Bulldrek v3.0

Cipher

To my knowledge, Mike's never claimed to be a documentarian. His business is filming persuasive essays. To criticize his pictures for highlighting only supporting evidence, and, in general, trying to persuade us lowly plebes is kind of silly. I think that walking onstage and accepting a "Best ...

Cipher

It's called 'acknowledging your sources,' 32. There're a shitload of directors out there with completely unoriginal ideas who are all too ready to claim that they're their own, but if you actually remember where those ideas came from and can implement them in such a way that it's true to the origin...

Cipher

Or you could just repeal the law which granted the U.S. Supreme Court judicial review. Remember - it's not in the Constitution!

Cipher

Every time that man's name appears in the news it only depresses me further.

Cipher

That's a little broad, don't you think? FDR's administration put the US on the right track after the Depression, and he could be considered on the left of the American political spectrum. Careful, Jong - the regulars on the BBS will tell you not to make crazy assertions like that around me. You'll ...

Cipher

I hear Halliburton has pretty high turnover.

...

(What? Too soon?)

Cipher

I couldn't help noticing the the word you edited out of that quote was the word "can't". :cute Yes - otherwise my reply wouldn't have made sense. :D I'm not sure what the purpose of that whole comment was, but it seems that you are saying a shift to the political left is always bad. Does ...

Cipher

If the Congress are more socialist/left-leaning, then I [..] see them changing something that's nothing but good for them. It follows as the night the day. Ipso facto and all that. Seriously, though: I am, as are we all I think, an ignorant Westerner who knows only what the news tells him. But I do ...

Cipher

Uh-oh: the pro-high-tech outsourcing party got buried. So long, improved standard of living!

Cipher

You know what always works? Without having to lie (too much) or scare anyone? Tell them you already have one. "Have you compared MCI's long distance rates with ...?" "I'm already an MCI customer." "Oh, you are?" "Yes. I have been for six months. Nice, low phone bil...

Cipher

Why not just call it the "Cain and 3278 Accuse Each Other of Not Reading Each Other's Statistics on Welfare, v1.2" and be forthright about it?

Cipher

That is officially one of the most sick and disturbing things I've ever heard. I wouldn't wish a torture like that on anyone. My heart goes out to you, for what it's worth.

Cipher

Hi.

I loathe RealPlayer, but I'm interested in what happens to you, Paul.

Mind telling me what happened, or could someone who saw the video summarize?

Cipher

For the record, Rev - I understand and expect that the money supply will fluctuate, even in the freest market. My main concern is that, when it does, it reflects the real state of what is being produced, traded and saved. When the federal government tampers with the interest rate - as it is free to ...

Cipher

The boom bust economic cycle has existed for at least several hundered years. Nations with metallically backed money have had thier economies crushed by changes in the prices of those commodities (China for example was devestated when the US went off the silver standard inflating thier currrency, S...

Cipher

ak404 wrote: Wouldn't revealing a nuclear weapons program that Israel will neither confirm nor deny only strengthen Israel's security via deterrence?

Dr. Strangelove wrote:Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world?

Cipher

The implicit, and false, assumption in this statement is that boom/bust cycles are a consequence of the unbacked monetary system, fluctuations in unbacked currencies are only one possible contributing factor to the business cycle. The boom bust economic cycle has existed for at least several hunder...

Cipher

Yes! Exactly. It's a tautology, like I said. Which means that it has no more value then paper, so your objections to going off the gold standard make no sense. Ah - now you misunderstand me (I hope not deliberately). (In all honesty, that kind of threw me for a bit. It's not at all what I meant to ...

Cipher

paladin2019 wrote: I guess I've been told. I prefer not having to go to war for venture capital.

Wait; what?

Cipher

people trade it and speculate in it because it has value But doesn't it have value because people trade it and speculate in it? Logically, Gold has no more inherent value then paper does. Value is an imaginary quality we assign to something based on it's usefulness to us. Yes! Exactly. It's a tauto...

Cipher

And here I thought changing the basis of a currency's value from a limited commodity to the issuer's production capacity was a good thing. It doesn't do anything to expand the amount of available credit in the system and therefore stimulate the establishment of new business enterprises. It doesn't ...

Cipher

No, I was explaining what you meant to Cash, who by his reaction I assumed thought you meant just that. I also think you are getting worked up over nothing. Sorry, I'm unclear. Is the "nothing" that I'm getting worked up over: (A) Your explanation to Cash (which I admit, getting worked up...

Cipher

Thanks for your answers thus far, everyone. I don't intend to go point by point and say, "Ha - that's already happened! Start packing, fatty!" as that wouldn't do anyone any good. But I'm glad people are thinking about it enough that there is some bright line, even if a distant one, which ...

Cipher

For those of you who haven't been following my sporadic posts on this and prior incarnations of Bulldrek, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am an anarchist. I believe that there is no legitimate function of government. I don't even believe there's anything that a federal government does that ...

Cipher

(A) The Matrix character is named "Cypher," after, I believe, a brand of audio mixing equipment.

(B) "Cipher" is an anagram for my last name.

(C) Any synergistic coincidence in being "a person without identity; a null value in the system" is solely my good fortune.

Cipher

DV8 wrote:
MooCow wrote:I seem to recall being required to show Photo ID before 9/11. Am I misrecalling?
Of course. Picture ID. Always.

Well, not always. But for a while.

Cipher

*bites tongue*

*swallows the first three comments that leap to his lips*

No. No, I guess there isn't. No compelling reason.

Cipher

Does Keynesian Economics have flaws? Yes. That doesn't mean it's entirely wrong, or even mostly wrong. And the reason that Keynes is still in textbooks today is because while he wasn't completely right, he was partly right. Spending is not the sole influence on the economy, but it IS the biggest on...

Cipher

When people spend more, people will save less, the banks will have to increase interest rates to attract new investors. I'm only an on-and-off visitor to the BBS, so pardon me if this sounds ignorant, but: are you an American? In the U.S., the fed funds rate, the interest rate which banks can charg...

Cipher

All right, let's look at some numbers. Cain, before I address some of the points in here, I want to offer an overarching comment: what you offer is a very specific scenario of where a flat tax might not work, not a reason why flat taxes won't work. I don't even think that the scenario is very reali...

Cipher

I'm a huge fan of the series. In fact, two years ago I attempted to translate the world into a D20 system, but didn't think I was doing it justice, so I stopped early on in the project. Really? As I understand it, d20 (or its predecessor, D&D 2nd ed.) is where Dragaera came from. Why do you thi...

Cipher

Just a flat income tax rate, (which would include interest as income.) You'd be taxing the same dollars twice, then. You'd be discouraging investment (in the same sense that investment is discouraged now by taxing interest and capital gains). The U.S. is already on track to catch up to where Japan ...

Cipher

3278 wrote:This is such a silly discussion. Everyone knows what <X> is ....

When has that ever been a sufficient criterion for ending a discussion on this BBS, a_e?

Cipher

I started out liking the Vlad Taltos series, but I started reading it a while ago. I'm just now paging through Issola , and I'm struggling, because the style just seems ... whitewashed on at this point. As if, at every miserable keystroke , Brust stopped and said to himself, "People compare me ...

Cipher

A Congressman's (or Senator's) willingness to let you own a firearm of any calibre is a pretty solid metric of how much he trusts you.

Cipher

Thank the phantom Christ no one's brought up the Depression yet.

Don't think that lets you off the hook, though; I've got the shotgun loaded and fire-ready next to the desk.

Cipher

I don't know as much about Edison, but I've been reading up on Tesla recently. Tesla was the one who actually invented much of what we depend on today-- the transistor, alternating current, the radio, and so on. Tesla lambasted Edison as a mere inventor, and not a genius. In Tesla's case, he did mo...

Cipher

News is a selective recreation of the facts surrounding a given event. By its very nature, it cannot be exhaustive: a total recreation of the facts would be the event itself, not a news report of the event. So what determines which facts you will select and which you won't? Bias. A headline of Bush'...

Cipher

I read the subject header and couldn't imagine what you meant, other than "mercenaries."

Cipher

And yet, that doesn't in any way contradict my original point that while there are always ups and downs, the overall level of individual and cultural freedom has done nothing but increase over the course of human history. . True. I didn't see the original discussion. What I presumed you meant, howe...

Cipher

Lots of quoting to start: I've never denied that the US has flaws, but I do feel that we are better now than we were before the civil rights movement, which in turn was better than before women's sufferage, which was better than slavery. ... the last of which was ended by the most gruesome war that...

Cipher

Crazy Elf wrote:You know, I'd really like to see what people would say if the protestors tear gassed and beat up the police rather than vice versa.

"Turnabout is fair play"?

Cipher

How about "loser pays court costs"?

"Well, Mr. Lardo McFatass, sorry that the jury ruled in favor of McDonald's instead of you. Here's a bill for our lawyers' fees for the last seven months."

Cipher

According to the news today, the coroner has ruled that the man died as a result of his injuries, not as a result of his hypertension or drug use. Or, as the coroner puts it: while the PCP and the enlarged heart certainly had a hand in tightening the noose, it was the act of physically struggling an...

Cipher

Yeah, even my extremist libertarian cop-hating friends think the cops used a reasonable amount of force.

Cipher

I believe, incidentally, that the problem that affects Snow Crash is the same problem that plagues Stephenson in other novels, such as Cryptonomicon - his inability to create a compelling villain. We're introduced to a wealth of cunning, complex, varied and utterly evil shit in the first half of the...

Cipher

Ancient History wrote:In the book, Juanita imitates Inanna. So would that make Hiro or Lagos Enki?

At the risk of sounding condescending - don't tell me it's going to be one of those English papers. Not everything has to have one-for-one symbology with everything else.

Cipher

I love Wal-Mart, but that should surprise no one.

Cipher

I'm not sure what all this nitpicky, hyper-rhetorical, "See? It's all a kind of force" is supposed to prove. Have I not been clear with what I mean when I say "the use of force"? I mean violence, organized enforcement, cops and courts. What are you folks hoping to prove? "We...

Cipher

There is no force in a small-scale cooperative effort, like a barn-raising or community theatre or a bowling league. Of course there is. It's just a matter of scale. All right. We're clearly talking about differing things, since you perform in or see theatre productions where the crew totes rifles ...

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Taking Up Arms: How Much is Too Much?

Re: Cyclical Freedom