Saffire

I'm still bruised up from the last time you roughed me up with your hooligan friends. :( And tacky silence is obviously the solution!

I need to vent, and this is my only place to do it, because I know Nick will come comfort me. If there's one person I'd love to punch in the teeth more than any other, it's this guy: I know, I know. I'm a non-violent anarchist. But he did win a Nobel Prize. And he is a douchebag. So if I ever run across him in public I'll temporarily set aside my principles for the "greater good". Sorry if that sounded statist of me. I'm still recovering.

I remember my mom holding me next to a window in the hall of our old house, and it was raining outside. I was probably less than 1. Then I remember my mom holding me while she was sitting on the couch, and I saw my dad calling her up to bed.

I don't like dogs. I know I'm going to get skewered for this, but I think they're loud, obnoxious, slobbery, smelly creatures that people believe are far more intelligent than they actually are. ;)

Money velocity is such a red herring. Nick's right, the second the economy starts to recover all the money the Fed printed will suddenly flood into the market and asset prices will be bid up dramatically. It'll be really fascinating to watch. And the only way the Fed can stop it is by selling bonds... but who's going to buy them? China is going to laugh in our face. Eventually income taxes will have to be raised, because you can't pay for universal healthcare, universal education, universal retirement, universal hankypank, etc without first dumping your global empire. This will go down in the history books as the most redneck nation in the history of the world. (pardon the term, if you happen to be a redneck who's reading this). ;)

I'll take both! I need the Hummer to take all my friends to the beach and a tank to defend it from pirates.

Last time I checked mine was a little over a foot. But that was years ago, so it's probably bigger now. I've been doing push-ups. Kidding aside, I've read that the avg penis length is a little under 6 inches. And before you ladies complain, here's an interesting factoid: human males actually have the biggest penis to body size ratio of any vertebrate.

Did somebody say penis? :stunned: Top Gear FTW!

This is a fantastic editorial about April 15, tax day. I love the language he uses, because it's absolutely accurate in describing reality as it is: http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=46

This site would be so much fun if it weren't for all the idiots who are looking for cyber sex from a "grrl". The second I tell them I'm a guy, they disconnect.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr4QBZfjtqs]YouTube - Cat Shit One Movie Trailer - The Animated Series[/ame] The Japanese have come up with another winning formula!

Double Post.

Adventureland: 3/10 Nothing you haven't seen before. Boy meets beautiful girl who wouldn't stand a chance of garnering any sympathy from the audience if she weren't hot, because she's a complete bitch. A few funny things happen during his summer job at a carnival. That's about it. Extremely boring.

Happy Birthday Emma! I want the slice of cake with Chris's eye on it... that would be so freaky. :D

LOL you're so original, I've never heard that one before. ;) Of course you can! Just bring me a more expensive present. :laugh3: It's weird, I don't feel any different than when I was 22.9999 ;) And I had some friends over and cooked dinner with them, it was delicious... then we watched a Cheech & Chong movie! Oh, thanks Mel for the Joshua Jackson pics! :P EDIT: Thanks Chuck! You'll always be my favorite Democrat. :D

Thanks so much guys!!! :D Ya'll are all so nice. I've had a great birthday so far!

Back to the original post: http://www.nypost.com/seven/04132009/news/regionalnews/phone_taxes_are_cell_hell_164180.htm Another example of a tax that hits poor people harder than the rich.

Chuck, has it ever occurred to you that shifting money around arbitrarily (at the point of a gun) makes that money... less accurate as a measure of value? That's like a scientist forcing air bubbles into a thermometer to make the mercury rise. And why are you so concerned about panic in the stock markets? Remember that when stock prices fall, the extravagantly wealthy become far less rich. In fact many ex-billionaires are now millionaires thanks to the recent halving of the value of our stock market. Liberty, equality, fraternity! Well not really the first bit, but we'll work with the other two. EDIT: Basically what I'm saying is, a great way to "equalize" wealth today would be to ensure higher interest rates. That way poor people wouldn't have to put their money at risk in the stock market to get a decent return, while the truly greedy would be taking on more risk because stock prices wouldn't have that artificial demand baked in. The reason stock prices get so high in the first place is because of all the workers who are told to contribute to a 401K... and remember that when it comes time for you to decide where to put your money, you'll consider the risk/reward ratio for both a savings account and a stock account. Make the reward greater for the savings account.

I'm the same way. I just can't dance in public. I tried it before, and it ended badly. Basically you get started and everyone's like "Ohh look at that white boy dance!" and then before you know it you're surrounded by Hepatitis-B hoochie mommas grinding against you and rusty hypodermic needles in your calves. And the cab ride home is just the icing on the cake.

Ok, good question Nick. Because there aren't any first-world anarchist territories today, I can only speculate how one would operate. But I'm fairly confident that it would have a banking system and a currency that operate within very rigid confines of the gold standard, or something similar. It's only logical that without a Federal Reserve, banks would be forced to compete based upon the good-faith their customers have in them (just like today), as well as whether they are considered sound (unlike today, where the Fed serves as the lender of last resort). So banks would advertise on TV that they carry a higher gold-to-loans ratio in their vaults than their competitors, or that they offer some sort of pooling of risk with other banks (similar to FDIC insurance in case one of the member banks fails due to a string of bad investments). The reason I mention this in relation to defense is this: If Canada expunges its government and suddenly becomes very prosperous, the US government would find this embarrassing and dangerous. So the first step to "embracing" Canada would be to try to tariff them out of existence (until Canadians themselves begin to plead for entry as a State). A president then might try to send in the military as a "security force" in much the same way we are occupying Iraq now. This would initially be funded by US taxpayers, but eventually US citizens would demand Canadian gold (like some US citizens are demanding Iraqi oil). Remember this would be the most prudent way to collect value from the Canadian people, because there isn't a census or a method for taxation in place already. I suspect this string of events would be well-considered by Canadian banks before it happens. In the run-up of political rhetoric coming from America, banks might employ various security measures to protect their gold-standard. It wouldn't surprise me if a bank announced it has employed the services of a group of nuclear weapons experts to either irradiate the gold so it is unusable, or build an ICBM for deterrence purposes. Existing security services would likely patrol the borders with America anyway, given the fact this land would now be privately owned and it is under threat from a statist society. Admittedly anarchist territories aren't good at the whole "violence" thing like governments are. But I'm sure the free market would come up with some fun deterrent measures besides nukes. Sort of like how the DEA has to be careful they're not about to walk into a minefield (literally) when they go to destroy a marijuana crop. ;) It's a really fun mental exercise.

Wealth is immaterial in anarchy because wealth isn't POWER. Power is having a military behind you. That's the government. Nick, the video you provided is great because of his comparison of government to a business - the government steals your money, so it can't determine if what it is doing is actually something that's in demand. Everything the government spends money on is a losing-investment... because if it were a profit-making investment, the private sector would have already done it. Government IS a business. It is a violently-backed monopoly on certain services: education, road-construction, defense, security.

I've concluded from reading this thread that the simplest way to bring the human race to extinction would be to somehow genetically alter women to be taller than men.

Ugh let me correct a few assumptions I'm seeing here (not just by Chuck, but Nick as well - damn you for not being an anarchist! I had our matching tattoo/mohawk appointments set up for this Wednesday!) 1. Rich people aren't a clan. In fact, rich people hate other rich people, because they jack up the prices on high-end real estate with bidding wars and make them wait longer to get that yacht or Bugatti. Rich people use the government gun to attack other rich folks' businesses. They use the court system to sue their enemies into oblivion. They befriend politicians to make sure certain laws are passed which hinder their rivals. They even vote Democrat en mass. Rich people are their own worst enemies. 2. Okay, so we've got to get rid of "tax havens" to prevent these assholes from not paying their fair share. The problem is, the tax havens can also be called something else - "sovereign states". So there's that pesky issue where you've got to invade them first, militarily, to make them jack up their taxes to be on-par with your own. 3. Upton Sinclair, a brilliant journalist. The Jungle would have been on the Oprah Book Club's reading list, if she were around back then. But let's face it, the whole process of packaging meat wasn't uniformly disgusting. That's like me writing a book about how terrible the bathroom is at the local 7-11, and Chuck Schumer setting up a task force to use taxpayer money to ensure clean bathrooms in all public places. Some meat packaging plants were perfectly fine. Others were disgusting. But what Upton Sinclair did was what he was supposed to do as an investigative journalist: write about it! Millions of people read his book, without having to be prodded by the government to do it. Anyone worth his salt would take a tour of a meat processing plant (or bother to know their local butcher personally) before actually buying meat from them. The shirt factory fire was a tragedy, true. But again, buildings were re-fitted to have doors that swing open from the inside, and fire emergency policies were taught to employees. In both these cases, government already existed. But did it save us from diseased meat and girls dying in infernos? No! It was only after the fact that government woke up and came around to writing new regulations. Same is true for 9/11/2001. Bush should have been impeached the next day. Instead he became a hero: "Oh save us from those evil terrorists, ye who are an instant-expert on the Middle East and extremism! Yesterday you might not have known a damn thing about Osama bin Laden, but today you are his worst nightmare!" Statists are always the ones who point to the problems of the past (Slavery!) and claim they have the solution - which generally includes this utopian idea that writing a new law will "prevent this terror from ever happening again!" But anyone with half a brain can see that "this terror" existed in tandem with the existence of the government. It just took a particularly emotional event to bring it to the fore.

If anyone's chatting with someone who claims to be a black person from Compton who's running from the cops, you're talking to Josh. Just a heads-up.

And the can of worms is opened... :popcorn: EDIT: I'm leaving my post like it is in protest of the fact that :popcorn: doesn't bring up the smiley icon that's eating popcorn. I'm in denial about it. *covers ears and las*