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InternetJunky posted:So what are the savings after you factor in any increase in crime that results from withholding aid from desperate people? Depends, what's the cost of a bullet?
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 02:14 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:21 |
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Leon Einstein posted:Give a man a meal and feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Providing their basic needs doesn't teach them anything. They just have to suck it up and work hard. Everybody can be a millionaire in this country if they just put enough sweat and effort into it. Pretty much, although they still want to try their hardest to make sure no one else gets a fishing rod because they've already got theirs.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 06:53 |
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So let's say gas prices go to record levels over the next 6 months or so, which they definitely may. To be completely and totally fair, how many people of a particularly liberal bent will make vague statements about how "The oil companies are trying to do their best to make sure Obama isn't re-elected"? I'm not making a South Park-esque statement about how all sides are equally bad because I don't at all believe such a thing but I do believe I'll hear that statement from at least one or two people if there's a ridiculous spike.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 08:05 |
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90% of people are dumb. Can't be helped.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 08:32 |
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Incorrect Username posted:Pretty much, although they still want to try their hardest to make sure no one else gets a fishing rod because they've already got theirs. More like they want a poo poo ton of fishing rods, even though a reasonable person only needs one.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 15:31 |
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Leon Einstein posted:More like they want a poo poo ton of fishing rods, even though a reasonable person only needs one. Actually, in the current system they own 99 out of every 100 fishing rods and pay everybody else to fish using their rods, then keep the fish and make the people use their wages to buy back the fish they caught. Also, in order to be qualified to fish using their rods, you have to go into debt and show a special piece of paper proving it. babies havin rabies fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Mar 1, 2012 |
# ? Mar 1, 2012 15:48 |
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Jesus H. Tapdancing-Christ. I just had my first run in with a rabid Ron Paul guy (I can only surmise he was a Ron Paul supporter because he kept mentioning gold) on Facebook. They sound so...so reasonable at first. I don't know what just happened. It was in response to that stupid Gas Pump Post-It, and we were talking about the source of the price hikes when... Craziness Ensues posted:Him I know I fudged some of the main points and made a few mistakes on the way, but holy gently caress, that end. I'm still in shock.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 19:55 |
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When someone says "oil is NOT a finite resource" you should just back away slowly.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 20:01 |
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So oil is literally infinite?
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 20:02 |
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I am absolutely confounded with his argument that gas prices aren't rising because they can be indexed against the price of gold. The price of gold has also skyrocketed, so his point doesn't work at all.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 20:08 |
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Chunk posted:I am absolutely confounded with his argument that gas prices aren't rising because they can be indexed against the price of gold. The price of gold has also skyrocketed, so his point doesn't work at all. The best part is that even if he is correct, it is only by mere coincidence that he was able to correlate the two time periods because the price of oil does not track the trending price of gold at all.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 20:12 |
Kro-Bar posted:So oil is literally infinite? Don't you know that oil is really the product of bacteria and that there is an inexhaustible supply of it?
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 20:13 |
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Armyman25 posted:Don't you know that oil is really the product of bacteria and that there is an inexhaustible supply of it? Didn't a US senator once say something ridiculous like this?
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 20:16 |
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Kro-Bar posted:So oil is literally infinite? Some people actually think that, yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin#Siljan_Ring.2C_Sweden
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 20:39 |
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"globalwarminghoax.com" sounds like a pretty legitimate site to me!
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 21:06 |
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zeroprime posted:Some people actually think that, yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin#Siljan_Ring.2C_Sweden to be fair, there are some legitimate hypothesis on bacteria in the crust creating hydrocarbons. No serious scientist is claiming that all, most, or even a large quantity of it was made via these processes.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 21:50 |
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This seems to be a great, comprehensive, and mostly unbiased primer on the history of oil and what we can expect. I haven't read through it all, but it has a lot of the information I've picked up from other places. http://oildepletion.blogspot.com/ It doesn't address that one crazy dude's adherence to supply and demand curves and gold, but those should be pretty easy to refute. Is there a convenient way to find data on gold price and oil prices? It should be easy to import them into excel and divide one by the other. EDIT - Might as well add my own crazy political rant: The US consumes around 19 million barrels of oil a day. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption The Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, the most likely untapped source for a productive source for oil in the US, may have as much as 9.2 barrels of extractable oil or as little as 600 million barrels, with a probable average of 3.5 billion. That works out to 484 days of oil, 31 days of oil, but probably around 184 days of oil at current consumption rates. That's predicting absolutely no growth in demand for energy in the US for a country just barely pulling out of a massive recession. http://www.anwr.org/Background/How-much-oil-is-in-ANWR.php As of 2006, Chevron (yes that Chevron) was saying that the world consumed two barrels of oil for each new barrel that was discovered. The source I have quoted it from Financial Times, Feb 2006, but I can't access it directly. The May 15, 2006 edition of Business Week repeats that statistic, 2:1. Exxon Mobil has made similar statements, and Goldman Sachs has this to say about the future of oil companies: quote:The great merger mania is nothing more We've already hit peak oil, we are just currently eating into the massive surplus we accumulated in the years when discovery outpaced consumption. We've been eating into that reserve for the past 40 years - new oil discoveries are in smaller amounts of of lower quality than previous discoveries, and they're fewer in number too. Consider that we as a species have burned through 4 billion years worth of crude in the course of two centuries... it will take hundreds of millions of years for new oil deposits to form, sink into the earth, get liquified by heat and pressure, and percolate up into oil traps that we can get at easily. Whatever the source of oil may be, it is not "renewable" in any reasonable sense of the word. DarkHorse fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Mar 1, 2012 |
# ? Mar 1, 2012 23:03 |
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NatasDog posted:Someone reposted Petey's D&D thread on gas prices from March of last year on their blog at http://webewizards.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/repost-why-is-gas-so-loving-expensive-the-answer-may-surprise-you/, but it does a pretty good job explaining what and who is responsible for the ridiculous prices of gas. I linked it to a buddy of mine who posted the post-it note on the gas pump to his facebook earlier. Thanks for this. It goes back over some articles I've already read but facts like the following are mindblowing Matt Tiabbi posted:from 2003 to July 2008, the amount of money invested in commodity indices rose from $13 billion to $317 billion
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 23:25 |
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The price of oil was much more closely pegged to the price of gold before the US went off the gold standard, and varied much more after moving away from the gold standard.
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# ? Mar 1, 2012 23:27 |
God I hope I'm long, long dead before the Oil Wars start.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 00:28 |
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The oil wars started a long time ago.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 00:29 |
euphronius posted:The oil wars started a long time ago. I suppose, I just mean the domestic aspect of a very bad shortage, the riots and pillaging and all that fun stuff.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 00:31 |
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Ugh. This is the link they're discussing, which is gross for other reasons.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 01:58 |
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My buddy James and me (green) are having a discussion that started with Breitbart but somehow found it's way to voter ID laws and welfare. Anyhow, I think I've held my own pretty well but if someone could point me to a few resources on why voter ID laws are effectively poll taxes and why people aren't living the high life on welfare (along with any other points I've missed) I'd appreciate it. By the way, James grew up in a wealthy suburb of a major U.S. city. If he sounds privileged and whiny about poor people, it's because I suspect he is. I'm trying to get him to see the other side. Xarthor fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Mar 2, 2012 |
# ? Mar 2, 2012 01:59 |
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ACORN had to, by law, register EVERYONE that came along. Even if a person wrote down that their name was "A Fry Guy" from "6969 Your Mother's Butt Way". By Law they would have to take that registration form and file it.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 02:17 |
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just a reminder, don't get into twitter fights with people, everyone comes out as a loser, including myself. Debating health care was not worth it for 140 characters.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 02:32 |
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DarkHorse posted:That works out to 484 days of oil, 31 days of oil, but probably around 184 days of oil
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 02:34 |
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PerniciousKnid posted:Er, what?
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 02:36 |
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myron cope posted:I looked at that for a long time and finally decided that was max/min/probable amounts of oil. Maybe I'm wrong though. Pretty sure that's what he's going for.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 04:40 |
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In case you wanna go the image rebuttal route:
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 04:42 |
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Xarthor posted:My buddy James and me (green) are having a discussion that started with Breitbart but somehow found it's way to voter ID laws and welfare. It doesn't matter what the cost is, anything that forces you to pay for something you otherwise wouldn't in order to vote is a vote tax. For reference, when vote taxes got banned, they were as low as 2 cents.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 05:11 |
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The larger issue with voter ID's is actually a simple record keeping error. NPR has been doing stories across the country on this for two years, and it's loving ridiculous the number of Americanss that simply do not have a birth certificate or a social security number. You're talking about primarily elderly or extremely rural people. Something as simple as a misspelling of a common name on "official" paperwork can literally gently caress you over for life. It's late and my google-fu is weak, nut here's one report: quote:In most states with voter ID laws, citizens must present birth certificates to obtain new photo IDs. Seniors and those born in rural areas, in particular, face a difficult time meeting the requirement because birth certificates weren't regularly generated in the 1930s and earlier. And many of these people were delivered by midwives, who often improperly spelled babies' and parents' names on birth documents. $200 to fix some bumfuck records is tantamount to a poll tax. The figures I have seen range from 300,000 to 3.1 million Americans falling in to this gap. chesh fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Mar 2, 2012 |
# ? Mar 2, 2012 06:36 |
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chesh posted:The larger issue with voter ID's is actually a simple record keeping error. NPR has been doing stories across the country on this for two years, and it's loving ridiculous the number of Americanss that simply do not have a birth certificate or a social security number. You're talking about primarily elderly or extremely rural people. Something as simple as a misspelling of a common name on "official" paperwork can literally gently caress you over for life. Holy poo poo. Do you have sources for the 300k or 3.1m figures?
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 07:36 |
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THE GAYEST POSTER posted:ACORN had to, by law, register EVERYONE that came along. Even if a person wrote down that their name was "A Fry Guy" from "6969 Your Mother's Butt Way". By Law they would have to take that registration form and file it. I also like to explain why that law exists. A republican group had been going around poor neighborhoods, helping likely voters with their registration paperwork and even offered to submit it for them. They then took all those registration forms and trashed them. Guess who got a big surprise on election day when they showed up to vote!
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 08:35 |
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I also like to explain why that law exists. A republican group had been going around poor neighborhoods, helping likely voters with their registration paperwork and even offered to submit it for them. They then took all those registration forms and trashed them. Guess who got a big surprise on election day when they showed up to vote! That organization still exists under a different name.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 08:52 |
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I also like to explain why that law exists. A republican group had been going around poor neighborhoods, helping likely voters with their registration paperwork and even offered to submit it for them. They then took all those registration forms and trashed them. Guess who got a big surprise on election day when they showed up to vote! Wow I can't believe I've never heard of this! Could I get a link?
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 12:48 |
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Play posted:Wow I can't believe I've never heard of this! Could I get a link? http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/14/politics/main649380.shtml http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/14/nevada.registration/index.html But then ACORN did the same (according to this article that is in no way completely made up) http://biggovernment.com/pgeller/2009/10/07/acorn-throws-out-republican-voter-registrations/ Z-Magic fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Mar 2, 2012 |
# ? Mar 2, 2012 12:59 |
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chesh posted:The larger issue with voter ID's is actually a simple record keeping error. NPR has been doing stories across the country on this for two years, and it's loving ridiculous the number of Americanss that simply do not have a birth certificate or a social security number. You're talking about primarily elderly or extremely rural people. Something as simple as a misspelling of a common name on "official" paperwork can literally gently caress you over for life.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 13:22 |
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I assume by this point you've all heard about this guy who got a crazy forwarded political email from his family! (Though he thought it was deliciously funny and forwarded it along!) quote:(CNN) -- Montana's chief federal judge has offered his apologies for forwarding a racist e-mail aimed at President Barack Obama. The judge also initiated a judicial misconduct investigation against himself.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 13:43 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:21 |
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ThePeteEffect posted:Holy poo poo. Sorry, I may have conflated or confused numbers. It was late! In the linked NPR article is states that 3.2 million Americans have no form of photo ID, based on this study: http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/voting_law_changes_in_2012 Other articles discussing that study say that it's 5 million people who will be affected by the new voting laws. 5 million people who voted in 2008 will either have to jump through crazy hoops or be unable to vote in 2012. The 300,000 figure was gleamed from this link: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x843658 But I can't find the original NPR link they are referring to.
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# ? Mar 2, 2012 14:49 |