As a <insert identifying interest group>-American, I have a RIGHT to be not offended! I also have the right to punish and/or silence you when you crush my self-esteem by hurting my feelings!

<quote>Not really. Like most organizations (in fact more so than most organizations) retail establishments don't pay a significant amount of their bottom line toward the employees staffing the store. A single store manager will make almost as much as the combined floor staff and combined salaries are still just noise in the bottom line.</p></quote>

    If you make 10 bucks an hour, it costs considerably more than 10/hour to have you on the clock. Even without medical benefits, the insurance, tax, administrative, and unemployment insurance contributions to support this person are substantially more than the simple wage of the employee. The very rough rule of thumb to figure this is double the employee's salary/wage to get the cost of that employee. This does not include benefits.

  If a typical Wal-Mart has 20 part-time(no benefits) employees making $6/hr, by your estimation the store manager must be making around $120/hr. I can assure you that Joe StoreManager does not make $230,000+ per year. The combined cost of the employees of a single store is considerable, a far cry from 'noise'.

Wow, so 25% of the total budget is a drop in the bucket to you? Education spending and Social Security equaled roughly 800 billion in 2009. SS, Medicaid/Medicare, and other legally mandated spending (such as pensions, VA medical benefits, debt service), consumes about 61% of the budget. This does not include the military budget. There isn't a single program in the federal budget that does not deserve scrutiny and a visit from the knife. If you exclude SS, Medicare/entitlements, and DoD from this as 'sacred cows', you exclude 80% of the budget.

  As an aside to this, there seems to be a large number of people who believe that SS is running a surplus to it's 'trust fund' (or something similar). Technically it is true, FICA revenue outpaces SS expenditures when the columns in the ledger are compared. The reality is that all FICA revenue is spent every year, in it's entirety, and has been done so since day one. There is no trust fund, no savings account. At best, there is a ledger with 75 years of IOU's in it. The Social Security Administration is required by law to use its surplus to buy US government securities. The treasury takes the money from these security 'sales', and congress spends it. The federal government has been using this shell game to mask deficits for a long time, including Clinton's "surplus" years, which weren't really surpluses at all. The total debt of the United States has gone up every year but two in the last 75 years.

  The largest holder of U.S. Federal debt isn't China or Japan, it's the Social Security Administration. It's exponentially worse, financially and morally than the Enron/Wall-Street funny-money greed these politicians moaned and wailed about. It is the Republicans fault, it is the Democrats fault, and it is the American peoples fault for electing them and allowing this to happen.

The potential three thousand dead you mention wouldn't be collateral, they would be the intended target.

This plan is airtight. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

<quote>

<quote><p>We need someone with some sense running this show. Instead we have Michael Cherthoff.</p></quote>

<p>Actually, we have Janet Napolitano. Barack Obama replaced Chertoff with her as soon as he was inaugurated.</p>

<quote><p>Did you see this story from the beginning of the year: <a href="http://www.infowars.com/chertoff-linked-to-body-scanner-manufacturer/">http://www.infowars.com/chertoff-linked-to-body-scanner-manufacturer/</a> ? Cherthoff, while serving as a key government official, also runs a private consulting company one of whose clients is - the body scanner manufacturer.</p></quote>

<p>Yeah, that's pretty shifty. I'm glad the current administration, if equally incompetent, is at least less corrupt. As far as we know, that is....</p></quote>

  You don't know much about Chicago lawyers, do you?

"Mommy, I spilled my shake all over the sidewalAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGHGGHGHGHG"

Probably a Diablo RPG, with the various warriors, wizards, and rangers replaced with androgynous, spike haired teenagers wielding 10 foot long swords. In all seriousness though, Blizzard would be smart to stay within the zeitgeist of console online multiplayer games. As such, they would (re) implement battlenet and game features (bugs) to mirror the state in the original Diablo games.

Well, if his Dad, friends, neighbors in that area start inventing shit and altering electronics that are on a killing rampage, there is an alien spaceship buried at the bottom of this thing. Especially so if the name of the town is Haven.

"Raytheon is seeking to develop the suits to help the US military carry supplies......and claims that one operator in an exoskeleton suit can do the work of two to three soldiers."

At about 200x the cost of 3 soldiers. It's carrying supplies. It isn't the Bataan death march for christ's sake. You don't go out on a patrol carrying a giant case of ammunition with your weapon on your back.

  "It sure was nice the dude in the robot suit carried our rucks for the first 5 clicks before it broke down."

  "Yeah. Sucks we gotta hump these fuckers for the next 20"

  "Nah, we'll just put them in the humvee that was following him to supply the power for the suit."

You need another layer of tinfoil. If people are knocking off all the people who've 'figured out the lies', why do I still see the people who've exposed it to all us sheeple walking around still screaming their inane bullshit?

    Regardless of any logical information presented, it's all dismissed with a wave of the hand and "so they've gotten to you!". I know it's feeding the (paranoid) trolls, but the ensuing wall of text is cathartic to me.

  Since monday, I've learned that half the population of the world is an aeronautical engineer, rocket scientist, or has lived their entire life 1 mile from Cape or Vandenburg. "I've seen plenty of rockets in my time, I know a rocket plume when I see one". Well, I'm a brain surgeon, and I've seen enough brains to know an idiot when I see one.

  Just apply a small amount of logic and common sense, and you'll be rid of all the paranoid delusions you're suffering from. Once again, You couldn't possibly pick a worse place and time to secretly launch a missile. "No doubt it was launched from a sub or a ship" you say. I'm not sure if you've ever looked at a map, but the Pacific Ocean is a sorta large. Of the 60 some odd million square miles of it, they pick 30 miles off the coast of LA? Seriously? Launched from the ground, then. Once again, why? They have large secluded installations specifically made to do this kind of stuff.

    Launching ICBM's 30 miles off the cost of a country with thousands of nukes to 'show your muscle' is idiotic. It'd be like me walking up to a cop and firing a pistol a foot from his head 'just so he knows I've got a gun, too'. We don't need to launch jack shit to show the world we have them, we've had them for 40 years.

    The cameraman says he tracked it for 10 minutes after he saw it. Forget all the perspective stuff, a little bit of research about missiles tells you all you need to know. Medium range ballistic missiles and ICBM's only burn for a minute or two. Cruise missiles boosters only burn a handful of seconds, the rest of the flight is with a conventional turbine engine. Deltas are dropping the second stage 4 minutes after launch at about 400,000 feet (it's been out of visual for a bit at this point). The shuttle drops SRB's 2 minutes after launch at 153,000 feet. It's in orbit in 10 minutes. "That flicker at the back looks kind of like a rocket. Yeah, I think it is a rocket. Most likely." There's gobs of dusk and nightime launch videos on the net. Watch a few. It's not a flicker. It's an incredibly bright ball of fire, lighting up the entire sky (for a few minutes, not 10).

    As far as the eeeeevil government/military paranoia, "oohhh the military/government took so long to explain it, they must be hiding something!" Right, and if they came right out and said it wasn't a missile, it would be "oooh, they sure answered that quick! It must mean they already had the cover story prepared, since they were hiding something!"

I think that maybe if they wanted to avoid media coverage, they would probably not want to launch a missile 20-30 miles off the coast of LA during rush hour. The only way it could be less inconspicuous is if they announced it beforehand in the newspapers, on TV, and google bombing the time and location. Grand conspiracy theories always want their cake and eat it too. We are asked to believe that insidious organization 'x' is simultaneously so clever and devious it has orchestrated a massive and complex conspiracy, and yet is so incompetent and stupid it's left a string of obvious evidence that any joe schmuck on the internet can find.

Agreed. I'm not sure where all this 'everything must be explained in minute detail' thing started with scifi. It sucks. Hai guyz, it's not the force, it's just those wacky midochlorians!

JINX PUT MAX IN SPACE

I recall my bike-training days. Steering? barely. Breaking and/or controlling speed? ehhh, not really. Ability to gather information of what is ahead, potential problems, and decide a course of action quickly? No way. The ability to do these things simultaneously? Bahahahahaha!!! yeah, right.