What seems lost in translation for the left is, the "evil" corporations as well as the little guys have little choice but to ALL have lobbyists pursuing their own interests. Why?

Because government is too large and too powerful.

You can take your pick of which is the greater evil: 'greedy' corporations which can and do fail, or a permanent class/army of government bureaucrats untied to quality performance or market demand, and which has lobbyists to shame even the corporations.

I'd rather take my chances with the market.






>> ^westy:

>> ^quantumushroom:
People who get "free" stuff usually like things being "free", and a corrupt government is more than happy to seize the money from the producers to buy the votes of the ignorant. Why should the producers continue busting a$$ only to have their 'extra' hard work taken away? Socialist paradises like mexifornia have been great for Utah and Arizona, which are more than happy to receive the fleeing companies voting with their feet.
Europe is in deep sh1t because of socialism, which sooner than later always fails. Even if you could tax everyone at 98% the unlimited wants of the people would outrun any government's ability to redistribute wealth.
Capitalism works, socialism 'sort of' works until it's literally too big NOT to fail.

Europe is in deep shit because USA DEREGULATED THE MARKETS and the whole of europe and USA are all tied into the same big banks.
In reality we live in a coperate run socity and thats because for the most part its a FREE MARKET in the sense that whoever has the most money can do what the fuck they like by lobying the goverment thats what you get when you let companies and money dictate things the people with the money own and run the goverment its as close to free market as you can get and hense why everything has fallen apart for the menny and benofited the few super ritch.
also look at crime rates and quality of helth care for countries that have better distribution of wealth you will find they are among the top.

>> ^quantumushroom:

People who get "free" stuff usually like things being "free", and a corrupt government is more than happy to seize the money from the producers to buy the votes of the ignorant. Why should the producers continue busting a$$ only to have their 'extra' hard work taken away? Socialist paradises like mexifornia have been great for Utah and Arizona, which are more than happy to receive the fleeing companies voting with their feet.
Europe is in deep sh1t because of socialism, which sooner than later always fails. Even if you could tax everyone at 98% the unlimited wants of the people would outrun any government's ability to redistribute wealth.
Capitalism works, socialism 'sort of' works until it's literally too big NOT to fail.


Europe is in deep shit because USA DEREGULATED THE MARKETS and the whole of europe and USA are all tied into the same big banks.

In reality we live in a coperate run socity and thats because for the most part its a FREE MARKET in the sense that whoever has the most money can do what the fuck they like by lobying the goverment thats what you get when you let companies and money dictate things the people with the money own and run the goverment its as close to free market as you can get and hense why everything has fallen apart for the menny and benofited the few super ritch.

also look at crime rates and quality of helth care for countries that have better distribution of wealth you will find they are among the top.

People who get "free" stuff usually like things being "free", and a corrupt government is more than happy to seize the money from the producers to buy the votes of the ignorant. Why should the producers continue busting a$$ only to have their 'extra' hard work taken away? Socialist paradises like mexifornia have been great for Utah and Arizona, which are more than happy to receive the fleeing companies voting with their feet.

Europe is in deep sh1t because of socialism, which sooner than later always fails. Even if you could tax everyone at 98% the unlimited wants of the people would outrun any government's ability to redistribute wealth.

Capitalism works, socialism 'sort of' works until it's literally too big NOT to fail.

I'm a girl gamer, and I want free stuff for boobs.


*instant celebrity*

I hope these asshats are better at analysing American issues than this drivel. The 'looters' weren't protesting shit, we've had lecturers and uni students and kids of bankers as well as the usual suspects... Simple fact is the police lost control and people realised there was a chance for free stuff, mostly dumb kids who will now stand a small chance of getting nailed. In the meantime the wanker bankers keep driving the economy forward, not a great idea to kill them then. Shit it must be nice to see everything in 2 dimensions.

I'll say two things, FWIW: 1) there were two parts of the clue given for that one, being "lost" and that you could "pull" the answer "out" , and 2) it's not supposed to be too easy. We want people to work for it, so that only the strong survive to enter (meaning better odds for those of you who do succeed) and maximum exposure of Sift Shop products for our potential customers. That's the only trade-off we get by hosting contests and giving away free stuff, after all.

Money can't buy you happiness, but the lack of it will make you miserable.

Can I ask how being happy for getting free stuff is ramapant consumerism? @littledragon_79 is totally correct, the Black Friday riots are far more indicative of the illness. Black Friday is all about proving your self worth to others by purchasing things. I mean, even Mother Theresa was ecstatic over winning the Nobel prize's $1,000,000 for no other reason than what it meant to her mission.

Also, looking down on people who DON'T have a $23 million net worth who are happy about getting stuff when YOU DO have a $23 million net worth is elitist bullshit.

'Free stuff is totally awesome, and you deserve it.' -Mark 11:24

... loosely, that's what it says.
... well look it up if you don't believe me!

Interesting. Instead of 'Strategy' in the top right quadrant and '???' in the bottom right quadrant, I would have "bad ideas" and "good ideas" respectively.

If it costs a lot of money, then you are losing money, thus "bad idea". If it costs a negative amount, then you are making money, thus "good idea".

I realize he was talking about the cost to the consumer, and not the company, but I can't make any sense of what a negative cost to the consumer would mean. Free would be zero cost; can you have less than free? More free stuff?

Well, they do manage to keep me employed fixing these things. Just about every week I get a machine from a friend that requires attention for the low price of free... at least they hope.

The combination we use these days for free stuff is malwarebytes/super antispyware/avira anti-virus together, and that usually clears up most things.

Personally I have had the misfortune of getting conficker on a laptop, however it is pretty easy to remove (and spot) apart from having the nasty habit of attempting to infect usb flash drives placing a binary autorun.inf on the things.

Unfortunately, this will likely never end as most malware is developed outside the US and its exceptionally easy to hide ones tracks these days with botnets that are traded like commodities.

I often wonder if some of the anti-virus vendors cook up some of this crap since there is the occasional "BEWARE OF (virus/malware)" scare and it always is fronted by companies who want you to buy their software, which likely would not protect you againt most of this crap anyways. There is no software that can fix PEBKAC.

These days I solve "questionable website" problems by visiting them in a VM. You would be amazed at how much you can fuck one up and then when you reboot you snapshot it back to how it was before. VirtualBox is free and *really* good these days and with 1TB disks becoming the norm one can easily afford the 10-20GB of a virtual install of XP.

I loved this game. For a video game nerd I'm surprised you only recently heard about the resolution fixes. They've been around forever! Even before these fixes came out everyday programmers were hacking this game to extend the resolution past 800x600 as far back as 2004, but I guess this just makes it easier. I "officially" quit back at the end of 1.09d. I walked into a random game, wrote "FREE STUFF" and started dropping my enigmas, occy rings, etc etc. It was an odd feeling and looking back on it I should have sold it on ebay.

>> ^EndAll:
I started Diablo again about a month ago, too, for the first time in years.. getting tired of it though. You leveled quick!
Any CS'ers? (Not Source, boo Source)


Ex-hardcore CS player too. 1.6 FTW.

Quantumushroom it's hard to tell if you're being sarcastic or if you actually believe what you're saying because it sounds so ridiculous. I'm sorry but to suggest that Fox is somehow above bias is just flat out ignorant.

I said nothing of the sort. Fox is but one network; what about all the others?

Fox didn't exist all those decades ago before cable news and the net when the liberal Big 3 networks ran the show without any challenge to their lies.

Why are all the other networks even competing? They all say variations of the same thing: "Obama is flawless, we won't question his plans or do the math, because he's Obama and he's the President."

Garbage! Even if you agree with what Obams's doing, don't you deserve honest reporting about how it's done? Whether it's legal? Questions like: "Hey Prez, how you gonna pay for all this 'free' stuff?"

Journalism is supposed to be about reporting news and questioning authority. When it doesn't do the latter, it dies as it deserves to.

^are you arguing that cell phones are necessary? If so, you epitomize everything thats wrong with this country.

Cellphones are a convenience. Like having a personal cook, or a personal chauffeur, or a personal gardener, or a personal slave. Having a slave (someone to till your fields, or someone to pay our cell phone bills) is real convenient if you are the slavemaster but its not so convenient if you are the SLAVE.

"If we expect people to live as members of modern society in the US, then they need a phone, a car or access to mass transit, running sanitary water, a sewage system, a means of cooking and refrigerating food, money, access to police and medical care, etc. etc. etc."

I guess they also need a microwave, a cable television, a garage, car, etc. Where do you draw the line in this arbitrary position? You just draw the line where your opinion ends, which as a mass-philosophy, is completely useless.

Christ, I was using a car as a ridiculous example but you included it in yours! I don't have a car or access to mass transit, wheres my free car? There are 300 million people in America, who is going to pay for all this free stuff???

This clip doesn't start with a random cube - I think there's something before this.

He's turning very slow and he's using the "normal" method of top then middle then bottom with just the basic moves - so even if this is the second minute he's lucky to be finishing in time (likely got some "free stuff" on the middle and bottom layers).

Initially I was quite impressed to have him do it in a minute (which takes a fair bit of practice to be able to do reliably). Barely eking out a solve in two minutes, turning slowly, means that he took a couple hours to learn the steps.