Free Republic

Shay’s Rebellion might be a useful starting point. It was a significant driver of the Constitution (Shay’s Rebellion took place under the Articles of Confederation.)

In any event, Geo. Washington came out of retirement to quell the rebellion.

The Constitutional clause concerning treason against the United States was an outgrowth of Shay’s Rebellion and perhaps you will find a useful discussion or two in the Federalist Papers or the Anti-Federalist Papers.

I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Never been in the situation personally, but don’t some ABS systems have alternating lock/unlock cycles while others sense differential speed between the wheels and throttle the hydraulic pressure to prevent lock?

I can’t keep up with the technology I use every day and certainly haven’t looked at ABS systems in a very long time.

In addition to skid marks and the like, vehicular computers record data for some seconds of speed, brake applied, air bag deployment and other useful (to the police) information. (I think the data is over-written in memory so all that is available is a few seconds before the event. I also recall that air bag deployment stops data recording so that the accident data is preserved and not over-written.)

I would assume the computer has been taken by the police and the data downloaded and analyzed.

I’m old enough to remember my law partners trying to transmute ordinary income into capital gains during the 1980’s, usually by some real estate purchase accompanied by a loan. The tax reforms in the later 1980’s coupled reduced rates for ordinary income with repeal of the capital gains slight of hand my partners engaged in.

So, risk of loss is important .. if my law partnership failed to make its income goal for the year and my share was less than it was expected to be, I should only pay capital gains rate?

Sorry, hedge fund managers should not receive tax breaks on carried interests unless they have their own money invested just like the other fund participants.

Trump’s proposed tax rates would be lower than present rates for all classes of income, which seems like a reasonable exchange for removing favorable treatment from hedge fund carried interests.

Suppose the hedge fund manager is paid a “performance bonus” equal to 20% of the capital gains. This would be considered taxable income and is subject to normal rates of income tax for “ordinary income.”

In the current system, the identical income to the fund manager is considered to be capital gains and is subject to a much lower tax rate than ordinary income.

The theory behind a lower tax rate for capital gains includes the concept that the stock owner takes the risk of loss and therefore it’s fair to charge a lower tax rate for gains.

However, in the hedge fund case, the fund manager doesn’t own the stock and is not exposed to risk of loss on the underlying asset value.

It’s wrong tax policy to transform a performance bonus into capital gains where there is no risk of loss. Hence, I believe Trump is correct to go after this anomaly.

Trump has said that 15 years ago, he thought at the time a single payer system might work in the USA.

His thinking has changed and is now to allow health insurers to compete across state lines in order to bring down costs.

Trump has been pretty clear on the time frames involved in his views, so I suspect JEB advertisements have played fast and loose with the facts.

Regardless, Obamacare has gotten things so screwed up that it’s going to take root and branch fixes - I think Trump needs to go further in reform, but at least he has a useful starting plan.

The vast majority, if not all, the consumer grade Chinese tools at, for example, Harbor Freight, are not worth the gas money to bring them home.

However, there are some notable exceptions in electronic test gear - couple years ago, I bought a Rigol (made in China) 100 MHz dual-channel DDS function generator with the expectation that it would be adequate for my needs, but would not compare in quality with HP/Agilent/Keysight or other US designed gear in my shop. After looking at its performance, I would put it at about 95% of Keysight performance at about 25% of the price.

If the Chinese put their mind to it, at least in the limited world of electronic test equipment, based on my experience, they are quite competent.

And, they are moving up the food chain in electronic test equipment.

Great humor if you are in 8th grade, but one would hope for something more sophisticated from Old Dominion students.

I’m a few miles east of Manassas, and driving to DC would be miserable unless you have odd hours, such as 4AM - noon. I-66 has been widened but that hasn’t kept up with traffic increases.

The good news is that there are two (I think) VRE train stations in Manassas. It’s a decent service that runs over rail lines and connects with Metro (subway) at several stations.

If a foreign intelligence agency were to cross-index the Ashley Madison files against the security clearance info obtained via the OPM hack, it might show some blackmail opportunities ...

Is there any information on whether the packet info was encrypted or sent plain text?

“Great. Start a potential trade war. That’s the ticket.”

We’re already in a bunch of trade wars, but can’t admit it.

For the first 6 months of 2015, according to the official statistics, the US imported $27B more goods than we exported to Mexico. For 2014, yearly total was $54 billion more in imports from Mexico than exports.

So, if we put a very modest 1% duty on all imports from Mexico ($145 billion in the first 6 months of 2015 alone), we could raise $2.9B in one year. That should be more than enough to build a wall.

Since we have a large trade deficit with Mexico, they are in no position to do a tit-for-tat increase in duty, as it would hurt their economy proportionally more than it would the US.

So, The Donald is perfectly correct when he implicitly says we have great economic leverage over Mexico.

Of course, we would have to abrogate some trade agreements with Mexico, but being a sovereign country (so far at least) we can do that.

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c2010.html

My wife accepted a job - this is 30 years ago now - at a black owned consulting company in DC, where she was the only white person on the payroll.

She quit after one day because of the harassment.

Unions in the public sector should have never been allowed to exist - history has shown an incestuous relationship between union contributions to elected officials and said officials entering into sweetheart deals with the unions.

In the private sector, unions did some good in the first part of the 1900’s, but the theory underpinning their existence has long gone.

My late father was a big union supporter, OCAW and then Teamsters. It was a matter we could not discuss as his theory was that management worked 24/7 to shaft the workers and any suggestion to the contrary was not possible.

However, it was exactly the theory that management and the workers had different interests in the success of their companies that lead to the downfall of US manufacturing. Not saying it was 100% of the reason, or even the majority of the reason, but it certainly aided in the downfall.

In many cases, the mob provides things that people want - after hour drinking, untaxed cigarettes, sports betting, etc. This part of the mob business you can take or leave depending on your desire for those products.

Government provides little that people actually want, but rather that which government itself determines people want, and provides it in the most inefficient and wasteful way possible and often prevents private competition for those services (for example, private trash collection where city-run services are a monopoly.) For the most part, therefore, the mob and government are not much different, except government has a better name.

Anyone that does business in New York or New Jersey has to deal with the Mafia - the bigger your business the more the mob wants to become your partner.

“Nice casino there - have many fires?”

“Certainly would be a shame to see such a nice casino have union troubles so that it never opened.”

Trump is a businessman and the political parties play the role of the Mafia in a shake-down racket.

Trump has to contribute to the party that controls the state and city where he wants to build. In the case of NY state and City, that party has a D symbol.

In the case of NY City, the current Mayor (D) has said (a week or so ago) that Trump’s projects will not be approved in the future and that if legally possible any existing contracts will be abrogated. That’s but one example of what happens when you cross the party in power if you are a developer. You play their game or else you can’t operate.

This shakedown isn’t limited to Dems, but it so happens that most major cities are Dem controlled so they are best situated to apply the shakedown.

I spent several years living in Europe in the early 1990, mostly Germany, but also Italy and Portugal.

The German summers without A/C weren’t all that bad, but one hotel I spent several months at had no screens so you had a choice between sweating all night or waking up covered with mosquito bites. Got the the point where I made a count of new bites every morning - record was 29. Eventually one of my German colleagues showed me their trick - a wall plug in insect fogger. That worked more or less, along with flypaper.

Italy was worse in the summer as the heat lasted longer and 90F days were not uncommon.

One interesting thing I remember well about Italy were the roadside prostitutes - they were on high seats, with a beach type umbrella, overall very similar to a beach lifeguard arrangement. The ones I saw were all black women, probably from Italian speaking parts of Africa. When I asked about it, I was told that their primary clientele were truck drivers... this was on a relatively rural two-lane highway 5 or so miles outside a town with a population of perhaps 25K people. In any event, never saw anything like that in my European travels.

I live in Fairfax County - maybe 20 miles airline from my house to the center of DC, so I’m well acquainted with Washington summers.