DescentBB

Ford Prefect

Does anyone here see a difference between immigration and illegal immigration? Seems to me that the problem is not the number of people that are legally documented to enter a country and eventually become citizens as well as hopefully rise high enough in the income chain to pay into the social netwo...

Ford Prefect

Hello again to you all. Thanks for the warm welcome and for the octopus :roll: And a special thanks to you Krom for keeping the doors open. Somehow I suspect that there is much more time spent on this board than in the tunnels these days. If I find a topic or a tidbit of information that seems like ...

Ford Prefect

Hey there all you Descent fanatics. It's been literally years since I looked in on this forum. It all became a bit too US-centric for this Canuck but I always enjoyed the civil and intelligent level of debate. I was sitting around with my sons yesterday and the topic of video games came up and event...

Ford Prefect

Invisible strings eh? How did they find those anyway? Some kind of invisibility detector? And who has invisibility technology anyway? OMG it's the Romulans!! Romulan pigeons roaming Iran looking for secret sources of unsecured grain. I wouldn't want to be Iranian right now.

Ford Prefect

That's the most mature response I can come up with right now.

Ford Prefect

I'm really not comfortable speaking to any one candidate's policies or electioneering. I haven't commented on any of the election threads and I don't want to start now. My politics are fairly obvious but neither of these candidates is electable in my country. In yours you should do what you think is...

Ford Prefect

you didn't post it so how can we comment on it? Sorry Will I thought the liberal biased press would be all over this and her comments on Hardball would be common knowledge. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/17/gop-rep-channels-mccarthy_n_135735.html Usually Presidents propose lowering taxes bas...

Ford Prefect

LOL Spidey. I guess you have a point. I am talking from one side of the spectrum to another. However I don't indulge in name calling, attempted belittlement and dismissive abuse of my opponent's position. Not that I'm accusing you of all of those offences. Those are however seeming to become the nor...

Ford Prefect

Spidey there are many millions of Americans that feel exactly the same way about politics, religion and morality as I do. Am I anti-American when I side with them rather than those whose opinions I don't share? You are posting an example of the polarization and lack of respect for the opinions of ot...

Ford Prefect

The comments reported to be by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) that Obama and all \"liberals\" are anti-American make me shake my head in amazement. This kind of extremism doesn't exist in Canadian politics. Here all the mainstream politicians understand and accept that the others hold differ...

Ford Prefect

Yeah you're right there Spidey. The removal of a criminal record for conviction does not really stop it from being a crime. Speeding is against the law but we don't all consider ourselves criminals when we do it.

Ford Prefect

Actually Spidey it is possible to decriminalize something without making it legal. A offence can be a misdemeanour that does not result in a criminal conviction but only a civil penalty, most commonly a fine.

Ford Prefect

Drug addiction is a medical problem and should be treated as such. The \"war on drugs\" has achieved nothing except to increase sales of black Escalades with fancy wheels. It is a total failure and should be abandoned for a new strategy that does not create a class of wealthy criminals and...

Ford Prefect

Buy B.C. Bud. It's mostly grown indoors. It has a greater carbon footprint because of that but it's more environmentally friendly overall. And good for the B.C. economy too. Important in the tough times ahead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BC_Bud

Ford Prefect

A $1 dollar coin would buy you .29 of a gallon of gas. Whatever it is made of.

Ford Prefect

You would be welcome here in Canada but I suspect that eventually we will be in some kind of union with the U.S. So I'm not sure that would be such a change. Not in our lifetimes perhaps but maybe in that 200 year limit you gave. My wife moved here from Seattle 24 years ago and wouldn't move back bu...

Ford Prefect

Australia New Zealand Japan South Korea (probably with the north rolled in) The EU (I know that's cheating on \"sovereignty\" United States of America Brazil Argentina Peru Heck Will the list is extensive. Why would Europe tank now after 500 years. All of South and Central America should s...

Ford Prefect

Live in your house, that’s its \"real\" value True that. There were lots of default and bankruptcies in 81-82 as lots of people were speculating by buying, fixing up and flipping houses. I knew a few people that lost all that they had made up to that time by doing the flip thing. Banks ho...

Ford Prefect

House prices in Vancouver BC dropped by more than 30% in 1981-82 during a severe recession. I'm sure this was repeated everywhere as interest rates skyrocketed all over North America and a mortgage could cost you as much as 20% per year. My first mortgage was at 11.5% I think. Mind you it was only f...

Ford Prefect

You get credit for recognizing the obvious. Something that certain economists and regulators get no points for at all. Don't these guys read the same articles and see the same statistics as the rest of the world? Are they just wilfully blind because such information doesn't suit their particular age...

Ford Prefect

The Economist whose poll is much maligned here has also been calling the U.S. housing market a \"bubble economy\" for several years. I guess the \"Chicago Boyz\" don't like reading that kind of negative thinking. Interferes with profit taking I guess.

Ford Prefect

Remember the Sub-prime mortgage crisis? That is what all this mess started out being called. And here is an excellent (and very funny) interview explaining it.

Ford Prefect

Fred Reed has an interesting take on McCain being a POW http://fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm With PTSD, or whatever you want to call it, the anger is the giveaway. These vets carry a load of subterranean fury that you don’t want to look at. As they would say, I ★■◆● you not one pound. I ...

Ford Prefect

Will you see a bit worked up over all this. Much more than on the usual political shenanigans that go on every day. The U.S. has spent far more than $850B killing passers-by and their own soldiers in Iraq and I don't recall so many Fs and ampersands in your posts. Haliburton alone must have extracte...

Ford Prefect

So Rather is using the Bush WMD line. \"We lied but we were right in principle\" ?

I am not bothering to follow the U.S. election so I can't say whether or not your media is slanted one way or the other but I hear the same comment from both sides so it should balance out.

Ford Prefect

Thanks for the link Lothar.

The next story was even better.
http://nakedloon.com/news/politics/2008 ... scue-bill/

Ford Prefect

Let's face it Will. Whomever is the administration when things happen carries the can for it. The general public is simply not smart enough for anything else. It doesn't matter when the seeds of the crisis or boom were sown the guy in power at the time it happens gets the credit or the blame, depend...

Ford Prefect

From the article quoted by Tunnelcat Reuters. April 28, 2004 ...... Since the new CSE rules will apply to the largest brokerages without bank affiliates, SEC Commissioner Harvey Goldschmid said, \"If anything goes wrong, it's going to be an awfully big mess.\" Yep, looks like Harvey got th...

Ford Prefect

I think it is also worth noting that The Economist http://www.economist.com/ has been calling the U.S. housing market a \"bubble\" market for about 3 years. Surely someone in the Federal Reserve or Treasury reads the leading economic magazine in the world and at least mentions these concer...

Ford Prefect

I wonder if this whole mess would be so wide spread if the problem was limited to organizations that made loans to bad credit risks. As dissent points out once a loan or mortgage was made the liability was then passed around, sliced up and disguised a dozen ways. I think that this will be found to b...

Ford Prefect

yet by their own claims there were no engines to be found

And the photos of impeller rings are of what?
Never mind. This is as pointless as debating science with a young earth creationist.

Ford Prefect

Actually Krom the plane missed the yard except for a few lamp posts and a generator and ploughed directly into the building at full speed. Not at landing speed where most people see aircraft and debris from crashes but at full out flying speed. It turned into scrap in milliseconds. A pile of empty s...

Ford Prefect

Interesting read from someone who is an insider

As someone who owns both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, I have sat front and center and watched as this mess unfolded.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02808.html

Ford Prefect

However, after the Democratic Party again won back control in the elections of 1954, it was the majority party in both houses of Congress for most of the next 40 years; the Republicans were only able to win control of the Senate for a six-year period (1981–87). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_S...

Ford Prefect

Oh and for 8 years he kept banging away on a budget that didn't balance, kept increasing the military budget, kept cutting taxes for that trickle down effect and kept running up the debt... but it was all the fault of those damn Democrats. I can see it clearly.

Ford Prefect

And he ate babies.

Ford Prefect

Didn't you guys do all this with Reganomics? With the result being a tripling of the national debt? (Figure debated if ratio to GDP used) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics 1) We need legislation that will effectively stop the exportation of jobs. Our government is losing taxes on all of the j...

Ford Prefect

Liberal Elitist and Conservative Blue Bloods, both think of themselves as so intellectually superior to the un-washed masses that it is their divine destiny to control the country as they see fit.

Ah but is the alternative an Idiocracy?

Ford Prefect

But it is reality. The government of any country has an enormous effect on the economy in many different ways and when the actions of businesses are such that they are detrimental to the welfare of the citizens then the government must act to protect them. An example are the environmental laws that ...

Ford Prefect

Having said that, I think the American people have already been sold out on a front that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are properly concerned with: economics.

I don't agree with much that you post Sgt. Thorne but I do agree with that.

Search found 908 matches

Re: well, there's a spin I hadn't considered....

Re: Just passing by

Just passing by

Anti-American?