I didn't believe the government would be shut down.

@McGentrix,

There are penguins at the equator. Shocked

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@McGentrix,

McGentrix wrote:

hingehead wrote:

Kind of, except that if I were to blindfold you and you drop off at one of the poles - you wouldn't be able to tell which one - they are both remarkably similar (until the arctic melts of course). So you can be opposite and terrifyingly similar. There's a philosophical point in there somewhere but my stablehand's shovel isn't big enough to dig it out.

Penguins.

No penguins at the south pole. And if you were blindfolded before the drop...only the stars would tell you the difference.

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@hingehead,

You can tell which end of a magnet is which when you try to move 2 magnets together. The polar opposite acts quite different from the same pole.

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@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

McGentrix wrote:

hingehead wrote:

Kind of, except that if I were to blindfold you and you drop off at one of the poles - you wouldn't be able to tell which one - they are both remarkably similar (until the arctic melts of course). So you can be opposite and terrifyingly similar. There's a philosophical point in there somewhere but my stablehand's shovel isn't big enough to dig it out.

Penguins.

No penguins at the south pole. And if you were blindfolded before the drop...only the stars would tell you the difference.

Wrong pole Frank. No penguins at North pole...

1 Reply

@McGentrix,

McGentrix wrote:

Frank Apisa wrote:

McGentrix wrote:

hingehead wrote:

Kind of, except that if I were to blindfold you and you drop off at one of the poles - you wouldn't be able to tell which one - they are both remarkably similar (until the arctic melts of course). So you can be opposite and terrifyingly similar. There's a philosophical point in there somewhere but my stablehand's shovel isn't big enough to dig it out.

Penguins.

No penguins at the south pole. And if you were blindfolded before the drop...only the stars would tell you the difference.

Wrong pole Frank. No penguins at North pole...

No penguins at the south pole either, McG.

There are some on Antarctica's ice shelf...but NONE at the pole. That was my point. If you were dropped off at either pole having been blindfolded on the way...the only way you could determine if you were at the north or south pole...

...would be by star gazing.

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@Frank Apisa,

True enough then.

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@McGentrix,

McGentrix wrote:

True enough then.

I would love the chance to look at the stars from either vantage point, McG. Almost no light pollution...although if there were any moonlight at all, I expect the snow/ice cover might present some problem.

I guess looking for Polaris almost overhead would be the indicator of whether it is the South or North Pole. Must be one hell of a view...although the dangers of getting to either spot (particularly the South Pole) are way too much for me.

No cost to dream, though!

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@Frank Apisa,

If you had a compass at the south pole would it point north or just circle?

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so we have I take it decided that the government 40% shutting down for weeks over political disputes is not important enough to be worthy of our time?

I question the wisdom of those who have made this judgment.

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@RABEL222,

RABEL222 wrote:

If you had a compass at the south pole would it point north or just circle?

Beats me.

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@hawkeye10,

Who said this? Name names please.

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So now we know that Obama will actually negotiate a debt ceiling increase, because he just did it.

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@hawkeye10,

He did it the first time also. It was only after that less than optimal negotiation that Reed encouraged him to take a hard line.

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@engineer,

Gates was just talking about how this budgetary bullshit has driven up the cost of the DOD doing business, and stonewalling the R let the D's get tagged with a huge chunk of the blame. The historians will not be kind to Obama, he showed a massive lack of political talent on this matter which resulted in huge costs to the nation and to the credibility of the elite.

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@hawkeye10,

I've seen pretty much the opposite with the Republicans being tarred for not just passing a clean resolution like they'd been doing since the Carter administration. IMO, failing to negotiate on something so fundamental to government was the right call.

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@engineer,

The pollsters nailed this down, the D's picked up less blame but they would have had none had they negotiated in good faith. The historians will point out the the costs of the shutdowns were several orders. Of magnitude higher than any realistic places of compromise would have been.

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@hawkeye10,

But if Congress had sent a clean debt extension, the government wouldn't have shut down and there would have been no costs at all. Remember that Congress DID send an extension after letting the government close and incurring all those costs. Doing it a month earlier was a no brainer.

Boehner and McConnell learned the real lesson when they vowed that the government wasn't going to shut down again. If they thought they could extract concessions from the White House every few months by threatening a shutdown, you could count on it happening regularly. The President put a stop to that and that is a positive regardless of who comes to power in the future.

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@engineer,

THere will be no stop to it till we either stop going deeper into debt or we change the laws that Washington operates under or those in Washington start to put the good of the nation ahead of their political games. We have been doing shutdowns since at least 1995. And then there is this

Quote:

Tea party Republicans weren't the first to make the debt limit a bargaining chip. Over the years, congressional Democrats and Republicans alike have held it up for strategic reasons.

In 1979, it was lawmakers determined to attach a strong balanced budget amendment to the bill. They finally relented, the day before Social Security checks were expected to start bouncing.

The tumult contributed to Treasury's failure to redeem $122 million in maturing T-bills, touted as one of the world's safest investments.

Some investors that April and May waited more than a week for their money. Treasury blamed problems with its newfangled word-processing equipment. The system was stressed, officials said, when the booming popularity of T-bills collided with the last-minute debt ceiling increase from Congress.

Investors called it a "default" and sued for interest to cover the gap. Treasury called it a "delay."

Most Americans didn't notice at all. But the bond market did.

T-bill interest ticked up 0.6 percent, a lasting bump that added about $12 billion to the cost of paying the national debt, according to a 1989 study in The Financial Review journal. It's title: "The Day the United States Defaulted on Treasury Bills."

That certainly counts as a default, even though it was unintentional, said Urban Institute economist Donald Marron, a former member of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers.

http://www.omaha.com/news/historians-put-an-asterisk-on-us-debt-claim/article_83f18eb8-bd33-565e-8510-db367ba74ad4.html?mode=jqm

If you think that Obama put a stop to the gambit you are dreaming. And they would have been doing this every few months only if they failed to negotiate for a long term deal, which would have been a choice.

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The last Government shutdown cost $23 billion.

1 Reply

@glitterbag,

glitterbag wrote:

The last Government shutdown cost $23 billion.

+ Trump. Sanders.Carson.

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I didn't believe the government would be shut down.

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