Slashdot Mirror

That's a fairly recent development though--in 2005, Texas only got back 94 cents for each dollar it paid out to the feds. And all states are getting more funds from the fed now (e.g., stimulus funds); in 2009, 47 states received more than they gave (the exceptions being Delaware, Minnesota, and New Jersey). Info on how much taxes were paid by residents of each state are at http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=102174,00.html and info on how much federal money went to each state is at http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/cffr-09.pdf

I don't just agree, I have a challenge;

US Census Bureau numbers seem to show a steady decline in the rate of accidents since 2000. Where's the beef?

I think this report, like a lot, are BS. More junk science to try and prove the government must step in and regulate even more of our lives. Would someone with more skills in manipulating the statistics care to prove me wrong in my assessment? I just don't see the evidence from this source.

You do understand that unlike the rest of the First World countries the population of the US is growing by leaps and bounds?

[Citation needed]

Until you provide something else, let's look at some official data: "Net gain of one person every 13 seconds" with "1 birth every 8 seconds" and "1 new immigrant every 48 seconds" (i.e. 6 newborns for every immigrant)

To put the things into perspective: 1 new person every 13 seconds means approx 2,500,000/year. This means an annual growing rate of 0.78% for the over 311 mils of US. And you call it "leaps and bounds"?
Gosh, similar calculations gives for Australia an annual growing rate of 1.43% - almost double the US (and I hope you will abstain to suggest that Australia is not a First World country).

We see it as a never-ending cycle in Arizona with stories about the latest rapist being caught after being deported 13 times and being deported again.

Ah, I see. If you think the illegal immigration is the reason for which the wiretap warrants number increased, read again TFS and ask yourself why the hell the most significant jump in wiretapping doesn't take place in Arizona, Texas or New Mexico, but in California, New York and New Jersey?

(I'm stopping short of suggesting that perhaps it would be a good idea for you to go back under the bridge?)

For instance, it is often said the US has high crime rates. WRONG, the murder rate in the US vs Holland is pretty much the same.

What a load of bull - check the statistics, and you'll find the murder rate in the USA is approximately 5 times higher per capita than in the Netherlands.

• Murders in USA in total, and per 100K gives well over 5 per 100,000
• Total murders in the Netherlands (work out per 100K population, assume population of 16.5 Million gives less than 1 per 100,000)

I suggest you do some research and adjust your world view.

-- Pete.

Do you really think in a state where brown skin is the majority that cops will waste their time bugging everyone who is brown skinned? We in AZ are aware there are a lot of legal Hispanics here, don't insult us with your assumptions.

Where do you see that AZ is majority non-white? Census numbers from 2010 show that Arizona is 73% white. Did I just read your post wrong?

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04000.html

The census titles their data with "highest driver BAC".:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/motor_vehicle_accidents_and_fatalities.html

Comes out to ~31% above 0.08 and ~5% between 0.01 and 0.07 (with the rest being 0.00).

Less than 14,000 alcohol related fatalities in 2008, and with the large drop in overall fatalities, I would expect less than that in 2010.

Population numbers from the US Census Bureau shows a decelerating growth. In 2045 or so it'll be 0.5%, which if my humble math knowledge would mean a doubling in well over 100 years. And the decline isn't projected to stop in 2045.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers list engineering solutions to providing for the growing population.

I don't know if you can call this "OK", but it seems like reason to be hopeful and have some trust in humanity.

...At least they had something to show other than stories.

Where? All I saw were un-backed numbers and STORIES in that report. Furthermore slashmydots cited the unquestionable truth that there are more teenagers in existence than 37-41 year olds. This does not necessarily mean that there are more teenage gamers (like slashmydots suggests) but it means that the percentage of older people gaming compared to those not gaming would have to far exceed that of the younger cohorts in order to overcome the difference in the group sizes and still produce a strong majority of gamers in total. Do I have hard numbers to back this up? -Sure, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/population.html Slashmydots and I may not have much to back up our claims either so you can call us hypocrites, but first consider that no one paid us for our research and we didn't publish findings under the CLAIM of scientific due process.

It's also understandable why US tried to fight for copyrights so much - that's basically the only thing they produce now.

Although I share your worry that the US will become an IP-based economy, there's still a long way to go before that happens.

Manufacturing and trade still dwarf other the information and entertainment sectors:
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/IBQTable?_bm=y&-filter=&-sortkey2=&-defOrder=N&-sortkey1=&-ds_name=EC0700A1&-sortkey0=-RCPTOT&-NAICS2007=00|21|22|23|31-33|42|44-45|48-49|51|52|53|54|55|56|61|62|71|72|81&-ib_type=NAICS2007&NAICS2007sector=*2&-geo_id=01000US&-dataitem=RCPTOT|GEO_ID$|NAICS2007|NAICS2007$|OPTAX$|FOOTID|ESTAB|PAYANN|EMP|NESTAB|NRCPTOT&-_lang=en
(Sorry link got FUBAR, paste it manually if you want to see it.)

The US also remains the world's largest manufacturer:
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/10/us-still-worlds-largest-manufacturer.html
(Sorry to have to link to a blog, but the reference in the post is a dead link.)

On the other hand, aren't there many, MANY more students than there are prisoners? Even with the excessive growth of the US prison population in the past few decades.

Seems to be about 11 students per prisoner. (Wikipedia gives 7 million odd prisoners and http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school.html gives around 77 million students).

"the bottom of per student spending" , citation please.

According to the census, Michigan is right in the middle on per pupil spending.

http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/09f33pub.pdf

The actual figure is 33 percent, according to the 2001 U.S. census, or 42 percent if you count the families that cited "morality" as their reason.

In 2002 the US Census Bureau calculated that the value of an average degree over a lifetime was $2.1 million

Has the value dropped that much in 10 years? Taking inflation into account, the value's gone from roughly $2.6 million down to less than $1 million? I know we're comparing average to median here, but I have a hard time believing Warren Buffett et al are skewing the numbers by a factor of 2.5+.

I recall hearing a couple years back that we could run fiber optics to every home in the nation for $1,500 per home. Vermont has 250,000 households. The federal funding alone for this project is $1,640 per home. Why are private companies getting all of the funding and where is my share of this federal money?

Sorry, you overshot by an order of magnitude: 13 * 2,000,000 = 26 million. There are 309 million people in the US as of July 2010.
And 309 / 2 is around 150 times, so it's a far cry from saying that 1 in 10 americans is in jail.

Rather than a 10 percent atrocity, like those US unemployment numbers we all know, these convicts are 1/2 of 1 percent :). Still, it's a lot of people considering that a standing-room only commuter train in Manhattan (say, 50 people per car times 10 cars) statistically likely to hold an ex-prisoner or a future con with who-knows-what behavior.

Sigh...

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0079.pdf

Double the birth rate of whites.
About 150% the birth rate of blacks

http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-04/news/29509479_1_world-population-population-division-wealthy-western-nations

The United States is growing faster than many rich countries, largely because of high immigration and *higher birth rates among Hispanic immigrants.*

Among the reasons -- catholic religion, culture desires children more, parents live at home and provide free baby care.

---
More importantly... you say

For example, is the percentage of Hispanics in the southwest US growing because they are having more children, because they are immigrating, or because whites aren't having enough children to keep their population constant?

This doesn't negate my point. Hispanics comprise a group resistant to the birth rate lowering effects of wealth and better personal living standards. As a result, they are coming to dominate the population.

It's true in most populations- the sub populations which resist and have larger families despite the inducements will come to dominate the population.

I'm not judging hispanics or islamics or whatever other subcultures around the world are doing this. I'm just saying that the population growth is not going to stop the way the UN has projected in the past. If anything, as the population gets higher, living standards will start dropping again, and people will start having children at a higher rate again.

For example...
Most of southwest USA will be hispanic within 20 years. It's a growing population.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/PublicHealth/22479
* Teen Birth Rate Drops in U.S., but Not for Hispanics
and
http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/natproj.html
* In fact, the Hispanic-origin population would contribute 32 percent of the Nation's population growth from 1990 to 2000, 39 percent from 2000 to 2010, 45 percent from 2010 to 2030, and 60 percent from 2030 to 2050.

Similarly, elsewhere the islamic population is coming to dominate populations.

I can't find this on India.
China had such a brutal birth control policy it may not be happening there.

The cause for high breeding rate could be personal traits or some social meme (religion, customs, etc.)

Similarly, people who are sloppy about birth control.
Think about the personality traits that lead you to be reckless about birth control (high lust, impulsive, substance use combined with sex) and those traits which do not.
In one generation, the "reckless" female can have 4 to 5 children who will share those traits with the mother. The reckless male could have many more children.
The cautious female and male might have no children.

So after just one generation, you could have (as a pure example) 100 couples that produce 100 children.
None from 10 careful couples who missed breeding opportunity.
about 80 from 80 careful or mixed couples who bred at replacement level.
about 20 from 10 careful couples.

The next iteration- the reckless traits are more common.

I don't think we have had enough time pass yet to conclude people will continue having no children based on a tradeoff for a better life. Very quickly those who value children over a better personal life will die out from the population over multiple iterations.

Of course, then you have the drop in sperm counts from estrogen poisoning-- that may take longer to develop resistance to.

On average 1.8 people die a second:
http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/pcwe

FWIW your usage of "Jesus Christ" in your remark is also offensive to many people.

You're probably a worse asshole than average, so maybe YOU should go back under your bridge.

One more thing:

You day to day activities will be assaulted constantly for circumstantial evidence that could be used to convict you of a crime you didn't commit. Jury's will believe anything an expert witness tells them.

I sat on a jury last year that acquitted a guy because we thought the DNA evidence against him, supported by expert testimony and a parade of cops swearing on a stack of bibles, was shitty. If you think juries are full of sheep who blindly trust the state, you're wrong.

The costs of law enforcement grow exponentially with population growth,

Factually wrong. California spends $871 per capita on law enforcement; Wyoming spends $837.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0341.pdf

how many more years until the value of an artificial intelligence which makes law enforcement technologically irrelevant is greater than the GDP of a third world country?

Science fiction aside, as I said earlier, your problem is not a Facebook problem. It's a problem with the federal government. Fight that. (And if you believe US citizens have totally lost all control over their government, you're fucked whether you post to Facebook or not, and the proper response is to take up arms and march on Washington rather than living like an Internet hermit.)

How do you define middle and upper-middle class?

I personally like nice even fifths. The bottom 20% are lower class, next 20% lower-middle, next 20% middle-middle, next 20% upper-middle, and the top 20% as upper class. The middle class, being the bulk of the population, can be those three middle fifths, which leaves quite a spread but focuses nicely on the middle of the bell curve.

So where does a household (solitary individuals, other non-family households and families combined) earning $250K/year sit in that breakdown? In the 2009 tax year (the most current data), there were roughly 2,372,000 households earning $250K+/year out of a total of 117,538,000 households in the US. That puts a household earning exactly $250K/year above 97.98% of the whole batch. That seems quite a lot towards the upper end to me, and not very middle at all.

So how do the fifths break down?

Lowest: $0 - $20,453 (Mean $11,552)
Second: $20,454 - $38,550 (Mean $29,257)
Third: $38,551 - $61,801 (Mean $49,534)
Fourth: $61,802 - $100,000 (Mean $78,694)
Fifth: $100,001+ (Mean $170,844)

And for good measure, the top 5%: $180,001+ (Mean $295,388)

I would imagine that the vast majority of new businesses created are created by people earning substantially less money than you claim. I see a lot of small firms of professionals, construction & trades contractors, mom & pop corner retail stores, basement tech startups, or even just entrepreneurs with a crazy big idea they try to make real. Some may have had a sweet job earning the big bucks before striking out on their own, but I doubt it's anywhere near most. A lot of people mortgage their houses to get startup money, then seek out venture capital as things get rolling. Many fizzle and fail in the first year.

Where you have a point about business creation is for people earning $250K+/year in investment income. They tend to be able to start businesses left and right, and can afford to have a few fail without disrupting their portfolios. But we call those rich people, because they usually have net worths in the multi-millions.

How do you define middle and upper-middle class?

I personally like nice even fifths. The bottom 20% are lower class, next 20% lower-middle, next 20% middle-middle, next 20% upper-middle, and the top 20% as upper class. The middle class, being the bulk of the population, can be those three middle fifths, which leaves quite a spread but focuses nicely on the middle of the bell curve.

So where does a household (solitary individuals, other non-family households and families combined) earning $250K/year sit in that breakdown? In the 2009 tax year (the most current data), there were roughly 2,372,000 households earning $250K+/year out of a total of 117,538,000 households in the US. That puts a household earning exactly $250K/year above 97.98% of the whole batch. That seems quite a lot towards the upper end to me, and not very middle at all.

So how do the fifths break down?

Lowest: $0 - $20,453 (Mean $11,552)
Second: $20,454 - $38,550 (Mean $29,257)
Third: $38,551 - $61,801 (Mean $49,534)
Fourth: $61,802 - $100,000 (Mean $78,694)
Fifth: $100,001+ (Mean $170,844)

And for good measure, the top 5%: $180,001+ (Mean $295,388)

I would imagine that the vast majority of new businesses created are created by people earning substantially less money than you claim. I see a lot of small firms of professionals, construction & trades contractors, mom & pop corner retail stores, basement tech startups, or even just entrepreneurs with a crazy big idea they try to make real. Some may have had a sweet job earning the big bucks before striking out on their own, but I doubt it's anywhere near most. A lot of people mortgage their houses to get startup money, then seek out venture capital as things get rolling. Many fizzle and fail in the first year.

Where you have a point about business creation is for people earning $250K+/year in investment income. They tend to be able to start businesses left and right, and can afford to have a few fail without disrupting their portfolios. But we call those rich people, because they usually have net worths in the multi-millions.

How do you define middle and upper-middle class?

I personally like nice even fifths. The bottom 20% are lower class, next 20% lower-middle, next 20% middle-middle, next 20% upper-middle, and the top 20% as upper class. The middle class, being the bulk of the population, can be those three middle fifths, which leaves quite a spread but focuses nicely on the middle of the bell curve.

So where does a household (solitary individuals, other non-family households and families combined) earning $250K/year sit in that breakdown? In the 2009 tax year (the most current data), there were roughly 2,372,000 households earning $250K+/year out of a total of 117,538,000 households in the US. That puts a household earning exactly $250K/year above 97.98% of the whole batch. That seems quite a lot towards the upper end to me, and not very middle at all.

So how do the fifths break down?

Lowest: $0 - $20,453 (Mean $11,552)
Second: $20,454 - $38,550 (Mean $29,257)
Third: $38,551 - $61,801 (Mean $49,534)
Fourth: $61,802 - $100,000 (Mean $78,694)
Fifth: $100,001+ (Mean $170,844)

And for good measure, the top 5%: $180,001+ (Mean $295,388)

I would imagine that the vast majority of new businesses created are created by people earning substantially less money than you claim. I see a lot of small firms of professionals, construction & trades contractors, mom & pop corner retail stores, basement tech startups, or even just entrepreneurs with a crazy big idea they try to make real. Some may have had a sweet job earning the big bucks before striking out on their own, but I doubt it's anywhere near most. A lot of people mortgage their houses to get startup money, then seek out venture capital as things get rolling. Many fizzle and fail in the first year.

Where you have a point about business creation is for people earning $250K+/year in investment income. They tend to be able to start businesses left and right, and can afford to have a few fail without disrupting their portfolios. But we call those rich people, because they usually have net worths in the multi-millions.

You'd need more than 50% to not return the form before it would make any practical difference at the statistical level.

Except that the census isn't designed solely for macro-level statistical information. One of the most important roles of a census is determining a city/county/state's population, which is used to allocate funding, and determine the number of representatives in the US House and state houses/senates, which does have a significant impact on the makeup of those bodies.

Return rates are not uniform across the board. Large cities are notoriously under-counted, because of the difficulty of counting the homeless population, renters, those who move during the course of the census, those who do not speak English (even though the Census prints in multiple languages, return rates are still lower among non-English speakers), and various other groups that tend to be much more prevalent in large cities than in smaller cities and more middle-class suburban neighborhoods. This map of Census forms returned county-by-county provides an interesting look at the issue. While the percentages can't be considered completely accurate due to issues like vacant apartments, etc, there's still significant variance. In New York state, for example, mail return rates per county range from 43% to 84%. That's a staggering variance, and when it comes to ensuring that residents have adequate funding and representation, having fairly accurate results is essential.

As an aside, statistical sampling for the census has been discussed in the past to avoid these issues. I'm not opposed to using a reasonable sampling technique, so long as it accounts for areas with statistically low return rates. However, Republicans oppose sampling because they feel it overcounts groups that tend to vote Democratic (and, Democrats tend to support sampling because they feel it's a more accurate count). In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled that sampling cannot be used to determine population for the purposes of apportioning US congressional seats, and while it could be used for drawing state/local lines and for allocating federal funds, it's such a political football that it probably won't happen in the foreseeable future.

Small to medium companies provide more jobs than corporations.

http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html

(I assume we're using "corporation" as shorthand for "large corporation", otherwise many self-employeed people will also be counted in "corporations".)

That's great, I bank at a credit union too (although in Canada credit unions are usually mandated to make a profit in order to provide services to customers). I would never advise anyone to play the stock market, but your numbers are way off. About 50% of households in the US own stocks.

A better indicator of houses vs family wealth is to look at it by regions, especially since there is such a disparity in America.
Houses: http://www.realestateabc.com/outlook/overall.htm
Median household income: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_wealth/cb10-144.html#tablea
Note that the disparity in housing prices is much greater than the disparity in income. The average home price is greater than the average household's income - but if you SAVE carefully and don't make unnecessary purchases like LCD TVs and new cars, you can pay off your mortgage quickly, own your house and then save more of your money. You do know why home prices have gone down right?

I might not know anything, but I'm not in debt, and that apparently pisses you off. Sorry about that. I know that while my family doesn't get to have vacations right now, we don't want for much, and we live within our means - not on credit. I'll take you up on any economics question you want to throw my way.

The census bureau defines the poverty line as explained here. It is not based on a fraction of the median income.

Bottom line I simply see nothing a library (or blockbuster) offers that can not be found in my ten-room home That's why I stopped going to the library or blockbuster.

FTFY. You'd be shocked to learn how many Americans still don't have Internet at home, nor credit cards (or even bank accounts) to use on Amazon, nor basements and bedrooms with "fat recliners", nor can afford to buy every book they would pick up in a library. While you may like to imagine you're "normal", there are far more people living in one-room apartments with thin walls and loud neighbors. Your unsolicited individual habits are irrelevant and nothing you've "simply" said really matters in the discussion because it's based on a misunderstanding what the real, larger world is like. Fact of the matter is libraries are a necessary public service in much of the United States.

Beside costs, there are qualitative issues at hand as well. Audible and author websites are not equivalent. They don't let you interact with the author and provide a a static and one-dimensional listening experience compared to live, interactive and actually-interesting readings (you've never actually attended a decent one, right?). Facebook? Why would I want to subscribe to a feed telling me in which far-away city an author is appearing each weekend to sell their current book? I want to talk to them about their craft- not their bus tour. Suggesting teachers are tutors suggests you understand the role of neither. In addition to that, substituting child programs with computer games tells us you're either not a parent, or a really crappy one.

I'm guessing you use Slashdot to check "social life" off your list too. How sad. There's a big world to experience out, and it's very obvious you're not getting enough of it through your monitor. No amount of money is too much to prevent more kids from growing up like that.

I just checked the US Constitution and all the amendments. It is a quick read.

There is nothing in it about the FBI having the right to wiretap peoples communications without a warrant. A few years ago, there were less than 3,000 judge approved wiretaps inside the entire USA. http://www.justice.gov/nsd/foia/reading_room/foia_readingroom.htm

There are 310,000,000 people in the USA. http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html They are suggesting all that this infrastructure be built to monitor 3,000 people? Only government thinks this way.

I'm sorry that monitoring private communications isn't easy. I'm also happy it isn't.

What the "greed is good" crowd seem to be missing here is that these energy companies are big. Really really big. And as a sector, the oil energy sector dwarfs all other economic sectors.

Here are all the economic sectors of the U.S. (2002). Big Oil is a subset of the Mining sector, which was the fourth smallest sector if you sort by sales. Only arts, entertainment & recreation; management companies; and educational services were smaller. The entire mining sector's sales comprised less than 1% of all the sales in the U.S. economy.

Those figures are probably from the 2000 Census, when oil was $25-$30 a barrel. It's at around $70-$80 now, so I expect the mining sector will be several times bigger in the 2010 Census (not that it makes the companies bigger, since most of the revenue from that price increase is given straight to oil exporting countries). But it's still small potatoes compared to other sectors of the economy.

I don't see the fundamental difference between the arrangement of cogs, springs and rods (say), and the arrangement of conditionals and loops.

Artificial scarcity anyone? One is copyable/usable by 6,900,000,000+ people at little or no cost. The other isn't.

The onus is on any patent proponent to show why billions of people should be blocked from using an idea, their free speech, to give a small number of people additional profit, for every single area of technology. Not for anybody else to prove that patents are not applicable.

Patents are a damaging, unnatural monopoly and by default should not exist unless there is compelling, scientific evidence, not anecdotes, that patents actually help rather than hinder in every single area of technology where they may be applied.

Particularly since there are vast swathes of ideas that have no patent protection and those areas of technology work just fine. Everything from cooking recipes to math to locating businesses to business organization to artistic ideas to political ideas to ...

The whole patent edifice is based on handwaving about what it means to say two ideas are the same or different (fundamental to deciding whether something is original or not). They can't even cope with the difference between inventing new words and inventing new ideas. The PTO's depth of thinking is atrocious.

---

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

You're an idiot if you really mean to suggest that average rent takes 50% of someone's gross income. Do some figuring with me, will you?

-- Median US Home price, December, 2010: $241,500. (source)
-- Assuming "Fair" credit, a 20% down payment, and a 30 year loan, you could expect a monthly mortgage rate of ~$1050 on a median-priced home.
-- Assuming a 10% down payment, the expected price would rise to about $1300/month.

I'm at a loss to understand why you seem to think this is somehow inordinately out of the reach of normal people. Rule of thumb says someone making $36k/year can afford payments of ~900/month. Not too far off affording the median price, on what is BELOW the median per capita income.

If you are spending $1500 a month on rent and making $3000 a month, you are being ripped off, you are stupid, or (most likely) you, Alex Belits, are a liar.

Example, here in Alaska, 16% of the land area of the US, has copper running to about 5-7% of it.

Well I googled it. POTS copper line leads into 95% of Alaskan homes, mainly due to FDR's universal service fund subsidizing the lines. In other words - you were waaaaay off.

I may be wrong, but I suspect you misinterpreted the parent's point (which, if I'm right, was admittedly poorly phrased). I think what the OP was pointing out was that Alaska is 16% of the USA's total land area--implying how big Alaska truly is--while hinting that only 5-7% of Alaska's own land area is serviced by copper. This would make much more sense considering how few population centers Alaska has as well as it's relatively tiny population.

My interpretation may be way off, and you might very well be correct, but according to the US Census Bureau, Alaska has a population density of about 1.1 people per square mile which is well below the national average of 79.6. If the OP did mean to indicate that only 5% of Alaska's land area is serviced by copper, this figure would make much more sense.

40 million people live in the NE and they account for 25% of GDP. There are 310 million people in the US. So 13% of the population is producing 25% of GPD.... You don't think having an efficient way to quickly move people and goods between major cities would increase productivity there or have any benefit to the whole country? What about the jobs created in Kansas to build and maintain tracks? What if Kansas becomes a major hub for the trains traveling across the continent? Kansas also falls into the "red state welfare" category of receiving more Federal dollars than they pay in (At least from 1982 to 2005)..... that money is coming from somewhere. I've lived in the US for 5 years now and I am still amazed at how prevalent the "How does this benefit my State?" attitude is. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_United_States_(U.S._Census_Bureau) http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22685.html

i'd think population and density has something to do with it...

Population (2009 est)
Texas - 24,782,302
North Dakota - 646,844

Density - Persons per sq mile (2000 est)
Texas - 79.6
North Dakota - 9.3

Dallas has 2x the population of North Dakota. More people, closer together, more chance for crime. Texas also has many more people below the poverty level. src: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html

They will claim that people born at a certain time of year share some traits...

You really got to ask yourself, how you want to view yourself. Astrology says that the position of the stars at your time of birth does lay out your life and destiny. So lets presume you can pinpoint the time of your birth to the second (and that is an extreme for everyone that has ever experienced a birth, it is hard to say which second in that process you want to pin your birth moment on). That means in 100 years there are 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 100 = 3.1556926 × 109 possible destinies. Given a current population of ~7 billion, there is 6 928 198 253 / (3.1556926 × (10^9)) = 2.19546044 more than one other "YOU" living the same live right now on this planet. This number grows if you account for all people that ever lived to 106 456 367 669 / (3.1556926 × (10^9)) = 33.7347078

If that is the kind of individualism that you want to live with, then it is a good idea to believe in Astrology, if you think you are more unique than that, you should determine it is not worth to believe in.

If it happens to save human lives, somehow no one should profit from it?

No artificial scarcity actually. It is beyond stupid that 6,900,000,000 people should be blocked from doing something life saving so that one tiny group can have increased profit.

Not to mention many university researchers double-dipping and generally acting quite dishonestly, being precisely the greedy capitalists and attention whores you imply they are not.

---

Copyright rewards distributors (copiers) far more than creators.

7.2 million teachers in the US, 2.3 million have tenure. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1859505,00.html http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/pdf/cb10ff-14_school.pdf

Check out the difference in pay between a doctorate degree and a "professional" degree. Professional degrees include MBA's, which are incredibly easy to get, so it supports your hypothesis. Professional degree also includes medical doctors, etc., but this suggests we value lawyers, MBA's and medical doctors over people who are actually more educated and expanding the knowledge and abilities of these people.

Sorry, but a "professional" degree does not include an MBA or even a DBA. Professional degrees for the purpose of the cited table are M.D., J.D., D.D.S., or D.V.M -- that is, doctors, lawyers, dentists, and veterinarians. Original source

Her line: “We need to start making things again in this country.” When I start agreeing with Representative Bachmann, you know we’re in Bizarro World.

Nevermind that the US has never stopped making things.

The United States is the world's largest manufacturer

(citation).
Lets go out and find some more of those fact thingies shall we. Sstatistics for 2002 and 2007. (for pretty pictures of 2002)
Only two data points, but it beats the pants off of the article's zero. Lets see total manufacturing sales beat beats inflation. Salary per worker roughly matches inflation. The first derivative on manufacturing jobs is negative.
And by the by, if you want to increase manufacturing jobs in the US, you are going to need to increase the [already high] worker productivity given the rather high labor cost in the US. This is a form pf innovation. Just saying.

You're looking at the "brain drain" graph on the Economist article? The y-axis on those graphs is 2009 dollars (raw data here: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/index.html, table H-13).

Well, according to one estimate the world population in 1200 AD was about 400 million, so 40 million represents about 10% of the world's population. Assuming they otherwise would have reproduced at the same rate as other people in the world, we could say that there would be about 10% more people living today without the Mongol invasion (super simplistic, whatever). So, current population would be about 7.6 billion instead of 6.9 billion. Assuming pollution scales directly with population (it probably doesn't), this means that Genghis Khan's actions back in the 13th century are currently saving approximately 3 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year (based on a total of ~30 billion tons from ye olde random website, no idea about the accuracy of the number).

Totally true (within an order of magnitude or two, anyway), but really pretty meaningless. Nobody is suggesting we should execute people in order to reduce emissions, but at the same time you can't really argue against the fact that killing off 10% of the planet's population would significantly reduce emissions (especially if you choose the correct 10%, but I'm pretty sure McDonalds et al have that covered). If you kill off 100% of the population, there would be absolutely no anthropogenic global warming (beyond what is already in motion). Genghis and the rest of the Mongols were just more successful at making a statistically significant dent in world population than anyone before or since (that I know of), so his "accomplishments" in that respect offer the most interesting (meaning most significant results) case study.

Why do you think it'll be a horrible mess? I live in a country (the US) where people currently move on average a dozen times in their lifetime. With such a highly mobile society, it is pretty simple to move cities over many decades (the smallest time scale over which global sea level rise is significant).

As your cite confirms, most people move locally. Gee, I wonder if that makes a difference. Oh, and that data is >15 years old, and has been sinking in the time observed.

You might actually want to check and see who is actually sending in more money to the government. I am betting you think it is the poor or middle class. You would be wrong according to the reported government numbers. The bottom 50% earners are only paying 2.7% of the total income tax received. This is actual money sent in to the government. Where is the myth that the poor are paying more than others coming from?

If the bottom 50% of the earners are only paying 2.7% of the income tax that ends up to be even less of the total amount of revenue that the federal government actually gets. How do people say the "rich" are getting off scott-free and the middle class and the poor are actually paying for everything? The actual revenue numbers being reported by the federal government don't seem to support that statement.

Top 1% Pay 38% of all income tax
Top 5% Pay 59% of all income tax
Top 10% Pay 70% of all income tax
Bottom 50% Pay 2.7% of all income tax
47% of American Households didn't pay any income tax for 2009.

45% of all the revenues of the government in 2009 and 2010 were from income tax. Corporate tax revenue was 13% in 2009 and 9% in 2010 of total revenues. The federal government revenues from largest to smallest are Income Tax, Social Security and other payroll taxes, Corporate Tax. All the other taxes don't even add up to the Corporate Tax amounts.

So if you added corporate taxes to the top 5% then you are talking 71.7% of revenues in 2009. It would 67.7% of revenues in 2010. So it would appear to me that the "rich" in this country are paying significantly more than half of the cash needed/used for the government to run.

So exactly who are the "rich" that we are talking about? It is just the fat cats on Wall Street and the CEOs? I don't think so.

If you look at who the corporations are in this country you might be surprised. 99% of all corporations/firms in this country have under 100 employees. They make up 30% of the revenue of all US companies. If you move up to companies with under 500 employees now you are talking about 46% of all the revenue of US companies. So small businesses are paying roughly 30% of the corporate taxes and small-medium companies are paying roughly 46% of all the corporate taxes. I suspect that most of the people who own these businesses would be considered "rich" by most people, but they are not the wall street fat cats and typical CEOs that people think of as the "rich". I make that comment because I hear people saying the middle class is disappearing. If that is the case then I would assume that those who own their own business are considered "rich".

Please explain to me how this is suppose to work where the "rich" supposedly are not paying their fair share. I am not saying the distribution of earnings in the US is a good/perfect thing. I do think everyone still has a chance to make more money and own their own business today, if they are willing to work hard and take the risks required.

http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html
http://www.kiplinger.com/features/archives/how-your-income-stacks-up.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budget
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget
http://budget.house.gov/
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/index.html
http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/federal-revenue
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/07/income-tax-47-of-american_n_529059.html

What worries me is that I want myself, my children if I ever have any, familiy, friends, their decendants and so on to be able to live and do so reasonably comfortably. Yeah, humanity in general can adapt and survive events like the flooding of all coastal cities even. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a big deal. No, it'd be a huge horrible mess with world-wide consequences, so I really hope we don't have to see it happen.

Why do you think it'll be a horrible mess? I live in a country (the US) where people currently move on average a dozen times in their lifetime. With such a highly mobile society, it is pretty simple to move cities over many decades (the smallest time scale over which global sea level rise is significant). If you really were concerned about yourself, your child, family, etc, you'd fully consider the costs and benefits of every strategy, not just whine that global flooding is bad. The problem is that any solution is bad too.

Until green house gas reduction advocates also take into account the cost of their actions, we can't have a serious discussion on the proposed solutions for AGW.

You know, these guys are so greedy and so shortsighted, a dangerous combination. I swear they'd sell a mugger the gun to rob them with.

No, bad choice of words. The muggers you speak of are, in fact your banker and your retailer selling you goods "on the tab". You may want to think twice before pissing them off.

US of A could not be helped to stop using the rope to hang themselves, even before they started selling the rope to China. With a trade deficit of more than a quarter of a trillion in2010 alone and a public debt to China close to 1 trillion, I don't know how to put it in other words.

Perhaps we might start demanding that every Chinese company wanting access to American markets must locate offices here, staff them with US workers, and share their technology in turn.

Yeap. Le'me guess China's answer: are US workers willing to get only USD200 a month? No? Well, will gladly pay them USD3000. (hmm... not that will help them too much after we'll be dumping on the financial marker all the US treasury bonds we own.... actually, might come even cheaper than the chinese workforce).

We did that with the Japanese...

Well, well... did the Japanase also had almost 1 trillion dollars worth of US public debt and had a trade balance in their favor of a quarter of a trillion/year?

Where the debate really needs to be centered is on two things:
  What items ought to be kept secret?
  Does the federal bureaucracy really need to be so big in the first place?

The population of the U.S. is 311,864,000.

The world 6,892,466,000. U.S. & World Population Clocks

The land area of the contiguous United States is approximately 1.9 billion acres (770 million hectares). Alaska, separated from the contiguous United States by Canada, is the largest state at 365 million acres (150 million hectares). Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, has just over 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares). The United States is the world's third or fourth largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and just above or below China. United States

The gross domestic product of the U.S. is about $14 trillion dollars a year.

First or second, globally, depending on how you look at things.

There is nothing magic about it.

Big numbers mean big government.

It is the federal government that gets to decide how much of that wealth is to be taxed and spent on programs that serve the national interest.

For example, the Great Depression exposed the weakness of states and cities in providing social services.

If grain prices collapse, the central states go broke.

If heavy industry fails, then there are breadlines in the northeast.

The number of Americans receiving food stamp benefits in May was 41 million. You could add to that the administration of Social Seccurity, SSI benefits for the disabled, federally subsidized low income housing, heating assistance, veteran's benefits and so on.

If the US would take such drastic measures, China would probably answer by selling their $2.5 trillions in foreign exchange reserves, most of them US Dollars. That would devalue the USD and EUR to virtually zero, bringing about economic turmoil of unprecedented magnitude.

I don't know why people keep saying this. China holds about $900 billion in U.S. Treasury securities (so they're not even "most" of the $2.5 trillion foreign exchange reserves China holds). That's out of $4.3 trillion U.S. Treasury securities held by foreigners, and $9.1 trillion overall. While China holds the largest share (barely beating out Japan), it's small potatoes compared to the total. And the whole reason China has been buying them is to prop up the US Dollar, to help maintain the favorable (for them) Yuan/USD exchange ratio. The U.S. has actually been trying to devalue the USD relative to the Yuan to try to correct the trade imbalance with China (why do you think our interest rates have been so low for so long?). So devaluing the USD actually works against China and for the U.S.

Furthermore, U.S.-China trade from Oct '09 to '10 was $253 billion in imports and $88 billion in exports, or about $340 billion overall. China's GDP is a bit over $5 trillion, while U.S. GDP is around $14 trillion. A trade war between China and the U.S. hurts China more than it does the U.S. In fact, due to the trade imbalance, the U.S. is in the role of customer. In a trade war, it's easy for the U.S. to change its shopping venue to another low-cost manufacturing nation like Malaysia or Thailand. It's hard for China to find another customer to buy the products it's currently selling to the U.S. So again, it's the U.S. which is in the driver's seat, not China.

What is the principle by which you made this decision? Is it a desire to see as few deaths as possible? Then you should be focusing your efforts on heart disease. That accounts for a third of all deaths in the US! (831,000 or 34.3% in 2006, according to the American Heart Association.) It's about as bad as a WTC event every second day (and every Sunday).

Perhaps it's only "unnatural" deaths? Then you should be campaigning to forbid automobiles, since automobile accidents account for some 30,000 deaths in the US annually ( http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.html ). Instead, you suggest using an automobile.

Perhaps it's only deaths with a culpable party? Then let's restrict ourselves to automobile accidents involving drunk driving. That accounts for about 10,000 deaths in the US annually ( http://www-fars.nhtms.dot.gov/Crashes/CrashesAlcohol.aspx ). That's a WTC event every five months.

Perhaps you're upset by intentional murder alone? The going rate in the US is 17,000 per year ( http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0295.pdf ). Terrorism rates for the past ten years have been less than ten annually except in 2001.

If you're restricting yourself any further than this, I doubt the utility of your principle.

You're not necessarily inconsistent here, just inefficient.

And only the top percentile of humanity gets to have a job in the medicine/science professions? What sort of Gattaca-fueled world do you live in?

Ok, top 2 or 3. This has little to do with IQ (although you need that). It's more about willingness to work.