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I would really need to see your figures and reasoning regarding the middle class having a negative tax rate.

I usually carry around a rough worksheet on this stuff. The gist is that we can restructure the Federal social insurances to build on top a foundation of a 12.5% universal dividend without cutting services, largely re-basing OASDI (retirement and disability) on top that. For example: you receive $1,500 from retirement and disability each month; under the new system, everyone receive $500 each month, and you receive $1,000 from retirement and disability, so you get a total of $1,500 per month.

This income is counted as means-test, but not as taxable income (like OASDI FICA, it's not deducted from your income, and so is already taxed when you pay into it--yes, it's stupid, we double-tax OASDI because we tax you on Social Security payments as income!). Thus because people are less-poor, they are less-eligible for welfare, and our welfare system can provide stronger benefits and reach further with lower costs.

In any case, the blunt restructuring is 40.2% of collected income taxes, shifting the OASDI payroll FICA to personal incomes. Cut that out, add a 12.5% Dividend, then rebuild OASDI to fill in the gap left and you end up with higher middle brackets and a lower top bracket--or, as you said:

The dirty secret of the Scandinavian countries is that compared to the U.S. they have a much flatter tax rate.

Now here's the rub.

That pays $500/month, or $6,000/year, in 2016 to every adult.

If you account the program's benefit as a sort of rolling tax refund, then a person paying in $4,000 and getting back $6,000 is essentially paying -$2,000 of taxes. For a two-adult, joint-filing household, you can get near around $50,000 with a total tax load of less than $12,000, meaning those households are paying less than zero in taxes.

Further, taking a flat tax on gross personal income and net corporate profits trends with the per-capita income, meaning it includes all productivity gains: if inflation is 2% and you have a 5% productivity gain, then per-person you have 7.1% more dollars. OASDI's cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) raises that payment by 2%; the Dividend, meanwhile, increases by 7.1%, further reducing the load on the OAS and DI Trusts.

A larger minimum wage--Norway's is around 60% GNI/C or $21/hr, and I'm looking at moving to 2/3 GNI/C here in 1.75% increments--further reduces welfare claims. This works largely because the Dividend has its biggest impact on local spending around the poorest, thus creating jobs where unemployment and poverty are highest.

When you consider the reduction of localized unemployment by this strong collective risk sharing, you realize one more thing: a lot of people are out there demanding jobs, but there are no jobs because there is no spending in their area (liquidity problem). Resolving that doesn't merely reduce welfare costs; it increases per-capita productivity, bringing a larger tax base and more revenue. Criminal justice reforms do the same by reducing prison population and activating those people as productive labor.

As a result of all of this, the zero-tax point creeps upwards, approaching the GNI/Adult (higher than GNI/C) for a single adult or the household average for households. The tax rate on the middle-class eventually becomes negative wholesale.

Likewise, with fewer institutionalized, fewer unemployed, and higher minimum wages, productivity per-capita increases, even though productivity per working-hour doesn't: the activated per-capita working hours goes up when the unemployed become employed. That means the government has the same number of citizens to support, and the cost spreads. That means lower taxes for the same services.

The top rate of 25% is a stretch, but a middle-class negative rate is easy.

Depreciated, while a past participle, is not an example of such a verb.

Incorrect. Depreciated also describes a present state. To say that "x is [fully] depreciated" is not only gramatically correct, it is the predominant usage.

Now take your prescriptive gammarian ass to France, because English grammar is not dictated by a regulator.

In about 2012, I switched to Android, mostly cause I run linux everywhere else and like it.
I thought I'd have more privacy, then slowly realized how stupid that was.
Looked into Cyanogenmod and LineageOS over and over, but ran out of time to ever actually do it.

If you were considering Cyanogenmod (phone has unlocked bootloader and is rooted), you didn't look hard enough.

AFWall+ lets you block apps from sending data over the network. Let's you selectively allow/deny access to the LAN, WiFi, and/or cellular networks for each app and service on your phone. (NetGuard claims to do the same without root, but I haven't tried it.)

XPrivacyLua takes a different approach. It allows the apps to send data back, it just turns the data they see into fake data. So your location will be spoofed as being in the South Pacific, they will see a fake contact list instead of your real one, This works better if an app you need needs network access to function or crashes if you simply block its network access.

In about 2012, I switched to Android, mostly cause I run linux everywhere else and like it.
I thought I'd have more privacy, then slowly realized how stupid that was.
Looked into Cyanogenmod and LineageOS over and over, but ran out of time to ever actually do it.

If you were considering Cyanogenmod (phone has unlocked bootloader and is rooted), you didn't look hard enough.

AFWall+ lets you block apps from sending data over the network. Let's you selectively allow/deny access to the LAN, WiFi, and/or cellular networks for each app and service on your phone. (NetGuard claims to do the same without root, but I haven't tried it.)

XPrivacyLua takes a different approach. It allows the apps to send data back, it just turns the data they see into fake data. So your location will be spoofed as being in the South Pacific, they will see a fake contact list instead of your real one, This works better if an app you need needs network access to function or crashes if you simply block its network access.

Really-- call a tow company in there, block them in, and hook up towing gear, and charge them a stiff fee.

If it isn't a tow away zone then somebody screwed up.

They don't need a tow truck. Teslas have a lot of low-end torque and a Model S or X could easily drag those pickups out of the parking spots.

Forget a damn pick-up truck, a Tesla Model X P100D can, and has towed an actual Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. That's a 130 tonne aircraft being pulled 300 meters.

See one of these many, many articles. Or this one.

For a Model X, a pick up truck isn't going to be a problem.

Quantum computers are about the size of a person: https://www.google.com/search?... While I agree all this brain stuff is nonsense; the size is kinda irrelevant.

spoke

the problem to solve is how to pay content creators the royalties they deserve

It is quite the opposite. It's easy for copyright holders to flag content. It's a completely automated system. You can read about it here:
https://support.google.com/you...

Platforms such as Facebook are much, much worse. Someone can steal your video from YouTube and upload it to Facebook and it'll be there for weeks before Facebook gets around to taking it down. You can learn about that here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This one can! Thank the gods that you posted as AC!

I found this on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/...

I'm sure there are many more (Google Play, of course, assumes an Android device); I don't know what Apple may offer.

What about KeepassX?

Or KeePassXC Password Manager? Question: keepassxc ... can we trust it ?

KeePassXC for Beginners says "Android users, consider KeePassDroid.
iPhone users, consider MiniKeePass".

YouTube videos say that you are either delusional or a liar.

https://www.google.com/search?...

I've found this but I've never used it and I'm not sure if it can boost the mic volume during calls.

This approach should be applied uniformly: every vehicle, large and small, should be assessed an annual tax based on miles driven and a * (w/a)^4, where a is the number of axles and w is the vehicle weight.

Get ready for amazon prime to only be $50 for shipping per item instead of the plebian $100 with that tax policy.

Actually, I ran the numbers, and the cost of truck transport would increase by about 43%. Of course, the total cost of shipping includes a lot more than just the truck transport, and Amazon Prime fees cover more than just shipping, but if we ignore all that then my proposal means that the cost of Prime will go from $119 (the current cost, not $100) to $170.

That crazy world got 4 moderation points from people with greater capacity for ideals than critical thinking.

You should be more careful when you accuse people of not thinking critically.

If diesel fuel were charged at a fair tax (about $4,500 per gallon of diesel fuel)

That's three orders of magnitude too high (should be $4.03; see below), and, also, there are lots of diesel-using vehicles that aren't semi trucks so taxing the fuel isn't the right approach. We should tax vehicle miles by weight and axles.

Your comment motivated me to look up some numbers and do some calculations (that link is a Google Sheet, which links to my sources). From the DoT's 2016 report (the latest available), 247,644,981 light duty vehicles logged 2,849,718,000,000 miles, while 11,498,561 trucks logged 287,895,000,000 miles. Applying the 9600x damage factor to the trucks, that makes their mileage 2,763,792,000,000,000. The total cost of roads and highways in 2016 was $219B. Based on damage-adjusted miles, the light duty vehicle share of that is $225,576,097.53 while the truck share of that is $218,774,423,902.47.

On a per-vehicle basis, the light-duty share is $0.91 (!), while the truck share is $19,026.24. That last number sounds terrible for truckers, but it's really not so bad when you compare it to the existing costs of trucking.

The current cost per mile (2017 ATRI numbers; yeah I should find their 2016 report instead) is $1.59. That includes equipment, labor, fuel, taxes, fees, everything. The share per damage-adjusted mile of the 2016 highway maintenance costs is $0.76, and the current per-mile cost of fuel taxes is $0.07. So after dropping the fuel taxes and adding the $0.76, we get a new per-mile cost of $2.28. This means the cost of truck transport would increase by 43%. That's a considerable amount, large enough that it would need to be phased in over time, but it's far from unmanageable.

Oh, and as for the "fair" fuel tax: The trucking industry used 54B gallons of fuel in 2016. If the damage-based cost were allocated to the industry with fuel taxes, we'd need to replace the current ~$0.07 taxes with $4.03.

but it checks out.

Jokes aside, approx 38 % of Americans believe in "Young Earth" creationism and 24% believe everything in the bible is the literal word of God ("literal" here means that nothing is a parable).

Guess we found the guy using Vimium. https://chrome.google.com/webs...

Molten salts have been done many, many times. Not too efficient, and dangerous. Doing small scale at lower temps helps - but also reduces the amount of energy that can be stored. Better to use large, slow-rotating, low-loss, low-cost flywheels. Much less dangerous, scalable, easy to use.

Molten salts are not volatile and don't explode. And unless you mess up the chemistry are reasonably safe, they just run at a high temperature. You are correct about the lack of efficiency. If you want efficiency, you would use molten metal or sodium (except sodium explodes). Much better heat carrying capacity and transfer efficiencies of those coolants.

Molten salts have been done many, many times. Not too efficient, and dangerous. Doing small scale at lower temps helps - but also reduces the amount of energy that can be stored. Better to use large, slow-rotating, low-loss, low-cost flywheels. Much less dangerous, scalable, easy to use.

It may be lack of democracy and free speech. Totalitarians treat citizens as expendable pawns

Yes, that's what I said, communists.

Besides, I said "traditional communism", not Soviet-style.

Oh no you don't.

Name ONE COMMUNIST COUNTRY, of any form, that has not brought about vast ecological disaster.

You are focusing on one narrow aspect of the military.

Whatever, warmonger. I was for getting out of Afghanistan (and Syria) before Trump was even a thing.

This is a radio clash live from satellite...

No, it's simple, where does the money come from? Explain it to me. i've read the articles and in no one of them does it explicitely state where the extra money comes from. FYI: If we say the bottom 10% of Americans will now be freely given a living, that is roughly 33 million people. (citation: https://www.google.com/search?...) Now there are roughly 136 million earners in the USA. (you'll have to google that yourself, I googled average earnings and then average collected by the IRS from individuals) No, what is a living wage? $30K?, not where I live in Virginia, $40K? So, yeah, maybe that is enough. Then those 136 million Americans need to each kick in an extra $13K in taxes to pay for those 33 million who are the bottom 10%. But of course, that doesn't cover the cost of the management of that program... we will say the program has no management and is free. I am happy to kick in an extra $13K, are you (if you are from the USA?) Oh, looky there! if I taxe the bottom 20% an extra $13K/year, holy crap, suddenly they are in the bottom 10%! Now I have made the problem worse. Bottom line, money doesn't fall from trees.

dangerous? Dangerous cartel?

You realize you just described bacon, right?

dangerous? Dangerous cartel?

You realize you just described bacon, right?

US made products

He asked about iPhones. You know where iPhones are made, right? Which part of the US is this place?

The current Medicare's unfunded liabilities are somewhere between $37 and $58 Trillion, depending on how you count them. The idea that more Medicare would save money fails the laugh test. We're not even currently managing to fully pay for the Medicare which has been promised to people.

The reasons for Medicare saving any money don't actually pan out. For example, Medicare doesn't have lower administrative costs, it just shifts those costs (and more) to fraud costs instead. It doesn't matter what you call the money being spent, it's still spending more. Medicare is already heavily subsidized by non-Medicare patients, to the point where 15 percent of Doctors no longer accept Medicare and another 30% limit the number of Medicare patients they're willing to accept. Without those subsidies from other patients, we just end up with less health care as providers (the people doing the actual work) go out of business or don't go into business and go do something else with their time instead.

You just have to look at how Medicare actually operates, at how the VA health system actually operates, to see how a Medicare For All plan would actually operate. It isn't a pretty picture, it's mostly waste, poor care and even poorer outcomes, but it does rip off taxpayers and consumers for the benefit of the Democrat's buddies, so I guess it has that going for it.

If what other people say and do really bothers you, do something which solves the problem. Simply install an extension which auto-converts Imperial units to metric. You will never have to see Imperial units in your browser again.

just for different reasons.

I was one of the few who really like Google Contributor. It allowed me to give back to the websites I frequent in a really convenient way. I was pretty bummed when they shut it down.

Contributor appears to still be in operation, at least in my part of the United States.

Apart from the data sharing between Contributor and AdSense/DoubleClick, the other nitpick I have with Contributor is that it bills viewers per page view, not per unique monthly article. This means a reload when a page fails to load is charged at full price, as are cache misses when viewing an article days later or on another device logged into the same Google Account.

I moved to Melbourne more than 50 years and there's been a great tradition of vilifying each new wave of immigrants

Really? That simple? Most of the current immigrants are from China, India and UK.
Sure there are a few grumbles about minor matters, but who is vilifying them?
I do remember a backlash against some groups, and maybe all if you go back far enough.
Vietnamese drug importation, high crime rate among Islanders who came via NZ, fraud from Greeks, the Griffith Mafia, ...
  But not every group, and not recently. The Chinese are working hard, not on welfare, and not committing crime. Not "vilified" .

There was never a huge problem with any of those groups. Not so many violent attacks on random strangers.
But the tiny percentage of immigrants from Sudan are causing a wave of of crimes that were previously rare in Melbourne.
All by mobs of male youths, around 15 to 25. Carjackings and home invasions, as well as swarms of youth snatching phones and handbags at public events and beaches. Not all immigrant groups are the same. To suggest so would be a bit racist, no?

https://www.google.com/search?...

I think this is the house: https://www.google.com/maps/pl...

The news story had the name of the owner, and zabasearch came up with that address.

Oh and for some of the previous posters, this was New Years day, not New Years eve.

we're about to put 3.5 million people out of work with another 3.4 million behind them.

We already have social security. Put a stop to our massive, pointless wars (7 or 8 of them give or take since I _think_ we're pulling out of Yemen, not sure about Syria yet, believe it when I see it) and we'll be well on our way. Meanwhile we can start taxing taxing these guys. That'll account for 30% of the population right there.

we're about to put 3.5 million people out of work with another 3.4 million behind them.

We already have social security. Put a stop to our massive, pointless wars (7 or 8 of them give or take since I _think_ we're pulling out of Yemen, not sure about Syria yet, believe it when I see it) and we'll be well on our way. Meanwhile we can start taxing taxing these guys. That'll account for 30% of the population right there.

the ruling class not wanting to pay for it is holding it back.

I mean, we have massive amounts of data that single payer healthcare would be infinitely superior. The latest studies (real ones done by Universities) show $5 trillion savings every 10 years. We could pay off the national debt in my kid's lifetime with that and all our foreign held debt in _my_ lifetime. 70% of Americans support it.. Still no go.

Meanwhile several Democratic congressmen just exited Congress while imploring their party to abandon Medicare for All (funny that they all took big money from insurance & Phrama, I'm sure that was just them buying into their agenda).

America has a ruling class, but we like to pretend we don't. Like most things in life pretending the real world doesn't exist is bad juju.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.focus&hl=en_US/

It is not misinformation to label a genetically-modified organism that is protected by intellectual property laws as a genetically-modified organism that is protected by intellectual property laws. Since it is a true fact, it is the very opposite of misinformation. It's quite suspicious that there is so much effort to this one very plain fact.

And again, I consider the presence of the label to be unjustified, as you have not shown the label to have any relevance for consumers. If more consumers were informed on food science, they may not want irrelevant labels on most of their food, as other people could draw incorrect safety conclusions, e.g. from reading that their potatoes are a result of radiation breeding, compared to being inbred.

No, the first patent of a plant didn't occur until 1931, and it wasn't a basic foodstuff.

You're may be right for US patents. Though as I'm unable to find the source I was thinking of, we'll stick with US patents. The oldest US "food" patent application I could find was a 1930 plum tree. Regardless, my point that food patents existed way before GMO companies still stands -- Why single out a specific technology when you're actually out to thwart food patents?

No, my way is more effective because it harnesses the power of consumer choice.

There will be labels.

So am I understanding you correct that you want to combat food patents by labeling the type of plant production used? That's would be a disingenuous label with a hidden malicious agenda.

I'm 41 and I've never heard that phrase in my life. Hell, if you google the phrase you mostly find articles telling you how valuable a college degree is (with a few that mention it's less valuable if you grew up poor, but it's still more valuable than hitting the workforce after high school).

Maybe if you grew up in the 70s with a big, Unionized manufacturing plant down the street, but that was almost 50 years ago. Those days are gone. The only thing left to kids without degrees is Walmart, $18/hr jobs in HVAC and if you're lucky Daddy's money when he dies.

Ahhhh too bad. Boo hoo

https://www.google.com/search?...

Here, let me Google that for you.

Oh, my, that was so hard to find.

Optimist: Ideally, USB Guard in Chrome OS could be configured such that if a USB device is seeing substantial block traffic in the seconds prior to unmounting, it'll stay mounted until the traffic dies down.

Pessimist: Google wants Chrome OS users to subscribe to both Google One and a wired home Internet provider as a substitute for backups to USB mass storage.

We already know you can jump off a plane and survive. Lois Ann Frotten was parachuting back in 1962 and the parachute failed, but as any true dare devil, she wouldn't set such a minor setback kill her.

The newspaper on the event
Her TV appearance where she talked about it

He's actually not. If you have an Android device I highly recommend paying a visit to https://myactivity.google.com/ Putin is the strongest leader in the world right now, because they dominate in cyber warfare and he's a baddass. Trump is nothing more than a glorified reality tv star and a lardass.

or even that special. I'm not the first person to notice that the working class refuses to think of themselves as such. He's not the other, known the guy since 7th grade and he is and remains my closest friend.

But you're strawmaning to avoid the issuea, which is that:

a. Automation is going to put us all out of work and if we don't change how we distribute wealth everybody but a lucky few born into it will live like shit (think Indian reservations but on a global scale).

b. Right wing politics don't work, you know this and it makes you very uncomfortable. Stop reading Ayn Rand and hating yourself and start looking around at the deck stacked against you. You'll have an uncomfortable free years while you work out the demons put in your head by the billion dollar propaganda machines like Fox News and Rush but you'll be better for it.

After digging deeper, I've decided to provide links and no commentary

https://translate.google.com/t...
(although some of it is in english)

http://weboob.org/applications...
https://lists.debian.org/debia...
http://laurent.bachelier.name/...
https://git.weboob.org/weboob/...
https://git.weboob.org/weboob/...

Here are some photos of "rivers of trash" flowing into the ocean.

As long as this continues, it is absurd to send ships thousands of miles out to sea to strain a few microparticles out of the ocean.

The place to stop pollution is at the source.

The difference is that the "thousands of miles out to sea" spot isn't swarming with violent folks who don't want your help.

Here are some photos of "rivers of trash" flowing into the ocean.

As long as this continues, it is absurd to send ships thousands of miles out to sea to strain a few microparticles out of the ocean.

The place to stop pollution is at the source.

Why I thought so..

https://www.google.com/search?...

Dude, you should totally use Google Analytics on your personal website! It's "The Bomb"!

What exactly is a "cloud native database"?

A distributed database that is designed to span data centers and withstand serious network faults. A couple of examples would be CockroachDB and google spanner.

Strawman argument.

Why? Because there NEVER would have BEEN USB Thumb Drives in the first place, if not for Apple and the iMac.

HAHA good one.

Proof? USB Ports had been on EVERY Wintel motherboard for YEARS with virtually NOTHING to plug into them... UNTIL THE IMAC CAME ALONG.

That's hardly a proof. http://tylervigen.com/spurious...

I applaud your healthy skepticism; however, in this case, the vast majority of non-Apple-Hating tech experts would agree that Apple, through the iMac, pretty much singlehandedly put USB "on the map".

https://www.macworld.com/artic...

" Apple Inc.'s iMac was the first mainstream product with USB and the iMac's success popularized USB itself.[12] Following Apple's design decision to remove all legacy port from the iMac, many PC manufacturers began building legacy-free PCs, which led to the broader PC market using USB as a standard.[13][14][15]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Citations from above:

12. "Eight ways the iMac changed computing". Macworld. 15 August 2008. Archived from the original on 22 December 2011. Retrieved 5 September 2017.

13. "Compaq hopes to follow the iMac". Archived from the original on 22 October 2006.

14. "The PC Follows iMac's Lead". Business week. 1999. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015.

15. Popular Mechanics: Making Connections. Hearst Magazines. February 2001. p. 59. ISSN 0032-4558. Archived from the original on 15 February 2017.

So, no; in this particular case, the consensus is that the iMac made USB into a viable alternative to parallel and RS-232 Serial (as well as other buses, such as ADB) interfaces popular at the time.

And considering that USB Thumb Drives first appeared on the market in 2000, it is fairly certain that, if the iMac had not come along and, through its popularity, given USB the critical "push" it needed to get past the "chicken and egg" problem faced by every new technology, those USB Thumb Drives would certainly not happened in 2000, and likely not until much, much later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Heck, I'm sure that you remember: While Apple was just a few months from launching the iMac, Microsoft couldn't so much as plug in a USB SCANNER without Blue-Screening W '98, even though Windows advertises USB Support as early as W '95 OSR2.1!

https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

And, BTW, note that Windows didn't even HAVE Storage Device USB Support until W '98 SE (May, 1999). AFAIK, Apple supported Storage-Class Devices from the first release of the iMac in August, 1998 (running (Classic) MacOS 8.1 !!!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

...and let's not even talk about Linux's sad and late adoption of USB. It wasn't even added until the 2.2 Kernel in 1999, although that was experimental support. Mainstream USB support wasn't really available in Linux until the 2.4 Kernel was released in 2001:

https://kernel.readthedocs.io/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And even now, USB and Linux is sometimes an exercise in frustration (but I guess that applies to all things Linux, doesn't it?)

https://www.google.com/search?...

> I don't know where you are getting this from, but Windows NT 3.1 was launched with multi-user support

"Multi-user" doesn't mean "you can log in before you have access to all the files on the whole system". That's a password-protected system, it's not a multi-user system. A multi-user system is one that multiple people can use at the same time and they don't have access to each other's stuff, and can't screw up the other person's stuff.

Here's one of many articles written at the time about Microsoft announcing they were buying multi-user and network access software from Citrix, in order to add these features to NT 5.0

https://books.google.com/books...