https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLpfbcXTeo8
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No it doesn't. This pig will be in trip zeroes by the Superbowl.
Wow, just read the NTEK/NTGL thread on WizardofVegas - what a total douchebag the ex-Prezidon't is.
One has to question the judgement of the BOD for EVER thinking headcase HighballWater would be suitable as an exec like Prez. Only a bunch of fools would have approved that move.
Oh well, no audits, no S-1 being drafted, no gaming license APPLICATION even submitted - NTGL is just a total farce and clusterfk.
The NTGL Christmas party - dinner in a private room at Silverton Daycare Center
NTGL typical 'working' day at the office closet
Last NTGL staff conference videoCON of the year (yes, this is an actual screenshot of an NTGL staff videoCONference!):
Another bleak Christmas for PPJE shareholders. Brokeass Basu cannot afford the coal and wood this year, so it's going to be just coal ash and wood ash for the shareholders this Christmas, as Brokeass Basu has diluted this scam to dust.
It's just a pile of dust now, and an old, broke pennyscam huckster 'CEO' on top of that ash pile.
The entire capital stock of all classes in PPJE - here is the summed value of the entire capital stock:
LOL!!! "237k active users" - 236k from one IP address or paid hits from Thailand - much like buying tens of thousands of 'likes' on FB from Thailand. Or like buying Alexa hits using the refresh button scam and folks with dynamic IPs gaming the system by switching IPs every time.
The only thing that matter is is PAID RENTALS. Butt UF never wants to talk about THAT pathetic number.
165 total rentals for Interstellar over the entire 9 month lease - and 25 of those were from the same IP address! GROSSED a total of $1,648.35 for a cost of $700,000.
#NOTWINNING
HighballWaterTower is just an incredible jerk - no wonder the FoleyCrimeFambly kicked him to the curb outta the Prez-I-Don't spott - dude is an embarrassment.
If they want a guy with decent people skills, who can be made at least presentable, and is nott widely insane and a thin-skinned egocentric, NTGL should put Stevia in the Prez-I-Don't seat.
Buy him a suit and some nice shoes. Have him dump the watchcap. And lett Stevia front for the scamco.
With a little training and experience, Stevia could prolly pull it off. Of course the power in the scam is always and everywhere in DaHandsOfDaFoleyCrimeFambly, butt Stevia could be their nominee/frontman/scutboy as the public face of DaScam.
I'll have to read that WoV website later and see how HighballWater gott himself banned there.
Mental stability seems to be a serious prollem for him based on the WoV posts he's made. Total jerkwater.
C'mon, subpennyland! You still have a week of trading to hit subpenny by yearend.
And from there to trip zeroes will be the adventure of the first half of 2016. Once all those floorless convertible notes are in maturity and all the weekly conversions and dumps accelerate, the Death Spiral tightens, and this scam will go down the drain fast.
Ironwill, it is because YIPI is a scam run by a buffoon, Little Richard Granville, and the 'news' doesn't mean a thing - YIPI is circling the drain.
It's a typical pennyscam with a less-than-even-below-average pennyscam CREo who has put himself and the company in a very badd spott and is being sued in two major lawsuits where he and the company are going to gett tossed into bankruptcy (personal and corporate).
Other than that, no prollems.
HTH.
The shareholder class action lawsuits will sink whatever is left of KBIO. Watch them tumble in. Saw the same thing with FNRG when the FBI arrested the chairman, Richard St. Julien, on securities fraud charges.
KBIO will wind up like FNRG (an exchange-traded listed stock at the time of the arrest) - dead. Killed by a deluge of lawsuits.
The investor losses here will totally swamp any amount of D&O insurance coverage and the entire asset base of the company. It will be forced into bankruptcy, and the assets sold off to pay creditors and the legal settlements/judgments.
This pig stock is now officially proclaimed DEAD.
It will trade for awhile, like FNRG, butt it's on the black diamond downhill slope now and gravity is unforgiving.
I could just do a search-and-replace on the company name for my earlier posts:
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=112891155
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=113223965
OUCH! Sykes was right again. He must be in cahoots with the FBI, DOJ, and SEC, right?
It can't be that he's right. Can it?
I've found that on iHub, many of the people that make those type of statements are either retirees or near retirement.
Eventually, when the stock craters and they lose all hope, they write "this scam took all my retirement funds" or "Is it alright with me that the SEC failed to enforce buy-in laws that could have resulted in hundreds of thousands of profit to me? Money that could be used to pay for such frivolous things as life-saving medical treatment?"
They are often old, nott Millenials. Old in NTEK, old in SPNG, old in KBIO.
This is ironic - SPNG and then KBIO - and the bad guys were 'short sellers' and the media in both cases (read both):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119010890
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=118983785
Law school is ridiculously easy. When you gett ~OUTT you don't really know shit about the real world of law. Nott a clue.
I learned more about law the first summer I clerked between law school academic years than I had learned in law school at that point.
I had many, many options open to me - stunningly so - and I chose based on only two criteria - which firm had the better mentor that I'd work with and which firm had the most interesting client base. I found the #1 mentor was also coincidently the guy who had, by far, the most interesting clients, so it was an easy choice.
The common adage in my subject area is "you make your bones the first five years" - which means it takes five years of working in this area at the fast pace of a law firm before you can consider yourself competent or 'graduated'. I'd say 85 percent of my knowledge in law came from those five years after law school and maybe 15 percent (if that) from the three years of law school. My buddy is a traumatologist orthopedic surgeon, and he says medicine is pretty similar. He didn't feel competent until after his five years of residency and a one year fellowship. Even then, he sought advice and counsel from his more experienced colleagues to provide a sanity check on his treatment plans (orthopedic trauma cases often require the surgeon to plan 4-10 operations that may take place over 2-5 years before the injury(ies) is/are fully healed - there has to be a stepwise strategy before you make the first cut on the first operation or you can box yourself into a corner and then the injury can never be fixed properly).
Again, the value of real world practical education versus 'academic' education is exemplified.
By the way, my ortho surgeon buddy is also from dirt. He's an adopted kid raised on a farm by a dad who was also an ex-Marine from WW2 (who was on Iwo Jima). He also lives frugally and modestly. Last time I saw him he had an old Honda Accord and a Toyota Tacoma pickup truck in his garage, and a Case tractor in his barn. He bought two parcels of farmland and built his house, a barn, and a machine shed. His hobby is raising 'boutique' grass-fed, no antibiotics or steroids beef cattle that a joint friend of ours butchers and retails to select restaurants throughout the Midwest. When he puts down the scalpel, drill, powered screwdriver for the day and rounds on his patients and Czechs in with his residents and leaves for the day, he gets home, puts on the overalls and fires up the tractor, and goes ~OUTT in the fields to move the movable fence so the cattle have fresh grass to graze on. Then after dinner he dictates note and answers pages and calls from the hospital - and makes orders over the phone and computer. Quite an active life he leads. His wife and my wife also come from dirt. We are quite the foursome when we get together.
One time, long ago, when I was visiting my friend when he was doing a fellowship in Indianapolis, he and I came ~OUTT of a restaurant and a top end Mercedes drive up and the driver getts ~OUTT and throws his keys to me and says "I'll be about an hour and a half." - he thought we were the parking valets! We are pretty unpretentious guys and nott on anyone's best dressed list, so we understood his error. Unfortunately we told him we weren't the valets before we considered the opportunity to take his car for a 90 minute joyride.
Always blue collar guys. You can't wash that ~OUTT of us nor could we - even if we tried. Always feel uncomfortable at a Four Seasons or Fairmont, prefer the Holiday Inn Express or even the Best Western. Don't mind the Super 8, although Motel 6 is now too sketchy unless it's in a place like Kalispell, Columbia Falls, Whitehead, Buffalo, or Sheridan.
If alone, I almost always will prefer Dinahs in Culver City or the Suburban Diner in Paramus over Cut or 17 Summer, even though I'm nott paying for the meal myself. Same with hotels - I usually only stay at the top end places when traveling with colleagues or clients who are staying there. Given the choice alone, I feel more comfortable at a Holiday Inn or HI Express.
Old-money rich people have too many rules, expectations, judgments, and stupid games for me to deal with unless I'm being paid to do that. I don't like being around them unless I have to.
Maybe my uncle, best friend, and I all suffer from deep-seated fears of being unworthy dirt people. I don't think so. I think the rich folks just have been insulated all their lives have a very poor grasp of reality and what is important. I think they have the deep-seated fear that they are unworthy of their wealth and use status and material goods to either self-validate or to maintain the facade that they think keeps the world from discovering their unworthiness/inferiority.
Butt what he hell could I possibly know. I never took a psychology course. :)
If I may ask a personal question(s), my first query is:
Janice, did you grow up in an upper middle class or wealthy family?
"But no matter what you think, nowadays it's clear that most young people think making money is "success". And that nothing else counts for very much."
Do you really believe that in the bold above? Have you hung ... errr... hanged ... errr ... spent some time talking with Millenials?
My son and his friends surely do nott follow that belief. Nott at all.
As I stated in a much earlier discussion maybe a couple of months ago, I volunteer with our local high school. The students at our school certainly don't believe that money is success.
In fact, these are much more grounded kids that my generation was. They kind of know the national debt and demographics have fucked them over. They know that global competition is brutal and will get worse.
These kids are largely eschewing money and material success in favor of experiences and hobbies. My son is nott driven by a desire for money, only for an interesting job where he can use his knowledge and skills for a long time and nott be pigeonholed or made obsolete by time.
Maybe the kids where I live are different than the ones where you live. California is notoriously way more laid back than the East Coasties.
It's never too late!!! Grandma Moses didn't start painting seriously until she was almost 80.
You can do it, Barb. Plus Vermont is such a pretty state, even in winter.
You'd be great, and even if you didn't practice, you'd enjoy the mental exercise and the way it will change the way you think (how you analyze problems and issues).
Don't expect to find either beauty or truth in law. If those ever existed in the law, they left a long time ago back in England.
It will absolutely provide a unique way to think - and read - and write. And you can grow with it forever - your perspectives and analytical frameworks will keep changing with experience. There are 90+ year old lawyers (and at least until recently a 93 year old Federal judge) who are nott only competent, butt their experience and skills better their younger colleagues in many respects. When you have a question about how to handle something, the old white-haired senior guy is who you go ask for advice. My mentor used to do that all the time - going to the second oldest lawyer at the firm and ask him for advice.
Law is nott like sports or medicine or engineering. You get better with age (assuming your mental faculties remain) with no upper limit.
Go for it!
Those poor kids made it in economic terms, didn't they? Butt hay, I don't want to bore you with examples like Larry Ellison or the guy that The Pursuit of Happyness was about.
Belfort and his poor kids found a way to make it - albeit illegality was involved. That doesn't discount my point that poor kids are 'advantaged' by a greater drive to succeed economically than kids of rich folks. I have tons of examples and experience.
In fact, the kids from some of the richest families have a very poor track record of personal success, economically or otherwise. Of all the people I know who came from wealthy families, a very high percentage of them have died - from suicide, alcohol, drugs, car accidents - long before they even would have been 30. Many who are still alive have marital, substance abuse, and even financial problems at a quite high frequency compared to the general population.
One of the biggest 'disadvantages' is to be a trust fund kid and know it. Those sloths generally have zero ambition. They know they don't have to work, so they don't. You can find a ton of them at South Beach, wandering about with a drink in their hand - at 10AM. Gosh, I've seen so many kids from my 'rich' friends and clients go that way.
Another huge 'disadvantage' is to be the son of a very successful, self-made father. A very small fraction of these kids are driven to match or beat their dad's success (it's possibly the Oedipal drive), butt most - the majority - are intimidated by that challenge and simply give up. Because of this, I made and make a very concerted effort to live way below my means. My son grew up nott as a 'rich kid' - and knowing the value of money and the lack of value of money. He knows that possessions are of little importance in the big scheme of life and he has become very much a minimalist. I made sure that he always believed he was able to overmatch me in many academic areas, butt still making it hard enough that he can never be sure of success (however measured) so he is motivated and his self-confidence is high butt nott so high as to be overconfident. The key in anything - business, academics, law, etc. is to always be hungry for better - to use Arnold's phrase, you have to "Get Hungry".
IMO, hunger for success, however defined, is the key factor in obtaining success - nott economic background, parents' education level, or any of the hooey that the coneheads who think smoking causes divorce think are relevant based on some charts and social 'science'.
"Practical experience" goes only so far if, for example, you want to be a lawyer."
Oh I would nott agree with that.
Let me first insert here that, as you may know, in California you can join the bar without ever attending a law school. You study as an apprentice of a California attorney and then sit for the bar (and pass the moral character requirements). Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming also license attorneys who have never been inside a law school butt have 'read the law' under the tutleage of a lawyer and taken and passed the exam and morals/character qualification. (I believe, butt do nott know, that Abe Lincoln became a lawyer this way. it's still used today.)
And frankly, some of the best lawyers in many areas are those with street smarts and who have walked a rough road.
I could cite a lott of examples of really bad lawyers with stellar academics butt no real world experience, and the flip side - great lawyers - like Morgan Chu (his brother, Steven Chu is the Nobel prizewinning physicist) who grew up in a poor Chinese immigrant family in New York - and as a kid he was tough as hell, rode the subways with his gang, and frankly had little use for school. He's probably one of the top ten IP litigators in the USA. His brother picked up a Nobel prize (and I know him and did some work for him one time). Nott bad for a couple of poor Chinese kids in the low-rent area of NYC from very poor parents, eh?
You are quite fond of stereotyping I see.
No, my folks didn't use crack. My dad drank and smoked.
Even with your odd counterexample of Belfort, you still don't counter my point that he did in fact succeed.
Kids from poor backgrounds and who have other hardship experiences growing up are often successful (economically).
Belfort was one of them. So he proves my point when the outcome is income and wealth. Thank you.
Unfortunately, your example of Belfort seems to stereotype poor kids as lacking in the morals that you seem to imply the 'advantaged' rich kids have. Like most leftists, you have a very deep disdain for poor people (and black people) - subconscious or at least you won't admit it to yourself. You assume that poor people and blacks "need help". How patronizing! "Oh, you poor soul. Of course you need extra points to catch up." - How demeaning an ASSumption!
I thought the premise of your argument is that poor kids (and parenthetically, blacks - dealt with separately elsewhere) need 'extra help' because they are economically 'disadvantaged' and thus will lag in income and wealth generation over their lifetimes as compared to the rich kids.
Now you cite Belfort, who clearly was successful on these economic metrics, butt you use him to somehow imply that the only way poor kids can make it economically is to be crooked, unethical, and ruthless - and you also imply backhandedly in that statement that poor kids must have a higher tendency to have low ethics.
Honestly, I am having trouble seeing how Belfort counters my point. Can you explain it further?
Executive summary of prior post:
(1) economic status is only one of many, many variables that correlate with a person's likelihood of 'success' as measured in income or wealth over a lifetime. Other variables outweigh this factor but leftists are preoccupied with economic status as a predictor of future performance.
(2) poor kids have many intangible 'advantages' over rich kids - ambition, lack of fear of failure, practicality, and just plain guts.
(3) education is often trumped by practical experience and drive.
(4) 'advantage' cannot be quantified nor equalized, and government is particularly incapable of both.
"I assume you had parents who valued education"
Nott my dad. My mom always encouraged me to read and write. Neither had college degrees. My dad, while a really supernice guy, could nott even figure percentages (e.g., what is 10 percent of 200 - he wouldn't know) and was born a 'blue baby' and probably had some brain damage at birth (he said he was told that by his aunt and his mother confirmed it). He was a Marine in the Pacific from spring 1942 until the winter of '45 into '46 - he was in many of the well-known battles across the Pacific - from the Aleutians, Kwajalein, Peleliu,the Gilberts, Makin, Okinawa, and the Battle of the Surigao Strait at sea. He was on the battleship Mississippi when it was hit by a kamikaze and he jumped into the 5" gun turret to throw live shells overboard so they would nott be detonated by the fire. When he was discharged, in 1946 in New Orleans, he had hearing loss, scars from flash burns, and a metal sliver in his eye that he had for over a year because there was no opthalmologic surgeon in the western Pacific or at sea who was qualified to do the surgery - so they disembarked him at New Orleans to have the eye surgery done before he was discharged. He was a great man, butt just nott very smart nor into the value of education.
My mom was a voracious reader and writer. Butt enough on that or this will be a very long post. She was more of an example to me than one who ever said or implied "you must do well in school".
And this goes to my point; at no time did I or do I feel disadvantaged because of our economic limitations - if anything, I feel the opposite - and maybe this is why I am so frugal and like ghetto tourism - I feel that being on the poorer side actually drove me to success. I feel that I was advantaged, if anything, by being from a low economic household.
My uncle (my mom's bro) also became very educated (in math and in computers in the early 1960s) on his own volition at public schools and public university/college. He was trained in computer science before they had computer science departments or degrees. After his masters degree, he took a job at Boeing in computing, then he went to LA and worked for McDonnell-Douglas in computing, then another company (I can't recall the name). He took all his available money and bought a janitorial service, then he had workers and pickup trucks so he had them learn to install fire and burglar alarm systems in his commercial clients as well and he bought a PDP-11 computer to have the alarms tie into to monitor all the alarms with one user at a monitor. He then had all kinds of spare computing power, so he sold one of his clients at Chino airport who sold airplane parts located all over the world a monthly subscription and he converted all those 3x5 cards they had to a searchable database (to use all the free time of the user sitting at the monitor he was paying to monitor alarms) - he saved them so much money that the client was paying him $14,000 a month in the early '80s just for that database service - more than his entire business expenses. Then he still had this person at the display with time on their hands (the alarms had to be monitored 24/7 so it was multiple individuals doing the same job at different shifts) and he realized that if his trucks had mobile radios the monitor person could dispatch them more efficiently when a janitorial emergency, an alarm, or whatever occurred. So he bought from a company that was divesting themselves of all their radio assets. He only wanted mobile radio, butt they wanted to sell the whole package - mobile radios, pagers, and this new thing called cellphones! So he bought it all, just for the mobile radios. Well, sure enough pagers became more popular and then the cellphone wave came along and he was king of cellphones in the Inland Empire - and sold his entire business to a larger cellphone carrier that was then bought by McCaw cellular and then became MCI. Bottom line - he made a ton of money after years and years of hard work and saving and investing in his business.
I suppose some people would call that just "good fortune". Nonetheless, he came from dirt, and even though he was and is what I think would be considered rich my everyones' measure except maybe Trump, when he visited he would go to the local low-end dive bars. I asked him why he goes to the dumpiest places with sawdust on the floors. He said to me "I'm a blue collar guy. That's all I've ever been or ever will be." He drove one of the old, dented, faded paint Ford Courier mini-trucks he kept from his business (until it finally blew a head gasket and cracked the block) even though he had tens of millions of dollars. I asked him why he left his aeropace computing career and bought the janitorial business in the first place. He said (I'll paraphase from memory): "I'm really nott that smart, butt I'm smart enough to know that I'm nott that smart. If I stayed with a big company, I'd eventually be pushed aside by younger kids from better schools. I know I'm a blue collar guy, so I knew I could do janitorial work even if business got bad, I could still sweep and clean toilets my myself. I've been so poor I don't fear failure, so I take risks and play in areas I know I can compete. That's all I've ever done. I was driven to make it work, no matter what it took or how much crap I had to deal with. The rich kids that were in my cohort at Boeing and McDonnell were stuck there because of their fear of losing their comfortable job and status. They don't think like us blue collar guys. They fear manual labor. They fear losing their new-car-every-two years or their house. They fear becoming poor - a fear that traps them. I've never had that fear. I've failed at things. I lived poor for a long time. Because of that, I succeeded at my business. Being a blue collar guy is what made me. Why would I nott go to bars where I belong - the blue collar bars - where guys who build stuff, get dirty, and rely on their ability to work - to survive and feed their families go to relax for a few beers after work or on the weekend. All I am is a blue collar guy who decided to work for himself and wanted to do a good job and be efficient."
I took that to mean that if he hadn't been poor, he would have wound up like the rich kids who wound up trapped in the bureaucracy and politics of Boeing and McDonnell.
So, tell me how 'advantaged' those rich kids were and how 'disadvantaged' my uncle was.
He's nott the exception either. One of my good friends is a very successful attorney - who came from a poor farm town in CA - his dad was a Japanese internee - the family lost everything in WW2. So he grew up with his dad running a salvage yard and farming a small plot of land. My friend used to work the vegetable field and also man the roadside fruit stand. His dad worked to find a way to grow the gobo root - a Japanese vegetable that people seemed unable to cultivate in the USA (the root didn't grow right and was misshapen and tasted wrong). His dad found a way to grow the gobo root in plastic tubes inserted into the ground, so the root filled the tube and formed an almost perfect cylinder - and it tasted right. My friend went off to a UC while his dad worked to expand his gobo root plot and find Japanese markets and restaurants that would buy it from him. My friend graduated and went to work for a major semiconductor company. Like my uncle, he decided he was a blue collar guy/farm kid in a bureaucracy that he didn't want to stay in, even though the money was very good. So, he saved and wound up buying three rental homes while he lived in a garage that was converted into an illegal apartment, and he went to law school - living off the rental income and his savings. He joined our firm a couple of years after I did - and us two farmboys/blue collar dudes hit it off. We'd play poker with these blue-blooded kids from Ivy League backgrounds who were slumming by inviting me and my friend into their game. While these schmucks would lecture us hicks on why we were misplaying our hands base don mathematical probabilities, we buddy and I were cleaning them ~OUTT. The mouthiest guy (after a few drinks) was a Ph.D. scientist/lawyer - he'd have to run ~OUTT to the ATM almost every game to replenish his chip stack. Everytime he'd explain why my friend and I were fucking upp by nott playing according to the mathematical probabilities. That chump prolly dumped $25k to us over the course of a couple of years - lecturing us all the way - never understanding that poker is nott a game where the mathematician wins.
I offer these as examples of how being from poor and/or rural backgrounds is often a real world advantage - and being a rich kid is a disadvantage. You should read this book - and this is why the top universities are accepting and inducing to matriculate applicants who were orphaned - they succeed at much higher rates than those with comfy childhoods with no experience dealing with obstacles or failing:
http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930
I'll end this overlong screed with a quote from Gordon Gekko:
"Gimme guys who are poor, smart and hungry."
There is pure truth in that statement. Those are the kids with the 'advantages' who are much more likely to succeed.
Let me also add that, to the point about measuring undefinable things like "opportunity" or "good fortune", my experience is that social 'scientists' are nowhere near science and are among the dumbest, rock-stupid people at the university (and I've been at a couple of the universities with the very top rated social 'sciences' departments - rated at the top for many decades.
Those people are buffoons and straight-up dolts. One very esteemed professor of sociology actually believed that a graph in the book of census results (the highly detailed survey sent to a very small sample of households) showed than smoking was a factor in the divorce rate. He used this graph that showed that as the number of smokers in a household and how many cigarettes they smoked on average per day increased, so did the divorce rate. He could nott distinguish correlation from causation - a very, very basic concept. He argued that since the graph showed this relationship it was perforce proof, or at worst strong evidence, that smoking was a causative factor in the divorce rate. He really believed this.
These are the chuckleheads who are at the top of the pyramid of social engineering - he had been an extensive advisor to the Johnson administration is justifying his Great Society proposals.
These are the kind of chuckleheads you'd apparently like to define, measure, and provide a designed 'remedy' to push society in some direction you deem preferable.
My atheist lord, you want the government to design social engineering frameworks when they cannot even run the Post Office, Amtrak, or the Obamacare website design?
Even if you somehow believe government SHOULD be doing social engineering, do you realize the buffoons who implement that plan? Will you like it when Jerry Falwell Jr. is President and he wants to mandate that every school teach 2 hours a day of Bible study and drop sciences?
Do you see the problems with having government being an intentional social engineer?
Do you nott realize that is exactly why the income tax code is so bloody ridiculous? Because 'equal under the law' was tossed aside and tax policy became used as a tool to force people to do certain things - and those are always determined by political strength - so lobbying is now more important in determining a business's success than conducting the actual business itself?
When you throw away "equal under the law" you gett the heavy, lumbering, mistake-prone hand of government guided by political lobbyists and ultimately corruption. Do you know why all centrally-planned economies ultimately fail? Do you think these governments are more competent to be a social engineer than they are economists or business planners?
Oh my.
How do you know I had less opportunities because I came from dirt?
I never asked for special treatment, nor do I think I deserved it.
I liked to hang ~OUTT ... errr ... spend a lott of time at the library, reading. I liked to learn stuff.
Shirley there were better elementary and middle schools than the one's I went to - I had a teacher claim that lightning was caused by two raindrops hitting each other. I corrected her (I head Issac Asimov non-fiction books since 4th grade). She sent me to the principal's office for arguing with her. I had a science teacher steal my jacket because I made him look the fool he was when he could nott make his own stoichiometric chemical equations balance.
I had some variable teachers. One chased me down the hall with a baseball bat before I realized at 6'1" in seventh grade I had nothing to fear from her bat. When I turned, she stopped and began crying. She was fired at Christmas break and she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Nott because of me, butt because she was nuts.
Just because my folks were nott rich and I had some questionable teachers, I don't think I was 'disadvantaged' at all. In fact, I had a lott more drive and ambition than the rich kids I ran into.
You and (excuse me) your 'ilk' think that you can determine 'disadvantaged' and measure it or make proxies for it. You're simply damned wrong and frankly arrogant in believing that you know better.
In any case, if you have these beliefs and a desire to 'equalize the opportunity' in whatever way you see it, then do it with your time and your own funds.
It is nott for the government to do. It cannot be an 'equal before the law' government and also a social engineer. These are mutually exclusive things, and frankly the government has no means or basis to make such determinations.
Taft was President before there was TV. Nixon lost in 1960 because Daley delivered over 50,000 fake votes and because he didn't have a close shave for his TV debate with Kennedy.
Name a recent President who was under 6 feet?
Why was FDR so wary of the electorate seeing him in a wheelchair?
Well then, no need for equality under the law if we can compromise on everything.
How many affirmative action points do I get for being half Czech (Bohunks - a discriminated class for many decades)?
How many points do we deduct from the WASPs in the Daughters of the American Revolution?
Does a 100 percent African ancestry gett more affirmtive action points than a 'colored' person who may be 80 percent European butt self-identifies as black? How about a Nigerian prince just off the plane versus a black in Gary, IN - same aa points for both on college admissions?
Do you see why definitions, measurement means, and who measures is hopelessly unfair and capricious?
Let's compromise - I'll make the NY Times illegal and you can make Fox News illegal. Deal?
Is that what you think the DOI and the Constitution is about?
"As for "disadvantage", well hey, I've been discriminated against as a woman, as were many of my contemporaries."
Everybody is discriminated all the time by everybody. Tall people make more than short, they (we) also gett elected to political office more often than short people.
Fat people don't have a chance. Go sit in the US Senate gallery when they're in session and find me one fat Senator.
As an atheist, I'm discriminated against, and I discriminate against religious people.
Dress poorly and most people will discriminate against you - I won't, I'll probably hire you, everything else equal.
Income is only one of many 'discriminations' that we all face.
"And we still don't have income equality."
OK, and why do you presume that is a result of a governmental action? Wait, let's start earlier - why do you presume that is an inapropriate outcome? Do you think that male and female employees pursue the same career tracks, are equally competitive, and are equally aggressive in taking risks and demanding more money?
(Note: female investors are notorious for avoiding risk taking and underperform the average male IRA/401(k) because of that - is that discrimination too? Should the government square the final balance of everyone's 401(k) and IRAs too - because there is a 'gender disparity' in portfolio performance?
And now that you've changed your tune, do you think that the government has the authority to treat people differently based on income?
Where will I find that in the Constitution?
How does that comport with 'equal before the law' as you've indicated was meant by the phrase 'created equal" in the DOI?
Can the government impose different prison terms to different individuals under the exact same circumstances - based on income?
Can the government decide that people who earn less than $100,000 a year are irreponsible and cannot own guns, buy liquor, or gett a jury trial?
If government can treat people differently based on their income, then that same principle can apply to any governmental action or law.
Should we assess postal rates based on income too? Amtrak tickets?
Oh my. We are deep into the unequal treatment cave now.
And Stewart was dead wrong about obscenity too. The Supremes have made many, many erroneous decisions.
The "I know it when I see it" is proof of his inability to think deeply about the issue. It is evidence of his weak thinking - an admission that he cannot define a term or provide any guidelines.
And hence 'obscenity' is a vague and capricious standard that leads to tons of unequal outcomes all across the USA, from the 1970s through today.
"Obviously Bob has better luck. But they're both taxed at the same rate."
Butt you just said that the justification for taxing one person at a different rate than another is "good fortune".
So now you're saying that "good fortune" is irrelevant? And lucky Bob should NOTT be taxed more than ED who sacrificed 10 years of his life for the same amount of money?
Oh my!
Wow. How interesting.
"legitimate advantage and disadvantage"
"Legitimate" as defined how, as measured how, as measured by whom?
Please go on.
"I'm afraid I do support the concept of a graduated income tax"
Then you do NOTT believe in equal treatment before the law (bu government).
Quit spouting excerpts from the DOI that clearly you do NOTT agree with.
You believe in government discrimination. Apparently based on "good fortune".
LOL! What a logical mess that leads to.
Hypo: Bob wins $4 million in the lottery. Ed decides to take a job cleaning up nuclear waste in Fukushima, knowing that he will be shortening his life by 10 years - Ed is paid $4 million for his service.
Bob and Ed both made $4 million last year. Which of them has more "good fortune" and thus should be taxed at a higher rate than the other?
Please answer.
In addition, the use of race as a proxy for 'opportunity' is thoroughly absurd.
My neighbors in law school were a white man and a black woman, both lawyers, with a daughter.
She will be given preferences for admission, scholarships, etc. solely because she claims to be black, even though she is more than 50% white (her mother is light skinned) and both her parents make solid six figure incomes.
Whereas a kid like I was - from the dirt, parents who were always struggling to pay the Household Finance monthly bill, would be considered to have a more advantageous position than their daughter in college admissions and scholarships.
Now, is that equality under the law? Really?
You are going to defend that?
"For their good fortune"???
Where is that in your "equal before the law" argument?
Do we now suspend equality before the law and measure "good fortune"?
LOL! How utterly insane (on many grounds).
First, you blithely attribute the $400 million to 'good fortune'. I'm sure that person just had the money drop into their lap - and if they did, SO WHAT. It does nott mean they are to be subjected to unequal treatment before the law. You seem to make a strange assumption about how people create value and wealth - as though it's a huge roulette wheel and they just toss chips onto a number and win. Butt the effort needed to obtain the $400 million is nott relevant at all. Even if they won it in a lottery, they should be treated EQUALLY before the law.
Second, if you are now in favor of unequal treatment based on "good fortune", then the same principle applies to all governmental actions - the court can say "yeah, you murdered 10 people, butt since you grew up poor, you can go free under the law, on the other hand, this fellow who had the 'good fortune' to go to Harvard butt committed the same crime will gett the death penalty.
Third, the government is wholly incompetent to measure "good fortune" or "opportunity". It is nothing but political handwaving to claim that as a basis for unequal treatment (like differential taxation or affirmative action).
Finally, the government is nott authorized to make such determinations nor to impose unequal treatment to 'remedy' any such 'opportunity' disparities (however measured and however determined).
So you really do NOTT support equal treatment by the law, you prefer politically-negotiated unequal treatment.
Just admit it. That is indeed your position.
Yes you are - admission to a university is an outcome. An outcome of the application process - which for governmental entities are supposed to be subject to the Due Process requirement - treating all as equal before the law - colorblind as to admissions.
An outcome!
It is the same principal as Jim Crow laws.
Did you miss the "million" after the $400?
And the same principal applies even if the person is domiciled in the USA and earns all $400 million in the USA. He/she should nott be taxed differently than others - equal under the law - he should have the same tax liability as every other citizen.
Nott 41 percent for some and -20 percent for others.
No, the government does nott have the authority nor the 'right' to even determine "equal opportunity". There is no objective way to measure or even define that.
You are using the word "opportunity" as a proxy for outcome.
Equal before the law means the law/government cannot treat us differently than other humans within the jurisdiction.
I agree that is the intended meaning of the phrase "created equal" in the DOI.
Which is why things like affirmative action by governmental entities is as abhorrent as Jim Crow laws.
Which is why a person who earns $400 million (say all of it from overseas sales and the person lives overseas butt are a US citizen) should nott have to pay 41 percent of his income to the US government whereas another citizen pays nothing or in fact getts paid a negative income tax (EITC). THAT is unequal treatment.
Leftists misunderstand that that phrase in the DOI does nott mean the government will impose "equality of outcome". No serious scholar of Jefferson can contend that with a straight face.
Now I'm confused again. What does "equal" mean if other than equal before the law - or, alternatively, literally the same (or substantively indistinguishable from other humans)?
In your view, what does "equal" mean in the phrase "created equal" in the DOI?
My view is that it was intended to mean people are born with the right to be treated equally by the law (and government) without reference to differences among humans.
I don't know. Whenever I travel, right before or right after Czeching into the hotel, I go to a CONvenience store and buy bottled water. Always. (Interesting LA ghetto story to follow.) So I just buy the stuph from Lawsons, 7-11, or vending machines. Don't know who makes it.
LA ghetto story (Integral will grok this)
As I wrote, I always buy bottled water before or after Czeching into my hotel. I often fly to LAX, sometimes very often, so I have a routine. I pick up my rental car, drive down La Cienega past the Burger King and hang a right on Century. Right there on your right is an ARCO station where I stop to buy my water (either before or after taking a quick run down to Yoshinoya on the corner of Century and Hawthorne in the deep dark crevasses of Inglewood). so one time I pull up and start walking into the ARCO and I see the clerk coming ~OUTT and looking around. I keep walking towards the door. The clerk waves his hands and tells me "No, we are closed. We were just robbed. Did you see him?" Well, I didn't, and I had to find another CONvenience store around. So I start heading back towards Yoshinoya on Century and find the ghetto liquor store on the right a few blocks down - I go in and pick up two 1.5 liter bottles of water and my drug of choice, a spicy V-8. I walk up to the Czech~OUTT area and I'll be damned if the whole area behind the broad, long counter isn't behind 2.5 inch thick bullet resistant plexiglass - and they keep the cigarettes behind this wall of plexiglass that guards the clerks and cash registers. They have a rotatable plexiglass pass-thru where you can pay and the clerk can pass change and any behind-the-counter items to you. The woman ahead of me was negotiating to buy cigarettes; she didn't have enough money and the clerks wouldn't sell here individual cigarettes, only whole packs. After listening to her try tho negotiate with them, and since she was obviously drunk, and since smoking is bad for her and will probably kill her early, I gave her a $5 bill and said "it's on me - buy yourself a pack". So finally I gett to the counter and pay for my water and V-8 through this massive wall of bullet-resistant plexiglass with speakers and microphone to communicate to the clerk. I told him that I'm there because the ARCO was just robbed and is closed. He says "oh, that happens a lot to them and the Shell station too".
When I walked ~OUTT of the store, the woman to whom I gave the $5 so she could buy her smokes and gett ~OUTT of my way to Czech ~OUTT is waiting and in her drunken slur she wants to "date" me to thank me for the smokes. Wow. A $5 whore. First time I ever met one of those. She was overpricing herself by about $6.
Welcome to the 'hood.
That's why I love slumming. You gett to have all these memories of weird shit happening. I have a few Yoshinoya stories too - BTW, that Yoshinoya has a full time armed guard inside after dark. There are at least a dozen bros hanging ... errr ... loitering in the parking lott offering to sell you crack rocks, weed, or eightballs.
Way more fun than sitting in the lounge of a Four Seasons.
"Created equal" is nott the same as being equal. And in fact it is false even as stated - we are nott all created the same.
Do you have cystic fibrosis? Hydrocephaly? Teratology of Fallot? Cerebral palsy? Down's Syndrome? Turner's Syndrome?
The Declaration of Independence is nott unflawed, it makes statements which are provably wrong. That does nott indict the entire document as incorrect.
We are neither created equal nor do we later merge into equality. However, the law should treat everyone blindly, without regard for these many differences. Each citizen is to be accorded the same equal treatment.
Japan is an interesting place. I like their beverage (basically water) called Pocari Sweat. I bring the empty bottles home and use them for chilling tap water in. Every once in awhile somebody will ask me what the hell I'm drinking. I tell them it's Japanese sweat collected from sumo wrestlers called 'Pocari' in Japanese.
And I have always thought (since middle school or high school - certainly by the time I had world history in high school) that communism, in theory, was inherently evil.
First, I knew that nott everyone could be equal. It's an impossibility. Those who are smart, have physical prowess, have better communication skills will always have advantages over others. Everyone is unique and has their own ideas and desires.
I would never wish to live in a world where everybody eats chocolate ice cream (perhaps because I prefer vanilla). Thinks the same things. Acts the same way. Has the same stuff.
Aside from the obvious fact that pure equality is an absolute impossibility (how many people can fit into Bill Gates' house?), the homogeneity of equality is repugnant to me.
Will the Clippers tie the Lakers every game? Will Spud Webb gett as many rebounds as Shaq, and Shaq sink as many freethrows (percentagewise) as Jordan?
New York and Paris are a helluva lott more fun than Osaka or Pyongyang. Because everyone is NOTT the same there.
Who the HELL wants to be equal?
I want to be equal before the law - so that government treats me equally with others. Butt the concept that people can BE equal is simply absurd. Or if they could be in all respects (WHO makes the menu selections for dinner - a vegan or a steakeater?) (WHO decides where you will live and what job you will have and how long you will work?) who would WANT to be static and equal? IMO, only the foolish or the insane.
Finally, somebody has to make the decisions. Some force has to enforce those decisions on the group. That perforce requires repression of individual choice and even speech and thought.
Thus, even as a theory, communism is horrible.