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No, the income tax was a bad idea from day one which is why it was purposely made illegal under the original US Constitution. I could probably write pages on why the income tax has caused a myriad of problems since it was enacted, but you can just as easily probably dig up the information on...

Here's the thread Tannin is referring to. The links to the article no longer work.

I'd say I'm already well below the average American's meat consumption. I'll get a pair of whopper juniors maybe every 3 weeks on average. That's the extent of my hamburger and fries fix. Outside of that, the only meat I eat is occasional meatballs with pasta and sauce, or meat otherwise used as...

I agree that taxing interest and capital gains is patently stupid if think about it for a while. If you get 3% on your savings account but the prevailing inflation rate is 5%, then you already lost 2% before you pay any taxes. Now if you have to pay perhaps a marginal rate of 33% on your...

Actually, having everyone pay the same is patently as unfair as a lot of the other schemes. Even without getting into the ability to pay, a lot of people will be paying for services they simply will never use. From a strictly fair standpoint, the best system is one where the user pays for...

Electronics Model Railroading (just making structures and detailing trains as I don't have room for a layout) Cycling Computers Trainsimming Railfanning (mostly subways) Lighting (both general and flashlights) Refrigeration (peltier experiments and such) Very occasional coin...

New York is the undisputed pizza capital of the free world. Maybe I'll get a pie at the local pizzeria and ship it to Indiana so Merc can see what he's missing. The Sicilian style is especially good.

Getting back to the main topic, I'm honestly not real passionate about any of these candidates. I like Huckabee's sales tax proposal, but his appeal to the fundamentalist wing means I probably disagree with him on just about everything else. McCain and Guiliani are too obsessed with terrorism to...

Somehow I think the fact that he's shorter than his wife might have something to do with that: I know it's a superficial reason, but Americans tend to vote or not vote for people based on superficial reasons.

Before you go ahead and invest in gold you might want to have a look at this post. The recent run on gold looks quite similar to what happened in 1976-1980. It was followed by a drop, and then 20 years where the price did absolutely nothing. We might be in for a repeat.

World's largest pool. This thing would probably take me four minutes to lap on my bike, and I don't exactly ride slow. It's basically an artificial lake, for lack of a better description.

And I give into my cravings for food more often as I should also. However, there's a huge difference between that and what we're talking about here. If I feel like having a bag of Doritos I can go out and buy it by myself. In fact, I had a bag last night, and some cookies also. Eating one bag...

Well, what else would you suggest? We've told people about condoms, birth control pills, probably a hundred other means of avoiding pregnancy, yet we still have large numbers of unwanted births. None of those other methods really get to the heart of the matter. For that matter, abortion is just...

Personally my views are that one shouldn't get pregnant by accident. In the absence of all else abstinence is a 100% effective even if less than attractive proposition. Getting a vasectomy isn't a bad idea either if you don't see children in your future, but still don't want to practice...

This book has some additional info on the subject.

No, they're sold for somewhat over bullion value or I'd be all over them. I pulled these figures off Google: iron: no idea of the amount of refined metal in existence but ~1 billion tons are produced annually copper: 338 million metric tons (amount produced since 1950) gold: 145,000...

The US bullion coins always have a face value way less than metal value. I suppose it's a way to keep from having to pay more for the coin than the metal in it is worth. I would guess a bunch of economists sat down and said the likelihood of platinum every falling under $100 an ounce was...

~$900 an ounce is what gold has been doing lately. Yes, a safe of sorts wouldn't be a bad idea. Even better is to somehow hide the safe by building it into a wall or crawlway. You can also get into gold buying gold funds, although I don't know how that compares to actually buying the metal...

Believe me Doug, I'm seriously considering buying either gold eagles, or even the genuine $20 gold pieces minted before 1933. I tried to talk my Dad into doing it when gold was $300 an ounce but he wasn't one to spend a lot of money at one time. I wish now I had bought some gold back then...

Same here. The coming bankruptcy of the federal government has been a topic of conversation for me for quite some time. After all, we owe ten trillion dollars. We just added an expensive prescription drug benefit to Medicare. We'll spend over a trillion dollars on the Iraq fiasco before all is...

Only thought that occurred to me during the entire video was how the hell can you feel something should be made illegal, and then not even be able to think of an appropriate punishment for it, as was the case with many of these people? Another disturbing thing was the number of times the word...

Absolutely. I was hooked from the first episode. It isn't the Disney cartoon like saga you might think it is, either. There are no scripts, and the producers just let nature run its course, even if that means some of the main characters go off to that big burrow in the sky.

I think what Merc is trying to say is that the medical sector should be run as a non-profit entity. Sure, the doctors and everyone else will continue to be paid a fair, market rate salary for what they do, same as today. What would be different is you won't have shareholders and rich CEOs to pay...

This really isn't about the stock market. In fact, the focus on the DJIA is really what hurt us. So long as the market was rising, which it was for a long time, people assumed the economy was hunky dory when it wasn't. The stock market can be made to rise or fall by the actions of a few large...

Regarding China, they're doing their own version of selling the family jewels for a night on the town. The price for their recent shift to being the world's workshop is enormous environmental damage and a looming public health crisis. Already cancer rates are on the rise due to the horrible...

The markets in the Far East and Austrailia tanked yesterday (that's early AM today US hours). The US markets open at 9 after being closed yesterday for Martin Luther King day. Look for a black Tuesday. Really black as in black hole black. The markets will lose over 10% before the day is out. I...

The Roman Empire fell, the world went on. We're certainly approaching the end of the easy credit, living beyond your means way of life. People are going to have to do what I've been doing my whole life-paying my credit card bills in full each month. And actually only replacing things when they...

That's exactly why the space program hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. When I was younger, I actually wanted to be an astronaut. Yes, me. The same person who adamantly refuses to step on an airliner today. I would have gone without a moments hestitation to Mars, or the moons of Jupiter...

Anyone here actually watch Meerkat Manor? I'll admit I got hooked. It's basically a soap opera where the main characters are 1 foot tall and furry.

The concept of health insurance is really what ruined the medical industry. We should go back to the user pays model which once existed. Once we do, medical costs will drop dramatically. Right now hospitals can pad their bills and the patient won't care since they're not paying. Try that if...

I almost went ballastic when I read about the "relief" package. Why should people who lived within their means bail out idiots who used every dime of equity in their homes to buy big-screen TVs, vacations, pools, game consoles, and other mostly unnecessary consumer crap that they couldn't...

I don't know how useful this will be, but there's an open source project to hack the firmware on certain Canon cameras called CHDK.

That's exactly the point. I think more people would support these programs if they actually worked as claimed. Case in point was LBJs $4 trillion (last I checked) "War on Poverty". It turns out the major beneficiaries of years of welfare/Medicaid spending were the service providers, especially...

It's probably not a bad idea for government to do some things to level the playing field a bit. For example, everyone should have access to decent education and transportation, whether or not they can afford tuition, or buy a car. So public education and public transit are good things to spend...

Agreed on all counts. I did vote in the last two presidential elections but not in the last two years. In fact, I'm probably not bothering to vote any more unless I'm particularly excited by one of the choices. IMHO we would probably do just as well selecting someone at random from the general...

200 GB in my main machine, 180 GB in second machine, but I'm probably going to move the 100 GB to the main machine. Other than that, an assortment of mostly small (20 GB or less, mostly way less) drives in several spare machines I found by the curb and refurbished. Total is definitely under...

McCain would be good provided he adopts Huckabee's tax plan (sales tax in lieu of the income tax). As for a wave of misery hitting the US soon, it's probably a given. You and Tannin may call it a readjustment of living standards. I call it a recession. I personally welcome it regardless of what...

Being that 2-platter drives have always represented the sweet spot in $ per GB, this would mean 800GB to 1 TB drives for about $79 to $99. Now that I've started putting some movies on my computer, I can see how fast hundreds of GB of storage can go. My 200GB drive is roughly half full. At best...

I share those sentiments. We're definitely headed for a major recession. It might turn into a full-blown depression if the Hildabeast gets into the White House.

Probably sometime this year according to this. A lot depends upon how many people actually have a need for something that huge. My guess is not many. Actually, 640GB should be enough for anybody. ;-) Personally, I'd rather see research focusing on making 500GB $100 solid-state drives than...

I didn't realize it's been that long but it has. It's also probably been at least 2 years since I posted at SR. I was there recently just to check if I had any PMs. The place is practically unrecognizable. The fact that StorageForum is still a viable community after 6 years, despite its small...

Not a chance-the integrated graphics on his old machine wouldn't have been up to it. Also, take those minimum system requirements with a grain of salt. MSTS will run, but barely, and with detail levels turned way down. The program has evolved greatly since it's inception. Add-on routes and...

Assuming this is true, then SSDs have already surpassed capacity of magnetic disks. Of course, there's still that pesky little cost per GB factor, but that will fall soon enough. I think $2 per GB is probably realistic sometime this year as we move to smaller process sizes. That's also the...

Any difference between any of the HD formats versus standard DVD playing in a player with a 1080 line upconverter? My brother borrowed The Day After Tomorrow. In all honestly on my mom's 1080p 42" TV it looked pretty close to HD, and that's on a player without upconversion. It is on a dual-layer...

While we're on the subject is there any speed difference in ordinary use between this processor and a similar dual-core? Or for that matter a single core? How many applications are actually multi-processor aware? I'm curious because for a lot of tasks my brother's new Athlon 64 x2 4000+ didn't...

Go ahead and buy it. I don't see anything much better than either the MH-C9000 or the Eneloops on the horizon. The MH-C9000 is a great charger. There may or may not be a bump in Eneloop capacity this year. Even if there were, it would probably only be to 2100 mAh, a mere 5%. I think NiMH...

Well, 2007 was marginally better for me than 2006. And up until 2007 all my years were getting progressively worse since at least about 1982. I'll take marginally better over worse any day. Now let's hope the trend continues in 2008. Don't get me wrong. Just so you don't get the wrong...

Here's what our house looked like this year: Sorry about the blurriness-this camera doesn't handle low light conditions well. Also, the sodium vapor streetlight right in front of our house tends to overwhelm the display. I've had larger displays, but this is the first all-LED one, and...

UPDATE: All the parts came this week and I put them together. Unfortunately, the power supply was DOA so I had to use the one from my mom's system to set up the machine. XP installed fine, everything works. The only issue is that XP only sees anywhere from 2.75 to 2.93 of the 4GB of RAM. I...

Somehow I knew this would be devastating to you when I first read about it a couple of days ago. ;) Now she's going to end up with a post-pregnancy fat body just like Britney. :( Oh, the horror....