The government is offering up to $8,000 for first-time home-buyers to buy a house. The intent is to stimulate the economy. This is great for those who would be better off owning but are trapped renting because they can't afford to buy, but who could afford a house if only it were $8,000 cheaper.

If you were going to buy a house anyways and can afford it without the aid, is it moral to take the money?

If you had no intention of buying a house because renting makes more sense to you, is it moral to buy a house just so you can have the extra $8,000?

With deficit spending, every "extra" dollar spent by the government is a dollar that comes out of our children's and grandchildren's pockets, with interest.

The same moral question applies to financially healthy companies who take advantage of tax breaks they don't need or who choose to operate less efficiently so they can qualify for government funds or tax breaks.

Comments welcome.

It just astonishes me that they got everyone out of that plane safely. Kudos to the Coast Guard and whoever else ran that operation. It's absolutely mindblowing.

It just astonishes me that they got everyone out of that plane safely. Kudos to the Coast Guard and whoever else ran that operation. It's just mindblowing.

My new wireless router came with a coupon for 50 free downloads from eMusic. Is there a particular strength that store has? It seems like mostly the usual unfiltered jumble of unknowns, with no good way to see what gems others have found and Todd Snider is the only one I know at all, with shovelware albums from some bigger-name artists mixed in.

Any suggestions for an artist or genre I could try out, or a better way to browse? The site also has a lot of scripting that my Firefox doesn't like.

Did you?

I'm not qualified to have an informed opinion on the bailout bill, and I certainly understand the skepticism and hostility towards it. But I get the feeling that this was a huge missed opportunity to avoid disaster...

Anyway, Shanah Tovah to all Jewish readers!

houghi and mr.witherspoone, a couple of comments down on this exchange from the Saudi supercomputer story.

But I see Frank Mundus died yesterday. I read Monster Man as a kid, and remember it almost verbatim today.

What do you think of idle.slashdot.com?

* The first thing I read every day
* It makes me laugh
* It's okay
* Not worth my time
* Take it out and shoot it
* Spare time? What's that?
* Sorry, too busy reading 4chan
* Give me CowboyNeal's journal any day

I'm still not entirely sure what that commercial is selling (Oreos, right?) but I wonder if I'm not the only person who watched it and thought "The four of them of them totally ought to date!" They seem like they'd hit it off, actually, and it might be the only way the Brady-Bundchen/Monahan kids will get any serious competition.

Remember when there used to be those window managers whose big selling point was that you could do things to them in LISP, back when people still cared vehemently about window managers. We now have qtile which now allows the same thing in Python. I'll give it a try to see why anyone would want that, which I never understood for the LISP browsers.

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Either I'm easily amused today or there's a lot to post about: Hal Porter on the Las Vegas Star Trek exhibit.

Chinese lab chooses abbreviation for their newly-invented copper nano-tubes -- points if you've already guessed where this is headed...

Fallingcow, on a pretty dumb Ask Slashdot. (Not dumb of the questioner, necessarily, but you'd think Timothy would know better.)