No...not everyone is for the millionaire surtax. I am not a millionaire nor will I ever be one because I can say honestly I don't want to work that hard (I wish more people would be honest about this).
Sure, I'll be honest about it. The honest truth is this: almost nobody in the "million dollar a year" crowd works "million dollar a year" hard. There are very few people whose contribution to society is worth that of 20 times the average household income. Much, MUCH fewer that.0001% "deserve" that kind of compensation. And of the few people who do deserve that kind of compensation, very few of them actually get that kind of compensation. The honest, real world truth is that money does not create a meritocracy.
Yes, it's very compassionate to let people starve to death or die of treatable illnesses in order to allow a few rich people to sit on slightly larger piles of cash.
Man, if only there were charities that helped with those issues, instead of forcing people to give up money they earned at gunpoint.
Wait, there ARE?! And they're predominantly supported by the millionaires you want to tax out of existence? And that charitable giving is almost entirely done by conservatives and NOT liberals?!
Wow, it's almost as if it's the LIBERALS who want people to starve to death and not the other way around! Wait, it's EXACTLY that way!
There are charities that will help starving people and treat people who are truly in need. Sure, they might not cover the welfare queen who needs the hospital to prescribe powerful antibiotics to "cure" her kid's cold, but - wait, why the hell do you want to do that in the first place?!!
Three points here.. Point 1: Conservatives often give to "charities" like the CATO institute or various anti-abortion groups, which are not actually charities but rather lobbying groups with tax-exempt status. Point 2: Of the few non-lobbyist groups conservatives give to, almost all of them are religious organizations which spend more on proselytizing than on actually helping people. Point 3: charities are ill-equipped to handle the sheer volume of people who need assistance, let alone sort out the needy from the scammers, let alone the medical needs of the uninsured sick.
Oh, and delisional Tea Partiers who are retired or unemployed yet somehow believe they'll be making a million bucks a year ANY DAY NOW.
Or they're ACTUALLY FUCKING HUMAN and can empathize with people other than themselves.
I understand that for the rationalist liberal, taxing the most out of every tax bracket you're not in is clearly the "right thing to do" but some of us who have FUCKING HEARTS can understand that, just because it might not hurt you personally, it still hurts others and has other consequences.
So you're right, rationally, it doesn't matter to retired people if other people start losing their jobs as investors stop investing as there's no point since they lose everything in taxes. Except when their 401k becomes worthless and social security fails because you've destroyed the economy through taxes.
No, wait, maybe there IS rationality to the Tea Party position, and you're just a vindictive asshole.
Yes, it's very compassionate to let people starve to death or die of treatable illnesses in order to allow a few rich people to sit on slightly larger piles of cash.
I never suggested they were. But they are also not exclusive to "rich" people unless the definition of "rich" is being scoped at around $75K+/year. There is also a significant number of "median income" people grabbing them on the secondary market and plenty of lower income folks snapping up the 15+ year old models.
I make roughly that much, and I can tell you with absolute certainty I could not afford this car. Hell, I can't even afford a car 1/3 as much.
Increasing demand doesn't always mean increasing supply
It doesn't always, certainly, but sometimes it does. Original statement said (indirectly) that increased demand must necessarily result in increased prices, which is overly simplistic and often not true.
No, I said (indirectly) that increased demand and fixed supply result in higher prices. Debates on the supply and demand model applies here are a little more muddied since you have possibilities of new sources of supply, government intervention, gouging, etc., but it would be very hard to argue that its not the most correct model to apply in this situation.
Okay, let's put it in math terms then (not going to debate the supply and demand model, as that's an entirely different conversation):
price ~= demand / supply.
as demand -> infinity, price -> infinity
Now let's make this a bit more complicated. Supply is constantly depleted, so for a given time span we can say that:
price(t) ~= demand(t) / (supply - (demand(1).. demand(t))
and thus as demand -> infinity OR supply -> 0, price -> infinity.
Sorry, I don't know the shortcut keys to the math symbols, nor do I have the inclination to look for them.
Actually, you're probably the one forgetting about supply and demand. There's ridiculous supply available. You're only talking demand.
Arg.. Okay, time for today's math lesson.
If you increase demand, you increase the price. If you increase the demand by 200 million cars (roughly the number of working vehicles in the country, assuming the average adult has 1 car), then you increased demand by a metric shit-ton. You really think the prices will stay the same?
Until they figure out solar, natural gas is the next big thing. Easy to retrofit, no batteries. Cheap (at least in the US).
Yeah, if you completely forget about supply and demand. How cheap do you think that natural gas is going to be once it's a common fuel for cars? Hint: look at the price and prevalence of diesel from 1980 to now.
Well you're fortunate then. My agency is on "pay bands", so we get zero cost of living increase and no step increases. You can get a 0.6% "performance" increase, but the managers can only give that to something like 30% of employees, so they round-robin those and you get one every 3 years or so.
"Cushy pension"? Federal Employees get 1% for each year of service i.e. work 30 years and get 30% of your annual salary as a pension. They also get a 4% contribution to a 401(k). Better than nothing, but not really "cushy". Employees who are required to carry guns get a better deal, but TFA had to do with "IT" employees.
$150K salary at retirement, 30% = $45K / year guaranteed. That's more than the average working household, so it is pretty cushy. It may even be more than the new IT guy fresh out of college. So each retiree is like a currently employee on the staff.
Plus keep in mind that these people have paid off their house, put their kids through college, etc. So the 30% of your final salary goes a lot farther than you may think.
Yeah, for a GS-15 maxed out in step increases. Most federal IT workers won't get past GS-12 in their career. And with so many years of pay freezes, they're not going to be anywhere near their top salary when they retire. Also, keep in mind that retirement is all or nothing. If you leave after 20 years but before you're 60, you get nothing.
I see a lot of posts about having a few lead guys locally and offshoring the grunt work as a good solution.. There's a couple big problems I see with this. The first is that, regardless of how good your management process is, you can't make a bad coder into a good coder; instead you spend valuable time correcting his mistakes or even more time pointing them out and telling him to correct them. The second main problem is that, if you have a lot of grunt work programming, you're doing it wrong. Write OO code. Write templates. Write code generators. Remember that every line of code written is an added cost to your company.
Unless I knew your codebase already, I'd have a really hard time quoting 2 hours for you. For all I know, you could have hard-coded every usage of the payment system in 100 different pages, each implemented slightly differently.
I would gladly pay for HBO. I will not, however, pay for a $100 cable package that's required before I can opt for HBO. So instead the cable company gets nothing from me.
He's also doing what he loves. I know many of us IT folk love one aspect of computers or another, but very few of us are working on something we would do in our spare time if we weren't being paid for it.
...because of the IT department thinking they know better than end users...
Because. That's. Our. JOB.
Then get better at it. If you're going to tell me I can't install a code library on my dev machine that I need to do my job, then you better give me a better reason than "it's not on the list".
No, it's not. The text you are referencing, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is in fact in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. The Constitution is supposed to be built around these principles, but the text you describe does not appear anywhere in it.
True enough. I should also point out that we're actually talking about Australia, which made no such claims upon its founding. But my basic point is that ascribing the status of a "right" to a tax deduction is ridiculous.
As someone who has developed in a DO-178B shop, I got the impression that the certification and process may not necessarily make for a safer product, but it *does* ensure that, were an unsafe product made, you would be able to pin down the exact point at which the unsafe decision was made. It's a paper trail, plain and simple.. But knowing there's a paper trail does tend to make you think a bit more about what you're doing.
Industrial scale cell culture (think a number of very expensive pharmaceutical products) is incredibly complicated. You don't drop a bunch of stem cells into a vat and come back two weeks later.
And despite that, we still produce alcohol on a local and industrial scale.
But dumping a bunch of ingredients in a vat and waiting is exactly what's done in alcohol production.. The exception is hard liquor, which has an extra distillation step.
There's nothing in your argument that is even moderately convincing. Give them a straight salary and can their ass if they do a bad job, just like every other profession.
I'm 25 years old, i dont think its too much to ask to be able to work 32-40 hours a week, have healthcare, my own modest place, a used car, feed myself, pay my bills, internet, phone, car insurance, and have a couple of bucks left over to maybe go out to eat two or three times a month, maybe go to a movie or concert once a month and out for drinks with friends occasionally. Thats all i really want at this point. But even that modest lifestyle is just not a possibility for the majority of people, myself included. I was an assistant store manager at a big box retail store, in charge of a staff of dozens and a store with several million in merchandise, 40-50 hours a week. Im living at home, but even a cheap 1bdr in a non shit neighborhood (nowhere near work) would have been nearly half my monthly takehome.
Let's see...
When I was your age, the internet was something you got if you were in college, maybe. If you weren't, you used a local Fidonet node and were glad to have it.
Brand new cars back then weren't as good as the 12 year old car I'm driving now.
I could go on, no doubt. But you might be starting to understand - it's not that we can work less and live the way we do now. We can work less and live the way we did in the 70's - no cable, no DSL, no computer, cars that are, by modern standards, deathtraps, no cell phones, no microwave, etc, etc, etc.
Or we work as much as ever, and have a great many more "things" that we couldn't even imagine back then.
So pick your poison - live like you would've HAD to live in 1975, or accept that you're working harder to maintain a significantly higher standard of living (a standard that you don't even recognize as "higher", since you can't conceive of living without the things you have now).
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Leftists often give to charities the Tides Foundation, which distributes those funds to MoveON.org and other political lobbyists. Eye, meet beam.
Leftists also don't claim that that we should do away with social programs and put the burden on charities, thus your point is entirely moot.
No...not everyone is for the millionaire surtax. I am not a millionaire nor will I ever be one because I can say honestly I don't want to work that hard (I wish more people would be honest about this).
Sure, I'll be honest about it. The honest truth is this: almost nobody in the "million dollar a year" crowd works "million dollar a year" hard. There are very few people whose contribution to society is worth that of 20 times the average household income. Much, MUCH fewer that .0001% "deserve" that kind of compensation. And of the few people who do deserve that kind of compensation, very few of them actually get that kind of compensation. The honest, real world truth is that money does not create a meritocracy.
Yes, it's very compassionate to let people starve to death or die of treatable illnesses in order to allow a few rich people to sit on slightly larger piles of cash.
Man, if only there were charities that helped with those issues, instead of forcing people to give up money they earned at gunpoint.
Wait, there ARE?! And they're predominantly supported by the millionaires you want to tax out of existence? And that charitable giving is almost entirely done by conservatives and NOT liberals?!
Wow, it's almost as if it's the LIBERALS who want people to starve to death and not the other way around! Wait, it's EXACTLY that way!
There are charities that will help starving people and treat people who are truly in need. Sure, they might not cover the welfare queen who needs the hospital to prescribe powerful antibiotics to "cure" her kid's cold, but - wait, why the hell do you want to do that in the first place?!!
Three points here.. Point 1: Conservatives often give to "charities" like the CATO institute or various anti-abortion groups, which are not actually charities but rather lobbying groups with tax-exempt status. Point 2: Of the few non-lobbyist groups conservatives give to, almost all of them are religious organizations which spend more on proselytizing than on actually helping people. Point 3: charities are ill-equipped to handle the sheer volume of people who need assistance, let alone sort out the needy from the scammers, let alone the medical needs of the uninsured sick.
Oh, and delisional Tea Partiers who are retired or unemployed yet somehow believe they'll be making a million bucks a year ANY DAY NOW.
Or they're ACTUALLY FUCKING HUMAN and can empathize with people other than themselves.
I understand that for the rationalist liberal, taxing the most out of every tax bracket you're not in is clearly the "right thing to do" but some of us who have FUCKING HEARTS can understand that, just because it might not hurt you personally, it still hurts others and has other consequences.
So you're right, rationally, it doesn't matter to retired people if other people start losing their jobs as investors stop investing as there's no point since they lose everything in taxes. Except when their 401k becomes worthless and social security fails because you've destroyed the economy through taxes.
No, wait, maybe there IS rationality to the Tea Party position, and you're just a vindictive asshole.
Yes, it's very compassionate to let people starve to death or die of treatable illnesses in order to allow a few rich people to sit on slightly larger piles of cash.
I never suggested they were. But they are also not exclusive to "rich" people unless the definition of "rich" is being scoped at around $75K+/year. There is also a significant number of "median income" people grabbing them on the secondary market and plenty of lower income folks snapping up the 15+ year old models.
I make roughly that much, and I can tell you with absolute certainty I could not afford this car. Hell, I can't even afford a car 1/3 as much.
Increasing demand doesn't always mean increasing supply
It doesn't always, certainly, but sometimes it does. Original statement said (indirectly) that increased demand must necessarily result in increased prices, which is overly simplistic and often not true.
No, I said (indirectly) that increased demand and fixed supply result in higher prices. Debates on the supply and demand model applies here are a little more muddied since you have possibilities of new sources of supply, government intervention, gouging, etc., but it would be very hard to argue that its not the most correct model to apply in this situation.
Okay, let's put it in math terms then (not going to debate the supply and demand model, as that's an entirely different conversation): .. demand(t))
price ~= demand / supply.
as demand -> infinity, price -> infinity
Now let's make this a bit more complicated. Supply is constantly depleted, so for a given time span we can say that:
price(t) ~= demand(t) / (supply - (demand(1)
and thus as demand -> infinity OR supply -> 0, price -> infinity.
Sorry, I don't know the shortcut keys to the math symbols, nor do I have the inclination to look for them.
Actually, you're probably the one forgetting about supply and demand. There's ridiculous supply available. You're only talking demand.
Arg.. Okay, time for today's math lesson.
If you increase demand, you increase the price. If you increase the demand by 200 million cars (roughly the number of working vehicles in the country, assuming the average adult has 1 car), then you increased demand by a metric shit-ton. You really think the prices will stay the same?
Until they figure out solar, natural gas is the next big thing. Easy to retrofit, no batteries. Cheap (at least in the US).
Yeah, if you completely forget about supply and demand. How cheap do you think that natural gas is going to be once it's a common fuel for cars? Hint: look at the price and prevalence of diesel from 1980 to now.
Only if you work as a teacher in a district where the teachers have a high mortality rate.
Well you're fortunate then. My agency is on "pay bands", so we get zero cost of living increase and no step increases. You can get a 0.6% "performance" increase, but the managers can only give that to something like 30% of employees, so they round-robin those and you get one every 3 years or so.
"Cushy pension"? Federal Employees get 1% for each year of service i.e. work 30 years and get 30% of your annual salary as a pension. They also get a 4% contribution to a 401(k). Better than nothing, but not really "cushy". Employees who are required to carry guns get a better deal, but TFA had to do with "IT" employees.
$150K salary at retirement, 30% = $45K / year guaranteed. That's more than the average working household, so it is pretty cushy. It may even be more than the new IT guy fresh out of college. So each retiree is like a currently employee on the staff. Plus keep in mind that these people have paid off their house, put their kids through college, etc. So the 30% of your final salary goes a lot farther than you may think.
Yeah, for a GS-15 maxed out in step increases. Most federal IT workers won't get past GS-12 in their career. And with so many years of pay freezes, they're not going to be anywhere near their top salary when they retire. Also, keep in mind that retirement is all or nothing. If you leave after 20 years but before you're 60, you get nothing.
Not true. The commies at least allowed a fair election, albeit after several decades of ruling with an iron fist.
I see a lot of posts about having a few lead guys locally and offshoring the grunt work as a good solution.. There's a couple big problems I see with this. The first is that, regardless of how good your management process is, you can't make a bad coder into a good coder; instead you spend valuable time correcting his mistakes or even more time pointing them out and telling him to correct them. The second main problem is that, if you have a lot of grunt work programming, you're doing it wrong. Write OO code. Write templates. Write code generators. Remember that every line of code written is an added cost to your company.
Unless I knew your codebase already, I'd have a really hard time quoting 2 hours for you. For all I know, you could have hard-coded every usage of the payment system in 100 different pages, each implemented slightly differently.
I would gladly pay for HBO. I will not, however, pay for a $100 cable package that's required before I can opt for HBO. So instead the cable company gets nothing from me.
He's also doing what he loves. I know many of us IT folk love one aspect of computers or another, but very few of us are working on something we would do in our spare time if we weren't being paid for it.
Because. That's. Our. JOB.
Then get better at it. If you're going to tell me I can't install a code library on my dev machine that I need to do my job, then you better give me a better reason than "it's not on the list".
No, it's not. The text you are referencing, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is in fact in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. The Constitution is supposed to be built around these principles, but the text you describe does not appear anywhere in it.
True enough. I should also point out that we're actually talking about Australia, which made no such claims upon its founding. But my basic point is that ascribing the status of a "right" to a tax deduction is ridiculous.
Sometimes the good of the many outweight the good of the few, or the one. Take Spock's lesson to heart.
But the good of the many should never be used to outweigh the rights of the few, or the one. Oh, and Spock is make-believe.
Yes, "life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and access to tax incentives" is right there in the constitution..
The link to the crypto class sends you to www.cs101-class.org. You have to guess the real url, www.crypto-class.org.
As someone who has developed in a DO-178B shop, I got the impression that the certification and process may not necessarily make for a safer product, but it *does* ensure that, were an unsafe product made, you would be able to pin down the exact point at which the unsafe decision was made. It's a paper trail, plain and simple.. But knowing there's a paper trail does tend to make you think a bit more about what you're doing.
And despite that, we still produce alcohol on a local and industrial scale.
But dumping a bunch of ingredients in a vat and waiting is exactly what's done in alcohol production.. The exception is hard liquor, which has an extra distillation step.
There's nothing in your argument that is even moderately convincing. Give them a straight salary and can their ass if they do a bad job, just like every other profession.
Let's see...
When I was your age, the internet was something you got if you were in college, maybe. If you weren't, you used a local Fidonet node and were glad to have it.
Brand new cars back then weren't as good as the 12 year old car I'm driving now.
I could go on, no doubt. But you might be starting to understand - it's not that we can work less and live the way we do now. We can work less and live the way we did in the 70's - no cable, no DSL, no computer, cars that are, by modern standards, deathtraps, no cell phones, no microwave, etc, etc, etc.
Or we work as much as ever, and have a great many more "things" that we couldn't even imagine back then.
So pick your poison - live like you would've HAD to live in 1975, or accept that you're working harder to maintain a significantly higher standard of living (a standard that you don't even recognize as "higher", since you can't conceive of living without the things you have now).
I'll take 1975, thank you very much.