Lurker > red sox 777

They're definitely colossal wastes of time.

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A legit Tea Party candidate (or perhaps Ron Paul) entering the general election would guarantee Obama victory, yeah. But I doubt anyone will actually decide to run, knowing the consequences (4 more years of Obama).

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I would say so, if you don't believe something as a result of faith you have the belief that it is not true. I think that's what you're asking.

What if you have faith that would cause you to believe something, but other factors were more convincing to you, leading you ultimately to disbelieve it?

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Well, I mostly meant the final 4. The others sort of got forgotten about.....

I mean, it's true that Santorum, Perry, or Bachmann would likely implement very different policies from Romney as president, and Romney's policies would likely be very similar to Obama's. But on the campaign trail, Santorum, Perry, Bachmann, and Romney favor basically identical policies, just with different rhetoric.

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You can not have faith in something. You can have beliefs that stem from faith.

Well in that case, do you have to believe something to have faith in it?

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Also, other than Ron Paul, I haven't noticed any major policy differences among the candidate. It's been a lot of posturing about who is more conservative. That's Romney's weak point because of his past history, so he has to compensate by making it appear that he's smarter/not crazy and can beat Obama. Of course he can't just come out and say he is smarter than Santorum/Gingrich or that they are crazy, which is the challenging part.

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Yes, the Republican Party is indeed divided into those wings. However, the Republican Party is very very good at falling in line, and you will see this come fall once a nominee has been chosen.

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Not if government took over the auto industry in those other countries too!

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Well, there is a story, don't know if it is real or not, about the Khan of the Bulgars who decided to convert from paganism to a monotheistic religion. So he invited religious experts from the Christians and Muslims to tell him about their faith so he could choose between them. In the end it came down to whether he had to give up drinking alcohol (to follow Islam) or give up his extensive harem (to follow Christianity).

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So what are we supposed to take from this message?

That God is free and sovereign. That he is not an automaton. That there is a big difference between following God and merely doing right.

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Also, Genesis 22 is shiver-inducing amazing. Especially after you read Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. It explores the difference between madness and faith, and Kierkegaard's conclusion is that there is no difference that could possibly be explained to another human.

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Genesis is the best. It's very different from you would expect, because the message is NOT that God will reward good people and punish evil people. It's more like, God is free to reward whomever he chooses.

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It's not like he can't get government assistance if he gets this $50 back.

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Congratulations to SuperNiceDog, Guru Winner, who was smart enough to pick
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And if she owes you money, just ask. Her needing to return the money is not conditioned her being friends with you.

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Congratulations to SuperNiceDog, Guru Winner, who was smart enough to pick
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You could sue her in small claims court, but it's probably not worth the hassle.

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What is he saying then?

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Don't quite know how to put or explain this but... I consider the purpose of regulation to be to protect people from choices they didn't make.

And that's not a good idea, because people are better at making choices for themselves than government.

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Hmm, I guess I would say that basically, regulation is evil but taxation is okay. As long as taxation is not applied to regulate- i.e. you can put in a progressive income tax, but you cannot put in a tax on a specific industry because the government does not like that industry.

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Indeed. Just look at what has happened to the airline industry as government has taken over.

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Congratulations to SuperNiceDog, Guru Winner, who was smart enough to pick
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Put him on SCOTUS when a seat opens up?

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Hmm, well it's not all in USD anymore, but most of its cash is still held in dollars and euros, both of which are especially bad when you consider that they have to do their accounting in yen.

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I guess Nintendo should pay a higher dividend. If they just did a special dividend of half their cash reserves, I don't think the market cap would fall by as nearly as much as shareholders would get cash. I think the market is discounting those cash reserves heavily because Nintendo has demonstrated over like 2 decades that it will not do anything with the money except let it sit in US dollars and inflate away. With $10B in cash reserves and only 3% inflation, that's $300M a year which is not at all insignificant.

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Yup, they've got massive profits and aren't sure where to put that money to use it seems. Though Nintendo is much more extreme- 80% of the company's market cap is in its assets, and 55% of the market cap is in plain cash (and the company has zero debt!).

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They've got something like 90B in cash reserves, perfect for buying Bank of America.

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Imagine this: Apple uses its cash reserves to buy out Bank of America, which it then renames the iBank. The iBank will feature much higher fees than competitors, but will use clever marketing to make customers feel they are cool and not giving their money to big evil faceless corporations.

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Congratulations to SuperNiceDog, Guru Winner, who was smart enough to pick
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In other news, Nintendo stock is now back above where they were before they announced their big losses for 2011. Yay.

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Congratulations to SuperNiceDog, Guru Winner, who was smart enough to pick
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George HW Bush = best president since Nixon.

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Congratulations to SuperNiceDog, Guru Winner, who was smart enough to pick
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Unfortunately, China isn't that dumb. Russia, likewise, already learned their lesson with the Soviet Union. Somehow it's only the US that has yet to learn from its past.

Because we won. The USSR lost. So the lessons for us and for the Russians were quite different. China is also different because it has never sought to be an expansionary world empire- until the past 2 centuries, Chinese empires always been arrogant enough to believe that China is the whole of the world that matters, so there was no need to go elsewhere.

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Yes, decriminalize all drugs.

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So if a condom breaks on a poor couple and they're forced to carry a kid into poverty (not a fate I'd wish on anyone), they can go screw themselves?

They assumed the risk. If you want to be 100% safe, don't have sex. This may seem almost absurd now, but this is just how humanity dealt with this scenario for thousands of years. It is still how we deal with this scenario for men even.

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It's funny how pro-life people talk about the sanctity of life and the fetus' health above all else, but when the woman travels to another state it's all good.

Well, the people of a state have the right to decriminalize whatever they want. (they do not have to right to criminalize whatever they want, under the US Constitution) The other state could make murder legal if it wanted to in theory, as long as the government there isn't the one doing the murders.

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Her decisions should be her own with regards to her own body.

But she is not just making a decision about her own body. She is also making a decision about the child's body.

Also, for non-rape cases, you already have made a choice by choosing to have sex. This is a choice that carries risk to it, that carries consequences. You make that choice at your own peril.

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I want an abortion welp better go live in another state/country and leave everyone I know behind, because it's legal over there. That seems like the most rational thing to do

You realize that's not exactly difficult in the US? It's the easiest thing to just travel to a different state. You wouldn't have to live there, just travel there once. And the good people of your home state that banned abortion will not feel like they have blood on their hands anymore.

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The problem with fiat currency is that it is prone to abuse, yeah. Pegging the money supply to the quantity of bullion mined may seem stupid, but at least it doesn't run the risk of being mismanaged by someone in government.

I don't think inflation is the worst of all evils though. If you get most of your income from working, you'll be fine. If you have debts with a fixed interest rate, you'll be happy to have inflation. If you have debts with a variable interest rate, it still doesn't hurt you as long as you are working or have non fixed-income investments.

It hurts you if you get your money from fixed income investments (or you are just sitting on a pile of cash that's not being invested). But the free market can deal with both of those pretty easily. Namely, you can choose to make different investments that are not fixed income! Or you can buy fixed income investments that pay a higher interest rate, which you will be able to get as the free market will force bond issuers to pay higher interest rates in an inflationary environment.

You lose transactions costs, which can be significant. But your wealth is not just being vaporized as it appears.

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The OT is God's book, as is the NT. No group of religious people has an exclusive right to it. Modern Jews and Christians both claim the OT as their own, just as Jews who decided to follow Jesus and Jews who decided not to in those times both claimed the scriptures as their own.

I suspect the reason why pocket New Testaments exist is that it is a lot shorter. And it covers what you need to know for Christianity, while the OT by itself does not. I think the Old Testament takes up around 75% or more of the total space in the Bible.

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And if you don't think Jesus wanted to continue Judaism, I suggest you read the New Testament, because it appears that you never have.

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Calling it a continuation of Judaism is a bit ignorant. Jesus basically told the Jews they had their perspective on God wrong and wanted to teach them a new way of seeing it. I'm not at all saying Jesus was a bad person, but the Jews saw this as a major threat to their religion, which it was... Jesus wasn't about "continuing" Judaism, he brought about a new theology based on love and forgiveness and everything... While in the OT people's attitude about God is that they should be "god-fearing" and he was always sending his angels down to smite people. When the Canon was being assembled many people opposed the OT from even being in it.

Jesus claimed that his way was the only true Judaism. Of course it's not possible for both to be right, but both claim to be right, and both claim the Old Testament as their scriptures.

And on the contrary, the OT canon was already well-established at the time of Jesus. They all agreed on it, at least that the 39 books in the current Protestant OT are canon. There were some minor disputes about a few additional books (the Apocrypha), but no one challenged the canon status of the 39 books in the established OT. The disputes that took place when the Christian canon was assembled centered on which texts to include in the New Testament.

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What changes?

Actually, I don't really want to waste time discussing that with you. But suffice it to say that early Christians saw their faith as a direct continuation of Judaism, and that has always been the main position in Christianity. If you actually read the NT, you'll see that it frequently quotes the OT, and it always treats it as the word of God. If the OT is not canon, the NT literally does not make sense.

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Except, you know, that Jesus explicitly said that it would be easier for Heaven and Earth to vanish than for the least part of the OT to become non-canon. Christianity is an extension, a continuation, of Judaism.

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Of course the Old Testament is part of Christianity.

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We should have a BCS system that no one understands determine everything.

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I imagine that regulation helps whoever owns the land it is now illegal to dump waste on. And hurts whoever has waste to dump.

But no one said that all regulations are categorically bad. Just most of them, especially the important ones that politicians really care about.

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If you seriously want to redistribute wealth, you can accomplish that in a much easier and more efficient way by simply taxing the rich more, and handing out the money to the poor. For the amounts of money we've been spending on stimulus every year we could end unemployment by fiat pretty easily. Every unemployed person between 18 and 65 gets a check for $15,000 in the mail every year, tax free. Compared to the massive funds being tossed around by the Treasury and the Fed in the name of stimulus, it wouldn't even be a huge amount of money.

If people who understand how the economy works choose regulations instead of direct redistribution.........it's probably because the regulation has a different real purpose!

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Are you legitimately telling me somebody who makes no money should vote for republican economic policy? These are the people that say "all poor people are just lazy". No offense but that is an absurd simplification.

Yes. Who do you think all the regulations we have are helping? Hint: who writes the regulations? And who pays them? Why do have just a few major banks that are colossal in size? Because regulation makes it difficult for smaller companies to compete. Regulation increases the barrier to entry and thus drives down competition.

People think regulation is about wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor, but it's not. Regulation is about increasing the barrier to entry. Lowering competition. Increasing profit among the fewer and fewer people on the inside of an industry. For example, Louisiana has a exam that people have to take to become a florist. The people who judge the exams are......existing florists in the area. Obvious conflict of interest there! And the exam, which is supposedly about quality control, really does not protect consumers at all, because consumers don't need a regulatory board to tell them if they want to buy a bouquet of flowers. They can see it for themselves as any buyer of flowers does!

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Didn't he sign into law the most comprehensive collection of changes to our healthcare system since Medicare was established in the first place? And he had to go through tenacious opposition to do it. I'm sure we all remember the Conservative/Republican/Tea Party/Old People Who Wanted Their Private Medicare Left Alone crusade against him during the healthcare talks.

What does the bill actually change? We are now required by law to buy healthcare from private insurance companies? I'm sure the 2000 pages of statute create a lot more complications than that, but I have no confidence that isn't what it ultimate boils down to. In which case it won't lower prices, because how can it? Now, you have to buy insurance......it's only logical that the price will go up, because you can't refuse.

This whole approach to doing things is really the worst of both worlds, IMO. We have loads of inefficient government regulation........but we still keep the private company at the bottom of it. Politicians can call it free market because we have a private company making money in there, but the problem for consumers is.......free markets are free because of competition. Capitalism is good because of competition. Competition is what drives prices down and drives innovation up. The company being private or making profits is not!

Here, we're killing the competition and keeping the greed. And then dressing it up in 2000 pages of regulations that probably direct the government to promulgate many many more thousands of pages of useless regulations.

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Not an expert on this, but I'd be pretty shocked if KJV was really one of the most accurate translations. It was translated around 1600.....I'm sure they did a great job with the resources they had, but we have much more access to original texts now, so it's be pretty astonishing if the modern translations were less accurate.

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The scary thing is that Apple's P/E ratio is only....14. It could go a lot higher from here and still not look like a bubble, except for the ridiculousness of the total market cap. For example, Amazon has a P/E of 139.

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AAPL 467B

JPM 144B
C 97B
BAC 87B
GS 56B
MS 38B
Total 422B

Take that, Wall Street! Your socialist, take government welfare to pass onto employee ways have failed you. Embrace the future of capitalism.

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Probably, but you'll probably get just as much value out of creating the sheet and not bringing it to the exam as you would from bringing it to the exam too. With so much info on there, there is precious little time to search through it during the exam. Though fortunately, the process of creating the notes will likely go a long way toward you remembering what's in them.

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Nah, only Gingrich would get destroyed. Romney would probably win in a close one, and Santorum is charismatic enough to lose in a close one. That's unless the economy continues recovering as fast as it did the past 2 months (unlikely), in which case we'll see the Dow hit a new all-time high by November and Obama has it locked up.

Though I suppose it is possible to artificially make the Dow hit an all-time high by just inflating the currency enough. That wouldn't help Obama in the election though.

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