With all of the variables between renting a place or buying, it can be hard to decide. If you are going to buy, how much should you put down? Anne and I recently were looking at the exact same decisions. Programming geeks that we are, we created a helpful spreadsheet (it’s shared to everyone, so you might want to download your own copy before playing with the numbers) that lets you figure out which decision is right for you. Let me explain a little bit about how it works: Continue reading
Archive for May, 2008
I just finished Liberal Fascism, and cannot rave highly enough about this (well documented!) book. While some critics of the book portray it as a thoughtless attack on their institutions and political philosophies, the book is instead a fastidiously researched text on the history of our current politics and political systems, fascism of all kinds, and how the two relate – even when the relation is on the political right as well as the left. Continue reading
The Diplomad has a good summary of facts.
How about returning to a single room educational system? As someone from a large family who was homeschooled, I can see the potential benefits of this system.
Personally, I think the biggest thing we could do to improve our education is to return education from a government monopolization to a private, competitive system. That way we can try out all of these ideas, see which ones work best, and compete between our schools for the best education quality. After all, we spent decades telling the Soviets that state controlled monopolies don’t work very well, so why do we operate our school system as such?
And realizing that certain Muslim customs don’t mix well with western values of equality. It’s nice to see feminists starting to realize where their focus should be.
A man (in Britain) endures repeated threats, aggressive (and criminal) behaviour from his new neighbor, and repeatedly reports this all to the police and the courts. Nothing is done. Finally, he is stabbed to death, and yet his neighbor’s sentence is commuted from murder to manslaughter. Why did all this happen? Because the victim was white, and the perpetrator wasn’t, so obviously it was the victim who was the racist.
Excellent. This is the sort of organization we should have instead of the U.N.
I would arrange the organization to have two different voting structures, like our own legislative branch does, except that one voting structure would be based on the population of the member, and the other based on the amount of negative (and only negative) liberties assured (with some assessment for how assured each liberty is) by the member state. The organization could similarly have only one voting structure that was some sort of combination of those two factors, but the key is that the negative liberties assurances are as or even more important than population.
If you did have the power strongly related to the amount of negative liberties assured to the population, not only would member states be encouraged to allow increasing human rights, but you could even allow non-democracies to join – they just would have very little power.
MIT just developed a (cheap!) material that selectively sops up oils, even when submersed in water. When the material is removed from the water, you can later pull out the oil seperately.
Obama’s got another hateful preacher he’s connected with – to the tune of $100000.
But of course, it’s the religious right that exploits what divides us in the name of faith. This man is getting pretty disgusting.
As, say, the Virginia Tech shooting. Yet another case where a gun owner stopped a mass shooting. You don’t want to be a victim? The answer seems pretty obvious to me…
Actually, out of the options besides Tokomak reactors (which are still 30 years off) my favorite are the Bussard fusion approaches, shown at the bottom of the link. The approach highlighted is pretty cool too though.
Yeah…Not so much. (Hat Tip Instapundit). The thing the media keeps on ignoring, and the misperception I believe they have deliberately strewn, is that there is a mathematical definition for a recession rather than people being in a recession whenever we’re not experiencing booming growth. We are not in one. In fact, our economy is still growing, just slowly.
MediaDefender just got caught launching DOS attacks against a legitimate bittorrent site. Interesting graph to see though.
Apparently Worker’s Comp is already granted to illegal aliens in several states…
As realtors are forced to accept the competition. Yet another industry where the internet is going to enable the little guys to compete, and I think ultimately outdo the big businesses.
Transterrestrial has a running summary on the constantly changing heroics of Obama’s relatives during WW2.
The progress of Iraq is so incredibly obvious that there’s no way he can visit the country and maintain his current stance on Iraq without displaying the blatant betrayal and lies of the Democrat’s stance on the war – therefore, there’s no way he can visit the country. His base won’t tolerate anything but complete and utter surrender on Iraq. In the same respect, he can’t even meet with Petraeus and Crocker, because they would tell him the same thing, and he knows it – and yet he’s supposedly trying to claim that he’ll be a new kind of politician, willing to meet with anyone, even Ahmadenijad.
As if the outrageous profit they make through the taxes on every gallon of gas and the outrageous shortage of supply they’ve created by forbidding most new drilling or refining for the past 30 years wasn’t enough, they’re considering a bill that will further tax fuel for the carbon that it produces.
Tai-Chi Policy 