Fatherpeteus

Disc/Holy hybrid, for smite dps + strong off-healing! http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?priest=050...000000000000000 At least, this will be my starting spec for levelling during the expansion. If we were to go back to Illidan and Archimonde in the next month, I'd probably go deep holy. Guardian spirit will be rediculous vs Bloodboil and Reliquary of Souls, especially with a Disc priest adding their tricks to help whoever is tanking!

Dow + >900 yesterday, 11%... And the Canadian TSE was closed for Thanksgiving! Canada has a federal election tomorrow, and our incumbent PM Stephen Harper must be pissed royally about the timing now. He took about a 10% popularity hit over the past couple of weeks due to people being upset with the stock market and blaming whoever was in power.

Certainly makes pally off-tanking more viable! Where a feral druid could become a top-end dpser with a simple gear switch for ZA encounters where only one tank was needed, a tankadin, not so much.

Nice find!

Speaking of Wii - My bro and I are still anxiously looking for a Wii game that simulates actual swordplay (i.e. I swing my Wii controller at his virtual head and he tries to parry or dodge it and counterattack. Does this title deliver any of that, or has anyone come across a good one that does?

Me too (paying off my full balance every month) - Anyone who doesn't is in deep, deep financial trouble on that issue alone! That was my point Shad - The bailout kindof encourages banks to make the same mistakes again. Not in the next couple of years, but give it a few decades and someone will be saying "Hey, let's loosen up the credit restrictions so people can buy nicer homes! Yeah, it was a little rocky last time, but the gov't took care of us...!"

On your character page in WoW, look at the "Defenses" stats beside your base stats (you may need to toggle from Melee to Defenses to see your Defense, Dodge, Block, etc). Mouse over the Defense number, and it will tell you what you gain from it. 490 Defense prevents crits from a L 73 mob on a L70 tank (i.e. typical raid bosses). You won't have to worry about that until 70, but every bit helps, while also increasing your Dodge, Parry and Block %s. Armor and stamina are always nice, Str and Agi give more threat and a bit of block and dodge. One challenge of gearing your tank is making sure you can hold agro. There's no point being invulnerable, if the boss runs right past you to the guy in the skirt! So it's a bit of a balancing act. Read some "Beginner tank" articles for sure - Try the Warrior Forum stickies on the Blizzard WoW forums too.

I haven't seen numbers that would support that, but in any case... I don't know exactly how 401k plans and Roth IRAs work in the US, but Canadian retirement plans (RRSPs) don't pay any capital gains at all. The whole point of the plan is to be a tax shelter. When you retire, you convert the plan into a retirement income plan, and pay income tax based on how much you withdraw from it each year. Pension plans and their associated investments work the same - You pay income tax based on your pension payout, and never file a capital gains claim. So, I don't see where capital gains taxes impact anyone's retirement plan unless they are affluent enough to cap all of the registered retirement vehicles and make significant investments outside of those plans - That isn't the case for Joe and Jill working class folks. When the investment community talks about capital gains taxes hitting your pension fund, I think they mean indirectly, under the assumption that any increase would be a catastrophic blow to the stock market and all of the investments in the funds would become worthless. I find those arguments alarmist and sketchy. Heck, Canadian capital gains rates are ~2x yours I gather, and our stock market has been outperforming yours - Well,, up until the last couple of days anyway. People want the stuff our companies make (potash, oil, Blackberries), so they buy the stock regardless of whether they get to keep 70% of the profits or 85%.

An interesting aside to this whole bailout thing (well, kindof)... Someone tossed out yesterday that (I gathered the total consumer debt, i.e. credit cards and such) in the US was $880 billion dollars. I though that amount was an amusing coincidence. So what if the bailout money was used to pay off people's credit obligations instead? Certainly it would rescue a lot of people from bad situations... Generally of their own making... And then I bet they'd get right to the business of running up those credit cards again. Some parallels there, for sure! ^^

Dude, I've made six figures, putting my two degrees to work. That isn't wealth. Doctors and lawyers (and pro athletes) aren't in that stratosphere - Hilton and Gates are. PS: I grew up on a dairy farm: work, eat, sleep, no vacations, no weekends. (I got time off for school, but dad was working while I was taking it easy there!) Discussing hard work with me will always be a tough sell. PPS: Take it easy man, you sound stressed! I have absolutely nothing against wealthy people, so set that misconception aside. Debate my actual point - When you need more money to balance the budget (a necessary evil), an average middle class person can't afford to pay more taxes as easily as a wealthy person can.

We're thinking of different things here. Maybe traders work long hours, but I'm talking about wealthy people who can just hire someone to manage their portfolio. They don't have to work at it at all. As for changing the capital gains tax and its income on the economy - Suffice it to say how much is debatable. Lower capital gains (or any form of tax) would be nice, sure... But it means less money for the government to use to balance the budget. Say the government needs to raise $850 billion (just picking a number out of the air ), that money has to come from somewhere. You can tax capital gains more, income tax, sales tax, whatever - It's all on the table. I'm not sure how you got "Marxist class warfare" from what I wrote... I meant that rich dudes get richer by acting in their own best interest, and when a millionaire proposes a "tax reform" you can pretty well guarantee he's looking to shift the burden from himself to others. I'll stand by that.

Yeah - Who is being taxed is an important consideration. There's fair, and then there's practical/effective. When considering any tax reform idea you need to consider how it will shift the overall tax burden. The top 10% in the US pay 90% of the tax, or something like that - Let's use that for simplicity. So those cats pay a lot of tax, and of course anyone would love to pay 10% less... But if they did, it would double the burden on the lower income earners, and that isn't practical. About fair tax vs stock purchases: if one person makes their money working their butt off, and another makes it on the stock market... Would it be "fair" not to tax the capital gains from the stock? Rich dudes are always pushing lower or eliminated capital gains taxes, and believe me, it's not because they want to help out the middle class! Wealth is usually not related on any of those things - It's inherited. At some point Paris Hilton is going to grow up and get a job, probably in some sort of marketing capacity for one of her daddy's companies, probably making $500k or so. And when he kicks it, she'll inherit more money than all of us together will ever make in our lifetimes. "Fair"? A different term that's often used when discussing redistribution of wealth is "fortunate". Ms. Hilton was fortunate to be born wealthy. As such, some would argue that she should be grateful to the country that provided the situation where that money could be accumulated, and give back accordingly. If you don't subscribe to that whole line of thinking, look at it from the other side - Take a 40-yr-old couple with three kids, two in university, a 200k mortgage outstanding, two car payments, both working... They are pretty cash-strapped, so it's very hard for them to bear more taxation. Whatever arguments you want to make (not that the arguments are invalid)... The Hiltons can bear increased taxation more easily.

From 4600 feet, does it even count as base jumping? ^^ The new frontier of construction that is going in to building that sucker is fascinating! They blow the concrete up pipes from the ground, with some rediculously big pumps.

lulz - I thought buddy was going to "turn" his keyboard... into a frisbee!

If businesses had to pay 22% on their purchases (i.e. the raw materials they process, or wholesale goods they resell), I don't think most would be doing any better than they are now. "Our people are our product" companies would be happy I suppose. But to take a simple example, if a corner store buys a bag of chips for $1 and sells it for $1.25, they make $0.25 profit on the whole transaction. They would pay, I don't know, 25% tax on that profit, or 6 cents, for an after-tax profit of ~19 cents. If they had to pay 22% on their wholesale purchase, they end up making only 3 cents... Or they have to mark their chips up and pass the tax on to the consumers to give them a chance at making a decent profit. Would stock purchases be taxed the same 22%? (i.e. a 22% front-end load?) That would hurt... It would certainly force a long-term investment strategy I guess! (All traders would be forced out of work, not sure if that is a good or bad thing!)

I would too... I wonder if anticipation of that is what has driven the Primal Life market up some? (higher than Primal Water, I noticed to my annoyance after I did the wrong daily transmute from Earth the other day) ^^

I'd be a great big hypocrite if I cast stones at someone else's breast fixation, so meh...

Orly? I thought all +shadow, +fire, etc stuff was being converted to raw spellpower... ?

What's going to happen to them? I gather they will be obsolete, but what about the enchants we have already learned? And more importantly, the ones we've enchanted onto our T6 gear, that we'll be wearing well into the Northrend zones? For example, I just hooked my L19 twink up with an epic healing patch for his pants, worth ~250g. Should I have set him up with a spellpower patch instead? Or will the healing patch magically morph turn into a spellpower patch when the content patch goes live in a week or so? PS: Any truth to the rumors of experience being added for BGs, to kill twinking altogether?

Nono Atrus - It's $850 Billion now! And lol Stang @ "stocks shooting straight up". I could have made much better use of ~$1 Trillion... I would have bought, I don't know, Greece? I do like the curly dark hair...

The new (to me?) buzz yesterday was that they were going to do away with twinking by giving experience in BGs... I would imagine that idea would be even less popular though... (Well, to people who actually PvP anyway, as opposed to the rtards who show up in WSG at L11... lol)

While I haven't done the math on that myself, I notice that the number keeps getting more impressive. First time I heard of it, it was 5-1, then 7-1, now 10. I tried eating grain once, but it stuck in my teeth and stuff. While the concept is believable... How much nutrition is there in a lb of beef feed-grade grain, compared to a lb of beef, I wonder? And how many lbs of soybeans in a lb of veggieburger?

We were talking dairy cows, not beef. Beef cattle are fattened up, then slaughtered. Obviously that's a little harsh on some level, though certainly defendable. Obviously also, it has nothing to do with dairy. Factory farms have the same issues that all big industries/businesses have - Concern for profit overrides all else. The root problem there isn't animal rights, it's unchecked capitalism.

Oooor... I could spend 24 years on a dairy farm, and be something of an expert on the issue. Oh wait, I did! What's this business of beating the cows? If you collected art for a living, would you go around smashing it up? Makes no sense... --- On a related note, how about the latest fun quality issue in China, with the water and much nastier additives in milk, especially baby formula? Now there's a good way to spark a riot, especially in a country where if your first baby dies, you're SOL permanently.

While I'm right there with the "the breast is best" concept - To say that dairy cows suffer is laughable. They chill in the field all day, coming in to the barn only to have a big buffet of the best legumes and grains available dumped in front of them, and be masturbated by their human slaves. I fail to see the ethical issues. PETA people, like all extremists, do tend to be a bit... Distanced from reality.