bfargin
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Posts posted by bfargin
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com'on CH man, you know dems can't be totalitarian.... relax it's no big deal.
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Oh yeah, before any of you overpaid self-loving douchebags get your panties in a wad, s/
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If you sky bus drivers weren't sitting up in the cockpit spanking hank you might get paid starting at boarding too. We all know what you commercial guys and gals do up there before the plane is boarded and doors secured, absolutely nothing!
https://news.yahoo.com/delta-begin-paying-flight-attendants-163906902.html
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2 hours ago, Prozac said:
Uhhh no. Only a broken education system and a public with a complete lack of historical curiosity would believe that the Nazi party was actually socialist. Despite the name, they were very much fascist by the time they gained power, which is in fact, about as right wing as you can get. I dunno, maybe open a history book or two once in a while? 🤷♂️
BTW: completely agree the MSNBC story is ludicrous.
They were very much socialist until they got into power...just like all of the other socialist countries' leadership has done. I'd argue the political spectrum can't be viewed as a tape-measure/line but rather as a loop/circle and the far left and far right meet on the backside at fascism. Small sample but look at the antifa/BLM movements and see how they are fascists in their own right but claim to be on the leftist end of things. Both extremes end with absolute control and tyranny.
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This version might be more accurate.
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Yes I had them shipped. It just shocked me because TN also has such high sales tax (9.75%) it makes it difficult to think any investment has a 10% hit (added base) the day you get it. I thought about having it sent to my brother in TX but just had it sent straight to me. I get that I'm buying the precious metal but if the US puts a legal tender value, you'd think it wouldn't be taxable. If I go to the bank I don't get charged for buying a roll of quarters (legal tender). I was just surprised and frustrated, so thought I'd see if anybody else had been hit by that lately.
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Alright, a question for any of you that invest in bullion. So I recently bought some Platinum Eagles. How can a state charge sales tax on what is officially United States legal tender?
I realize the face value is only $100 but according to the mint's own website it is legal tender (even if the face value is a nominal value). The wholesalers I checked with (Cal Numismatic, JM bullion, apmex)) all say states are now collecting sales tax on bullion coins sales (even ones that are US Mint products and are U.S. legal tender). I've never paid sales tax on US coins before and it doesn't seem right to pay on official US minted coins.
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The trailer only showed F-18s, I wonder if Fat Amy will make an appearance in the new Top Gun.
History: I had completed my T-38 contact check and was prepping for the form check when the original came out. Some of us went together to check it out and of course were throwing penalty flags on some of the BS/hype but we still enjoyed the attention it got us at ASU's Devil House and other locations around Tempe/Mesa after its debut.
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Here are the date points from the same Our World in Data source used by NSPlayr. I don't know where the Prager U speaker got his data/information but this data shows he wasn't far off with the 2% change in energy consumption from Solar and Wind. This graph shows it went from less than 1/2 a % in 2000, to just over 3% in 2019 (their latest validated year for world energy consumption that I could find).
Obviously my stated bias is Nuclear but I do see a role for solar and other renewables (I've had solar on my roof since January 2016 and haven't paid an electric bill since - and get a yearly check for my roof's production surplus). I calculated an 8 to 9 year oay-back when I installed the system and am on track to reach payback at 9.5 years. Without the 30% TVA tax credit it would have been closer to a 20 year payback. I admit my personal hypocrisy in accepting the government tax credit while advocating for less government interference. At my age I wouldn't have made the move without the credit. If I had been in the same financial situation when I was 30 I might have still done it without a government subsidy/tax credit.
I'm for pretty much anything other than coal for electricity production (though I recognize that the industry continues to improve on the efficiency and cleanliness of coal). And, I guarantee any of you guys who are north of 50 like me, can attest to the improvement in our environment over the past 40 years (water and air). We need to be good stewards but we can't let emotion and the leftist shrills screw up everything in the name of another crisis. Slow and steady wins most races and is usually the best policy.
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Interesting summary of energy trends and cost. Bottom line, we've only moved 2% of energy usage away from fossil fuels to wind and solar (over the past 20 years) in spite of governments spending more than 5 Trillion on solar and wind technology and incentives.
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3 hours ago, Sua Sponte said:
Now I know why everyone here is bailing from USAA...they have to put a plan in place to stop your money laundering.
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Lots of new fuel sources are being tested/developed. I read this article last year on where some of the technology for nuclear power generation is heading. Substantially less initial fuel required and less waste as a result. The French (Germans were - but not sure of their current efforts) are seeking ways to recycle nuclear waste resulting in even less waste going forward.
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The Chase Amazon card has 2% on certain things and 5% on anything bought from Amazon and whole foods. A great deal if you buy from Amazon, and a decent deal if you don't. No annual fee. I use it more than my USAA card.
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Wind is a terrible energy source for mass production. Nuclear is the cleanest and safest energy source we have available. We even have the ability to make power from elements that can't be weaponized and can be recycled almost to zero remaining waste. Let's spend some money and energy getting that in place (to at least eliminate coal usage). There is no excuse for us to depend on coal for more than 20% of our power generation.
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3 hours ago, dream big said:
The flip side is said slow cumbersome government actually passing a budget and funding essential elements of our government such as the military.
There is truth in your words of iron ... (sorry, I just watched Outlaw Josie Wales again.)
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10 hours ago, nsplayr said:
The baseline assumption in modern American politics is the incumbent party loses seats at the first midterm. All bets should be made from that baseline, e.g. a Dem loss of both chambers in 2022 should be expected even if you know nothing about anything other than the raw seat numbers in both chambers and which party holds the White House.
My personal guess as of tonight is the GOP takes the House with a 10-20 seat majority (net +20-30ish from now) seats and I could believe a senate anywhere from 46/54 GOP-led to a 52/48 Dem led, there are some interesting senate races out there this cycle.
But as we see in the news, sh*t happens and people’s memories are short, so we’ll see where we’re at by November!
Feel free to look back and laugh in a few months, although I will mention that I predicted Biden’s SCOTUS nominee correctly when the vacancy was first announced 😎 My guy did famously narrow it down quite a bit though haha…made it relatively easy. Though one could say the same of Trump, having chosen all three of his nominees from a well-publicized short list and saying specifically he wanted to replace Ginsburg with another woman (how sexist of him! /sarcasm).
I'm just hoping we never have all three (house, senate, potus) controlled by the same party. I absolutely love a slow cumbersome government that has to convince everyone that the cause du-jour is a good idea. It's not foolproof, as evidenced by the Patriot Act among others, but it usually works better than either party does alone.
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And on a side note, a couple of the smartest guys in my UPT class washed out. Intellectually they made the rest of us (including the IPs) seem like special ed students. So even if he had washed out, it doesn't mean he doesn't have the smarts to logically crush anybody else's arguments/thoughts.
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11 hours ago, FLEA said:
Ahhhhh nothing like a good ol security crises to cement those approval ratings before going into an election your party is unpopular in....
I'm wondering what rational person listened to that feces and thought "yeah, he seems to have it all under control". I get that his supporters know what he is and accept it, but how did that dumpster fire of a speech positively sway anybody's opinion??
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23 minutes ago, hockeydork said:
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Take your political hat off, this isn't about politics. There is a fixed amount fossil energy underground in the US, yes I agree with you now is the time to leverage it to bail Europe out, but there less and less every day, it is not the future.
You're shitting us right? Our energy policy is totally about politics. it shouldn't be but, in the US everything is politics now. We still have decades and decades of energy in the ground under the US.
The newest Nuclear technology is the cleanest and most green energy source we have available right now, but sadly it's out of fashion.
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28 minutes ago, Smokin said:
I really hope you're right, but I think the last 24 hours have shown that Putin is switching strategies and is no longer trying to minimize civilian deaths. He's shelling major cities with absolutely zero military value other than avoiding urban combat. But, even with that as an excuse, that's a poor one as history has shown that shelled cities are just as defend-able as intact ones. That does not mean that nukes are a logical next step, but the war going poorly for him does not mean the war will continue to go relatively well for Ukrainian citizens. On the contrary, the worse the war goes for Putin, the worse it is going to get. This is an ego driven war and a totalitarian leader with an ego in a losing war is a dangerous thing.
no doubt Putin got a hold of one of Hunter's crack pipes, but there is still no fargin way he goes nuclear!
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There is no way Putin drops nukes (tactical or otherwise) in Ukraine!
So far the Russian troops seem to be diligently trying to minimize deaths. Putin is in the wrong to invade, but he fully outlined his reasoning and intent.
goingkinetic is dropping some strong acid with the "war crimes" talk.
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A couple of years ago I did an intentional search for nails made in the USA. At the time there was one remaining manufacturer that supposedly made nails in the US. I can't say my search was 100% exhaustive, but it made me do a similar search on other manufactured products and it confirmed how little we produce here at home. For many items we source the raw material and send it to China (or elsewhere) to have it fabricated and sent back. Pretty shocking how little we actually make and that it's cheaper to send product to China and back rather than make it here.
I know I'm unique here in the US, but having grown up in Taiwan it worries me how serious the threat really is to one of the few young democracies in the world. Taiwanese have grown from an autocratic more or less dictatorship (KMT run and controlled) while I was there (1970-1980) into a fully functioning democracy fighting for it's very existence in a world that fails to recognize them as an independent state. General CKS basically doomed Taiwan to the current situation by being so dogmatic that he was the ruler of all of China when the UN in the early 1970s chose the CCP as the official Chinese government.
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The meaning of life and other ill sh!t
in Squadron Bar
Posted
The initial ruling by the court in Roe V. Wade was totally ridiculous. The court used the excuse that science hadn't demonstrated that the fetus was a human person (the word fetus actually means "child" or "offspring") and stated that if science/medicine ever established that, their ruling would and should be reversed as the baby would be protected by the 14th amendment. This was definitely not "activist" and is valid and should have been ruled correctly in 1973. We've murdered 61 million babies in the U.S. since that ruling. The most shameful thing we as a nation have ever done (and we've done plenty of other stuff).
No doubt the left will use this ruling as an excuse to continue their assault on the constitution and the American ideas of freedom and liberty.