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Forum: Sold Items 04-01-2012, 05:34 AM  
For Sale - Sold: DA* 300mm F4 ED[IF] SDM
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 3
Views: 1,140
PentaxForums.com Marketplace Listing

Item for Sale
DA* 300mm F4 ED[IF] SDM

Asking Price
$950

Item Location
Upstate New York (United States)

Item Description
Pentax DA*300 F4 ED IF SDM. Asking $950. Excellent condition, all I could find looking at it all over is a minor, 1/8-inch rub on the focus ring. Perfect optically and mechanically. Comes with box, pouch and paperwork.







Price includes Paypal fees. Actual cost of shipping with tracking and insurance with your choice of carrier will be added . Note: I will ship to Paypal verified addresses only. I may consider non-US/Canada destinations on a case-by-case basis.

2 day inspection guarantee, your money back (minus shipping and insurance both ways). More pics here. I can answer any questions, or even take example shots, within reason and with sufficient time.

Are you the original owner of the item being sold?
No

Are you selling or trading this item?
Selling

Item Condition (Key)
Used
Excellent

Shipping Destinations
North America

Shipping Charge
actual cost

Shipping Services
Your choice

Accepted Payment Types
PayPal

Return Policy & Additional Details
2 day inspection guarantee, your money back (minus shipping and insurance both ways, of course).

Please send me a private message if interested in the item!
Forum: Pentax Camera and Field Accessories 10-27-2009, 07:01 AM  
Very good deal on Velbon 540 carbon fiber tripod
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 2
Views: 6,300
Just to let anyone interested know, Buy.com has the Velbon EL Carmagne 540 Carbon Fiber Tripod with a 3-way head on sale for $130 with free shipping. It's a really good tripod, and pretty much half price.

Note that the maximum load is listed as 25 lbs on Buy.com and Amazon, but it's only about 9 lbs according to B&H.
Forum: General Talk 10-01-2009, 06:18 PM  
I have to agree with the Obama
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 82
Views: 15,074
Come on guys, it's clearly a fake. Do you really think any self-respecting high school student would take time away from videogames, TV and hanging out at the mall to write a letter to a friggin' newspaper? How naive are you? I suspect most high school students don't even know what a newspaper actually is, let alone read one.
Forum: General Talk 09-30-2009, 08:28 AM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
I am just going by this:Depending on exactly what documents you obtained under a false name and what exactly you have been doing with them, you may be guilty of anything from knowingly and willfully making materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation in a matter under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government, to fraud, tax evasion and so on. At the very least, providing false information on a driver's license application is a felony in most (possibly all) states, and certainly in Florida.

Of course, it is possible that you did not actually commit any felony, but were just boasting about committing it. But that doesn't sound very good for your "tough on criminals" act either.
Forum: General Talk 09-30-2009, 06:39 AM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
A misdemeanor is a misdemeanor, it's not "OK" by any stretch of the imagination, and I never said it was. I just pointed out that the virulently anti-immigrant fringe has a habit of making the simple fact of being in the US illegally to be a far worse offense than it actually is. And of course, for you (an admitted, though as far as I know unconvicted, felon) to stand in judgment of people who commit a lesser offense is an obvious display of hypocrisy.

Now, the "hungry" part has to do with the concept of "extenuating circumstances", which is - as I am sure you know - a well-established part of our legal system. It still doesn't make any violation of the law "OK", but it can, and often does, mitigate the judgment imposed for it.
Forum: General Talk 09-29-2009, 05:50 PM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
Sure, and illegal immigrants who do it are subject to the appropriate legal remedies. That doesn't make "illegal immigration" a felony.

And of course, lying on government forms about one's identity is also a felony, but that is what you glibly stated you do routinely, so pardon me if I doubt that the Sanctity of the Law is your principal motivation here. At least most illegals who commit those felonies do it because they are hungry, you commit yours just because you are paranoid.
Forum: General Talk 09-29-2009, 05:21 AM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
Maybe the part in the US code (Title 8, 1325) where the "illegality" of the vast majority of illegal immigrants is considered a mere misdemeanor, on par with such "crimes" as public intoxication and disorderly conduct. It is only racist nutjobs who in their mind make illegal immigration a felony on par with robbery or murder.

And of course, illegal immigrants have plenty of rights (e.g. due process, protection against unwarranted search and seizure, personal security, freedom of speech and so on) except those that apply expressly to citizens (e.g vote or eligibility to office) according to that pesky Constitution thing that you often hear the same nutjobs also talk about.
Forum: General Talk 09-28-2009, 07:34 PM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
LOL, so Bush was the real conservative, and the Republicans in Congress were the RINOs? Actually, only the House Republicans must have been RINOs, because those in the Senate (like Specter) actually blocked the House RINO bill upon Bush's request.

Fine, so you are a Bushist. OK with me, and glad we clarified that. I just have a hard time keeping track of all the contortions.
Forum: General Talk 09-28-2009, 07:28 PM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
Uh? No one is talking federal subsidies for illegals, so Obama is still right, and Wilson still a liar or a deeply confused fool.

What that means, as is clear to anyone who can read, is that illegals will be allowed to simply buy insurance at their own costs, like they do now (50% of them already do). Extremist Republicans (I am saying extremist because most Republicans actually are against this) want to have racist, punitive rules that would prevent any illegal from even buying insurance with their own money, which would result in needless additional costs for enforcement, and in the rest of us having to bear the expense for the illegals' emergency care anyway, since it is unlawful to deny emergency care to anyone in immediate danger. Great plan!
Forum: General Talk 09-28-2009, 07:20 PM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
Again not true, and again you know it. Bush in 2003 proposed to move the control of the GSEs from Congress to the executive. Some say that was the first step towards final privatization, but regardless, Congress balked, despite being under Republican control. The House Financial Services Committee instead worked on a potential compromise bill that would have created an independent oversight agency. It passed the House in 2005 on a bipartisan vote, but the WH opposed it and the Republican Senate obliged, by killing it in committee. That's the bill I mentioned above. That's why GSE regulation was not passed in 2005: the WH wanted all or nothing, and nothing it got.

It is simply insane to imagine that in 2003 the Democrats or Barney Frank alone would have been able to stop any legislation that was favored by both Bush and the Republican-dominated Congress. It's like saying that the Republicans could stop the Democrats from passing a health care reform plan with the public option. If the public option is not there in the end, it's the Democrats' fault.
Forum: General Talk 09-28-2009, 12:42 PM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
I said that the canard that Bush in 2005 favored regulation of the GSEs, and Frank opposed it, was a lie, as I have shown. As far as Clinton goes, he absolutely bowed down to the republicans way too often on key issues, this being one of them, as your quote shows.

The conservatives insane deregulation rampage started under Reagan, but really accelerated in the late 90s and early 00s, and all we got out of it was boom-and-bust cycles, rampant fraud, ridiculously inflated executive salaries, the relative shrinking of middle and working class wealth and incomes, and the transfer of the economic leadership from the productive sectors of the economy to the financial. A real tragedy, and I am glad that despite your conservative stance on many issues, you also call for tighter government control and regulation. On that we fully agree.

[And of course, the idea that ACORN could in any way pressure giant banks and mortgage lenders, with thousands of times its budget and political weight, is simply preposterous, but I suspect that it seems perfectly reasonable in Limbaugh-land.]
Forum: General Talk 09-28-2009, 11:55 AM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
Oh please, you already know that it was Bush, with the complicity of the Republican-controlled Senate, who stopped GSE regulation in 2005, as acknowledged by the Republican Chair of the HR Financial Services committee, Mike Oxley, who had worked on the legislation with Frank.

I understand that Lying for the Cause is considered an art form by Fox News fans, but aren't you even a little bit embarrassed doing it yourself? Especially when you know it's so easy to expose the lie?
Forum: General Talk 09-28-2009, 07:33 AM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
That's what your simplistic right-wing ideology-based expectations would suggest, but alas I previously linked to a study that concluded that the extent of Medicare/Medicaid fraud is similar to that for private insurance. Would you like me to find it again, since maybe repeat reading on your part will help you process that information?

And of course, the irony is that the democratic health reform plan proposed to save on Medicare by reducing fraud and waste, and Republicans replied trying to scare the elderly by saying that those savings could only come at the expense of reducing services, effectively claiming that there isn't enough waste and fraud in Medicare to realize those savings. Go figure.
Forum: General Talk 09-28-2009, 05:08 AM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
As I have shown to you, and you studiously ignore, Medicare is subject to as much fraud as private insurers. And of course Medicare would not be "broke" if it were allowed to raise premiums by double digit percentages every year as private insurers do. The simple fact remains that Medicare offers better customer satisfaction to a more expensive patient population for a lower per customer cost than private insurers. Hardly an example of failure.

As for your other post and links, you are missing the point. I am not claiming that government project overruns don't exist, of course they do. So are private project overruns. What I am saying is that the right-wing myth that you have been parroting, i.e. that "the government has never completed a project on budget and on time", is simply a lie. The majority of government work is on time and on budget. School districts, state universities, police, fire and sanitation departments, etc are run on a budget every year, and much more often than not throughout the country they deliver what they are supposed to.

Of course, as your quote above points out, when private party contractors are involved, all bets are off. In most cases, overruns are the unavoidable consequence of certain types of business (anyone who ever hired a contractor for a moderately complex task - like building a house or extensive renovations - knows this, so it's hardly surprising that the same could happen with the Hoover dam or the Panama Canal, something no one had done before), and in other cases they are the result of contractors' dishonesty (purposefully low-balling costs to obtained a contract) or incompetence (inability to accurately forecast costs). Either way, one can hardly only blame the government if a private contractor exceeds its contract terms. And of course, if the government made it an a priori rule not to hire the cheapest contractors in order to limit overruns, they'd be accused of wasting taxpayers' money by the same people who now accuse them of overruns.

And yet, even so the majority of small scale government contracts are on time and on budget. In fact, I just came from a meeting where a group of NIH funded institutions reported on their biodefense-related government-sponsored contracts. They are all pretty much on target, with one year to go, and in fact most of them will deliver more data (quantitatively) than originally planned.
Forum: General Talk 09-27-2009, 03:40 PM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
LOL. Your first example of government failure is a program that scores higher customer satisfaction than private providers do, and for a lower cost? Man, you have been listening to Fox News!
Forum: General Talk 09-27-2009, 10:09 AM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
You are asking me to find the kind of "dog bites man" evidence that is very hard to track down. Unless it's big things like the Human Genome Project or the Apollo program, you only hear about government contracts when they are really screwed up.

But I will be generous, and will allow you to actually support your claim on a level playing field: for every government project I will list here that has reached its target on time and on budget, you promise to list an equivalent government project which was not, and for which the responsibility of the failure does not rest with a non-governmental contractor screwing up (e.g., the Big Dig in Boston, whose costs and time overruns was entirely due to the contractors' planning mistakes, even though the government routinely gets blamed).

If you are unable to keep up with my list, you will again apologize to the government on this board, as follows:
"I, graphicgr8s, recognize that the government is doing a better job in carrying out public interest projects than private industry has shown itself capable of."

Deal?

Here's my first one: the F/A18 Super Hornet. Your turn.
Forum: General Talk 09-26-2009, 06:55 PM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
Graphic, sorry to have to say this, but either you are consciously lying, or you are really daft. I never did any such search or made any such claim, in fact I repeatedly said the opposite, and you know it.

What happened is that you had said originally that the government had never completed a project on time and on budget, one your many patently erroneous claims you seem to parrot from whatever right-wing pseudonews source you fill your head with. I simply countered that I had proof of at least one, because when the genome project was completed, its timeliness and cost-effectiveness was widely reported, and I had you apologize to the government after proving you wrong.

Of course, there are very many government projects that come in on time and on budget. Every time the road in front of your house is fixed, I suspect the work is done on time and on budget. It's just that when a government project is completed as planned, it doesn't make news.

So, try to tell the truth, at least when you clearly ought to know what it is.
Forum: General Talk 09-17-2009, 12:00 PM  
How we are going to do this? Health Care
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 196
Views: 23,162
What can I say man, if that is the case and you are happy, knock yourself out (or actually don't, or your insurance may drop you for self-destructive behavior).

Of course, since the KFF numbers are indisputable, if what you say is indeed true then it would also mean that a) health insurance companies are subsidizing low-cost private insurance by overcharging companies for comparable policies (in other words - you ironically would be the one currently taking money out of other people's pockets to pay for your health care) and b) companies which offer health insurance to their employees (i.e. the majority of US companies) are absolutely mismanaged, because they could easily provide similar coverage for their employees at a third of the cost on the private market. Either way, definitely not a ringing endorsement of the fairness and effectiveness of market-based, non-government-supported health care.

But just to give you an idea, the average medical expenses for an American are >$7,000/year. Even correcting for a disproportionate share of those costs being borne by the government through Medicare for the elderly, it is unlikely that insurance companies would be making the kind of profits they have been raking in by consistently charging less than $5K/year for a family of 3, including a baby. It is simply the nature of any insurance system that the vast majority of people normally must be paying more than they receive from it, in exchange for being covered if ever/whenever they need to receive more. Otherwise insurance companies would not make any money.

It's really a matter of simple arithmetic, something's gotta give. I still suspect it's your wife's employer somehow and you just are not aware of it, but who knows.
Forum: General Talk 09-17-2009, 09:06 AM  
How we are going to do this? Health Care
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 196
Views: 23,162
I am afraid that only means you are among the ranks of the underinsured, who however are in the tens of millions, so you have company. There is nothing necessarily wrong with it, you probably just have a high deductible (maybe $5000 or more), high coinsurance, some sort of low annual/lifetime cap and a bunch of fine print exclusions. For most people these plans are fine, and they don't ever notice any problem, but it is the type of limited coverage that leads to the much-heard-of health care bankruptcies for the the unlucky few who happen to hit on a severe illness or accident.

As for "Max's estimates", they are not Max's and they are not estimates. They are numbers that come from the KFF survey of >2,000 employers, which is pretty much the gold standard in the field. You may not like the numbers, but no one really disputes them. They are what they are.
Forum: General Talk 09-17-2009, 02:21 AM  
How we are going to do this? Health Care
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 196
Views: 23,162
I am sorry man, but the market is the market, and I doubt Aetna gives you the nice-guy discount. Employer-based insurance prices run at around $1000/month for a family of four, and that is usually cheaper than one would find shopping privately, because employers have group pricing. the employee pays about a third of that, and the employer the rest (well, nominally - of course if employers did not have to pay for health insurance, they would have to pay somewhat higher salaries to employees, so ultimately it is mostly money out of the employees' pockets whether they know it or not). If you are buying privately and pay less than half that amount, then your insurance must have some limitations, like caps, very high deductibles, or something like it. There is just no way around it.

And the Kaiser Family Foundation is not a "liberal" think tank, you silly. It's non-partisan, and is brought to you by the same people who own Kaiser Permanente, which is one of the largest health insurers in the country.

Besides, numbers are numbers, they are not "liberal" or "conservative", just right or wrong. If you have a "conservative" source that says insurance is dirt-cheap, bring it on. But of course you don't, because you just prefer to ignore reality when it doesn't suit your ideology, and are perfectly comfortable not replacing it with anything at all.
Forum: General Talk 09-16-2009, 06:30 PM  
How we are going to do this? Health Care
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 196
Views: 23,162
I agree Baucus is a fool. However, on the facts, he's right. The reason you think you are only paying 4 grands/year is probably because your employer picks up the rest of the tab (that's why the private health insurance system is such a drag on small businesses). If on the other hand you are buying insurance on the private market, and pay only $400 a month, then you have really crappy insurance, and should quickly review your policy for hidden limits and such (assuming you can even change it at this point, because not many providers offer affordable policies for private families with newborn babies - kind of a pre-existing condition thing).

But thinking of it, that may explain why you are under this bizarre delusion that the US private health insurance system is relatively cheap and works great - you actually don't really know how much you are paying.

EDIT: Sorry, here's the reference, from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Forum: General Talk 09-16-2009, 12:59 PM  
How we are going to do this? Health Care
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 196
Views: 23,162
I am late to this, but the obvious problem with your numbers is that you include only incomes in your calculations of the pool of resources which could be used to pay for any health program. If there are ~150M workers in the US and the average pre-tax income is $40K, you'd come to about $6 trillions. But the numbers you need to consider is GDP, which of course includes all the wealth generated by the country (people and businesses) in one year. That is around $14 trillion for the US.

Now, currently the US spends about 14% of its GDP on health care to cover ~80% of its population. If we had a health care system as cost-effective as Switzerland's (the next-highest spender), which spends 11% of its GDP on health, we could cover 100% of our people at no extra cost. A system like France's (cost of 9.5% of GDP) would allow us to cover 100% of eligible people and save a smidgen over 2% of GDP every year (that's ~ $300 billions/year) for education, or big screen TVs, or to invade some other country that pisses us off. So, let's just let the Swiss or the French run our health care. ;)

Of course I am joking, and things are not that easy, but the blueprint is clear: universal health care coverage in the US is not feasible unless substantial savings are found in our system, whose costs are primarily driven by the skyrocketing health insurance premiums. If we do not want to transition to the straightforward solution of a single-payer system to do so, for whatever reason, then the only clearcut market-based solution to reduce costs is to apply competition pressure. And the only certain way to apply competition is to let the government offer a low-cost option. The effectiveness of all other alternatives ranges from "far from certain" (e.g. co-ops) to "pie in the sky" (tort reform).

Unfortunately, this is a problem that should have been solved over a decade ago, before it became a real crisis, but the Republicans killed the prospect of reform under Clinton for political gain, and here we are. Right now, we do not have another decade to waste before the current system either collapses with no alternatives in place, or bankrupts the country.
Forum: General Talk 09-16-2009, 12:17 PM  
How we are going to do this? Health Care
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 196
Views: 23,162
That study has been strongly criticized, because, among other things, it misleadingly failed to include in its employment numbers the 3+ million workers directly employed by New Deal government programs. So, what it basically says is that at least some of the people employed through Roosevelt's WPA etc would eventually have found employment in the private sector if they had not been, and the the existence of the government programs delayed their transition to private employment. That may be the case, but of course, millions of other unemployed individuals would not have, and were saved from poverty by the government's programs. Thus, even accepting for the sake of argument the study's conclusions, the trade-off would have been between the 15 year-long depression we got, in which a large number of people still found gainful, decent employment thanks to government programs, and a shorter, 8-year depression in which millions would have been condemned to abject poverty and, basically, starvation. I don't think any sane person would doubt what the moral choice would have been.

Ironically, the authors also suggest that one of the key problems with the NIRA was that it suspended key regulatory mechanisms for industries that fulfilled certain criteria. Thus, even if one ignores the study's selective use of employment data, it carries little comfort to the conservative, laissez-faire capitalism crowd, because it reiterates the requirements for continuous, strong governmental regulation of markets and corporations.

But don't expect many conservatives to go past the reading of "Roosevelt... wrong".
Forum: General Talk 09-16-2009, 08:44 AM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
Nice try, but context matters. Showing Obama as Hitler is not different than showing Bush or Clinton as Hitler, but showing Obama as a witch doctor is different, and so is the persistent use against him of ethnic (Muslim, African, Indonesian, etc) references and historically racist animalistic imagery (mainly monkeys and apes) as insults.

And of course it is unprecedented: to my knowledge no previous (white) presidents were ever subjected to this level of vitriolic accusations of not being "real Americans" (the only possible exception was some people's aversion to JFK because of his Catholicism, which was of course rooted in another, but similar form of bigotry).

On the other hand, the brouhaha about Jim Wilson's "you lie!" cry is plain bullshit. If a representative of the people thinks the President is lying, he/she should be able to say so loudly, openly and clearly. Whether it is opportune to do it during a joint address to Congress is another matter, but one of protocol and manners, not of content.
Forum: General Talk 09-16-2009, 04:47 AM  
The Obama Address
Posted By slomojoe
Replies: 508
Views: 44,049
But yes, of course! Racists and vocal opponents of racism are all extremists, better juts stay in the safe middle... let's not condone racism, but also not make such a big fuss about it. :confused:

Yes, that was exactly what Tea Party leader Mark Williams told Anderson Cooper, before Cooper quoted Williams himself stating on his blog that Obama is an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug" and "racist-in-chief". Watch it, it's hilarious..

Who do these people think they are fooling?
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