rkbabang

I no longer own a pool, but at my last home I had a 20x40 in-ground. One thing you might want to look into (if you don't have one already) is an auto-cover. I'd never own a pool without one. We ran our pool without a cover for 2 years, then installed the cover and owned that home for another 6 years. Our pool heater almost never came on once we installed the cover, the cover kept the heat in. We had no evaporation I'd fill the pool to its proper level at the beginning of the season, then never have to add water after that. And the largest cost savings was the chemical usage, I added chlorine about every 3 or 4 weeks. Not too mention that it keeps dust, pollen, and debris out of the pool, so you vacuum much less often (we had the dolphin robot so we almost never had to backwash and waste water and chemicals). With the auto-cover you uncover the pool only when you are using it, it stays covered 24hrs/day otherwise and it takes only about a minute to uncover it, you put in the key and turn it and it retracts. It is also considered a safety cover so it also keeps kids out.

I don't live in CA, so the CA sales tax you paid does me no good! ;) Actually, my daughter lives in West Hollywood, so it is helping her. I'm old enough to remember when IN first adopted a 2% state sales tax. Our current rate is 7%. I know from visiting my daughter you have it worse. If your daughter: has a job; has a significant other with a job; and/or lives off of invested capital earning a return; then CA taxes are most certainly not helping her.

--“King Icahn” +1 In most areas of life there are no absolutes, everything is varying shades of gray. But there are some areas where it is all or nothing. If I give you a large glass of drinking water and you see me place a 1/4 teaspoon of raw sewerage into the water, would you find it comforting and be willing to drink it if I told you that it was 99% pure drinking water? No, in this case 1% sewerage is as bad as 100% sewerage. You are not going to drink it. The other things I put in this category are freedom (there is no such thing as part time slavery or being mostly free) and integrity (you can either be trusted or you can’t). This is the reason that even though I made a lot of money investing with Biglari in the past I no longer do so.

I just got the email invite today to try the digg reader. It looks more like google reader than feedly does, but I'm not sure if I'm going to keep using it or not, I've gotten used to Feedly.

I don't know what you are using it on, but on the firefox version of feedly you can hit "index" and get a list of all your feeds, then just click on one to read it. You can set the index page to be your default page in the settings. I prefer the firefox feedly to the iPad feedly app for this reason.

That's a tough way to go, especially if you're not careful to do it right and you end up just blocking your airways and suffocating slowly to death. You could do the Kurt Cobain thing, but even though that is quick it is messy. May I recommend picking up a purple blanket, Nike sneakers, sleeping pills, and make some vodka jello shots. The last people to use this method went with smiles still on their faces. There is always harakiri, it may be slow, painful and messy, but it is cool and will have people talking about it for a long time.

I use feedly on firefox. The old method was to use a browser add-on. The new method starting yesterday is to delete your browser add-on, restart firefox and then go here: http://www.feedly.com/index.html No browser add-on is required now. the addon puts a nice little button in handy place on the browser. :) I am keeping mine. I never used the button anyway. I'm not sure if it is an add-on I'm using (I've got a ton of them installed) or a feature of firefox, but when I right click on a tab I get the option to "pin tab". This makes that tab permanent, so it is always there. My permanent tabs are gmail, feedly, yahoo portfolio, my yahoo watchlist, facebook and Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax. These tabs are just permanent fixtures on my browser. Also the mini tab extension is a must so that you can have tons of tabs open and you see only the favicon unless that tab is selected, I currently have 26 tabs open and they only reach about 2/3rds of the way across the tab bar.

I use feedly on firefox. The old method was to use a browser add-on. The new method starting yesterday is to delete your browser add-on, restart firefox and then go here: http://www.feedly.com/index.html No browser add-on is required now.

Apparently digg is working on a google reader replacement. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/06/inside_digg_reader/all/ http://digg.com/reader

"According to a recent tweet from the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company’s founder and chief executive, Elon Musk, there will be no initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX stock before humans have begun to settle Mars. " Musk: Humans on Mars Before SpaceX Goes Public

What non-essential item do people continue to buy right up to their last nickel? That isn't a rhetorical question, because I don't know. Basically anything that causes additions? Sex?

I don't know many people who love a certain brand of toilet paper over all others. I've never seen someone with a toilet paper branded t-shirt or hat, or toilet paper memorabilia as decoration in their homes. It would be hard to compare any toilet paper company to what Coke once was.

Maybe beer, but (at least with the people I know) Coke and cigarettes seem to be a necessity for an ever shrinking percentage of the population. I suspect in 20 or 30 years saying Coca-Cola will be like saying "Tang" or "Ovaltine" today. It may bring back a feeling of nostalgia, but it will not be on anyone's list of things people spend their last nickel on. Coffee might be another one, but it is a highly fragmented market, and the big players do not have even close to the best coffee, in fact you can make much better coffee yourself at home. That leaves beer I guess. I shouldn't have sold my SAM stock.

What non-essential item do people continue to buy right up to their last nickel? That isn't a rhetorical question, because I don't know.

I'm still using feedly as well. It's ok, I've gotten used to it.

+1 Thanks for posting the article. Even if it was more of a rant than an article, there wasn't much of anything in it that I wouldn't agree with. If you want a more detailed and thoughtful analysis of political authority check out "The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey" by Michael Huemer" http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41SUpgBS5VL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg I just finished it last night and I highly recommend it. It is just starting to become a must read book in the libertarian/anarcho-capitalist circles. Unlike many others who start out with a controversial premiss (such as "selfishness is a virtue" or "charity is destructive" or "property rights are absolute", etc), he starts with some pretty non-controversial premises which most civilized humans with liberal values would agree with and goes from there. One of his comments toward the end of the book after coming to the conclusion that state power if it exists will almost always be used aggressively against foreigners he makes the analogy to defending your home. You have a right to defend your home from invaders, but you do not have a right to do something likely to kill innocent children who don't live with you (such as burying landmines in your front yard). You have an obligation not to cause unnecessary harm on others. For this reason alone you have an obligation to find some other way of protecting yourself other than an aggressive state. I'm probably not wording it very well, and this is just one small part of an entire book. The first half of the book he goes over every possible justification of state power and why it is not valid. Then the second half of the book explores how a liberal modern society could function without giving aggressive power to a central authority.

I've read almost everything Dawkins has written. You can't go wrong with any of his books.

Just finished: (re-read for the 3rd time in the last 10-12 years) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Cryptonomicon%281stEd%29.jpg Currently in the middle of: (excellent so far) http://resources.macmillanusa.com/jackets/500H/9781137281654.jpg

I'm not sure if Sanjeev can change that or not, but it is how the simple machines message board software works by default. Post-Count based membergroup

I don't know which browser you use, but if it is Firefox get the "Nuke Anything Enhanced" add-on. . I use this whenever I want to print portions of a page on the web. It allows you to remove anything from a webpage. You can click on an object, right click and select "Remove this object", and it will be gone until you hit reload. What is nice is that if you remove stuff you can then print the page without the stuff you don't want. To print a single post from this board you could 1) Select the entire post that you want to print 2) Right click and you will see two options: "Remove Selection" and "Remove Everything Else". Hit Remove Everything Else and you will have just that post in your browser window with everything else gone. 3) Then you can print it as you normally would. 4) After you can hit refresh and the page goes back to normal.

Ouch. He uses almost the same words.

"We continue to expect strong overall equity returns throughout 2013 led by the world's largest stocks, i.e. mega-cap stocks. Further, we believe the bull market is likely far from over with the sweet spot for mega-cap stocks still ahead and though its peak... The mix of optimism and skepticism is consistent with our view we're at the bull market's midpoint, with much more bull market yet to come. As legendary investor Sir John Templeton said, "Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria." In our view, investors still have one foot in skepticism and one in optimism." "Fisher Investments - Stock Market Outlook"

Now I get it, he's into penny stocks! I always wondered where his name came from.

Fusion is one of those technologies that we have known in theory how to do for a long time, but we don't yet have the enabling technology to actually do it. Just as we knew how to build a computer for hundreds of years before the vacuum tubes (and later transistors) existed enabling us to actually build one. One day this is just going to happen and it will seem to most people like a giant leap forward in short order, even though it will have been based on a century or more of research and development. Here is a good synopsis of the current state of the technology. There is a lot of good info in the links. Nuclear Fusion Summary - Prospects for breakthrough commercial reactors 2018-2025

I introduced no straw into the argument. What you said was ridiculous and indefensible. Which is why your only defense was an ad hominem. OK, show some data or evidence that demonstrates the economic impact of the printing press since its invention in 1454 and let's say 1700. I've been alone here putting evidence on the table, while most dismisse it with a sleight of hand. My only defense is that evidence: * Agriculture was 99.9% of the world output until the industrial revolution * The printing press does not show in the slow advances of agriculture, detailed in 1493. * There is no evidence in output per capita growth in history until the industrial revolution. * The gap of the richest countries compared the poorest countries until the industrial revolution were minor compared to today's standards. * Check the graph of historic GDP per capita. You can't see the printing press, you can see the steam engine. Now, if you think that the printing press was an enabling technology for the industrial revolution 300 years later, that only reinforces the point of that post: a technology is a tool, and its worth only depends on its use. You use it for art you get Gutenberg's bible, you use it for science you get Principia Mathematica, you use it for political theory you get The Prince, you use it for religion you get Luther and the King James' bible. Why wasn't it used for agricultural innovation? The industrial revolution is one of the most mysterious events in human history. What was stopping the invention of the steam engine or the cotton gin for centuries? The technologies are not that complicated. I doubt that it was the printing press but I concede that an argument can be made on it importance disseminating the steam experiments in France from the late 1600s … but letters worked well for Kepler and Brahe. I was reading today about the semaphore, the predecessor of the telegraph, that was introduced during the French Revolution and latter perfected by Napoleon. The technology is so ridiculously simple that it is not easy to understand why it wasn't introduced thousands of years before. No need of a printing press for that. The industrial revolution origins are not that clear even today after dozens of books and hundreds of years of accumulated investigation. Almost every year there is a new book (irony) that fails to solve that puzzle. Economic output was handicapped by the church and the feudal system. These were systematic, crippling handicaps which needed to be broken and it took centuries. The printing press is what got the ball rolling and enabled these systems to be eventually destroyed. Look at the computer. You don't see an immediate impact in 1946 after the first computer. You don't see a major economic impact for another 40 years, at least. Tt is safe to say that innovation makes an impact 10 times quicker now than it did in the 15th century, so 40 years now = 400 years then. Not to mention the computer didn't have to re-organize the way society worked before making an impact, the printing press did. The internet is a better analogy to the printing press, in that it will eventually completely change the way society works. Destroying old systems, building new ones, destroying them and building still newer systems. This will be a process that will take a long time. You can see the realization beginning to dawn on some people already that business can be done between any two people on Earth as easily as it can be done locally, but all of these physical political boundaries unnecessarily complicate things and get in the way. Look at Apple trying to figure out what to do with its cash. Where the most difficult part wasn't how to create excellent devices or how to best benefit shareholders, but rather how to make sure the parasites don't steal an excessive amount of it. People have a resistance to changing how they view the world. Things will stay the same until the cognitive dissonance required to fool oneself becomes unbearable. That is when (like serfdom, slavery, women's rights, or gay rights) the generally accepted way that things "have always been done", becomes generally accepted to be immoral and is changed.