Slashdot Mirror

I did provide factual information.

1) There's more Democrats than Republicans. That's a fact.
2) The Census reports it. That's a fact.
3) Pollsters report it. That's a fact.

Since one of us has to be a man, and the other a child, I'll be the grownup here and point out that the Census data up till 1995 is graphed here: http://www.census.gov/prod/1/gen/95statab/election .pdf#search=%22us%20census%20political%20%22party% 20identification%22%22

And some poll data indicating what I have been saying all along is here:
http://www.electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/t ab2a_2.htm

Now Pudge, go fuck yourself. If you want to claim victory based on some semantic laxity in my using the term majority then I think everybody will be able to see what a whiny fuck you are.

Your crying is completely irrelevant to my original point in that Republicans are fewer in number than Democrats, so Republicans resort to both a superior GOTV effort, AND an unAmerican dirty-tricks campaign designed to make it harder for people who are traditionally Democrats to vote.

Those nefarious hackers who stole the Census Bureau laptops have apparently cracked the encryption and already published all the personal, private data online! Here is the link.

"Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been added in the health-care sector, which includes related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health insurance. Meanwhile, the number of private-sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago."

We had 283M people in 2001 and have over 297M now, 14M more people. But only 1.7M more jobs. 88% of the growth is jobless.

The medical industry just isn't meeting the challenge. We can't blame Bush for that, because he's maiming as many people in Iraq and Afghanistan as he can (numbers higher in secret CIA prisons).

Lots of people say they don't want this stuff. But on election day, 99% of them say they want government to address their concerns or solve their problems. Yes, 99%.

I'm sorry, but when have 99% of the people in this country ever shown up to vote on election day? According to a government report on voting statistics in the 2004 elections, the highest percentage of voting-age citizens to turn up at the polls was 68% in 1992 (page 1) -- just over two-thirds of potential voters. At most your argument demonstrates that up to "99%" of those that vote recognize the power of government and want to influence that power for their own benefit. I say "up to" because a fair number of them might very well wish only to counter the influence of those who would try to enslave and rob them through new victimless-crime laws and higher taxes. Voting, by itself, does not and cannot demonstrate support for interventionalist policies.

People say that governments, taxation, etc. exist to correct externalities that supposedly cripple voluntary interaction, but what about the externalities inherent in voting? An individual's vote only counts for anything if a near-majority of other individuals vote the same way; the majority is represented completely and the minority not at all. All governments favor the majority, on whose aquiescence their continued existance depends, but only democracies draw such a sharp distinction between the ruling majority and the enslaved minorities. Luckily we do not live in a pure democracy -- the Constitution hasn't been completely nullified yet -- but it's only a matter of time before that last rights-equalizing barrier is overcome.

Government is all about the use of force. That's what government is, the only thing that it can do, and what it is good for. When you say you want government to do something, that means you want force.

I agree, which is why I oppose government influence in all its miriad forms, just as I would oppose any other aggressive individual or criminal organization.

OK, I have to weigh in here.

It costs $16BN a year to keep NASA running

And it costs $129BN a year to run the Department of Agriculture.
And the US government spent $71BN for the Department of Education (mind you, the federal government operates ZERO schools)


One in five of their classmates go hungry at home or at school because their parents can't afford to give them enough food,

The National School Lunch Program spent $7.1 billion in FY 2003. http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/Lunch/AboutLunch/NSLPF actSheet.htm According to the same source, "In Fiscal Year 2003, more than 28.4 million children each day got their lunch through the National School Lunch Program." There are about 60 million school age kids in the US (ages 3 to 17) http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/school/cp s2004/tab01-01.xls. So already we provide lunch to half of them. It seems to me we could feed the other half for about $7BN. Now, which makes more sense - reduce the DoE budget by 10%, or elimate the space program? I know which way I would vote.

The "smoke" from the solid rocket engines contains huge amounts of hydrochloric acid.

Nice article. Did you read it? It's filled with lots of "maybes" and "could be's". Sure, huge amounts of HCL are released, and, according to your citation, some cars parked nearby could have their paintjobs pitted. And maybe if the wind blows right, and there are enough launches, the PH in nearby ponds could drop. The best example they have of environmental damage at a launch site was in Kazakhstan at the Baikonur launch site - not where 115 shuttles have launched from. Seriously, this is not a big issue.

As regards the ISS falling apart .. no big surprise. Big cross-government project ... most likely the pork is spread around not based on merit, but on political correctness.

I always like it when people work out the math of problems on /. And while your math seems fine, I think a few of your assumptions are...well, a bit on the high side. That said, I am not a statistician (and statistics was one of my weaker engineering degree subjects).

For starters, you assume that each person talked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (6.5KB/s * 2 * 86,400 sec = 1.066GB/day). Longest time I ever spent on the phone in one shot was 10 hours. I think perhaps there are numbers out there that might show it's slightly lower than that. We could say up to 2 hours a day, on average, for fun. My guess is it's closer to that of the link I cited, about .18 hours a day (again, on average). That gives us 93.6MB/day, or 34GB/yr. The numbers from the table would be about 8.5MB/day or 3.1GB/year.

Second, you assume that all 250 million people in the US have phones. Five live in my house, and we have a land line and two cell phones (my oldest is 5). There are about 110 million households in the USA. The last census said about 93% had phones. There are more than 100 million cellphones out there. But I don't use both at once. There are 220 million people in the US, age 16 and up, arguably the predominant class of phone users.

You also assume that no two people are talking to one another (250 million bi-directional conversations). That's 500 million "conversers" (assuming no three way calling). Hopefully a sophisticated spying system wouldn't record both conversation directions on each end.

Anyway, I work out that, assuming more probablistic use of the phone system, in terms of raw storage, they'd need:

6.5KB/s * 648sec/day * 365days = 1.58GB/yr per channel (on average nationwide)
220 million users, one 'speaking' channel each * 1.58GB/yr = 347,600,000GB/year.
347,600,000GB / 300GB = 1,158,666 $100 hard drives, or $115 million. Peanuts.

My math could be wrong though, I did use windows calc ;).
Oh, and there are also pretty good compression routines for voice out there (much better than 53kbps/channel), speech recognition for suspicious keywords that would allow routinely deleting obvious calls to grandma about aunt Mildred's bunions, etc.

I hope this didn't come off as a flame. I thank you for motivating me to actually think about it, actually :).

So congrats on being great and finding fault but said fault was irrelevant. You do earn an A+ for arrogance and being an ass (I would call it trolling) with your "Why do I even bother with Games postings..." comment, however. Thanks!

Back in January, related to the story on how the DoJ demands and gets ISP data, AOL had said that "We did not comply with the request made in the subpoena," spokesman Andrew Weinstein said. "Instead, we gave the Department of Justice a list of aggregate anonymous search terms that did not include results or any personally identifiable information."

AOL- you need to rethink that phrase personally identifiable, because it doesn't seem to mean what you think it means. You're hiding behind one technical definition of PII, without concern about whether or not the results actually have PII. If you're releasing results with personally identifying information, then you cannot say you're not releasing PII. I'd written in January I'd writen "I question this assumption by Yahoo, AOL, etc. that search terms, by themselves, have no privacy considerations because they've been separated from personal info. What if the search itself contains personal information? Are the search companies deleting the timestamps and randomizing the order of the search terms themselves? Because otherwise I could see personal info showing up." Obviously, half a year later, they still think that replacing a name with a number takes away the PII. They need to have a talk with, say, the Census Department, about why the department will withhold data about *groups* of businesses in a region. Grouped data can easily become PII data if you can tease out characteristics. AOL didn't even group the data!

As always, relevant quotes from the best.essay.evar on why privacy is a fundamental human right: "If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm..."

"...agents of the state in Canada cannot order Canada Post to photocopy the address on every envelope we send, nor can they order bookstores to keep a record of every book we buy, let alone of every page of every magazine we leaf through. There is no reason why they should be able to exercise such powers with regard to every e-mail someone sends or every Web site he or she visits."

"I do not see any reason why e-mails should be subject to a lower standard of privacy protection than letters or telephone calls. And I do not see why Internet browsing should be subject to a lower standard of protection than book purchasing or researching in a reference library. Canadians should not be subject to greater state monitoring or scrutiny just because they choose to use new communication technologies."

3,000,000 is not a lot of people compared to 150,000,000 who have nothing at all.

Wow, going to start making up numbers now. The poverty rate in the US is 12.7%, or 37,000,000.

So, 13.7% is the number of people either poor or very very well off. The vast majority then are getting their basic needs met.

The economic system that places all the power in the hands of people who inherited money. You'll be lucky to get such a deal in our current system. Take a look at the people who invented some of the biggest new inventions of the last few decades. Notice how none of them are wealthy as a result? That is because they had to borrow the resources to develop their ideas or they would never even have existed.

Wrong. The investor is free to walk away. And are your poor poor investors homeless living in the street, or do they still do pretty well for themselves, even if not mega wealthy.

Statistically, this does not seem to be true.

Oh yes, crime is because we have so many people starving on the streets. Bullshit. Pretty much any poor person can get to a food shelter or get on food stamps, and this is what happens.

Some investments will tank, others will pay out. In general the wealthy simply invest in the market broadly and let it earn them money while sucking it away from the people who didn't have money to start with. And why do they have that money to invest? Because their parents did for the most part. Money is power. Have you ever heard the saying "it takes money to make money?" It is true, which is why money always consolidates in the capitalist market.

And its THEIR loss when it tanks, isn't it? Your argument is that people that have money shouldn't be able to make more. Pretty poor one it seems. How exactly is investing in an invention "sucking money away from those that didn't have it to begin with"? You can take money from someone that doesn't have any!

Sure the economy could collapse, but all the economic models of capitalism predict it certainly will collapse due to this, just as it has always done in the past.There is a difference between maybe something will happen outside our control and choosing a plan that results in something happening.

Seems like the socialist ones are having the problems; China, the EU formed because, individually, the Western European countries weren't doing that hot (which the exception of Britian, which is why they didn't adopt the Euro). All economoic models (captialist or not) are flawed, because they can't account for human nature. Its simply not possible.

Please. It works just fine in a lot of countries. What makes you think it wouldn't work in the US?

Because we value individualism more here than in outer countries. And it not necessarly working in all countries either; it seems Canada is considerng moving back to private health care.

People are violent and dangerous and kill each other all the time. People commit more violent crimes when they are subjected to poverty. Will eliminating poverty eliminate crime? No. Does that mean it is useless for reducing crime? No. A lot of the time people steal or kill because they are desperate and then are more likely to do so again. A lot of times people feel they are being treated unethically by a system that grants privilege to some and not others and it removes the primary factor that inhibits people from committing this kind of crime. What, exactly, do you think would reduce this kind of crime?

A lot of people still and kill because they feel like it, or want something that they can't have but which is a luxury. I don't feel like i've been treated ethically all the time; I haven't killed or stolen anything because of it. To say that being violated is justification for harming some other 3rd party is stupid.

Nope, the bank foreclosed.

Ugh. The bank foreclosed because he couldn't pay the

I haven't looked at all the posts, but just in case here are some links that might be useful in your search.

http://www.ams.org/employment/
http://www.ams.org/early-careers/
http://www.maa.org/careers/index.html
http://www.ams.org/careers/
http://math.ucsd.edu/~sbuss/GradInfo/index.html
http://www.beanactuary.org/
http://www.nsa.gov/careers/index.cfm
http://www.census.gov/hrd/www/jobs/emp_opp.html

No, it ended when only a minority of citizens bothered to register to vote, and only a minority of those actually bother to vote.

Umm, 86% is hardly a minority. True democracy is a failure in America due to blue and red levers, gerrymandering, rigged voting machines, monopolization of media outlets... yada yada yada. But that isn't anything new. It is a system that was designed by white slave owners. There are no more 'slaves,' but politics remains a rich man's game. The proles are only allowed to 'participate' in order to maintain the illusion that they are free people. If the votes themselves had any power whatsoever, the proles would not be allowed such a privilege. The only power that remains in a vote is the ability to not cast one. Boycott the process in order to remove its legitimacy. Hence, the most powerful ballot is a blank one. If you really want change, vote with a blank ballot in the next presidential election.

I'll give you that. Like I said, there is racism. But when it's perfectly politically acceptable for a black person to call a white person a "cracker", yet a sin to end all sins for a white person to call a black person "nigger", that's a racist double-standard.
Primarily I was objecting to the fact that when it happens to "minority" people (by 2010 "white alone" will only be 65% of the US population.) that it's something to be railed against, but when it happens to white people it's all fine and dandy, we're just getting what we deserve from our years of oppressive behavior. Realize that a lot of it is cultural. If you don't emphasize education, if you don't work to make your situation better, you'll just sit in the ghetto. That's true for anyone, not just minorities. I guarantee you that if a cop sees me wandering through a trailer park or poor neighboorhood at 2am, he'd possibly question me or at least pay very close attention to me, whereas he'd just drive by if I were downtown at the same time, whether I was black or white.

For example, Ford has a concept truck that can run on gasoline, ethanol, or hydrogen. (Other auto makers also have concepts, no doubt.) Also, considering the fact that most people's daily commute is about 24 minutes (24 miles assuming average speed of 60 mph, which is generous), commutes are well within the range of electric vehicles (if anyone would sell one) or plug-in hybrids. That would allow the energy source for your car to be whatever is on the grid. Which allows wind, solar, bio-mass, nuclear, hydro, etc. to enter the picture. Furthermore, bio-diesel has to be considered as well. So, the long-and-short of it is that while ethanol cannot completely replace gasoline as THE next wonder-fuel, it is entirely feasible for all of our vehicles to be run using renewable energy. Besides, ethanol is produced locally and it reduces our dependence on foreign oil (that's for all those Republicans out there).

In the 2004 election*, 28.4% of the vote was cast in California, Florida, New York, and Texas (each of the four individually had over 5%) Another 13.5% was cast in Illinois, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania. Throw in another 19.6 % for Georgia, Massachusets, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin. That's 61.5% of the vote from 30% of the states. I don't want to see presidential campaigns turn into battles for who can pander to the issues of less than 1/3 of the states in the union. The problem isn't so much that people can't figure out the Electoral College, but rather the federal government is so bloated beyond what it is supposed to be that the Electoral College starts to look counter-productive to democracy. If the federal government were returned to it's intended scope the Electoral College wouldn't look as obstructive as it does to some.

* Census Bureau data, PDF

Conversely, North Dakota which is shown as having the lowest violent crime rate has fairly lax gun control laws (North Dakota got a "D" grade by the Brady campaign).

Of course, none of the referenced data allows one to determine a cause/effect relationship.

Of course, in Texas you need to defend yourself given the fact that it regularly ranks in the top 10-15 crime plagued states; for example, in 2004 it was 12th:

http://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank21.html

This is precisely why I'm getting the F*CK out of Texas; too many "self-defense" happy Texans who have utterly no clue about the reality of how to handle crime.

Good luck to you and your pistol.

Philadelphia, New Beijing, Taiwan, Seoul, Londinium, Carthos, Constantinople, Phoenix, Chicago, Tampa, Rio De Janeiro, Tokyo/Kyoto, Sydney, Jakarta and Dubai were all carefully planned.

A defining feature of many of those cities is that they were completely destroyed, sometimes repeatedly, and rebuilt. As such they went through "iterations" of planning which resemble an agile process much more closely than they resemble a waterfall process. Not a single one of those cities was originally planned according to some conception when the city was founded.

Er, that's just not correct. Philadelphia's expansion after incorporation - that is, after the 20,000 person mark - was planned carefully. No destruction. New Beijing was an emperor's experiment; so was Seoul. Londinium was invented as a support system for the critical military juncture of the area by the Romans. Carthos was created to fortify a supply depot with major importance to fighting Rome, and was designed by military leaders for the express purpose of maintaining definsibility throughout growth. Constantinople was founded, and Rome quite literally stripped to create it, in the interests of re-seating the Roman empire to deal with communications problems springing from sheer empire size; it was arguably the finest example of Roman pre-creation planning, and had its first 500 years of growth sketched out before the ground was broken. Phoenix was planned when it was founded, and re-planned with the advent of air conditioning. Tampa was planned as a swamp-dredge city in the same way that Washington DC was. Rio de Janeiro was the root of Spanish action in the area, and the only destruction that happened during its creation was the Spanish razing the area and starting over. Tokyo has been planned and re-planned seven times, all but one of which reflect simple socio-political changes. Sydney was planned as the port supplier and basis of the British penal system of the day. Jakarta is an imperial city which carefully phased out the old city a piece at a time. Dubai is currently under development as a monarchial experiment in the interests of commerce.

Indeed, the only cities in that list that have actually been replanned due to destruction were Chicago and Kyoto, both after fire, and both cities had been previously planned for other reasons. There is no such coincidence regarding destruction at hand; I was quite careful to avoid such a thing.

Most people don't know that one of the most carefully planned cities in the US was Los Angeles.

Los Angeles predates the United States by almost two hundred years, and is the confluence of nine monasteries. It was largely grown by accident as a commercial hub during the gold rushes of 1849 and later 1861. In fact the formal urban planning of Los Angeles did not begin until 1922. This simply is not true. Please begin to cite sources; your data is false.

It's amazing to me how ridiculous were the planning assumptions, made 4 decades ago, for a city with a population 1/5th what it is now.

Los Angeles had a population of 9,519,338 at the 2000 census, and a current population estimate of 9,935,475. In 1960, the population at census was 6,038,771. This is a growth rate of 64% in 40 years, rather than the 400% you suggest. I would appreciate it if you wouldn't invent data while arguing.

Los Angeles has traditionally had the most rigid zoning requirements, and the strictest building codes, of anywhere.

Los Angeles is actually famous for its lack of zoning requirements, something typified by the Long Beach port wars of the 1980s and the Earthquake Safety Urban Reinvention Board after the quake in 1993. You are in fact simply incorrect. I would ask that in the future, when making sweeping claims like this that you begin to cite da

Yes thanks for correcting me, I had heard the larger number on the radio yesterday, I should have noticed the error.

Though that would still leave the average household which is making $43,318 (census) paying 10%, whcih is about $4350, of their income every year to pay off the debt in the next 30 years, assuming a 4% interest rate.

So, 10% of every able working adult's income for the next 30 years just to get to broke.

*Sigh* Some days it seems that if wikipedia had a penny for everyone who bashed it, the wikipedia organization would be richer than Gates.

I hate to nitpick (okay, not really). If wikipedia had a penny for every person on the planet, the organization would have less than $70 million. By comparison, billg is currently worth more than $25 billion. The sad realization is that if you had a dollar for every person on the planet (regardless of whether or not they bash you), you'd still have a ways to go to catch up. Of course, you shouldn't believe numbers posted to Slashdot or Wikipedia!

...let's replace every reference to "women" in your post with "black", and see how it sounds.

"I know I'm going to get modded down as a "racist" for saying it, but this is hardly uncommon with black bosses. The last company I worked at had a black CEO, and he was an absolute NIGHTMARE to work with (as were the other two black people I had worked under in the past). He was an absolute control freak, could take NO criticism, let his personal vendettas rule his hiring/firing/demoting decisions, etc.

And, yes, I've worked for some asshole white people in my time too. But none of them even COMPARED to the nightmare of working for the black people."

If you had written the above post, it would get modded down to -1 so quickly it would make your head spin. Furthermore, I'd go so far as to say you wouldn't even bother writing it, because you would immediately be shunned by the people responding to your post, and it wouldn't be taken seriously.

So how is it that you get modded as "insightful" by saying something that is obviously anecdotal, and furthermore, applies to 50.8% of the population? Something that you likely wouldn't even dare apply to the 12.8% of the population that is black.

I am sure there are women boses out there who are tyrants. There are male bosses out there who are tyrants. There are black, white, yellow, red, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and God-knows-what-else bosses out there who are tyrants. The fact is that your anecdotal experiences regarding more than fifty percent of our population cannot be applied as a blanket statement.

Why "outside" Europe and America? There are countries in Europe where $300 a month is considered a good salary. Give a third of that for Windows? Yeah, right.

And even in the US and the developed countries of Europe there are plenty of people barely making ends meet. If anybody's curios they should check out a recent US Census bureau report, which states that 37 million people in the US lived in poverty in 2004.

It's bloody elitist to consider that everybody buys ready-made PC's from Dell or that $99 is nothing. Let's not lose perspective here. There are lots of people out there who get their computer from second-hand parts and can't afford Windows. And if you were going to say "then they shouldn't use Windows" or "poor people don't use computers", that's elitist and stupid too. Computers and Windows are a de facto standard and they have to use them. You can't afford to tell a prospective employer "fuck MS Office, I use OpenOffice" or "I don't know how to use computers" when you're barely etching a living.

Argghh, matey. We be feeding this post to the trolls, eh?

Axe public health? Check.
What exactly is this president "axing"? Legislation to give universal healthcare? That's all Congress. Oh, and you're assuming that universal healthcare is a good thing.

Axe social security? Check.
YEAHH! GO TEAM! Social Security is going bankrupt, due to Republican and Democratic politicians spending all of the money in any "reserve" it may have once had. I'm 30, and neither I nor any contemporary I've discussed SS with believes we'll see a dime of it. Graduate it out, now. At least save me the last bit of money I'd have to pay into a dying system.

Axe public education? They're most certainly working on it.
Nice. The state of Georgia is consistently bottom of the barrel in education in the US, despite being the 8th highest spending state on primary and secondary education. For once, conservatives are advocating a program (vouchers) that allow people to choose whether or not they like public schools. But you don't want that, do you? Public schools are what you want, and public schools are what those whining bastards will get. Let them eat cake.

Ignore urgent need to invest in renewable resources? Check.
Good plan. Let bureaucracy do our research. It worked before, right?

There's seriously not much more they can axe to funnel more money into the military, is there?
Sure there is. If you weren't just another troll, you'd put your time in helping reduce pork. But no, you just want to bitch, not do anything productive.

The next step as freedoms diminish is to start reducing the size of the middle class: those who have money and time for lesuire, but do not have any power in the system.

Americans spent $25 billion online in the first quarter of 2006 alone. Obviously a market that size can only support one big player.

The fact is, for a college educated professional (the very definition of middle class) - [150K a year is] an average salary with a decades or so experience.

In certain industries, perhaps. But look at the salary stats for say, teachers, or veterinarians (two established middle-class professions which require college educations). Way less than 150k.

Seriously, if you think 150k is an average middle class salary, you're leading an insular existence. In fact, if you look a the historical stats on income from the US Census Bureau, you'll see that you're coming in at the lower limit of the the top 5 percent. Now, unless you're going to argue that only people in your income bracket are truely solidly middle class, and so redefine the problem away, you have to admit that you are, at the very least, upper middle class.

That's very odd - because I'm solidly middle class... make around $150k/yr from your early thirties...

That's very odd, because the median income, in the USA, is less than 1/2 of what you declare to be "solidly middle class".

I have a hard time buying this. A quick glance at population growth in the U.S. over the last hundred years reveals that we're really not growing all that fast at the moment -- in the 1950s -- which social scientists note for a very high degree of civic engagement -- population was routinely growing at almost 2% a year. But for the past ten years, it's been less than 1%. Moreover, with birth rates at historic lows, much of the population increase we're seeing is coming from immigration -- communities which by necessity are characterized by dense social networks.

If there's a culprit to be found in population patterns and geographic movements, it's not so much in urbanization (most cities have been losing people over the last few decades) -- as in suburbanization -- a pattern of life which is characterized by atomization and long commute times, leading Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) speaks of a "sprawl civic penalty".

6.5 Trillion? Either I was asleep while *everyone* was breeding, or you're off by three orders of magnitude. I'm not trying to be a Population Nazi, but having 6.5 trillion meat-popsicles on this rock would be pretty disturbing.

Then again, it seems that also means they need us more than we need them which should make them friends indeed.

I'd like to thank the US for these restrictive laws that prevent US companies making money out of internet gambling.

In the U.S., around 7% [1] of the population is self-employed, and roughly half are employed by small businesses [2], so I don't think the situation is all that different. Only a very small percentage of businesses compete for VC funding, but they happen to be in sectors that receive a lot of public attention, particularly technology. I doubt that venture capital is much more or less prevalent than it is in other nations with similar economic climates and legal restrictions on investment.

In the United States there's a very large cultural attraction to the idea of "striking it rich." People, for the most part, fantasize less about living comfortably (rather, they just assume they'll do that) than about being fabulously, stupendously rich. Thus there is a lot of attention paid to people who have made millions via VC funding and through garage startups, and less to the majority of small businesses that are actually typical, and get their funding from banks and private financing. People don't want to hear about the one pizza restaurant that expanded out to become three pizza restaurants and let the owner and his family live well, they want to hear about the one pizza restaurant that became a nationwide chain and let the owner buy a fleet of Gulfstream V's and retire to Bali.

[1] Source here. (Hopefully that link won't break.)
[2] http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/misc/entrepre.htm

Let's look at it this way. What if you said, "Black people usually like to be led"? Sure, there are plenty of examples that follow that would seem to "prove" your case. Black people were slaves in this country for many years. There are only four black Fortune 500 CEOs. Heck, you may even personally know of a black woman or man with whom you worked who preferred to have direct instructions given instead of thinking creatively and out of the box. But if you said something like that as a general stereotype, most people would be offended and would definitely consider you racist. Why is it not okay to say that about 12.3% of the population of the U.S., but it is okay to say that about 50.9% of the population of the U.S.?

Do you see my point? Even though you may consider this valid based on interactions you've had, it is not valid for a large population of women. (So large, in fact, that I doubt you'd even find that most women in the U.S. would agree with that statement.) Furthermore, even the women I know who choose to be mothers instead of traveling a career path would be offended by that statement... much as most black people would be offended by the statement if you applied it to them.

"Women usually like to be led" is not only not a fact (it's an opinion you have based on your experience with two women), but it is a stereotype that is denigrating and offensive to a lot of women. Since you mention that your wife is raising children, I certainly hope that this conversation will help you raise your daughter to know that she can be anything that she wants to be in this world, or raise your son to treat women as equals and respect their choices (whatever those choices may be -- motherhood, a career, or both!)

Cars, or rather the system under which they operate, are in fact broken. Most of us drive both ways to the office, likely with three perfectly good seats empty, and for hours a day. Is this not because the inherent design of cars (capable of high speed, size, materials used, comfort) pushes us to use them more and devote more space to the road?
The convenience of email makes its problems more severe. Nobody wants a trade off for that.
I think the inverse of your analogy may be correct.

The *average* educational expendeture per student in the US is currently above $10,000 per year.

Not quite: according to a recent release from the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. public school districts spent an average of $8,287 per student in 2004, ranging from $12,981 in New Jersey to $5,008 in Utah.

As amazing as this sounds, it's actually cheaper to go to college - if you look at just tuition, the average cost of college is under 10K

If you just look at tuition, the averge cost of public school education is free. Colleges get significant government support, as well as private grants and endowments, that would have to be accounted for in a meaningful comparision.

Even disregarding that substantial support, at four-year private institutions, tuition and fees averged $19,710 for 2003-2004, over twice the average per-student public school spending. At (heavily subsidized) four-year public institutions, it was $4,694, about half - but a full-time college student spends about half as much time in class as a primary or high school student, so in terms of student-hours it balances out. And we haven't yet accounted for state subsidies to public universities.

Yet somehow, the public school system can't seem to make that happen.

It is misleading to speak of "the" public school system. There are over 10,000 school districts in the U.S., with varying funding, administration, curricula, and levels of success.

0.000000153% of the total world's population.

10/48,422,644

0.000020651% of the South Korean population.

So, yes, compared to the total deaths in S. Korea from cancer (~65,000 in 2004) or suicide (~12,000 in 2004) [source] I would say it is rather insignificant.

I mean, "every day, 37 Korean children under the age of 14 are killed or injured as pedestrians in road traffic accidents." [source] These people were playing video games too much.

"The BSA claims that all of these "lost sales" represent real harm to the economy. ..."

Along those same premises, let's say, hypothetically, that I had a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop on one of my PC's. I'm not a graphics professional, and have little use for it beyond making my own wallpaper. Are we to assume that I would actually pay the $699 price tag for this software? HELL NO.

What I would very much like to see is a poll comparing what people have pirated against what people have pirated and would pay for if they could not pirate it. I don't have any statistical evidence to back me up, here, but I'm going to hazard a guess that piracy leads to a lot less in actual losses than the BSA or the RIAA/MPAA assumes. And that is ignoring the fact that there are a rare few people that actually purchase a product just because they were impressed with the pirated copy, and wished ot support the author/creator.

Haven't we heard enough of this "piracy is going to kill our economy" bullshit? Why are we focusing on this, when the our (America's) trade deficit with China is over $200,000,000,000/year (yes, that is 200 billion dollars a YEAR at the current rate). Seems to me that this piracy thing is small potatoes, in the end.

Not much. Put every penny of it was ours.

According to the Census Bureau the population is a little under 300M. The math shows $1127.74 per person in the US. If we reckon that 1/3 of people in the US don't pay taxes (I think this is a conservative guess given that children, homemakers, prisoners, and persons who are paid "off the books" don't pay tax) puts the per-taxpayer bill at about $1700.

I make a decent living, but I certainly don't live a lavish lifestyle that allows me to shrug off an expenditure of that magnitude with ZERO RETURN.

Anyway, I'm not sure what point you were driving at, but I think that adequately answers your question.

Also, I don't really want a refund. I want responsible government. There's no reasonable way to finance such a refund. I'd like to cause people to think in terms of return for their tax money.

-Peter

Let's use an analogy of the stock market. Classical economics talks about perfectly competitive markets where people have all the information they need, people make rational decisions, suppliers can freely enter and leave markets, etc. There are no perfectly competitive markets.

People do not have perfect information. They frequently do not make rational decisions. So, unless you change the meaning of the word "value" to basically mean that you deserve whatever the market decides to give you, you do not have much support for those notion that people are paid according to their contribution to society.

Thought experiment. Why don't companies publish the salaries of all their employees or for specific positions - for review by anyone in the company? If everyone is getting compensated relative to their true value, this would not present any problems - would it?

I work in a large American corporation. I actually check the H2 Visa forms that my company to get a sense of what different positions in my organization are paying - and I know as a fact that there is a huge disconnect between different positions relative to their value. I also know that this is not unique to my circumstance through people I know working in other corporations.

Secretaries make more than professionals because they work close to a C-level executive. Incompetent bosses carried by more junior people. People with seniority that actually take away more value than they bring paid more than stars. Anyone that has worked anywhere has seen these things.

My example was to compare the salary of CEO's who make millions to the average salary of an employee in their company. While there may be examples where a CEO might earn the millions that he makes in compensation, I would argue that it is the exception that proves the rule. To use your example, CEO's make more than social workers because the market pays them more. It would be trivial to point to incompetent CEO and people that are fantastic social workers - and by doing so you would be point out that an incompetent CEO is probably harming value but still gets compensated more than any social worker despite the relative quality of their work. Again, another disconnect.

No doubt plenty of people earn $70 000, but in the UK plenty of people earn well over £50 000. The average male earnings at the end of 2005 were in fact £31 500 (http://www.incomesdata.co.uk/report/view942.htm).

It's quite common knowledge that UK incomes are relatively high, coupled with higher living costs. And following on from that, their opportunity cost of buying a console at an exchange-rate equivalent price will be considerably lower.

365 million? I realize Jeff Bezos probably thinks he counts twice, but the US Census Bureau disagrees with your number.

Most US citizens are in rural areas

I usually don't comment about statements like this, but this one is so clearly erroneous that I have to speak up. According to the Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf, 80% of Americans lived in a "metropolitan" area in 2000. Fifty percent live in suburbs and the remaining 30% live in central cities. Even accepting the fact that some of the suburbs have rural portions, it's simply not the case that "most" Americans live in rural areas.

As of 2003, the median income for a 4-person family in the United States was $65,093 (source. Median household income in the United States was $43,318 (source).

I'm failing to quickly find comparable figures for the UK.

As of 2003, the median income for a 4-person family in the United States was $65,093 (source. Median household income in the United States was $43,318 (source).

I'm failing to quickly find comparable figures for the UK.

I missed the urls and citations in your post. Maybe one of my browser extensions was hiding it, but what reputable sources did you capture these figures from?

First, I want to start by saying you are correct. Those numbers were way off.

That doesn't make it ok for you to be a total jerk. Cut off with the stupid pointless sarcasm. The first 2/3 of your post make you sound like a child, then to make matters worse, you do exactly what you seem so upset about. You think everyone should have to provide proper references, but you are exempt.

If you want to be something other than a worthless asswipe, find the numbers and politly post them.

Depending on how you define "a lot of people" and "small companies", I'd wager you're talking out of your ass and haven't actually looked at any statistics. According to the US Census Bureau, only about 10% of everybody that's employed is employed in firms with less than 10 employees. On the other hand, firms with over 500 employees (I'd consider those to be 'big business') employ about 50% of the workforce.

Do you have anything backing up your argument other than "uhh, there's a lot of small businesses so, like, I'll go ahead and say they must employ a lot of people and I'll hope everyone will believe me because everyone believes things they want to hear regardless of proof"?

Hmm, Well, I used 2004, the oldest on that site is '98. 62.1% Registered. 41.9% Reported Voted (Of Total Elligible). 67.5% of registered, voted. MAybe all that "Rock the Vote" crap actually did something. Or just the fact that '98 wasn't a Pres. Election year might have something to do with it, but the numers are considerably different. Here's the page on these numbers. http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/voting/cp s1998/tab02.txt

Close. 65.9% of the elligible registered to vote but 58.3% of the elligible voted. The good majority (88.5%) of those that bother to registed bother to vote. Source, http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/voting/cp s2004/tab02-1.xls But yes, a good third of US either don't give a rat's ass or don't know how to. Or they've realized gov't is corrupt and they don't have enough money to buy a law.

So Americans are overperforming their expected representation in the set of winners by 84%. How is that a scarce showing? You have to be arrogant and ignorant to expect much better than that.

We lag in the lifespan department, there, chum. You are evidently not reading something correctly. We just caught up with India on lifespan not too long ago. Try again.

Here are the figures from 2005

United Kingdom 78.4
United States 77.7
India 64.4

Maybe you read something about the life expectancy for African-Americans? That is similar to the Indian average.

I guess I misheard the statistic. The US Census Bureau confirms that 18.9% of people are uninsured.

But on to the actual point: How was TB eradicated? Let's ask the CDC. Well, what do you know, it was tax-funded public health departments who ran treatment facilities, not private industry. There was federal funding from 1944 thru the 1960s.

Still, never let the facts get in the way of right-wing dogma, eh?