greg1647545532

That's my point. It was a bad law, and now it's not a law anymore. That's my perspective.

Not intended; I was just curious by your use of past tense for a law that was still on the books. Personally, I was outraged by the Patriot Act, but 10+ years later my outrage has cooled. It garnered a vote for John Kerry from me, but not much else, and a lot of the dire predictions from the left about a police state failed to materialize. Likewise, someone who voluntarily made themselves a felon (as you seem to be advocating here) over the 1994 AWB might feel like they overreacted after watching the ban lead to... absolutely nothing. And it didn't require civil disobedience, it sorted itself out correctly via the democratic process. Perspective... that's all I'm looking for.

Like the 1994 assault weapons ban lead to.... That's not actually how politics works. You give someone an inch, and there's usually a massive backlash. What civil disobedience did you advocate for the Patriot Act? And why did you stop advocating it?

Hyperbole much?

So much for the myth of the law-abiding gun owner... You do all realize that your "team" controls the House and nearly half the Senate, which means an assault weapons ban is dead in the water, right? It will absolutely never pass, because, *news flash*, you're not an oppressed minority. You all are adequately represented; government is working like it's supposed to! Makes me wonder what the point of threads like this are...

See, this is the problem with this story. The victim failed to kill, or even incapacitate, the robber. He's lucky as fuck that the robber ran away without firing a shot, instead of A) shooting back and killing him or his infant, or B) running away firing blindly over his shoulder, "accidentally" killing him or his infant. Dude chose to escalate an armed confrontation into a shootout and then failed to finish the job. That's absolutely reckless considering there was a 2-month old child right there.

Except for the part where he got (presumably free) emergency treatment at Mt. Carmel and was arrested there. Alive.

If only he'd been armed...

Regular insulated wire puts all the wires right next to each other. If the insulation were to ever fail, you'd have lots of arcing. Knob and tube puts inches between all the wires, so in one respect, it's actually safer. Incidentally, I've seen really old wiring that's just exposed aluminum wire, no insulation, with about a foot separating everything. Apparently insulated wire was a novel idea. The real problem is the way houses were wired back then. You might run the neutral along a center column of the house (that's how mine was done) to the 2nd floor, then run a hot wire all along the exterior walls. Then you can tap into the neutral wherever you want to complete a circuit. Essentially, the entire house would be 1 circuit, which is fine when the only electronics that have been invented are low-watt light bulbs and low-power radios. As demands increased, though, it was very easy to overload the rating on the wires. Also, like in my house, you can run modern wiring off an old K&T junction box. My kitchen lights were all "modern" wiring when I moved in, but we found out shortly thereafter that it was actually connected via some old K&T to the electrical box. Scary. At least the GFCI outlets was on a dedicated circuit. But that's not really the wires' fault, it's the fault of the previous owner who didn't want to pay to do things right. We ended up ripping out about 95% of the K&T. The remaining circuit only powers 3 lights like I said, and replacing that wiring would mean ripping out massive amounts of plaster walls. 3 electricians told me to leave it be, so I did. At this point, the wiring is pretty well under-loaded so it shouldn't be an issue.

I had to replace a bunch of knob and tube when I moved in 3 years ago. Still have 3 lights powered by it, and it's probably going to stay like that for the long-term. Yay for 86 year old wiring! But I find it curious that all of your appliances are dying a few days before the end of the world....

http://eugene.craigslist.org/cto/3465598709.html http://images.craigslist.org/3K43Lb3Nd5I25H75Mbcc8e5e593d3e76714b1.jpg http://images.craigslist.org/3E83l93Hb5O25Z15F4cc865baf1c68e3611e0.jpg

You ranted about Obama while responding directly to my complaint that you rant too much about Obama. Brilliant! Again, not surprising.

And you're counting on volunteer poll workers, most of whom are like 80 years old, to be able to both a) figure out how a generator that they've never used and barely been trained on is supposed to work, and b) manage the growing crowds of wet and disgruntled voters. It'll be chaos; cats and dogs living together, Republicans and Democrats joining forces to loot beer stores. I predict lawsuits.

All well and true, but I still don't think you'd make paying off China a priority, would you? It's much less important than eliminating our deficit and paying off our debt in general, wouldn't you agree? And then you just go on a rant about Obama, when I wasn't talking about Obama at all. Again, not surprising.

You seem to agree with me that China owning a portion of our debt isn't something we need to worry about or make a priority.

How big is our national debt? Is it 11 trillion or 16 trillion? Seems to me that everyone wants to use the bigger number, except for now, in this one instance, where you want to use the smaller number so that China's percentage of it looks bigger. Otherwise, point taken. You didn't, my post was responding to JuicedH22. In the very sentence you quoted I called it a dumb suggestion myself. eta: My point is just that it's not an asinine suggestion. Paying off one credit card with another is a perfectly reasonable strategy if one credit card has a much higher rate. I just paid off my mortgage with a brand new mortgage at a lower rate, and I don't think that was asinine. If the US decides that having China own our debt is too much of a liability for whatever dumb reason, then we can pay them off by borrowing money. This wouldn't be an option if China owned a much larger percentage of our debt like some people think; we couldn't borrow 8 trillion to pay them off, for instance. Or at least I don't think we could.

Well I can agree with almost all of that, I guess. I wouldn't say it's "silly" to point out that China only owns 10% of our debt; I also wouldn't say that I'm minimizing it, merely pointing out that the reality isn't as bad as the perception. If that seems minimizing to you, then I may suggest it's because the Republican party has been so effective at painting China out to be an economic boogeyman. Mitt Romney standing up in the debate and saying, "We need to ask ourselves if it's worth borrowing this money from China" is misleading; he should be saying "if it's worth borrowing 10% of this money from China." But it's in his best interest to create an enemy, even if that means misleading everyone. You yourself said you didn't realize that the percentage of our debt owned by China was that low. I also don't think that pointing out that we could borrow money to pay off China is "asinine." That's too strong of a word for what I admitted was a dumb suggestion. In any case, will you agree that this... is a reasonable position, but this... is inflammatory baloney. It's hard to believe that both of those quotes came from the same person.

Well your last sentence is just not true, since they've increased the money supply by that much before. Now, that was a unique situation - the creation was carefully controlled over a 15 month period, and not in one fell swoop. But there's nothing saying we can't do the same thing with China. Look, I enjoyed your charts and graphs and explanations of hyperinflation, and - no snark intended - I appreciate you taking the time to post it. And if China owned, say, 1/3 of our debt, I would wholeheartedly agree with everything you said. The US can't absorb a 50% increase in the money supply without some very bad shit happening. But 11%? I believe that's well below the threshold that would cause hyperinflation. You say, "So you are increasing inflation of MB by almost double and 'overall' inflation in money supply by 11%... that would DEFINITELY be more than enough to turn into runaway inflation, I am sure most economists would agree." Find some of these economists, because I don't believe you, and you haven't posted any cites. Surely we agree that there's some threshold at which inflation will turn into runaway inflation - 13.5% wasn't enough in the 80s, 18% wasn't enough during WWI. What is it? 20% 30%? What amount of increase in the monetary supply will get us to that threshold? 11%? 15%? 30%? To be honest, I've looked and I can't find an answer. I'm more than willing to be educated, but just stating that it would cause hyperinflation isn't going to cut it, especially since every bit of evidence I can find suggests that $1.2 trillion wouldn't be that big of a shock to our system.

Yeah, they can "demand their money" exactly when we've already agreed to give it back to them. Thanks for agreeing with me that China doesn't have a big red button labelled "Destroy America's Economy."

Actually, I'm suggesting that it could potentially be worse than the early 80's. 15% was the inflation number I pulled out of my ass, a number which is higher than the 1980's 13.5%. This is why, in this very thread, I've said that this idea of paying off China by printing money is moronic and that we should not do it. Is that clear? What it won't do is cause hyperinflation, just like we didn't have hyperinflation in the early 80s. Do you really think so little of America that you think we couldn't live through that again? Of course you do, down there in your little fear bunker.

Looking forward to it. You could also just admit that I'm right . I wouldn't hold it against you.

Well, if you have another definition, I'd love to hear it. I'd also love to hear you make a case for why creating a trillion dollars would cause hyperinflation. I've been wrong before; maybe you'll convince me! But you need to bring something to the table other than a basic definition of inflation and an admittedly exaggerated example. I'd like it if our elected officials could give us straight answers about our problems. I don't want them to exaggerate them for political gain, or whitewash over them in order to make it seem like everything's OK. I'd prefer if all Americans did the same. I'm sure you feel the same way, right? I don't claim to be an economist, but I know that the Federal Reserve is tasked with managing the money supply. In order to manage it, they have to track it, and the value they're currently tracking for the amount of US currency in existence (the M2 value explained at this link) is in the ballpark of 10 trillion dollars. Creating a trillion dollars would decrease the amount of all existing currency by about 10%. That's how I came up with that number. I'm assuming you know that when we talk about "printing" money to pay off China, we're not actually talking about the Bureau of Engraving. Instead, the Federal Reserve actually creates money, basically out of thin air, and loans it out to banks. In the last 4 years, the Fed has created about 2 trillion dollars in this manner. This is how they control the rate of inflation, which is one of the primary jobs of any central bank. If they suddenly created a trillion, it would spike inflation, but there's also nothing that says they'd have to do it all at once. If they did it over the next 5 years we'd barely notice. Please also note that I'm not suggesting this as a fiscally sound course of action. In fact it's completely moronic, because China owning some of our debt is no big deal. Also, it would thrash our credit rating further than it's already been thrashed. But it's incorrect to think that China can crash our economy by calling in the debt, and hopefully I've adequately explained why.

I had to look this up, but a hyperinflation period is generally regarded as one in which inflation exceeds 50% per month. Printing a trillion dollars, by my estimate, would cause an instantaneous spike of about 10% inflation. On top of our typical 3-4%, you're looking at 15% tops, and only over a very short period. So no, it wouldn't cause hyperinflation. Would 15% inflation suck? Yeah. Should we print a trillion dollars to pay off China? No. But if you're really that concerned about it, that's all it would take to get China off our backs. We'd take a temporary hit of inflation, everyone would bitch about it, but then you'd sleep better at night knowing that we're not going to become the Peoples Republic of North America or whatever. I'm just trying to help you be less scared, man.

He does have an entire page dedicated to it. It's an obscure link, I'll forgive you for not having found it. (Don't bother dismissing everything he's claiming on that page, I know you're going to do it anyway and it's not going to be very convincing).

Well that's not at all what you just said. You said that the president is letting (allowing?) foreigners buy American companies. But this garbage just says some crap about the economy. Are you backtracking? Do you think that if you just spew enough words that nobody will call you on your bullshit?