posted 12-18- 07:39 PM               

No apologies needed. We're more than happy to point out the error of your ways. LOL

posted 12-18- 09:15 PM               

This is the flame wars section, please see my posts in other areas if you don't enjoy the flames to go with your hot air.

I take certain stuff seriously, but I think I have a good sense of humor about it as well, too bad you didn't crack any wit

One might argue, quite easily, that anyone who posts here either takes things to seriously or not seriously enough

But I get the feeling by the start of this post that you are offended by my 3 sentence greeting I gave you, I thought it was a quite fitting rebuttal to your post that once again told me that I don't get "it" still without clarifying exactly what "it" was or how I didn't get "it." And this being the flame wars area, I decided to retreat to common sense and implement the four letter rule. I thought it came of rather nice, oh well.

Anyway, glad you passed calc, you're entering a group of people that becomes more distinct each year.

posted 12-18- 10:31 PM            

You dumbshit...are you telling me you are that damn dense that you cannot even figure out the meaning of this post? At least Jerry picked up on it. You, on the other hand are about two steps away from being a complete moron. You STILL just don't get it do you?

"I got an A in calculus 10 years ago, so fuck you again."

Bullshit. I bet you can't prove it. If you did get an A it was probably from Sally Struther's "TV/VCR repair school", cause you can't even spell liar correctly.

"Anyway, glad you passed calc, you're entering a group of people that becomes more distinct each year."

I know. Soon I will be a UT alumni. I can't wait.

posted 12-18- 11:26 PM               

If you are trying to show I am stupid, I think you have a long way to go.

And since you need money from other people to go to school, I am sure you are a poor ass bastard who actually has to learn a "skill" so that massa might give you a job in his sweat shop. I wish you many years of doing calculus for "da man", I'm sure it will be quite easy for him to keep you down.

Also maybe you can get a good job spell checking the work of people with real ideas and vision, if you are lucky.

Are you threatened by the fact that I got an A in calculus? I assure you, it was one of my very few aces - and I am proud of that. Ever hear of a gentleman's C? Kinda like a horn player in the orchestra.

I am sorry I can not figure out the meaning of your posts, maybe you should explain them better.

Are you sorry? Was it fun? Am I too serious? Are you quoting me because you are so impressed by my posts? Just some of the questions that remain up in the air in DanW's post.

You know, it might shock you to know that some of us are doing things a hell of a lot more stressful and way more important than passing calculus right now.

So now is my post here a serious post, or a light-hearted post? I guess like you DanW, I will just pick the one that suits my fancy at the moment, since neither is actually implied. And if I get called to task for anything, I will just report that "you still don't get it, do you?"

You are the must frustrating flame war fellow I have ever flamed with, Jesus!

posted 12-19- 12:31 AM            

How bout them calculus scores...I'm waiting.

posted 12-19- 09:43 AM            

No, you won't have to hire me either. I'm sure I'll be well ahead of you on the job scale anyway.

Well, looky here. He was in the Air Force, is in Texas, and did get A's in his government classes. Gee, imagine that.

I'm still waiting Sv. Let's see your A in calculus. Or does "Earn Your Degree at Home" not provide transcripts? You chicken shit pussy.

posted 12-19- 12:19 PM               

You guys are silly. But that's okay...I like silly. Silly is good.

Sv is a hoot. Can't spell real well, but seems to think in complete sentences, and seems to think about things a lot. That's good.

Mirth...well...Mirth must have some issues. May have had parents that were hippies, or feels that someone who was a "bleeding-heart-liberal-communist" fucked him over or something in the past, I don't know. But it sure is fun hearing what Rush Limbaugh is thinking during commercial breaks. Don't ever change Mirth.

And DanW? Well...Dan is man...like any other man...only...more so... Hey Dan, how many hours are you from Tyler? If I ever get down there to see some family folks and you're not too far, I'll buy you a beer. Unbelievably, after watching and listening to you mix it up over the last month or so, I'd still have to put myself a little bit to the left of you, but you could probably stomach me for a couple of rounds. Of course it would all depend on how fast we drank...

And me? Well, I'm just completely lost. I can barely figure out how to color in a circle, much less punch a chad. I'm going to start voting for whoever has the coolest name. And the best tie.

But you know what ties us all together? We seem to think. And care. And feel. Not too shabby.

I recall watching the beginning of all this election mess, and they interviewed some young kids dancing at a disco. They asked, "Did you guys vote?" The dancing couple giggled, and said, "Um...uh-uh. But um, we like, would have voted for Bush." This was all without missing a beat of the obnoxious "club" music.

At least we're not like them. We may be diametrically opposed to each other, and occasionally have pretty strong words to use with each other, but great God, at least we're using our heads for something other than backwards-ballcap storage.

I truly wish for the day when we have an online sim to fly, with decent damage modeling, so we can all fly against, and with each other again. Those were truly the happiest days of my life in the last couple years, outside of watching my 4 year old grow up.

Ah well, the nurses are coming again. Time to go.

Fuck you Mk.

posted 12-19- 03:26 PM               

Speaking of Jesus, did you guys hear about the burgler who was burglerizing this house?
He was looking for something to steal and heard someone say "Jesus is watching you."
He jumped with fright but saw no one. As he
was moving through the house he heard again
"Jesus is watching you." This time he saw a
parrot in a cage in the corner. He asked the
parrot "Have you been saying that?". The parrot said yes. The burgler asked the parrot
"What's your name?". The parrot replied "Mosses". The burgler said "Who in the hell
would name a parrot Mosses?". The parrot said
"The same guy that named the doberman Jesus".

posted 12-19- 03:36 PM            

Heya Dan... did you work TRAACON at Nellis? And when did you get out... you may have worked with my sister is why I ask.

-Stark

Damned clumsy finger typos...

posted 12-19- 05:11 PM            

I was downstairs in the NATCF from November 97 - November 98. But I wasn't sober. I may run for public office.

Tyler is pretty far away. But nothing is too far for free beer.

posted 12-19- 07:58 PM            

Maybe a little demented...but no more so than the rest of us.

posted 12-20- 12:23 AM               

Here's an easy one from the final in my 5th calculus course: Engineering Analysis.

My respect to the first person to respond with the correct answer:

The response of a seismometer to the ground acceleration a(t) following an earthquake is governed by the equation:

x''(t) + 2*n*w0*x'(t) + w0^2*x(t) = -a(t)

x(t) is the instrument displacement
w0 is the undamped natural frequency
n is the damping ratio

a.) Given n=1, w0=1/sec, and the initial conditions x(0)=0, x'(0)=0

Find, for t>0, the displacement with ground acceleration given by a(t)=[1-u(t-2*PI)]
Where u is the step function.

OK thats the first of four parts, but the crux of the problem. Ill post the answer in a week or so. Have at it gentlemen

posted 12-20- 10:59 AM            

That took all of five minutes to do. YOU REALLY GOT ME ON THAT ONE...I FEEL SO STUPID NOW. sarcasm off. This stuff was posted to show your dumbass that I can back my shit up.

How is the Nazi play going anyway? Can I join your militant group and help rid the world of those pesky Democrats?

posted 12-20- 12:50 PM               

When I was a young lad, I remember the, oh, what was it, CETA or something?

That was supposed to be set up to pay, at least in my area, young miscreants making a stab at doing something productive, by getting them jobs at construction sites and such, to learn a trade, so they could become productive members of society.

I had friends in the program, and all they were told to do was to pick up trash. The construction company owners (in our area, most likely ALL Republicans), would utilize what they viewed as "free" help, to do all the jobs no one else wanted to do.

Hard to learn how to be a carpenter holding a trash sack, picking up other worker's beer cans.

The same with welfare and other social programs. No, they are not set up to teach people how to survive on their own. No, they do not help wean folks on the low rungs of the ladder off the governmental teat...but it's not that that kind of thing can't work at all...it's that it needs to be done well.

And Lord, this is scary, I'd almost kind of have to agree with Mirth on this one.

Where we differ though is that yes, definitely, I think THEY COULD be set up to work much more efficiently. I DO believe they could be administered as tools to corrupt folks into being productive capitalists.

I'm a big believer in environment over breeding. I think "Trading Places," while obviously a comedic farce, had some truth in it.

You show someone they can make 40k a year as a carpenter, and not have to worry about getting their brains blown out selling crack, or busted and used as somebody's cell-toy for 10 years, and they'll start looking at that circular saw with a different viewpoint. It's just that a lot of them don't know it's possible.

I've seen it happen. But we need to make these programs become what they were supposed to be in the first place.

Aids. Starting points. Assists. Training. Teaching. A beginning, with an end goal in sight.

But what happens? Well, humanity mainly.

The people who set up the programs make sure that all the paperwork is correct, and all employee evaluations are in order, but don't have any idea what's going on on the street.

The employees aren't what you'd call extremely motivated to begin with, after all, their govornment workers who feel like they're in a rut. They make sure their paperwork is filled out correctly, so when their employee evaluations are done, they'll get that 2% raise each year. Whoopee.

The people who actually work with them on the street don't give a shit...they use them to pick up garbage, or just give them food stamps and Medicare, so they'll make sure and not get their funding cut, and not have enough the next year.

Everybody's so worried about the damn paperwork, that they forget why they're there in the first place.

Here's an idea: Grant money, gift money, or extremely low-cost college student loans to kids who agree to work for the various Social Services at street-level positions for 2 years after college at normal govornmental pay?

At least you'd have some kids with some energy, and it would be some incredible experience to use if they went to grad school, and provide an understanding for the kids as to how the world REALLY works, what life is REALLY like, and hopefully start doing for these programs what needs to be done.

I'm sorry. I promise I'll never talk about this shit again. I don't know why I took it this far in the first place.

posted 12-20- 03:07 PM            

Sounds like I'm for more spending for welfare and work programs don't it? Nope. We have a ton of money already... it just can't be spent where it should be due to stupid laws and bad regulations. Take for example the anti-tobacco movement here in California. My department has a Tobacco division, this division gets approximatly 2 million a year from the state and that is matched by our county. So they get 4 million to teach about the harms of tobacco. As a contrast, Preventative Healthcare for the Aging (PHCA), Immunizations, WIC, Indigent Healthcare, and Childrens Medical Services combined get slightly less than 2 million in total. So California spends millions on anti-smoking commercials while children from families that cannot afford health insurance get worse medical care than is available to a stray dog. Seems like a waste of money to me. That money could be far better spent teaching impoverished parents a trade so they could afford to take care of their kids properly.

The system is screwed up, but please don't blame it on the gov't employees (at least at the county levels). We work very hard to make things as good as we possibly can and certainly don't get paid very well for it. Unfortunantly we are run by a bunch of elected goobs who couldn't find their way out of a paper bag half the time and usually don't really give shit about the welfare of anybody who doesn't vote. That's true of both Republicans and Democrats.

posted 12-20- 04:02 PM               

I'd like to put a little more emphasis on my feelings that many times there is so much red tape and filing that needs to be done to satisfy gov't. jobs, that it almost becomes more important in the end, than the reason departments exist in the first place.

I guess a lot of my frustration in that regard came from working for 4 years for a University administration, and then 7 years for a Municipal administration. Both were ponderous, lumbering, and seemed to care less about WHY they existed, as opposed to how to get the best marks on an internal audit, or personnel evaluation, or in the worst case scenario, survive the onslaught of a head-hunting "outside efficiency expert."

I'm mainly deriding the system, not the folks.

And, in addition, I guess my idea of suddenly having to manage a bunch of know-it-all Gen X'ers is kinda scary too, ain't it?

posted 12-21- 02:36 PM               

I need more time to research this so the latest data I could come up with was for 1995. In that year the total welfare expenditiures for the Federal Government was $397 Billion dollars. This includes food stamps, school lunches, federal housing, medicade, AFDC, job training for low-income people (154 different programs), direct cash assistance, etc. If that's 1% then our Federal Govenment spent 39.7 TRILLION dollars in l995. I don't think so!

This doesn't even count what is spent by states, counties and cities which, near as I could tell, runs another 2/3 of the Fed total.

The Federal total alone comes to $8,907 for every man, woman and child living under the "poverty level". That's $35,628 for a familiy of 4. Does anyone here actually think they got that money? Most of it went to the bureaucrats running the programs.

posted 12-21- 03:03 PM               

You consider school lunches to be welfare? Geez, if you could call that welfare, I suppose you could call anything welfare. I suppose you consider social security to be part of the welfare program too?

Anyway, here's the beef...

From http://www.mdrc.org/Reports/AfterAFDC/After%20AFDC.htm#Key comes this...

Features of the Welfare System

How much is spent on welfare?

This question is difficult to answer because, as noted earlier, there is little agreement on which programs should be called welfare.

In the mid-1990s, the federal government spent about $250 billion per year on programs targeted to low-income people - about 17 percent of total federal spending. (States and localities spent about $100 billion per year on such programs.)32 This figure, however, covers many items, such as job training programs and college grants, that are not usually considered welfare. In addition, the largest program in this category, Medicaid, which cost the federal government nearly $90 billion in 1995, directs more than two-thirds of its spending to the elderly and disabled, groups that are generally not expected to work.33

The AFDC program cost about $25.5 billion in 1995, with the cost split between the federal government and the states.34 AFDC accounted for less than 1 percent of federal spending and about 2.8 percent of state spending.35 AFDC spending remained roughly constant in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars from the mid-1970s until the program ended. As noted earlier, the number of families receiving AFDC grew during this period, but the average payment per family dropped. Under the 1996 federal welfare legislation, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant has replaced AFDC, the JOBS program, and the Emergency Assistance Program. The TANF grant will be funded at about $16.4 billion annually through 2002. States are required to maintain at least 80 percent of their 1994 spending levels in order to receive their full TANF grant.

Another program commonly considered in discussions of welfare, the Food Stamp program, is funded almost entirely by the federal government; it cost about $27 billion in 1995, accounting for about 2 percent of federal spending. About half the money spent on Food Stamps goes to AFDC recipients; the rest goes to elderly and disabled people, low-income working families, childless adults who do not qualify for AFDC, and others.36

posted 12-21- 03:51 PM               

JT, when I referred to lunch programs I am referring to school lunch/breakfast programs where family income is the criteria for eligibility. If the government is feeding, clothing, housing and providing medical care for the poor then yes, that is welfare.

I'm not saying that govenment assistance isn't needed some times. Just that the 5.5 TRILLION dollars spent since the "War on Poverty" started in the 60's hasn't worked. The poverty rate hasn't changed much in the last 35 years.

posted 12-21- 03:55 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Smokey:
Jerry,
While your doing your researching see how
much federal money was doled out to corporations
in any recent year.

---

If, by dole you mean giving money and getting nothing in return then the amount is zero. Corporations pay far more in taxes (collectively) than they ever receive back from the government. Can you say that about low income people?

If dole to you means the purchasing of goods and services from corporations than the amount is substantial.

posted 12-21- 04:10 PM               

Also, the Government does give away plenty of things to corporations with no direct return, such as the public spectrum to the media companies, military intervention for the oil companies, low interest loans, anti-striking laws, etc.

posted 12-21- 07:01 PM               

Yes, some corporations take advantage of tax laws that are passed by our elected officials. That's what a democracy is. How did we get the huge tax surpluses if this was a rampant practice?

posted 12-22- 01:26 AM               

The fact remains DanW that the taxes, whether they are $1.00 or $.01 per CD, are passed on to the consumer.