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 Waaagh_Gonads wrote:
I think that the US needs someone who is going to try and make ends meet financially.

A country cannot just keep running deficits.
Eventually it all falls in a heap like it has in Greece and there simply won't be enough money in the world to save you.

exactly. what dont people understand about $16 TRILLION (16 thousand thousand thousand thousand Dollars)?

 jordanis wrote:
presidential rankings would be based on their approval rating, which would be a fair way of assessing most popular (and more successful, because you dont get popular being unsuccessful, which is a mystery of Obama, but thats something else)

Popular doesn't mean "good". Bush I was a great President, but he was also a 1 term President because he was unpopular.

 jordanis wrote:

how does my criteria of "OWNED a business, successful or not" make all presidents business owners?

Because your understanding of ownership plainly has nothing to do with actual ownership.

I could have said "You're making gak up." but that would have been uncouth.

 Waaagh_Gonads wrote:

Eventually it all falls in a heap like it has in Greece and there simply won't be enough money in the world to save you.

Or, more importantly, you.

what is your definition of ownership? mine is what you see in the dictionary: " To have or possess as property" in that definition everything i have said is the truth
YET AGAIN you attack me without actually proving me wrong, only SAYING I am wrong, with no information to back up your claim, when every one of my claims can be factually backed up. STOP attacking me and legitimately prove me wrong, cite information, give me links, i did, why can't you?

 jordanis wrote:
what is your definition of ownership? mine is what you see in the dictionary: " To have or possess as property" in that definition everything i have said is the truth

That's a circular definition if there ever was one.

how? its pretty straight forward to me: if you dont possess or have the property/capital/whatever you dont own the business.


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would you people please stop just saying "your wrong" without providing proof? thats like saying "that woman is a witch!" because she has a wart on her nose. your proving nothing and its not a valid attempt at debate.

 jordanis wrote:
what is your definition of ownership? mine is what you see in the dictionary: " To have or possess as property" in that definition everything i have said is the truth

I own everything I say I own, awesome.

 jordanis wrote:

YET AGAIN you attack me without actually proving me wrong, only SAYING I am wrong, with no information to back up your claim, when every one of my claims can be factually backed up. STOP attacking me and legitimately prove me wrong, cite information, give me links, i did, why can't you?

No, I think I'll keep attacking you because: 1. It is fun. 2. You can't defend yourself. 3. You probably will not accept any reasonable standard of proof.

Word to the wise: Citation does not replace argument.

I was simply poking fun at the horrible definition, not at the content of your posts. Definitions that send back to almost identical terms are bad definitions. Since property/ownership is a legal term, you should check the legal definition.

You have ownership to what you can claim the three rights of fructus, usus, and abusus, or in layman terms, the right on the product of that thing (like the young of a beast), on it's use, or on it's disposition, either by modification or destruction.

That's a definition.

citation doesnt replace argument, of course, but it reinforces and validates claims, and you twisted what i said, i didnt say "to allege to have or possess as property" your the one incapable of an actual defense, your claims are empty and your argument is weak. you claim my information was wrong, but do not prove it, you say my definition of ownership is wrong, but do not give a better one, you continue to use irrational conjurations and twists of my statements to back up your convoluted argument which has no basis in reality.


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 Kovnik Obama wrote:
I was simply poking fun at the horrible definition, not at the content of your posts. Definitions that send back to almost identical terms are bad definitions. Since property/ownership is a legal term, you should check the legal definition.

You have ownership to what you can claim the three rights of fructus, usus, and abusus, or in layman terms, the right on the product of that thing (like the young of a beast), on it's use, or on it's disposition, either by modification or destruction.

That's a definition.

and your definition even further backs up my argument, Thank you.

Wow...Romney getting hammered for not mentioning Afghanistan in his acceptance speech....

 jordanis wrote:
citation doesnt replace argument, of course, but it reinforces and validates claims...

No it doesn't. If X is wrong 7 billion people can cry out to the contrary, but it will still be wrong. Citation is an academic circle jerk, especially given that there's like 5 academics in the modern world that have had original ideas.

 jordanis wrote:

....and you twisted what i said, i didnt say "to allege to have or possess as property" your the one incapable of an actual defense, your claims are empty and your argument is weak.

Wait, weren't you the guy talking about supplying citation when refuting points?

Either way, I never said what you're quoting me as having said.

Poor form at best.

 jordanis wrote:

you claim my information was wrong, but do not prove it, you say my definition of ownership is wrong, but do not give a better one, you continue to use irrational conjurations and twists of my statements to back up your convoluted argument which has no basis in reality.

1: You haven't presented any information outside your beliefs. That you believe you have is a big problem.
2: Proof in social science is not generally "proof" least of all when the initial statement comes from Wikpedia.
3: Its nice of you to use big words that you likely don't know the meanings of, it makes i easier for me.

 dogma wrote:

 jordanis wrote:
what is your definition of ownership? mine is what you see in the dictionary: " To have or possess as property" in that definition everything i have said is the truth

I own everything I say I own, awesome.

i didnt say you own everything you say you own, where did you get that?

1: i have presented information outside of my beliefs (huffington post article) and proved it incorrect and to contain falsifications.
2: wikipedia is only considered an innacurate because SOME documents can be altered, many of the more controversial topics are locked and my only be edited by wikipedia employees. in almost every, according to Dummies.com (http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/is-wikipedia-reliable.html) wikipedia is reliable, but one should be wary and check the sources (i did just that) when using it as a source.
3: i use big words because i do know the meaning of them, if you think i am using them wrong, you must not know their definition, and that is not my problem.

my entire argument was that the best rated (by popularity) Presidents at one time before their Presidency owned a business, big or small, successful or not. i proved exactly that, now if you want to rip my argument apart for not proving something that i wasn't intending to prove, go ahead, but that would be irrelevant and like this argument person 1:"apples are good." person 2:"no, because oranges." person 2's argument is both irrelevant to person 1 and incomplete. now go ahead and claim that i am person 2 and make a fool of yourself.

 jordanis wrote:

 dogma wrote:

 jordanis wrote:
what is your definition of ownership? mine is what you see in the dictionary: " To have or possess as property" in that definition everything i have said is the truth

I own everything I say I own, awesome.

i didnt say you own everything you say you own, where did you get that?

1: i have presented information outside of my beliefs (huffington post article) and proved it incorrect and to contain falsifications.
2: wikipedia is only considered an innacurate because SOME documents can be altered, many of the more controversial topics are locked and my only be edited by wikipedia employees. in almost every, according to Dummies.com (http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/is-wikipedia-reliable.html) wikipedia is reliable, but one should be wary and check the sources (i did just that) when using it as a source.
3: i use big words because i do know the meaning of them, if you think i am using them wrong, you must not know their definition, and that is not my problem.

my entire argument was that the best rated (by popularity) Presidents at one time before their Presidency owned a business, big or small, successful or not. i proved exactly that, now if you want to rip my argument apart for not proving something that i wasn't intending to prove, go ahead, but that would be irrelevant and like this argument person 1:"apples are good." person 2:"no, because oranges." person 2's argument is both irrelevant to person 1 and incomplete. now go ahead and claim that i am person 2 and make a fool of yourself.

1. Yeah, the sideboob post. They're not that good. Very poor journalism, very opinionated. Proving them wrong should be like proving fish breathe water.
2. You presented ONE poll out of the several polls listed on your article. Whether or not Wiki is accurate is irrelevant if you present lopsided information.

 Jihadin wrote:
Well. In a business sense. I see bringing back US troops from Europe (except Ramstein), Middle East (except Kuwait), Asia (most of the troops there), Bosnia and Kosovo, and Africa. Drawdown the additional brigades per Army division. A couple of carrier fleets get mothballed.

Seal the US borders from illegal immigration.

Increase NGP, oil and coal. Install solar farms in the desert, wind turbines and tidal turbines.

...that be a good start.

A good start that doesn't actually have a measurable impact on the economy and takes decades to do.

Sideboobs are awesome.

 whembly wrote:
... I was... is it that obivious?

You're a lot more fun when you're sober, Whembly.

Just saying.

Mind you I'm probably no fun at all right now, spent about eight hours in a water park, I'm mildly sunburned and deeply sore, and it'll probably take at least one more shower before my hair gets back to being soft again.

 Melissia wrote:

 whembly wrote:
... I was... is it that obivious?

You're a lot more fun when you're sober, Whembly.

Just saying.

Mind you I'm probably no fun at all right now, spent about eight hours in a water park, I'm mildly sunburned and deeply sore, and it'll probably take at least one more shower before my hair gets back to being soft again.

EIGHT hours at the h20 park! Daang... I'd be crispy by then...

I should probably be as wlel, but I used several layers of sunscreen.

I'm white as the facepaint in my signature though, so I'm surprised I wasn't burned more.

 jordanis wrote:

3: i use big words because i do know the meaning of them, if you think i am using them wrong, you must not know their definition, and that is not my problem.

Really? The guy that can't be bothered to capitalize is going to pretend he has a superfluous grasp of the English language.

We're done here.

 whembly wrote:
Didn't know where to stick this...

Romney got his bounce...
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

We should see something similar for Obama later on in the week.

Its Rasmussen, which has been tracking with a strong Romney lead the whole campaign. Most every poll is showing basically unchanged polling results before and after the convention, so there really hasn't been a bump. This is supported by the ratings for the convention, which were down about 30% on 2008.

It's kind of confirming the overall campaign story for both sides - static.


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 whembly wrote:
But... the question is... do we even HAVE a formal fed budget?

Yes. You're getting confused with the failure to pass a new budget each year. When that happens you get spending capped at last year's budget, while various bits of spending have their sunset clauses cut off.


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 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
IIRC for the last 3 years Congress has basically had 'continuing resolutions' which means keep doing what you did last year.

So basically a holding pattern rather than bold decisions, or indeed any decisions at all. And that comes back to the inability of the two parties to work together.

It's in part the inability to work together, but also because no-one wants to take ownership for the gak sandwich financial situation the federal government is in. Whichever party passed a budget that's halfway plausible would have to have a massive deficit, and then the other side could just hammer them over that deficit.

No congressman wants to go back to his district having voted for that. So instead you get continuing resolutions.


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 Jihadin wrote:
How far can one regulate business to where its not profitable for the owner/owners. I do not blame if businesses move to other countries to avoid spending 90% of their time ensuring every regulations is followed continously.

Its one of the myths of that free market thing* politicians made up that regulation is automatically anti-business. Regulation and government authority is essential in ensuring market places work for both the consumer and the business. Think of standardising weights and measures. Think of how airlines work within a timetabling schedule set by government authority, so they don't have to keep in constant communication with other airlines to make sure they're not accidentally putting their planes in the same places at the same time.

And then look at the only banks in the world that maintained profits during the GFC - they're here in Australia. And they remained profitable because we put in place a regulatory authority that prevented the CDS that drove the financial collapse.

Regulation can be a restriction on business. Other times it can provide the framework to produce a competitive market that delivers for both business and the consumer. It really depends on the quality of regulation.



*I think many people fail to realise that the free market is not a concept in economics. It's a thing made up by politicians to justify no regulation. Economists talk about the perfect market, which is a concept that doesn't look for no regulation.


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 jordanis wrote:
so assuming ones that portrayed both sides can be counted as a half, 4.5 of the top 10 presidents were liberal with 5.5 being conservative, thats too close to say conservatives are better, but of the ones that owned businesses, 5.5 were conservative while 2.5 were liberal, thats a significant gap. more than double. also the top 7 owned their own business with only 2 not
huffintonpost.com (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/19/presidents-entrepreneurs_n_1684521.html) which is known to be extremely liberal in its views have posted that the worst presidents were entrepreneurs, but their "list" of presidents who ran business is even shorter than my list (compiled independantly of theirs) and skips over several conservative president entrepreneurs, in fact, it only seems to highlight 3 "bottom tier" presidends: Hoover (the man behind the hoover dam) and the 2 Bush's. with a list of only 9 presidents out of 44, of which at least 25 are known to have owned or managed a business. while i only focused on the top 10, they focused on the bottom, of which they failed to make a compelling argument. if you have anything to add to this, please do.

How is George Washington listed as a conservative? What in the nine shades of hell is conservative about leading a revolution and the building the world's first liberal democracy? Those are some really radical things to do.

Also, Hoover had little to do with the Hoover Dam. It was approved before his presidency, and completed after. It's name was a matter of considerable contraversy for some time, as it only became known as the Hoover Dam when a Hoover appointee started calling it such, without any approval from any government naming agency.


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 youbedead wrote:
The only people that should ever be saving money are households, a business should be reinvesting profits and a gov should either reduce taxes or increase spending if they are running a surplus.

No. Who told you that?

First up, reinvesting profits is saving - it's building up equity. The alternative is paying a dividend.

And yes, governments should run surpluses. They should do this to build up funds so that when economic times are poor they can run deficits. And they should also run surpluses in periods of high economic activity to take heat off the economy - when demand exceeds the productive capacity of the economy you get excessive price inflation and importing, and having tax revenue greater than expenditure can reduce that.

The perfect market also doesn't technically exist, like anything that's perfect :/

Then again,neither really does a free market.

 jordanis wrote:
2: wikipedia is only considered an innacurate because SOME documents can be altered, many of the more controversial topics are locked and my only be edited by wikipedia employees

Point of fact; there are no articles on Wikipedia that are only editable by employees of the Wikimedia foundation (that I'm aware of, anyway).

I presume what you are talking about is a protected page, recognizable by the lock in the top right: these are generally locked to prevent non-registered users from altering a page. So, anyone with an internet connection and who is willing a few minutes registering an account may still edit these pages. The lock is to discourage casual vandalism.

The only pages that have the kind of protection you state - only editable by Wikimedia Administration - are templates used for articles and banned users, not articles proper. Allowing these to be edited by edited by non-savvy may break large chunks of the site itself; the protection is for technical reasons, rather then editorial control.

I would like to point out that Wikipedia does have an accuracy rate comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica, so people really should respect it as a source.

 youbedead wrote:
I would like to point out that Wikipedia does have an accuracy rate comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica, so people really should respect it as a source.

Because it's the most edited info source it means it also the most corrected info source on the web besides if you doubt Wikipedia's sources you can always check the links at the bottom or compare it with a similar article from an other site to see if there's much variance on the info.

Oklahoma has a "rainy day fund" that is an interesting concept and it seems to work fairly well.

If we collect more than 100% of the estimates taxes for that year, the leftover goes into the fund (up to 15%).

If we collect less, we can use the fund to make up the difference.

 youbedead wrote:
I would like to point out that Wikipedia does have an accuracy rate comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica, so people really should respect it as a source.

I find myself doubting that. It's one thing to be factually correct, it's another to be a rich source of information. The articles on Wiki might have a good rate of accuracy, but as a source of information, the content really isn't the same as Encyclopedia Britannica.

I could have replaced a few of my university courses by lectures on EB and would have obtained the exact same amount and quality of information.

Wikipedia could've done the same for only one course, Descartes. Every other one I've checked (I make killer 40+ pages notes doc ) weren't worth the read.

 Kovnik Obama wrote:

 youbedead wrote:
I would like to point out that Wikipedia does have an accuracy rate comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica, so people really should respect it as a source.

I find myself doubting that. It's one thing to be factually correct, it's another to be a rich source of information. The articles on Wiki might have a good rate of accuracy, but as a source of information, the content really isn't the same as Encyclopedia Britannica.

I could have replaced a few of my university courses by lectures on EB and would have obtained the exact same amount and quality of information.

Wikipedia could've done the same for only one course, Descartes. Every other one I've checked (I make killer 40+ pages notes doc ) weren't worth the read.

Absolutely, I was only commenting on the factual accuracy of it. Saying 'you got that from wiki so it must be wrong' is a fallacious argument

 sebster wrote:

And then look at the only banks in the world that maintained profits during the GFC - they're here in Australia. And they remained profitable because we put in place a regulatory authority that prevented the CDS that drove the financial collapse.

Swedbank is an Australian company?

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 sebster wrote:

And then look at the only banks in the world that maintained profits during the GFC - they're here in Australia. And they remained profitable because we put in place a regulatory authority that prevented the CDS that drove the financial collapse.

Swedbank is an Australian company?

The Canadian Banks would like to disagree with you as well. We did just fine thanks.

You're not anadian, Fraz, don't say "we".

OUR banks are colossally corrupt and have basically put both parties in their pocket.

 Melissia wrote:
You're not anadian, Fraz, don't say "we".

OUR banks are colossally corrupt and have basically put both parties in their pocket.

(Looks at business card)
Sorry the "we " still stands. Thanks though.