finknottle

Do you know anything about the Watergate scandal? Can you show an idiot like myself how the term can be used to describe the tactics of planting false flags?

Whether or not partisan media runs with it has no bearing on whether or not it is true.

I still am waiting for somebody to show me that the tea-party is exclusionary. The only statistics I have seen show it to have a higher African-American component that I would have expected, given its positions and those of the black community. Two simple questions will suffice. 1. Given a random organization, what percent of its members would you expect to be black? 1. Given a random organization defined as anti-administration, what percent of its members would you expect to be black?

Welcome to the forum, and congratulations on your first post! Could it be that you are part of this? http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2010/April/O...ltrate-Rallies/

The union, right? Busted knee-caps for stepping out of line? Tell them to stuff it! Clearly there are different types of positions. Some positions call for a strict shift, some a flex-time environment, some are contract (by job or by hour), and some are what are typically called 'salaried.' Occupational trends, away from line work and towards highly skilled work, have resulted in a shift towards contract and salaried employees. Even so, there is also variety within professions. A government dry-waller works 9-5, and punches out whether the job is done or not. A free-lance dry-waller promises to fix your bathroom. If he falls behind, he starts working long into the evening and wishing he quoted higher. He doesn't ask for overtime.

Touche! But I'm still willing to bet that if a private company had that as an expected safety record (as opposed to 'ooops, we'll get it right next time), they would be prevented from flying manned missions.

Hahahaha... In a professional adult work environment, like programming say, you work enough to get done what you said you could get done, and as on time as you can. Once in awhile that means 14 hour days. If it starts to happen with any regularity, the work-load adjusts or you quit. And here is another scenario: suppose you are a small business principal. Then you definately work as much as you have to, and it will typically occur with regularity. Most entrepeneurs average 12 hour days, and are never really 'off the clock.' Travel is always a problem, particularly business development. If you go on a sales trip for a week, you often have to travel on the weekends, have meetings during the day, and work dinners during the evening. You've burned 7 days of your life, but most companies expect you to clock just 40 hours. It would be ruinous for them to pay you comp time. As an employee, you usually suck it up and say it is the price one pays for a visit to Tokyo or wherever.

We have the worst of both worlds. We think private industry will pay for the development of a capability, but want to ensure that NASA drives and regulates it. Suppose you have an approach that gets a manned shuttle in orbit for only $500k, but the shuttle blows up on launch 2% of the time. Good enough for pioneering spirits, and good enough for people wanting their payloads launched, but do you really think NASA would let you launch? There would be no commercial air industry if the current regulatory philosophy had been in place a century ago. The Wright brothers would have been shut down for reckless endangerment.

Funding for this research courtesy of the National Science Foundation.

Like much of the world at various times, slavery was flourishing in Africa before the slave trade, with most areas apparently comprised of at least a third slaves. http://www.britannica.com/blackhistory/article-24157 Slaves were primarily captured in war, or enslaved for crimes or debts. They were treated as an export commodity before the middle passage was opened up. At least initially I suspect the desire for guns was driven more by local politics than fear of enslavement by merchant raiders.

Your retirement matches what everybody else gets: you are paying into SS at the same rate, and TSP is essentially a 401k plan with typical employer matching. But you get a bonus that we peasants do not: 24 years at 62 provides you an additional annual pension of 26.4% of the average of your high three salary year (basically your ending salary).

In all seriousness, my anecdote is real. I was surprised in my travels in asia and the middle-east at how often the young and educated brought up NASA, and how their views about the US turned positive when discussing our space program - this regardless of their normal leanings. It is IMO among the most powerfull tools we have in our PR arsenal, and that aspect is unappreciated here.

Gone will be the days when we could travel the world and people, hearing that we are American, will light up and say "Ah, NASA!" I'm not holding my breath for "Oh! Public Exchanges! And CHIP!!!"

Thanks - that's in line with my thinking. If your goal is X and you make sufficient allocations, you will meet or exceed X with high probability. But if your goal is to maximize your expected return (or minimize risk, or some other philosophy), it is not so good.

My recipe is stocks and more stocks. Stop when the expected annual return is what I want each year in retirement. Confidence in the target expected annual return is important. Confidence that the S&P will grow 6% annually, say, is greater than GE specifically. Confidence in what the real estate market will do long term is, for me, dangerously lacking. As an aside, you have to think about how you handle a business after retirement. It is one thing if it is a revenue stream vehicle that will run itself, and you can be a passive owner getting periodic checks. It is quite another if you will still have to be involved day-to-day, are are assuming you can sell it off at some targeted price.

This raises an interesting question about the culture of investing. What he did is only different in magnitude from what an invester does who shifts retirement funds from bonds to speculative stocks. There is a pervasive belief that retirement portfolio's should be designed so that they become more conservative as you get closer to retirement, and this has led to the proliferation of retirement-date funds. Can anyone point me to a mathematical rationale of this stategy versus others? To my eye, they are underperformers in the sense of absolute return. You are gaining increasing certaintity as your retirement approaches, but at the cost of expected gain. That may be desirable for some, but it certainly isn't highlighted. It is like advising poker players to reduce the stakes of the games they play as midnight approaches. It may be a valuable psychological strategy, but it questionable that it should be seen as poker strategy.

Do you understand what you just wrote? That over an 8 year period, 42% of US corporations essentially had no profit for at least two of the years. This offends and/or astonishes you why?

What does any of this have to do with the Left's animosity to the principal of natural selection outside of biology?

Are you federal or local? If federal, you are under FERS. Beyond the fact that another 10 years gets you much more than 400 dollars, you will also get TSP and SS. Your retirement is the three combined, with the pension the smallest part. That's some sweet action.

^--- Speechwriter for Marie Antoinette

Re the "No blacks in the Tea Party = Racism" meme, some musings on small numbers: I took an interest in this and dug up some facts - you can draw your own conclusion. IMO there have been only two objective polls of the movement, and only one (Quinnapiac, 3/24) looked at the racial demographics. Surveying 1,900 RV, here are the political affiliations of the respondents: 28% Republican 35% Independent 32% Democrat 6% Other/No answer Respondents were also asked if they had an unfavorable view of the Tea Party, a favorable view, and if they considered themselves part of the movement. 13.3% considered themselves Tea Partiers. By affiliation, those self-identified as Tea Partiers were 44% Republican 38% Independent 12% Democrat 5% Other Respondents were asked their demographics, and there were two interesting things. First, the self-identified Tea Partiers were 55% female (at odds with the other, smaller poll which put it at 45%). Second was the racial composition: Total (76% White, 11% Black, 7% NW Hispanic, 5% Other) Republican (93%, 2%, 3%, 2%) Tea Party (88%, 6%, 4%, 2%) Independent (78%, 6%, 8%, 8%) Democrat (58%, 27%, 10%, 5%) This tells me that the Tea Party is in fact more diverse than the Republican Party, somewhere between it and the block of independent voters. Racially, it looks more like America than does the Democrats! So the next question is purely statistical, with respect to the African-Americans making up 6% of the Tea Party. Is this significantly low, when black respondents were 11% of the survey? What would we expect in a random sample? 11%. What about a party which is defined to be anti-incumbant generally and anti-Obama particularly, when Obama's approval ratings within the black community hover just over 90%? More like 2%. Black membership in the Tea Party is in fact higher than I would have expected when you factor in their policy positions.

But they still have to leave their drive and ambition at the door, so it is not all roses. Nobody is going to look back on a 30 year career of staff meetings, quality improvement seminars, and persum writing at the Dept of Education and say "Damn! For a while in my life I was a real player, a mover and a shaker!"

Would you expect business corruption to be lower or higher if: - Each buyer was legally obligated to deal with a single supplier company, without competition - That supplier company could refuse to provide goods and services if its terms were not met, with legal protection against retribution - Supplier companies could strike together in support of one another - Any attempt to provide the goods and services internally would be met by a campaign of demonization

Not elementary school related, but 'This American Life' http://www.thisamericanlife.org/ (see NUMMI episode) has an interesting podcast on the failure of GM management to capitalize on Japanese workplace techniques. While TAL is reflexively liberal, the unions come off surprisingly poorly - lots of candid interviews with union members detail the corrupt UAW workplace culture and how they ran the show.

Why is it so hard to see that laws against 'criminal' activity don't work period, be they for theft, tax evasion, or what have you. It only encourages the growth of criminal organizations. Why should the experience with drugs be any different? The only logical answer is to decriminalize everything, lest our inability to eliminate such activity in the US be mocked.