Y2HH

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 03:46 PM) Checked amazon today, still no sales tax. That's because Amazon abandoned IL affiliates...so you aren't purchasing anything from IL when you buy things on Amazon anymore...thus no state tax. It's up to you to "remember" and "tell them" what you bought...but this has long been the "law", which is why it's on your 2010 IL tax form, etc... It's a shame so many people in IL suffer from memory loss. :/

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 02:48 PM) Or federal law, which would of course be seen as trampling on states' rights! How does this bill not do anything? You'll have to pay sales tax in Illinois now, right? No. I still don't. That's the point.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 02:40 PM) Hey guys thanks for pointing out why this bill was seen as necessary! Nobody knows what you are even talking about. And this bill isn't necessary for the exact reasons we pointed out...because it still didn't do anything. Until all 50 states enact some variation of this bill, it doesn't matter...which is what I said in the first place.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 02:36 PM) My 2010 tax return says I may have thought I used amazon, but I didnt and my memory is bad. That's the same issue I ran into.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 02:32 PM) I use Amazon a TON, this ruling sucks donkey cock. It's not sales tax that has ruined brick and mortar stores, its their horrible prices, service, and return policies. I'm sorry, but do you actually remember using Amazon a ton, or do you THINK you used Amazon a ton?!

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 02:26 PM) I will do no such thing. I tried too...but when I thought about online purchases I made this year, I couldn't think of any conveniently. I have a bad memory for such things, I guess.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 02:07 PM) http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/12/...E72B2JR20110312 IIRC, Plato made up Atlantis in his writings to examine/explain a hypothetical situation...

I have nothing...

QUOTE (Iwritecode @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 01:13 PM) I swear I've seen job openings that have required that much skill and more. I never applied at those places because it's probably just a company that needs a "computer guy" and they really have no idea what skills are needed for the position. Same.

3 reactors in meltdown?

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 11:35 AM) I see that Chicago is in that earthquake zone for the New Madrid fault, although very far from the main area. Would the damage from a huge earthquake do much to Chicago? And is there any natural disaster that could really ravage this city? I know it's pretty hard for a tornado to touch down in a city, plus we can't be hit by hurricanes, etc. If Curt Hennig was standing directly on top of the New Madrid fault when a 9+ magnitude quake hit, he would not be hurt. Because he is already dead.

QUOTE (Chi Town Sox @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 10:26 AM) Thanks, i should have put that this is mostly for marketing positions. Where I would be sending out promotion e-mails and all that good junk, etc. When it comes to a persons resume, and this is from a person that interviews people from time to time, sometimes, less is more. Things I hate and immediately notice when going through resumes: 1) Super busy resumes filled with nonsense that nobody cares about, strewn about the entire surface of the paper as to make it look more impressive than it actually is. To me, that shows the person is trying to throw stuff at the wall rather than being concise about what it is they can actually do. On a resume, WHITE space = good. I want to know the basics about you by glancing at the top half of page 1, and if I can't...I'll find another one that can. 2) Resume fabrication whores that do nothing but flatter themselves in their "scope of work"/experience section with gobs of what I call "impossibilities". For example, a person claiming they installed a network of 50,000 servers, spread over 14 states. Reason: Because no you didn't...you assisted many other people with such an implementation, but you didn't do it yourself, so don't make it sound like you did. 3) The "Impossible Skillset liar-face". Example Skillset: Windows 7, Windows XP, *nix (Linux/Unix), Mac OSX, VAX, Mainframe, C++, Java, C#, Scripting, Perl, PHP, HTML, Cisco Routers/Firewalls, Checkpoint, etc... Basically, they claim to know everything about everything related to a specific industry. These are immediately dismissed, because no you don't...and if you did, you wouldn't have to look for jobs...ever, because jobs would look for you. 4) The "I work at every company for 1 year and move on, and in that 1 year, I did 50,000,000 things" exaggerator. This is the guy/gal that has a list of previous employment that reads like an encyclopedia. 9 months here. 8 months there. 1 year here. 11 months there. This means you can't hold a job, or you are a unloyal b****face (which is fine to look out for yourself, but don't let your past employment spell this out in big bold letters), because I'll take a chance on someone that might be more loyal out of the box. Oh, and somehow, during their short little stint at the company, they somehow accomplished 5 years worth of work/projects...which again...no, they didn't. 5) The "10 Pound Resume" dickface. If I need to work out with Rock in order to lift your stupid resume, you aren't working here. There is some information you do not need to include...such as where you worked 20 years ago. If there is a need for me to go that far back in your employment history, I'll ask for it...but if it's going to make you're resume more than 2 pages, just stop. 6) The "MVP Award" Whoremonger. A.K.A: I was a superstar MVP employee at all of my previous places of employment and won awards for being so awesome, yet I need a new job. Why? If you were so awesomely invaluable, why didn't they promote you to some position that paid you millions of dollars to assure that they kept your awesome services? ----- If it's on your resume, it's open game. For example, if you claim you can type 90WPM, you might run into an interviewer like myself that says...ok, show me the money, Jerry. So if you printed it, you'd better be able to do it...and not only do it, but do it under pressure, such as in an interview. I have many tips for resumes/interviews, but so much of this skill is in feeling out your interviewer...and figuring out what they like, and somehow talking about it. For example, I got my first job in the IT industry because the interviewer found out, during the interview, that I played the game Quake online.

QUOTE (Chi Town Sox @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 10:19 AM) If anyone knows, do companies still look for words per minute on a resume? If I only typed like 50 wpm I would not bother putting it but I am up around 100 I am trying to just add a few extra things under additional skills and whatnot If the job requires diction or typing skills, yes, it matters...if not, not really. Like for a standard IT job, it wouldn't matter. If you were a secretary, however, it would.

I'm interested to see the relief efforts, which are already underway, from numerous governments and institutions around the world. My prediction: Those asshole American's everyone seems to hate will contribute 95% of all relief work/money to the Japanese, and the rest of the world will contribute the other 5% combined. We are such pricks/bad guys, it's not even funny. :/

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 08:56 AM) I don't really have one. Ignoring nuclear power is a bad option, because it is carbon free, and it takes several chernobyls to do the kind of damage we're looking at from Climate Change. Shuttering nuclear plants is a bad option, because there's huge investment already in them, and we don't have infrastructure to replace them. Pretending they're safe right now only works until they become unsafe. I guess I kinda feel the right response is to deal with them how NASA dealt with its shuttle program after 2003. You can't completely shutter the program for years, but you can't expand it, and you have to fight like Hell every step of the way against institutional complacency...the "it hasn't happened for x years" effect. Of course, for that to work, we still need a replacement energy source. It's possible that Japan may wake people up a bit on inspections, but what's more likely, IMO, is that we're going to continue to see inspection cutbacks, lobbying in favor of inspection cutbacks, lobbying in favor of building new plants and expanding current plants, until eventually some set of engineering issues or natural disasters combines to produce a radiation release in the U.S., because that's just how it goes. All of that of course ignores the 2 elephants in the room...the fact that the program is "too big to fail", in the sense that if a plant were to melt down, the plant itself couldn't handle the claims without bankruptcy, so there's a tacit government insurance whether we admit it or not...and second, the fact that the U.S. government is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to plant operators because the government promised to build a facility to store the waste and has yet to do so. See, this makes too much sense and avoids the standard Greenpeace (and the like) tactic of shouting "doomsday is approaching", usually based on little to nothing, or flawed and often cherry picked studies which support their side, while ignoring any vetted and valid counter science. This is why people aligned with groups like Greenpeace usually annoy me more than anything, as their beliefs on this sort of thing are so deeply ingrained into who they are that it poisons them. While they may never admit it aloud, I think there are more than many Greenpeace members actively hoping that reactor melts down...just so they can say I told you so.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 08:39 AM) I might not know all the details about Japan, but it seems as if the tsunami caused most of the worst damage/deaths, not the earthquake. If somewhere like St. Louis faces an 8.0 earthquake, if there was no tsunami, you think it would still be more damaging overall? I do realize Japan is more prepared for an earthquake in general. It would be far more damaging, to an order of magnitude this map will explain: Consider the Los Angles disaster in the 90's, a magnitude 6.7 quake ravaged LA. The red zone is the major damage area, the yellow is the moderate/minor damage area as it spreads. In comparison, look at the damage zone for a similar magnitude quake on the New Madrid faultline:

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 08:29 AM) I have a little more time now, so it's manifesto time. When I look at the nuclear industry, my biggest critique is that its an industry that only works when communism works. For a nation to have a functioning nuclear industry, you need the nuclear industry to be perfectly willing to accept criticism and, to first order, never ever fight against a charge/complaint from the government. Nuclear plants are highly complex engineered systems. If history has taught us anything about engineering, it's that eventually, things always go wrong in ways we can't anticipate. If its taught us one more thing, every time there's a critical failure, its because some rule wasn't enforced correctly, and that lack of enforcement combined with an unexpected event to produce a disaster. Put a nuclear energy system into an ideal political environment and it might work, but you need scenarios that are fundamentally impossible in our system. You need operators who never push systems farther than they should go. Plants that hit their designed age can't continue to be used; they should be shuttered. If something goes wrong unexpectedly, you don't patch it, you shut the plant down. If you're operating a nuclear plant and you discover an offshore fault, rather than continuing operation until you determine if there is any chance of motion, you shut the thing down and spend the money it takes to learn everything possible about that fault (san onofre). On top of that, you have constant, skeptical inspectors whose job it is to make sure that unexpected things don't happen. They need to be as well trained as the people working for the plants, as well paid as them (if not better), and certainly not overworked or overwhelmed. You need at least 1 outside group to avoid the type of groupthink that is common in engineering disasters - NASA has struggled with this problem more than any other, it's cost them 2 shuttles. Problem is, none of those scenarios will ever be met in a for-profit, lobbying based industry with cost constraints. If a reactor is operating normally and is close to the end of its life, it will continue operating until serious issues crop up that force shutdowns. If it is realized that the section of the subduction zone offshore is actually seismogenic and the reason no one knows this is that it hasn't ruptured since 800 a.d. (Japan), then you need to consider shuttering the reactors. If the government starts running a deficit or wants to cut taxes, it can't look at inspection cutbacks as an option, and we've seen again and again that it always happens. It's happening right now. You can criticize the anti-nuclear folks all you want, you can deservedly ridicule statements from Greenpeace...but I would counter that statements from the nuclear industry deserve exactly as much skepticism, because that's how engineering problems happen. They always happen, they happen in unexpected ways, and they're not going to stop because we have a better system. Manifestos usually include a proposed (and usually crazy/bordering on insane) solution. Where is yours?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 08:12 AM) Yeah, that's pretty much my logic on why I said a magnitude 8 event on New Madrid would be more damaging than this magnitude 9 event in Japan. I had a friend who's parent was in the Evansville Mayor's office, after Katrina I passed along a few casual tips about what your emergency services should have on file somewhere as a plan for what to do in the event that it were to go. No idea if they followed anything I suggested (one suggestion was to spend the money on a study/planning scenario, at least as a Cover-your-tail move). Most of them are unaware of it because of how dormant/silent New Madrid has been, even when it does rattle, it's barely touching 3's in magnitude. If NM decided to repeat it's 1812 quake to remind us of how strong it can actually be, it'd pretty much be the most catastrophic natural disaster to hit the US since...forever ago. From Wiki (removed reference links) November 2008, The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that a serious earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone could result in "the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States," further predicting "widespread and catastrophic" damage across Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and particularly Tennessee, where a 7.7 magnitude quake or greater would cause damage to tens of thousands of structures affecting water distribution, transportation systems, and other vital infrastructure. The lack of apparent land movement along the New Madrid fault system has long puzzled scientists. In 2009, two studies based on eight years of GPS measurements indicated that the faults were moving at no more than 0.2 millimeters (0.0079 in) a year. This contrasts to the rate of slippage on the San Andreas Fault which averages up to 37 mm (1.5 in) a year across California.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 12, 2011 -> 05:26 PM) Good work by the NYT... Looks like a partial meltdown may be in progress.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Mar 12, 2011 -> 09:39 PM) Indeed. Faster than any handheld device out there. My iPad 2 is faster by about 20x, and it's handheld

QUOTE (iamshack @ Mar 12, 2011 -> 04:28 PM) What did you think I was implying he would use? His desktop? Have you seen his phone?! It's practically a desktop.

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Mar 12, 2011 -> 12:53 PM) as compared to Obumbo? It's Oblahblah, because all he does is give speeches.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Mar 12, 2011 -> 07:11 AM) From what I have been told the radiation wouldnt pretty much not leave the premises of the nuclear plant if it does meltdown, but that is from what I remember m brother telling me about a year ago. I really hope they are able to fix the pumps, there's a big future depending on that fix including my brother's career. ??? PARADOX ???

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 12, 2011 -> 12:01 AM) O'Keefe heavily distorted and lied about what the ACORN videos showed through very selective editing. I'm not sure what your rant has to do with that fact, really. He may have, personally I thought the videos, and this new video are rediculous. That said, if a simple video with obvious selective editing that anyone can see was doctored is all it takes to sink an entire organization then I think we'd see many more of them falling apart. Same goes for the republicans when I hear them talk about how the left leaning groups caused Sarah Palin to "have to quit as govonor" because of their public slandering and lies. If that's all it takes to get a person to quit their government post, then we would be seeing a lot more politicians quitting over nothing.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 11, 2011 -> 06:13 PM) That's what the unedited video shows, too. This guy was repeating what two "top-level Republicans" said about the Tea Party. It's sad/hilarious. I thought everyone would take this buffoon with a little more caution after it was shown how much he distorted and lied with ACORN and then we he tried to lure a CNN reporter onto a sex boat, but then again a sizable portion of people instantly jumped on the "ZOMG! OBMA SPENDS $200 TRILLION AN HOUR IN INDIA!" s***. Confirmation bias an an endemic problem in politics. Yea, he distorted and lied about acorn, that's why congress disbanded their funding, they were duped! Wake up already, if acorn was a setup as you and the demos claim, nothing would have come of it, honestly already, if it were that easy to destroy an organization with millions of dollars, you'd see a lot more of them falling apart...so seriously, give up the acorn was innocent bulls*** already, because it makes you look like an idiot, along with everyone else that spews conspiracy innocence crap. Acorn was a corrupt organization and they got what was coming to them, and so did this f***ing moron. Just stop with the acorn was innocent garbage, because they weren't innocent...just stop it. Innocent organizations with public favor and millions in funding do NOT fall apart in the light of trash journalism unless there is a good reason. You and the rest of the intelligent morons can ignore reality all you want because it seems to make you feel better, but anyone that still belives acorn did no wrong is a f***ing jackass, and there is no other way for me to put it.