Steve Schacher

quote:To the above, very true, it is a local issue, but I beg to differ as to whose problem it is. It is not the governments place, in my opinion, to shelter people from thier mistakes, that is for thier family or private organizations to deal with. Yes. This is why one of Bush's initiatives was the Faith-Based initiative to get churches, synagogues, mosques, etc., involved in solving the local problems, with Federal assistance. Of course, the "faith-based" part of it was lambasted by the Left as being state-sponsored religion (or more likely in this case, state sponsoring of religion instead of a specific religion). The Left will try to knock down any initiative that involves personal responsibility, accountability, and private support, until all that is left is Federal government assistance. But I still maintain that the solution is to dry up Federal funds and keep as much of it as local as possible.

Regarding nukes vs. the sick homeless: If the issue is one of where to spend our tax dollars, on missile defense or the homeless, I beg to ask a different question: Missile defense is a federal issue and federal taxes should go towards what the military deems important. The homeless issue is a local issue (even though it seems that all localities have a homeless problem) and should be solved with local taxes, meaning State and city taxes. Shouldn't this issue be reframed as a taxation question, with emphasis on who (the states or the feds) should get what, so that the money stays closer to those who need it while other monies are designated for the more national issues like defense? When the Federal government takes more and more of the taxation pie and leaves everyone else to scramble for the crumbs, then the local issues get ignored while the Washington politicians get more and more drunk with power as they wield tax dollar influence over the rest of us. This is why Bush's tax reduction is so important. It allows us to keep more money to spend locally. This will influence the local needs more directly, because we have more money to spend at home (which means more local sales taxes that go to the states). Also, it gives us more control to spend the money on things that are important to each of us individually, instead of being lumped into some entitlement class at the federal level and then getting pitted against some other entitlement class at election time to scare us into voting for politician x or y. Federal programs would be reduced if we each had more money to spend on our needs ourselves. If I spend $600 per year on prescription drugs, give me a $600 tax reduction and let me buy my drugs instead of taking my $600 and declaring the need for free prescription drugs. Give parents more money back for their dependent children instead of taking their money and having their children go to government-funded day care centers. As the states take in more in local taxes, they can use that money to fund programs for the homeless. If they don't, then vote them out and vote in candidates who will do something about the problem. You will have much more luck at the local level with issues like these than you would at the federal level. Local candidates are much more responsive than federal candidates. Keeping tax money local would give the people much more power over their government than sending the money to Washington would.

Also, exactly what race are we Americans, that you claim that Krauthammer's comments were racist? Exactly what race was he denigrating? The US Census Bureau only recognizes five races: White Black or African American American Indian or Alaskan Native Asian Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander I don't understand your remark.

quote:Kyoto was a fricking joke, it was a socialist scheme to take money from first world countries and GIVE it to developing 3rd world countries That's right. Under Clinton, the Senate voted it down with no dissent. Clinton was wise enough to not force a binding resolution, only a non-binding one since he knew the Senate would never go for it. This way, he can have his cake (to appease the environmentalists by paying lip service to Kyoto) and eat it too (by knowing that Congress would never support it). The only country to ratify the treaty so far is Romania. quote:Yes, we finally have a grown up in the White House, who knows foreign policy, is working on a number of problems that have been and were ignored by the last president and his cronies. Here is a recent Wall Street Journal revelation regarding the Clinton foreign policy with regards to Haiti. Surprise, surprise that his advisors are now partners in the Haitian telephone monopoly. It makes you wonder what his motives were in the first place? quote:And guess what, barely 130 days into his term and we have our tax cut!!! And if you listened to the Democrats, you'd think he spent that time just poisoning the water and air, but only the water and air that Democrats drink and breathe... There is now way that Bush, in 130 days, could cause all the calamities that the Democrats accuse him of. The Democrats will tell you that any policy Bush enacts will take 12 to 18 months before the impacts show up on the markets, but they will not say that recent market movements were the result of policy initiatives made 12 to 18 months ago, because those were under the Clinton administration and don't fit into the policy of blaming Bush. quote:they are thinking that they are the truly most powerful country, and in no way they can be stopped. As soon as the rest of the world starts turning to China, Russia, India, and others for relief after every disaster instead of the USA, I will stop believing that the USA is the most powerful country in the world. quote:once your guns in Canada were gone your crime rate SKYROCKETED!!! Without guns the only one with guns are criminals!!! And let me tell you they use them!!! You have what? 30 million citizens in Canada? your crime rate per capita is higher then the US by a wide margin, and when did that happen? After they took your guns The big unreported statistic is that although gun-related deaths went down after guns were banned, knife-related deaths (and other non-gun weapons) skyrocketed. People will find the tools they need, whether it is a gun or a knife. The gun isn't the problem -- the person is the problem. quote:Even kids in your schools are more violent. I attribute this to the decline of our educational system. We have a self-esteem feel-good system that would rather social-promote someone who can't read than hurt their feelings by holding them back. We are eliminating scoring from junior sports events so that there are no more losers (we don't want to hurt their feelings). We are eliminating the SATs as college acceptance requirements because our students can't pass them anymore. Instead of teaching our children how to handle loss and defeat while they are young, we are teaching them that pride in accomplishment is not as important as pride in just trying. They are taught to believe that just trying is all that matters and that alone deserves compliment. The actual result (i.e. getting it right) is secondary. Therefore, when someone challenges them (like a bully, or a romantic competitor), their only reaction is to lash out and attack because their self-esteem has been threatened. Here is a fascinating article by Diane Alden on this topic. I wrote an layman's editorial on this topic (under a pseudonym) on Free Republic a month before Ms. Alden wrote this, making many of the same points without the expert backup that she cites. Just lucky, I guess. [ 05-30-2001: Message edited by: Steve Schacher ]

I skimmed as as far as a couple of "Page Down" keypresses, but some brief thoughts (until other points of view emerge): From the article: quote:Russia and China never fail in their summits to denounce explicitly the "unipolarity" of the current world structure and to pledge to do everything to abolish it. This is what is going on right now in California. We are a one party state (Democrat - we have one Republican in an elected executive position (Bill Jones, Secretary of State)). California's electrical problems were caused by politicians who are ducking and covering and begging for a Federal bailout so they don't have to be accountable for what they have wrought. This would only be possible without an effective opposition party. On a global scale, I imagine that this is how the rest of the world feels about the USA. However, the rest of the world doesn't understand (as some of us do) that the American leadership has been corrupt for the past eight years (yes -- there has been corruption before, but never elevated to the art form that Clinton achieved). quote:We still need a missile defense system because some bad guy will shoot a missile at us. Personally I don't think we need one. But if ya get one to work sure, go ahead; scare the crap out of the rest of the world. Chris Ruddy had a good column on this, relating with Ben Affleck's words of wisdom since his role on "Pearl Harbor" has made him an expert on war. quote:Ben Affleck was on the E! Network Monday talking about, among other things, the dizzying success of his career. He then went on to discuss his latest film, which he said had an important lesson. The lesson was the same as the one in "Saving Private Ryan," Affleck said: Both films showed how horrible war is. Of course, that is not the lesson of Pearl Harbor. Nor is it of the enormous struggle that took place at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, and the days thereafter. No, the lesson of both battles was that if we don't act now to maintain a strong military, we invite war, which is horrible. The rest of the column is here. I yield the remainder of my time to the gentleman from Australia.

Did you ever see the close-ups of the cities in the Elite games (you dock near a planet starbase and use your zoom to view the area). There are billboards and signs on the sides of buildings, all for futuristic products.

quote:Why?? Because a computer game **THAT I PAID FOR** is the last place I want to see some frigin marketing department throw even more %#& $*&@ advertising at me! How many Nike logo products do you wear?

Remember all the hype over "IT" a few months ago? "IT" is supposed to be an invention (a personal scooter) that will revolutionize the way people travel about? They said that cities will be redesigned to accomodate "IT" because of its revolutionary ideas? "IT" is supposed to be introduced to the public next year.

Did you notice that the plot was the same story as when Chakotay and Kim, in their later years, go back to the ice planet where Voyager is frozen to prevent their earlier selves from crashing?

quote:Steve, oil tycoons do not have energy experience. They are the ones who sell the fuel to some of the people who have energy experience. Oil tycoons also tell just as many lies as politicians do (if not more). I guess it depends on the definition of "oil tychoon." Back in the early 1980's, there was a guy name T. Boone Pickens who owned a small petroleum company named Mesa Petroleum. It was more of a stock brokerage than a petroleum, since all he did was buy up small companies and then sell off the pieces. Is he a "tychoon?" My CEO heads up the company, and he gets his money in the form of stock options and bonuses, although he doesn't actually own land or receive royalties. Does that make him a tychoon? BTW, I don't think that he's ever lied to any of us. A land owner who receives royalty checks each month might be considered as a tychoon since they are the people who actually own the rights to the oil and sell to the refiners. However, that's as far as that goes -- a royalty owner doesn't influence gasoline prices, so being a tychoon has no real value. When you look at other industries, like Big Media for instance, then you get their form of tychoon like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner and Steven Spielberg. The price of a movie ticket is now $9.00 in New York City, but are people complaining (well, maybe a little). How come people have no problem paying $2.00 for a bottle of water but they balk at paying $2.00 for a gallon of gasoline? Water falls from the sky, but gasoline has to be explored, extracted, refined, distributed, and sold. Think about how many jobs that bottle of water provides versus how many jobs that gallon of gasoline provides? Actually, think about how many jobs the plastic bottle that holds the water provides versus how many jobs the water provides? Who makes the plastic bottles? Where does the plastic come from? The Big Oil companies create the plastic. So why is $2.00 for a gallon of gasoline bad, but $2.00 for a bottle of water good?

Many many years ago, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was a light rail bridge. Three companies (Standard Oil of California, General Motors, and Goodyear) conspired to lobby the city to convert the bridge to a passenger car bridge (more cars, more tires, and more gasoline).

quote:In case anyone noticed the reply I wrote about Steven Schacher's reply to Korono's post, I decided to delete it. In retrospect, it was a bit childish. I'm sorry I missed it. The reason that gasoline prices rise and fall have more to do with seasonal driving habits, local refinery capacity, and fuel regulations, than for profit gouging by Big Oil. Holiday weekends, such as Memorial Day and Labor Day are big driving vacation weekends, so the laws of supply and demand kick in (air fares work the same way -- try flying at Christmas or Thanksgiving). Last year, during the campaign, Al Gore was attacking the oil companies for price gouging even though his own DOE report showed that mid-west gasoline price spikes were related to a refinery fire and a pipeline shutdown, not collusion. Also, with local "boutique" formulas for gasoline, it is not possible to shift supply from one region to another to keep prices down. Finally, do you realize that about 50 cents of the gas price is taxes? Remember last year when President Clinton released emergency oil supplies from the strategic oil reserve in order to combat high heating oil prices? What happened? He awarded the contracts to cronies, two of whom were single-person minority companies that were not equipped to manage the oil and had to give the contracts back. The whole things was a PR stunt to boost Al Gore's campaign. Also, America has fallen in love with SUV's. I just bought my wife a Toyota RAV4, which is a mini-SUV that gets 24-27 mpg, but full-size SUV's get 15-17 mpg. When you trade in your economical car that get 30 mpg for an SUV that gets 15, you are in effect putting two cars on the road for every one that you take off. That means that you are doubling the consumption of gasoline within a few years. That is where gasoline is going and why the prices are rising. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently concluded an internal investigation into western states gasoline pricing and determined that their was "no evidence of conduct by the refiners that violated federal antitrust laws. Here's their link: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2001/05/westerngas.htm The whole thing is political. The Democrats need an enemy in order to rally their constituents because they are really a conglomeration of special interest groups (NOW, African-Americans, labor unions, and teachers unions). If they really stood for anything, they would be putting forth their own proposals instead of just attacking Republican positions and demonizing people. Their current plan is to stall Bush until 2002 when they hope to take over Congress. Until then, they will look for easy targets like the oil companies to try to sway public opinion against Bush and Republicans. [ 05-24-2001: Message edited by: Steve Schacher ]

quote:But lord knows with that old Oil Tycoon Bush Sr. running the country.... Ooohhh... we don't want someone with actual energy experience making energy decisions, do we? quote:I bet the next 4 years are going to very profitable for the old oil wigs in this country. Lest we forget the years when oil was $15 per barrel and the oil companies made no profit whatsoever... If you slice up time in small enough chunks you can make any business look like gougers (let's look at hardware stores in the days before hurricanes). Over the longer term, the oil companies are making back the money they lost while exploring during the lean years just to keep the gasoline flowing for everyone. quote:And aren't OPEC's prices falling right now (last I heard, could be wrong though)? OPEC controls supply, so they can regulate prices by increasing and decreasing production. Remember, whenever you hear Democrats crying about how Bush is only looking at the supply side of things (meaning let's look at conservation = demand), OPEC rules the supply, so Bush's supply focus is also an international diplomacy focus. OPEC can cause prices to jump skyhigh or plummet rock-bottom with the turn of a spiget. quote:strange that our prices are going up You should look at the Clean Air Act that congress passed and how localities are enforcing it. California has special "clean burning" gasolines that require the use of MTBE. It makes the air cleaner, but it poisons the water (who knew? not the politicians who want us to believe that they are experts instead of people with real industry experience who are labeled as partisan and tainted -- by, you guessed it, politicians!). Each municipality has their own formula for clean-burning gasolines, which require the "old oil wigs" to refine specific gasolines for each market (at a cost), which also prevents the old oil wigs from shifting supply from one region with a surplus to another region with a shortfall because the locally mandated formulas are different. quote:Alaska just seems more like a move to pay off the people that got old GW in office to me. Don't listen to the politicians -- they'll lie to you every time. Read this article for details on how the Clinton Administration is actually responsible for the rise in oil prices over the last year. [ 05-23-2001: Message edited by: Steve Schacher ]

If the truth be told, Americans have been dumbing down for several generations. I think it is horridly fascinating to watch the decline of a civilization like what is happening here. If today's freshman college class needs remedial reading and math classes; if the schools are eliminating SATs and inflating grades to cover up that fact; then who will be tomorrow's scholars to pass on the accumulated knowledge of our civilization to the next generation and the generation after that?

Personally, I can't wait for the blackouts. They can't come soon enough for me. Gray Davis didn't create the problem, but he could have taken action last year when San Diego first started showing signs of trouble. He didn't because he was fundraising and building up his presidential ambitions, and didn't want to tarnish his image with a troubling policy. California politicians were blaming the Republicans for the problem because Gov. Wilson signed the deregulation bill. They are trying to argue that Wilson, and Deukmejian before him, were Republicans so that makes this a Republican problem. However, Willie Brown was the Speaker For Life of the Assembly and he (and the rest of the legislature) were Democrats. Now they are trying to blame this on Bush because he won't pull their behinds out of the fire. California politians want short-term fixes to get them past the next election cycle, so they want the feds to impose price caps on energy. Bush wants to find long-term market solutions and won't tamper with the free market for short term fixes. Besides, with all the effort he put into California during the election, what did he get to show for it? Why should he put himself on the line for California when they will just turn around and stab him in the back the first chance they get? Finally, Gray Davis just hired Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani to handle his PR. Lehane and Fabiani were Clinton's main attack dogs during the era of politics of personal destruction. It was Fabiani who was spokesman for Al Gore's campaign. It was Fabiani who started rumors about Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris. It was Fabiani who called Harris a Soviet Commissar. Since the rumors of Bush and Harris were proved false, they recently changed the woman but kept the rumors. This is the team that Gray Davis is bringing into California to help solve the problem -- the problem of his plummeting image, not the energy problem. Oh, and he's not paying them from his $30 million campaign warchest -- he's paying them with taxpayer dollars. So I can't wait for the blackouts to begin.

Conservation is not the answer. California ranks 50th in per capita electricity use, meaning we are the most conservative when it comes to electricity and we are still having power blackouts. We can't conserve any more because we are already at the bottom. Our problem is multi-fold: 1) no new power plants in 15 years, 2) unrestricted illegal alien influx drawing on our supplies (I bet that if we suddenly deported all the illegal aliens back to Mexico, our power problems will be drastically reduced), 3) PCs (Silicon Valley), 4) Disneyland and the new California Experience. Of course, while this is all going on, the California Air Quality Board is forcing auto manufacturers to sell more electric cars. Where will they get the juice to charge them up?

This is where Limbaugh got his list: quote:I found something from the early 90's that proves my point. It's a collective effort by members of various American environmental groups who contributed to this at the invitation of the Earth Island Journal, a publication of the Earth Island Institute. Regarding evidence of global warming, my opinion is that we have only been accurately measuring the earth's temperature for a few hundred years now, out of a several billion year existence for this planet. Do we have enough measurements to determine what are short-term fluctuations vs. actual long-term trend changes? The reason that current evidence of global warming is being criticized as junk science is that: 1) it is now coming out that ocean temperatures used in these studies were measured as the water passed through the engines of ships at sea. The oceans make up 75% of the surface of the earth, yet the measurements are being taken randomly by ships from where ever they may be at the time. Do these samples represent enough of a statistical population relative to the whole to be able to draw valid conclusions? 2) Atmospheric temperatures over the water have not been statistically correlating with water temperatures. Initial global warming projections were based on the assumption that rising water temperatures would lead to rising atmospheric temperatures. 3) With all the concern over rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (CO2), have we forgotten all the recent volcanic activity that has been going on over the past few years? Also, CO2 is produced naturally as we breath, and we have been slowly destroying the natural consumers of CO2, the rainforests and other old-growth forests. As we keep chopping down the rainforests to make room for cattle grazing, we eliminate the natural scrubbers of the atmosphere, and that is just as likely a cause for rising CO2 (less depletion rate) as is the argument that we are increasing the output of CO2. 4) Global warming "experts" were recently debunked when the New York Times ran a story on how a "hole" in the ice in the Arctic Ocean was proof of global warming. They retracted the story a few weeks later when they learned that their "expert" didn't know that the ice frequently melts at the north pole, and that this wasn't his specialty anyway. Read this link for details.

I'm no expert at this, but in the very early days, wasn't their a rule that you had to have the chips in from fastest to slowest, or slowest to fastest or something like that? If you PC is crashing with supposedly mix n' match memory, try reversing the order of the chips and see what happens.

Thanks, all. My wife surprised me with a weekend getaway at a bed and breakfast in Napa Valley. We had a wonderfully intoxicating time!!

Ultimate Bulletin Board. Check the copyright notice at the bottom of the screen. [ 05-10-2001: Message edited by: Steve Schacher ]

I feel like I'm watching The Prisoner. quote:I am number 2. Who is number 1? You are number 6. I am not a number, I am a human being!

For early combat, what I do is enter a hostile area and stay by the jumpgate. In fact, you can order your BC to escort the jumpgate and it will just circle it and attack hostiles with the PTA's. In BC3K, the hostile station will send out wave after wave of fighters, then the heavier ships. You can keep an eye on your shield level while your PTA's take out the fighters. You may have to manually take care of the heavier ships. Once the station runs out of ships, you then close in on it. This is when it launches its missiles. The chicken way is to let the station launch its missiles and then fly to the jumpgate. Wait there until the missiles explode and then go back and do it again until the station runs out of missiles. Then you can wear down the stations shields and armor. All this is much easier when you have upgraded your ship to the max.

One way to prevent fleets from ganging up on indies is to have some sort of political structure that has consequences. I don't know how the NPC's would react, but if a (supposedly law-abiding) fleet keeps harrassing an indie of a particular caste or race, then others of the same caste or race would become unfriendly and ultimately hostile. At some point, the old axiom that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" kicks in and you start becoming more friendly with one side to defend against the other. In GCO, players would have to form alliances to enable this. I know that the NPC kernal has abilities to script political alliances, but I don't know how much of it will be dynamic in GCO, responsive to changing events.

quote:Which makes more sense? knock the missile out of the air before it takes out Detroit and then take out the terrorists who launched it with a surgical strike, or to let it take out Detroit and then take out the whole country of Iran with 1000 missiles. I wonder if this is really the problem that we should be preparing for. Going back to my earlier arguments in previous threads, it would take a madman in charge of a country to authorize wholesale slaughter of millions of people with weapons of mass destruction. Therefore, the threat must come from individuals with small arms like suitcase nuclear bombs. So the question is: which is the more likely scenario: 1) a nation launches one rogue nuclear missiles at us, 2) a nation launches a full-scale nuclear assault at us, 3) a terrorist detonates a single nuclear bomb smuggled in a suitcase. Timothy McVeigh used a truck full of manure to blow up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. Other terrorists used a truck bomb to blow up the World Trade Center. There are truck bombs blowing up all over the Middle East. How long will it be before these trucks start carrying nuclear bombs? I'm not saying that we should neglect the former, I'm saying that we should also not neglect the latter.

quote:I say let the Arms race begin, we can afford it, China can't!! Maybe you think your country can afford it but the money would be better spent on education, poverty reduction, environment protection and other stuff that would benefit mankind in the long run. This was the argument when the USA wanted to go to the moon and when Reagan wanted to spend the USSR into submission. However, I do believe that it has more meaning this time because of the the previously cited examples. Saying that, I still think that there is a risk that must be mitigated. We used to talk about a Peace Dividend. Remember that? The money spent on the arms race was supposed to now go towards poverty, education, roads, etc. What was the result of the last eight years? More homelessness and plummeting SAT scores! So, societal problems will not be solved by throwing more money at them. A rogue nuke, however, will make a territory uninhabitable for many years -- Hiroshima and Nagasaki were lowly A-bombs and those regions house people today. The Chernobyl region is still closed off to people. What would happen to a city if today's nuclear weapons were to be detonated? How long would it be before we could use that land again? What would that land be good for? How much is preventing that worth? [Note: this is an emotional response -- nothing is to be taken as fact.]