud enough to be overheard in a crowded conference hall that's far less private,
Ok, so:
Got it.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying, and I think maybe you took my comment above the wrong way? All I was responding to was the comment, "and a time machine."
3d printing changes nothing about this, you cannot get or make NFA weapons without getting a stamp
...and a time machine.
Strictly speaking, this is not true. "NFA" covers suppressors, short barreled shotguns, destructive devices, etc, and those can still be made today. Even a machine gun can still be made, though, of course, you'd have to be a SOT to possess it, and you'd have to be making it for some entity that was legal to buy one (like law enforcement), or for some other purpose allowed by law.
Here's the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. This family controls about $1 trillion in assets. It's time to tax the shit out of them. When you can donate a castle to charity, you have too much money. That smells of a tax dodge.
For the sake of argument, let's say we did what you suggest--hell, that we went even further than that and we took every red cent that they "control." We would pay for this year's budget deficit, and that's about it. Now what?
I drive a lot in Germany, it is a joy to drive there because there are no speed traps, as a consequence people obey the law _more_ because the traffic signs mean something, you see a sign for 100kph then you go 100 because the road or conditions will not allow that speed (god help you if you get a ticket because you really fucked up).
I've never been in a car in Germany where the (German) driver drove 100kph in the 100kph zone. Ever. Typically, "100kph" means "120kph" at a minimum, unless there's a speed camera nearby, in which case they slow down just to pass the camera, then speed back up.
One thing I will say is that they NEVER, EVER speed through a residential area. When the 50 or 30kph signs show up, they WILL honor them (within 10% at any rate), and I do find that a refreshing change from the US where people by and large just don't give a fuck.. I used to live across the street from a school, and the road ended in a T-intersection (a concrete wall, to be precise) and it never ceased to amaze me how fast people would drive past my house. I lived on one corner, the T-intersection was at the other corner, the block was about 200 yards long, and tires would SCREECH at both ends.
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.
