StrangeSox

I'll have to doublecheck the square footage of the countertops, but we did something very similar about a year ago. Quartz countertops all around, large undermount sink, and a new island with an overhang for seating. IIRC countertops were ~$4200 including the sink and install. We put a backsplash in there later, too. If you can get by with refinishing your existing cabinets, that'll save you a ton of money and time/effort. Our fridge was relatively new, so we left that. We replaced the microwave and dishwasher. Our stove is old but functional and our budget was getting ridiculous so we've left that from now. Yeah, it looks terrible, but it'll go eventually. edit: that terrible fan is also on the shortlist to go now that I've broken the dome again. edit2: the hardware is from ikea. The same stuff from the kitchen store or HD/Lowes was at least twice as expensive.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 21, 2013 -> 11:15 AM) I try to read the cnet.com reviews to sort through the spec nonsense...I feel like they have a good handle on what stuff you can actually appreciate in terms of a viewing difference. There are two 70-inch models available from Sharp...one that is 120 hz and non-3d for like $1700, and another that is 240 hz and 3d for about $2700...I've read the cheaper model is crap...I would love to save the money, but you don't buy a tv that large and have it suck, or skip during sports or action scenes. I think I am going to spring for the 3d model... Well that factors into it. The models with the higher specs like 240Hz are going to be the higher-end models anyway, even if the 120/240 difference is meaningless. So that 240Hz TV is going to look better, but not because of the 240Hz. AVSForum is a good site if you really want to dig into the technical details. Actual display engineers etc. post there.

Wasn't the sequester what the Republicans required in order to not force a sovereign default due to the debt ceiling in August 2011?

I don't think anything above 120HZ matters if you're not going 3D, at least for LCD's. So much of this stuff is just spec-sheet wars that don't really matter.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/more/news...1&eref=sihp This is whats wrong with the NCAA.

Can't make it this weekend, but I'll drop a donation. We're looking for a puppy, too, so I'll check out the available adoptions.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Feb 20, 2013 -> 11:40 AM) You kind of pay a premium for their value adds. Yeah, they'll throw in some extras (brackets, connectors) that others don't for free, plus the great tech support and guides. Their prices are more in-line with others these days and can come out cheaper when you factor in the add-ins. Edit: I don't think I'd use them for anything but car audio, though. I don't need a guide on how to hook up a TV or A/V receiver.

For taking apart modern dashes and door panels, it can be a huge help if you don't otherwise have the car's maintenance manuals. Plus they're good about throwing in the connectors and adapters you will need to hook up to factory wiring.

huh?

OTOH, you can get way, way better tech support from mail order companies sometimes. Crutchfield's installation guides and actually knowledgeable techs are way better than what you'd get from Best Buy.

I don't think we're really disagreeing there, ultimately. That the top 1% captured all of the income growth and then some is indicative of the weakness and type of 'recovery' we've experienced over the past several years and while the stock market's doing just fine, most people aren't.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Feb 20, 2013 -> 10:51 AM) Printing out a label and leaving it downstairs is supremely easy. Much easier than driving, Parking and waiting. Seriously, I order stuff like windshield wiper blades on amazon. They'll be at my door in two days whereas I might put off going to the auto parts store for a week or two. I rarely return anything, though.

The top 1% didn't take 11.2% of 1.7%, they took 121% of the 1.7% growth. The growth of the total income shares of the top 5 or 10% has been pretty linear, but realize that, when we're talking about income shares, it's a zero-sum game. If the top 10% are capturing a larger share of the income, then the bottom 90% are capturing a smaller share.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Feb 20, 2013 -> 10:25 AM) Probably...but that's why I tend to not like these types of comparisons that lump massive groups together in order to make a point. I don't think it's surprising that the rich get richer...since they're the ones with money to invest. Just as I don't think it's surprising that the poor get poorer, when everything they buy/need gets more and more expensive. From phone bills to electricity...and phony "tax cuts". The "1% got 121%" was the attention-grabbing headline, but Saez's work gets deeper than that. For a while, the poor weren't getting poorer in relative or absolute terms. Now, they are. This study is just looking at the numbers and isn't examining why that's been happening, whether that's good or bad, and what (if any) policy response there should be. Saez has argued for a higher top marginal tax rate elsewhere based on his work, but he isn't doing so here.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Feb 20, 2013 -> 10:24 AM) I don't see anything that's groundbreaking or abnormal with those numbers. The recessed but improving economy, low and middle class people aren't capable of finding much room for growth, but there were plenty of investment opportunities throughout the country, which the wealthy, with large, disposable incomes, will invest in to increase their share of the market. Didn't seem to have happened with past recessions (to the same extent) or, especially, with the Great Depression. The paper I posted a page or two back was an update with 2011 numbers to this previous paper: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf Table 1 on Page 6 compares this recession and the early 2000's recession, where the top 1% saw 65% of income gains in the recovery

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Feb 20, 2013 -> 10:14 AM) The % rises exponentially with those absolute numbers, so again, it's not quite that easy to dismiss it. I think you might be focusing on the individuals again and not the aggregate. Yeah, over your life, your salary will grow like that. But that's not looking at any one individual's income over their life but the collective incomes of the entire country in any given year. We don't see any exponential growth in the data. We see plenty of flat or linear growth. edit: even at the individual level, it doesn't matter. Try a simple excel table to see that. row 1: Year 1-20 row 2: Income 1 (start at 100) row 3: Income 2 (start at 1000) row 4: Income 2 % Share (=A2/(A2+A3)) Step each income by 5% every year. In the end, you end up with 252 vs 2526, but the % share is still the same (90.9%). This is essentially what we had in the post-war economy. Wealth was growing steadily, but so were wages across the board. There were income and wealth gaps, obviously, but they were steady %-wise for about a generation. In the late-1970's, wages and productivity were decoupled, wages stagnated for the most part and more and more of our wealth went to the finance sector.

We're talking about percentages here, so the absolute difference doesn't matter. edit: for some reason all the labeling on those graphs didn't copy over. Go back to the first Saez link and look at the graphs with the labeling. Those high levels on the left-hand side are the 1920's. The income disparity dropped during the Great Depression, stayed level for several decades and then started taking off again in the 1970's. The Wolff paper also compares 1983 data with 2007 data and gives both absolute dollars and percentage shares. It also breaks down wealth composition if you're interested in seeing where/how wealth is actually held across different parts of the population.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Feb 20, 2013 -> 09:57 AM) It's probably fair to say the top 1% have seen the most wealth gains over all of time, too. These are way too broad/generalized numbers to actually mean anything. To find actual meaning in these numbers, it would have to be broken down far more than 1% vs 99%. As these numbers have and probably always will apply if you break it down to simply the top 1% vs the rest of us. Income and wealth disparities have been increasing over the years. You can look at Saez and Piketty's work for the breakdowns you're looking for, or Edward Wolff's work. From the Saez paper, here's the top 10% income share: (triangles include capital gains, circles don't) and the top 10% broken down further: (black: 0-1% blue: 5-1% red: 10-5%)

Nah, according to that study, you're a data point. Not every single data point falls on the trend line. You're confusing statements about individuals, which the study doesn't make, with aggregates. Can you point out the assumptions and bad math in that study? Can you point out where it says your position is impossible? Can you show me where Saez's ideology is leading him astray and results in him not accurately analyzing income percentiles and groupings? This paper appears to be a descriptive analysis, not something offering policies or preferred income/wealth distributions.

Wealth/Net Worth vs. Income. You're not drawing any income from your IRA's or 401k's. Plus we're talking aggregate here over tens of millions of people, so you or me getting a promotion and raise is counterbalanced by a whole lot of people who lost their jobs, got pay cuts, had to take lower-paying jobs, have not seen raises in years (lost ground relative to inflation), etc. The top 1% has seen most of the wealth gains in the post-2008 recovery, but not over 100%. I can't find a good cite for this at the moment, but consider that for most people, if they have positive net worth, their home is their biggest asset. Housing values haven't recovered nearly the way that equities have.

Who pays the Corporate Income Tax Bruce Bartlett has a summary of several economists' answers to that question. The answers range from Shareholders 100% to Shareholders 40%, Workers 60%.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Feb 19, 2013 -> 10:50 PM) Norton really sucks. Use Avast. It's free and stable.

That's not really what the research was looking at. It wasn't about individuals getting raises, it was about the total share of income growth that was captured by a given segment of the income distribution. If the total income in the US increased by $1000 Billion dollars 2009-2011, then the total income of the top 1% increased by $1210 Billion during the same time period. In other words, the top 1% captured every dollar of growth during that period and then some, meaning that the other 99% saw a net drop in income. That's both in real dollars and in relative percentage of the total income shares. You're right when you point to the fact that the growth has been in investment income, though. Wages have been stagnant or declining for a while now and were really hammered in 2007-2008. Yet, despite record profits (investment growth), we're not seeing wages come up. It wasn't always the case that the only way to increase income was by already being well-off and investing money, but that's been the trend for a while now and it's really kicked up lately, as evidence by the fact that 1% is capturing more than 100%. Bloomberg had a recent article about Walmart on why, long-term, this type of "growth" and having almost all of the wealth be captured by such a tiny slice of the population isn't good for anybody. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-15/w...in-e-mails.html

huh?

QUOTE (chw42 @ Feb 19, 2013 -> 05:20 PM) They look really nice, but if you judge on sound quality alone, you can do way better at the price. I'd say they're the Bose of the headphone world except Bose has that covered too.