Yes, the AMT is mostly an effort to fix the deduction problem at the top end, you're right in that I shouldn't have said 'rich'. (Although while they don't get 'deductions', they instead can get all sorts of weird tax shelters and stuff.)
But, seriously, it's still fucked up. Let's assume that the government lets you deduct $5000 worth of solar panels.
A guy who makes $100,000 a year, and puts up $5,000 worth of solar panels, now pays taxes on $95,000, which is the equivalent of writing him a check for $1,500.
A guy who makes $20,000 a year, and puts up $5,000 of solar panels, now pays taxes on $15000, which is the equivalent of writing him a check for $750.
A guy who makes $10,000 a year, and puts up $5,000 of solar panels (Somehow), now pays taxes on $5000? Which is the equivalent of writing him a check for $0, because he's not paying taxes at either $10,000 or $5000.
And people are like 'Good, if he doesn't get pay any money he shouldn't get any back'...really?
So the middle class guy that put up those solar panels did us $1500 worth of social good, the poorer guy did less, and the poorest guy didn't do any? Someone's going to have to explain that logic to me. Seems like the poorer did the exact same amount of good, and at greater expense to themselves!
It's totally fucked up because deductions work at the top tax bracket. And, you're right, they work for exactly the voters, instead of, oh, I dunno, actual rewarding with an even hand the entirety of people who do those things we invent deductions for.
Let's get rid of deductions, period. If the government wants to reward people for doing social goods, to give people an economic incentive to do those things, the government should write people a damn check.
Before the 16th amendment, there were two sorts of taxes, direct and indirect. Direct was taxes on people and things, and indirect was taxes on, basically, the movement of money. Direct taxes were constitutionally required to be apportioned equally among the states, indirect taxes were not.
In Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., in 1895, the courts reversed almost a century of precedent and decided that 'asset gains', from things like rents, dividends, and interest, were 'direct taxes'. This decision was wrong.
The quote I gave was from Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad, a later case, in which the court explained that this decision was wrong, that those things inherently belonged in the category of indirect taxes, no matter what the court had ruled earlier.
However, as the 16th amendment had removed the 'equally apportioned' requirement anyway, they said that was a moot point. It didn't matter if they were direct taxes, they were legal either way under the 16th...but the court went ahead and said that such things were indirect taxes and constitutional anyway, even though it didn't need to.
If the 16th amendment was repealed tomorrow, the income tax code would almost entirely stand intact(1). The courts have clearly indicated, as blatantly as they can without existing in a legal environment without a 16th amendment, that they think Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co was incorrect, and that taxes on any monetary transfers is constitutional, and that the 16th amendment did absolutely nothing in that regard.
1) There are probably a few places in the income tax code where ownership of money, not movement of money, is taxed, and without the 16th amendment those would have to be proportioned equally among the states. It's interesting to note that this is why we don't have a federal property tax...until the 16th amendment, it would have been unconstitutional, unless weirdly skewed based on state population.
The shortest path algorithm is NP complete but satellite navigation systems manage to do a decent enough job.
That's not the same thing, as the other post said, but let me explain it a bit simplier:
Sat navs are working from where you are, to one location. They know how long each road takes to travel because they have that programmed in, so all they have to do is draw one straight line, and start checking roads outward until there aren't any roads that connect to the endpoint that get you there faster.
The traveling salesman problem is not the same thing. It requires reaching multiple points in any order, hence every possible order has to be checked. (Except some can be almost immediately exclude, but whatever.)
Sat navs have to check maybe 20 paths and they reach the ideal solution(1), which they know because they've looked at all possible roads, which they get by counting outward from that straight line. They stop checking when any road that far away would require speeds of more than 80 mph or whatever to beat the road they already found, and they know what the maximum possible speed limit is.
1) Mathematically ideal, that is. Not always accurate.
Like, for example, the superrich, who have managed to wrangle a 15% tax rate for their income, which is in the form of stock gains, which results in them paying a lower tax rate than anyone but people making under $16,000.
Although I suspect, somehow, it's the people making under $16,000 that people like you are talking about.
You know what I've always said? Fuck deductions.Tax deductions are already the most regressive tax imaginable. Oh, look, we'll reduce a rich guy's taxes if he installs solar panels, and we'll reduce the taxes of a poor guy if he does also...oh, you say he doesn't pay taxes, so can't use a deducation? Well, they, we'll give him no reward at all, I'm sure his contribution to society was worthless, whereas the rich guy deserved to be paid.
Look, if we want to pay people money for doing stuff, let's pay people money for doing stuff. If we want to give the people $X for doing something, they can take their damn receipt and mail it in, and we'll send them a check.
It would be a lot more obvious than all these idiotic deductions. I mean, I'm in favor of some of them.
But not the mortgage deduction, which helped blow up the economy. We don't want to reward people for buying a house, we want to reward them for staying in one place (And hence building community.) Which is a fuckload easier if we're just sending out cash based on documentation than giving them a 'deducation'. We give you $1000 for living in the same place 5 years, $2000 for ten, whatever.
And, as a bonus, human beings could stop doing taxes at all. Everyone's company could just pay them, because there's no actual 'options'. If they pay you X, they pay the government whatever X says on the tax schedule. That's it. The only people who would have to do their own taxes are the self-employed, and it would just be an easy 'add up everything you made, and look it up' (I'd also be against the weird semi-corporate existence of business deductions we allow, trying to figure out 'income' for the self-employed. You want to run your own business, you give it a fucking separate bank account, and it writes you paychecks, and you pay taxes on that money when it gets to you.)
Uh, no. Try looking into the actual history of income tax, please. What you claimed is trivially disprovable. See here
The 16th amendment was needed to for the Federal government to tax dividends, interest, and rents. Aka, 'money earned without doing any work'. Not income from employment, which was always taxable.
And, strangely, the supreme court decision that seemed to disallow that was probably in error. Taxes on property, aka, a 'direct tax', were not allowed, and that court decision had a very convoluted way of trying out make out that that any income from property was also somehow a direct tax, which they certainly are not.
Congressional scholars, and in fact the US supreme court, currently mostly regard the 16th amendment as utterly pointless. I quote the court, 'Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged.'
And the US had plenty of permanent progressive income taxes before then. In fact, it has never had any other sort of tax on income. (How would that even work?)
And there was not even vaguely the promise you claimed it had. People were already taxed more than that without the income tax. More than 5% of household paid taxes the last time there was an income tax, see the previous link.
The thing is, they invented the genre 'target', when FPS not only already exists, but is a sub-genre of 'action'. Or, rather, action is a supergenre that has FPS, flight sim, driving games, whatever.
It is also a term that can be applied to games in genres that traditionally aren't, like 'action adventure' or 'action puzzle'. (Tetris, for example.)
Basically 'action' is the opposite of 'turned-based', and is the same thing as 'real time'. Although 'real-time' also has the connotation that things will keep happening without you, where if you just stand around doing nothing while playing DOOM, very little is going to happen if there aren't any enemies near you. But stand around doing nothing in Command and Conquer and you will soon be in trouble.
Although confusingly at some point RPG started off being turn-based, but are now assumed to be 'action RPGs', and now you have to specify 'turn-based RPG'. Strategies, meanwhile, have no default, so you have to specify either way, real-time or turn-based.
Speaking of strategy, WTF is 'Combat/Strategy'? That sounds like a very strange way to describe RPGs, if that's what they're trying to do.
Meanwhile, while Zelda games are indeed, adventure games, or at least action adventure games, they are not very representative of the genre. They are an action game with some adventure elements added.
And where the hell are puzzles? Are we really leaving Pong and Tetris out of video games?
What they should have done is had a 'milestone' list and a voted list.
Actually, if I was making a exhibit at a museum, I don't think I'd have any public input at all. Letting the public vote throws in all sorts of games that art not that impressive, artistically, but that everyone grew up with.
Like all the Zelda games. Yeah, we all like Zelda, we all have fond memories of Zelda, they are very good. They each have good graphics for their time, and they have reasonable stories for a non-linear action-adventure game. But should that many of them be on the list?
I think I'd go with 'genre innovations' and 'technological innovations' (Which sometimes are the same game.) and then show some end result of each of those. Two separate timelines, or rather, two separate groups of timelines. One a list of all technological changes, which obviously transcends genre, the other a list of the actual genres, showing where they start and where they are currently. On one list you'd expect to find how computer graphics went from 4 color to 256, etc, and on the other list you see DOOM go to Deus Ex as an example of an FPS or whatever.
Sometimes the tech will be inextricably tied to a genre, like the tech category 'world realism in flight simulators' is obviously pretty closely linked to the 'flight sim', genre but that doesn't mean the evolution of the flight sim genre necessarily is best represented by that specific technology, if you see what I mean. The best 'flight sims' are not always the one with the 'most realistic world'.
Likewise, the FMV tech category would include games in multiple genre, like Wing Commander and Tex Murphy. If you're actually trying to document video games, you can't just go by genre, because they often were held back by technological restrictions, and when people could get past those, they all raced past at once. Both those games were able to do FMV due to CD-ROMs.
And speaking of FMV, it would be nice to have a 'rise and fall' area, of both genres and technology that have shown up, gotten over-exposed, and vanished, and somewhat secretly made a comeback, like FMV and adventure games.
Also, I'd start any exhibit with pre-computer 'video games', like pinball. Which also get very artistic at the end.
At this point, I'd suggest that slashdot do something like this.
Actually, sleeping with mature teens probably is 'normal' in the sense of biology. And with maturity happening sooner thanks to better nutrition, 'mature teens' are getting younger and younger. People used to get married at 15...and now our 13 year-olds look like those people. (It is perhaps worth pointing out that for most of human history, almost no one was as well developed as a 18 year old teenager is today.)
And we're not talking 'a long time ago' either. You could grab some girl on her first day of 9th grade, send her back in time 150 years, and people would be amazed she wasn't married.
Anyway, sleeping with teenagers is 'normal' in the same way that punching someone in the face when you're angry is 'normal'.
But just like punching someone, society doesn't put up with it. It's against the rules we've set up.
Mostly because while people have been getting physical mature younger, they've been getting emotionally mature later.
Or, to put it anther way, it's silly argue that wanting to have sex with under-aged people is normal, but actually doing so is not. Unless you've defined normal to mean 'What society accepts' or 'What people do all the time', but that's really not what 'normal' means.
My understanding of the economics of child pornography is this: at the highest levels of production and distribution, pedophiles are trading new and unseen images and videos with each other. The market is based on barter, not money, to thwart efforts at tracing the participants.
Yup. The FBI has, in the past, when it actually cared more about child abuse than 'child porn' (aka, people passing around incriminating records of sexual abuse), has busted a few of those rings, usually by abuse being found out other ways, and a search of the abuser's stuff revealing other abusers.
Eventually this material is somehow leaked to lower level forums which are more easily accessible, and from there the images are reposted again and again. Below a certain level in the distribution chain, the incentive for the producers to keep producing is entirely lost; the material is reposted on various forums at no cost. The overwhelming majority of people who view child pornography are viewing it at a level that is far below this point, and are contributing nothing to its production.
And 'leaked' is exactly the right word, as the original producers of the material do not a record of their child abuse leaking out.
Running around closing those forums or prosecuting people who download or even upload to them is counterproductive. It helps child abuse. We want that stuff out in the open, so we can find the abused child and figure out who abused them.
Seriously, people need to step back and actually think about how child abuse works. 'Child porn' isn't the problem...go ask any prosecutor if he thinks trading videos of people committing crimes should be illegal. Ask him how he'd feel if there was an entire network of people trading videos of their car thefts or something, and if he thinks that should be outlawed and shut down. He will say 'Hell no' and start operating his own site like that instead, to see who will upload videos that incriminate other people.
The whole anonymous file sharing nature of the internet should be a godsend to people fighting child abuse, because apparently sexual abusers are so damn stupid they will enter into exchange deals with other sexual abusers and trade incriminating evidence and then, sometimes, upload evidence they were given to the goddamn internet!
The entire concept of outlawing child porn is fucking insanity, from top to bottom. I suspect that some child abuser who didn't want evidence of his crimes to get out invented that law, and has been laughing ever since. It's a law outlawing possession of evidence of a crime, which, um, makes it somewhat harder to, you know, actually find evidence of crime. Go figure.
Because it's easier to decide whether or not to pay if you've actually seen the patents that are supposedly involved.
That's not the question. The question is why should B&N have to sign an NDA to be informed of what they're infringing.
Patents aren't secret. They are a matter of public record, and anyone can look them up. The second anyone who claims patent infringement starts acting as if they are secret, well, it's SCO all over again, and we have a pretty clear warning sign the case is bogus.
Incidentally, Microsoft has a financial reason to disclose what patents are infringed, because if you inform someone they're infringing your patent, you can get a lot more damages if they kept doing it afterward and you later win in court. Whereas 'unknowing' violations result in less liability. (And, no, vaguely asserting 'some parts of millions of lines of code infringe some of our thousand patents' does not count as notification.) The second you actually inform them of the actual infringement, you start collecting triple damages if they keep doing it and a court says it's infringement later.
The only reason to not be specific is if they are just creating FUD and don't actually have a case, like B&N asserts.
The broken window fallacy is when you destroy goods in order to stimulate the economy. Saying 'I will choose interactions that require human employees' is not the same thing at all.
In fact, the entire argument is stupid, as the breaking windows is correct, from the POV of what the parent is trying to do, which is keep people employed.
I love how so many people have internalized 'Everyone must do what is best of the economy' that they bring up the 'broken windows fallacy' in non-economic situations.
Breaking the windows of a store does not help 'the economy' in a global sense. And wasting the resources of a store by deliberately choosing interactions that require humans doesn't help the economy in a global sense. Those things are true.
But it sure as fuck help glass manufacturers, or, in this example, minimum wage cashiers, at the expense of the store.
And, you know what? Fuck the store. The parent, and me, will support the min wage cashier instead. We have rightly realized that giant corporations don't pass any savings on to anyone, so doesn't even slightly matter what we do.
I get the exact sort of bullshit in response when I talk about how offshoring is bad. I don't care if it helps the giant abstract economy. I will cheerfully admit it does that, but I don't fucking care at all. I care that it, you know, actually doesn't seem to help any actual workers, and harms quite a few. We do not exist to be ground up by 'the economy' and spit out.
Fuck putting the refrigerated items back. I'm not stealing the stuff, but they just wasted thirty minutes of my time, they aren't wasting any more of it.
If they're lucky, they might get me calling the police for them.
If you're going to do that you should leave an I.O.U. with your name, phone number and Itemized list. This will protect you legally since an I.O.U is a legal form of payment if the other party accepts the I.O.U. Since, you could argue that that they accepted it by not telling you that you couldn't pay with it. So long as you make good on the note everything should be Okay.
Uh, no. An IOU is not a 'legal form of payment', because there is no such thing as 'legal form of payment'. Legally, you can pay for groceries with a paperclip, if the store accept it. (Do not confuse this with 'legal tender', which is for debts. You do not have a debt when buying stuff from a cashier.)
Now, if you were actually borrowing something, leaving your name and address might protect you...it's only theft if you intend to deprive the other person of it, which requires that you don't intend to return it. (Yes, really. I know your mother said otherwise. She was legally incorrect. Borrowing-with-intent-to-return is not theft, if you can prove you meant to return it before they were 'deprived' of it.), Leaving a way to be tracked down might help a claim that you intended to return it.
However, this doesn't work for purchases, which you are not intending to return, even if you leave your name. You're intending to keep them.
Also, perhaps rendering this all moot, how the hell do you total up your purchases if all the stupid displays are asking for alcohol authorization? You can't write 'IOU some amount of money'.
Before you say 'People should know math', the price usually isn't printed on the goods, so unless you have a really good memory, that's not going to be an option. (And then you have to figure out taxes, which are not obvious and are different rates for different items, although it's possible NZ has them easier.)
But it's been demonstrated in testing that we think of distances utterly different in the horizontal and vertical axis, so there's some of that there also.
A fun trick is to lay down on the ground and look at a several story building from right next to it. Then look at the ground, and try to figure out the distance away on the ground that is the height of the building.
Then walk to that point, lay back on the ground, and look back at the top of the building, which should be at exactly 45 degree angle (Barring the height of your head or whatever.)...but isn't. Because you don't judge horizontal and vertical differences at all the same.
Strangely, this inability flips with distance. Like I said, we tend to judge everything out of our reach as 'sorta tree height', about 40 to 50 feet. (This might have something to do with our depth perception focal length, in fact.) You'll judge a two story building as taller than it should be, but a ten story building as shorter.
Or, to put it another way, studies have show we think of 'reachable', 'possibly climbable', and 'beyond everything', and that's about all the depth perception with height we have. we don't have anywhere near the gradients that we have vertically, probably because we never needed, evolution-wise, to figure if something in the air was 500 feet or three miles away. Unless it's close enough to throw a rock at, it's infinitely far away, unlike something on the ground, which we can walk to.
And when the moon is on the horizon it manages to flip from 'beyond everything', which is impossibly far and we literally have no idea how big it is, to 'a few miles away, behind that other stuff', suddenly making it huge. Exactly what it's behind can change the size, but it's always going to look somewhat larger no matter what. (Unless we were on a tiny asteroid with a very close horizon or something.)
Yes, they have turnkey window air conditioning units that are designed to work off solar, I suspect they just cut off when the power drops.
Although it might be cheaper to buy a mobile unit, like they have for campers and truckers.
Most solar systems can easily be hooked up where they provide only a specific range of power, and nothing outside that range. I.e., if the voltage drops too far, it gets shut off entirely. That's just a simple relay.
It should be possible to build a air conditioner that runs at any voltage, just slower as it drops. But I doubt any actual one does that.
Homeowner Associations are the bane of actual homeowners everywhere, and if it wasn't for the fact that your choices are to either live on a ranch in the middle of Texas or drop trou, take it up the ass like a man, and live in a homeowner-association-owned dwelling within 30 miles of a city, I wouldn't touch an HA with a 10 foot pole.
HOA are great if they're in charge of a pool and green space and streets and stuff. That was, in fact, their original point, to own community property, and even force people to pay 'taxes' to maintain that. It is not a bad idea.
However they then had power creep, over people's private property. I can see the rational for the start of that power, against people with absurdly unkempt lawns and rusted cars parked in yards, but somehow that turned into 'approving constructions' and then 'approving everything'.
I wouldn't live anywhere with an HOA that allowed the HOA to make whatever new rules they wanted about private property. Sadly, that appears to have become the default, with literally infinite power. If you have an HOA, check and see if you can find anything that stops them from calling your entire house 'unsightly' and requiring you to tear it down. I bet you can't.
I'd claim they were 'light antenna' and for the HOA to take it up with the FCC. People can put up any antennas they want, the HOA can't do anything about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the AMT is mostly an effort to fix the deduction problem at the top end, you're right in that I shouldn't have said 'rich'. (Although while they don't get 'deductions', they instead can get all sorts of weird tax shelters and stuff.)
But, seriously, it's still fucked up. Let's assume that the government lets you deduct $5000 worth of solar panels.
A guy who makes $100,000 a year, and puts up $5,000 worth of solar panels, now pays taxes on $95,000, which is the equivalent of writing him a check for $1,500.
A guy who makes $20,000 a year, and puts up $5,000 of solar panels, now pays taxes on $15000, which is the equivalent of writing him a check for $750.
A guy who makes $10,000 a year, and puts up $5,000 of solar panels (Somehow), now pays taxes on $5000? Which is the equivalent of writing him a check for $0, because he's not paying taxes at either $10,000 or $5000.
And people are like 'Good, if he doesn't get pay any money he shouldn't get any back'...really?
So the middle class guy that put up those solar panels did us $1500 worth of social good, the poorer guy did less, and the poorest guy didn't do any? Someone's going to have to explain that logic to me. Seems like the poorer did the exact same amount of good, and at greater expense to themselves!
It's totally fucked up because deductions work at the top tax bracket. And, you're right, they work for exactly the voters, instead of, oh, I dunno, actual rewarding with an even hand the entirety of people who do those things we invent deductions for.
Let's get rid of deductions, period. If the government wants to reward people for doing social goods, to give people an economic incentive to do those things, the government should write people a damn check.
Perhaps you should read the quote I gave.
Before the 16th amendment, there were two sorts of taxes, direct and indirect. Direct was taxes on people and things, and indirect was taxes on, basically, the movement of money. Direct taxes were constitutionally required to be apportioned equally among the states, indirect taxes were not.
In Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., in 1895, the courts reversed almost a century of precedent and decided that 'asset gains', from things like rents, dividends, and interest, were 'direct taxes'. This decision was wrong.
The quote I gave was from Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad, a later case, in which the court explained that this decision was wrong, that those things inherently belonged in the category of indirect taxes, no matter what the court had ruled earlier.
However, as the 16th amendment had removed the 'equally apportioned' requirement anyway, they said that was a moot point. It didn't matter if they were direct taxes, they were legal either way under the 16th...but the court went ahead and said that such things were indirect taxes and constitutional anyway, even though it didn't need to.
If the 16th amendment was repealed tomorrow, the income tax code would almost entirely stand intact(1). The courts have clearly indicated, as blatantly as they can without existing in a legal environment without a 16th amendment, that they think Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co was incorrect, and that taxes on any monetary transfers is constitutional, and that the 16th amendment did absolutely nothing in that regard.
1) There are probably a few places in the income tax code where ownership of money, not movement of money, is taxed, and without the 16th amendment those would have to be proportioned equally among the states. It's interesting to note that this is why we don't have a federal property tax...until the 16th amendment, it would have been unconstitutional, unless weirdly skewed based on state population.
The shortest path algorithm is NP complete but satellite navigation systems manage to do a decent enough job.
That's not the same thing, as the other post said, but let me explain it a bit simplier:
Sat navs are working from where you are, to one location. They know how long each road takes to travel because they have that programmed in, so all they have to do is draw one straight line, and start checking roads outward until there aren't any roads that connect to the endpoint that get you there faster.
The traveling salesman problem is not the same thing. It requires reaching multiple points in any order, hence every possible order has to be checked. (Except some can be almost immediately exclude, but whatever.)
Sat navs have to check maybe 20 paths and they reach the ideal solution(1), which they know because they've looked at all possible roads, which they get by counting outward from that straight line. They stop checking when any road that far away would require speeds of more than 80 mph or whatever to beat the road they already found, and they know what the maximum possible speed limit is.
1) Mathematically ideal, that is. Not always accurate.
So you're going to have to explain why businesses get to deduce expenses, but not people.
Oh, right, because you're an idiot.
Fair is everyone paying the same rate.
I agree. Everyone should pay the same tax rate.
Like, for example, the superrich, who have managed to wrangle a 15% tax rate for their income, which is in the form of stock gains, which results in them paying a lower tax rate than anyone but people making under $16,000.
Although I suspect, somehow, it's the people making under $16,000 that people like you are talking about.
You know what I've always said? Fuck deductions.Tax deductions are already the most regressive tax imaginable. Oh, look, we'll reduce a rich guy's taxes if he installs solar panels, and we'll reduce the taxes of a poor guy if he does also...oh, you say he doesn't pay taxes, so can't use a deducation? Well, they, we'll give him no reward at all, I'm sure his contribution to society was worthless, whereas the rich guy deserved to be paid.
Look, if we want to pay people money for doing stuff, let's pay people money for doing stuff. If we want to give the people $X for doing something, they can take their damn receipt and mail it in, and we'll send them a check.
It would be a lot more obvious than all these idiotic deductions. I mean, I'm in favor of some of them.
But not the mortgage deduction, which helped blow up the economy. We don't want to reward people for buying a house, we want to reward them for staying in one place (And hence building community.) Which is a fuckload easier if we're just sending out cash based on documentation than giving them a 'deducation'. We give you $1000 for living in the same place 5 years, $2000 for ten, whatever.
And, as a bonus, human beings could stop doing taxes at all. Everyone's company could just pay them, because there's no actual 'options'. If they pay you X, they pay the government whatever X says on the tax schedule. That's it. The only people who would have to do their own taxes are the self-employed, and it would just be an easy 'add up everything you made, and look it up' (I'd also be against the weird semi-corporate existence of business deductions we allow, trying to figure out 'income' for the self-employed. You want to run your own business, you give it a fucking separate bank account, and it writes you paychecks, and you pay taxes on that money when it gets to you.)
Uh, no. Try looking into the actual history of income tax, please. What you claimed is trivially disprovable. See here
The 16th amendment was needed to for the Federal government to tax dividends, interest, and rents. Aka, 'money earned without doing any work'. Not income from employment, which was always taxable.
And, strangely, the supreme court decision that seemed to disallow that was probably in error. Taxes on property, aka, a 'direct tax', were not allowed, and that court decision had a very convoluted way of trying out make out that that any income from property was also somehow a direct tax, which they certainly are not.
Congressional scholars, and in fact the US supreme court, currently mostly regard the 16th amendment as utterly pointless. I quote the court, 'Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged.'
And the US had plenty of permanent progressive income taxes before then. In fact, it has never had any other sort of tax on income. (How would that even work?)
And there was not even vaguely the promise you claimed it had. People were already taxed more than that without the income tax. More than 5% of household paid taxes the last time there was an income tax, see the previous link.
Why the hell was Fallout 3 competing with Myst?
The thing is, they invented the genre 'target', when FPS not only already exists, but is a sub-genre of 'action'. Or, rather, action is a supergenre that has FPS, flight sim, driving games, whatever.
It is also a term that can be applied to games in genres that traditionally aren't, like 'action adventure' or 'action puzzle'. (Tetris, for example.)
Basically 'action' is the opposite of 'turned-based', and is the same thing as 'real time'. Although 'real-time' also has the connotation that things will keep happening without you, where if you just stand around doing nothing while playing DOOM, very little is going to happen if there aren't any enemies near you. But stand around doing nothing in Command and Conquer and you will soon be in trouble.
Although confusingly at some point RPG started off being turn-based, but are now assumed to be 'action RPGs', and now you have to specify 'turn-based RPG'. Strategies, meanwhile, have no default, so you have to specify either way, real-time or turn-based.
Speaking of strategy, WTF is 'Combat/Strategy'? That sounds like a very strange way to describe RPGs, if that's what they're trying to do.
Meanwhile, while Zelda games are indeed, adventure games, or at least action adventure games, they are not very representative of the genre. They are an action game with some adventure elements added.
And where the hell are puzzles? Are we really leaving Pong and Tetris out of video games?
What they should have done is had a 'milestone' list and a voted list.
Actually, if I was making a exhibit at a museum, I don't think I'd have any public input at all. Letting the public vote throws in all sorts of games that art not that impressive, artistically, but that everyone grew up with.
Like all the Zelda games. Yeah, we all like Zelda, we all have fond memories of Zelda, they are very good. They each have good graphics for their time, and they have reasonable stories for a non-linear action-adventure game. But should that many of them be on the list?
I think I'd go with 'genre innovations' and 'technological innovations' (Which sometimes are the same game.) and then show some end result of each of those. Two separate timelines, or rather, two separate groups of timelines. One a list of all technological changes, which obviously transcends genre, the other a list of the actual genres, showing where they start and where they are currently. On one list you'd expect to find how computer graphics went from 4 color to 256, etc, and on the other list you see DOOM go to Deus Ex as an example of an FPS or whatever.
Sometimes the tech will be inextricably tied to a genre, like the tech category 'world realism in flight simulators' is obviously pretty closely linked to the 'flight sim', genre but that doesn't mean the evolution of the flight sim genre necessarily is best represented by that specific technology, if you see what I mean. The best 'flight sims' are not always the one with the 'most realistic world'.
Likewise, the FMV tech category would include games in multiple genre, like Wing Commander and Tex Murphy. If you're actually trying to document video games, you can't just go by genre, because they often were held back by technological restrictions, and when people could get past those, they all raced past at once. Both those games were able to do FMV due to CD-ROMs.
And speaking of FMV, it would be nice to have a 'rise and fall' area, of both genres and technology that have shown up, gotten over-exposed, and vanished, and somewhat secretly made a comeback, like FMV and adventure games.
Also, I'd start any exhibit with pre-computer 'video games', like pinball. Which also get very artistic at the end.
At this point, I'd suggest that slashdot do something like this.
Actually, sleeping with mature teens probably is 'normal' in the sense of biology. And with maturity happening sooner thanks to better nutrition, 'mature teens' are getting younger and younger. People used to get married at 15...and now our 13 year-olds look like those people. (It is perhaps worth pointing out that for most of human history, almost no one was as well developed as a 18 year old teenager is today.)
And we're not talking 'a long time ago' either. You could grab some girl on her first day of 9th grade, send her back in time 150 years, and people would be amazed she wasn't married.
Anyway, sleeping with teenagers is 'normal' in the same way that punching someone in the face when you're angry is 'normal'.
But just like punching someone, society doesn't put up with it. It's against the rules we've set up.
Mostly because while people have been getting physical mature younger, they've been getting emotionally mature later.
Or, to put it anther way, it's silly argue that wanting to have sex with under-aged people is normal, but actually doing so is not. Unless you've defined normal to mean 'What society accepts' or 'What people do all the time', but that's really not what 'normal' means.
My understanding of the economics of child pornography is this: at the highest levels of production and distribution, pedophiles are trading new and unseen images and videos with each other. The market is based on barter, not money, to thwart efforts at tracing the participants.
Yup. The FBI has, in the past, when it actually cared more about child abuse than 'child porn' (aka, people passing around incriminating records of sexual abuse), has busted a few of those rings, usually by abuse being found out other ways, and a search of the abuser's stuff revealing other abusers.
Eventually this material is somehow leaked to lower level forums which are more easily accessible, and from there the images are reposted again and again. Below a certain level in the distribution chain, the incentive for the producers to keep producing is entirely lost; the material is reposted on various forums at no cost. The overwhelming majority of people who view child pornography are viewing it at a level that is far below this point, and are contributing nothing to its production.
And 'leaked' is exactly the right word, as the original producers of the material do not a record of their child abuse leaking out.
Running around closing those forums or prosecuting people who download or even upload to them is counterproductive. It helps child abuse. We want that stuff out in the open, so we can find the abused child and figure out who abused them.
Seriously, people need to step back and actually think about how child abuse works. 'Child porn' isn't the problem...go ask any prosecutor if he thinks trading videos of people committing crimes should be illegal. Ask him how he'd feel if there was an entire network of people trading videos of their car thefts or something, and if he thinks that should be outlawed and shut down. He will say 'Hell no' and start operating his own site like that instead, to see who will upload videos that incriminate other people.
The whole anonymous file sharing nature of the internet should be a godsend to people fighting child abuse, because apparently sexual abusers are so damn stupid they will enter into exchange deals with other sexual abusers and trade incriminating evidence and then, sometimes, upload evidence they were given to the goddamn internet!
The entire concept of outlawing child porn is fucking insanity, from top to bottom. I suspect that some child abuser who didn't want evidence of his crimes to get out invented that law, and has been laughing ever since. It's a law outlawing possession of evidence of a crime, which, um, makes it somewhat harder to, you know, actually find evidence of crime. Go figure.
Why does an old (.gt. 70 years) person *need* US$200,000 a year of cancer treatment?
Because otherwise they will die, you sociopathic fucktard.
Because it's easier to decide whether or not to pay if you've actually seen the patents that are supposedly involved.
That's not the question. The question is why should B&N have to sign an NDA to be informed of what they're infringing.
Patents aren't secret. They are a matter of public record, and anyone can look them up. The second anyone who claims patent infringement starts acting as if they are secret, well, it's SCO all over again, and we have a pretty clear warning sign the case is bogus.
Incidentally, Microsoft has a financial reason to disclose what patents are infringed, because if you inform someone they're infringing your patent, you can get a lot more damages if they kept doing it afterward and you later win in court. Whereas 'unknowing' violations result in less liability. (And, no, vaguely asserting 'some parts of millions of lines of code infringe some of our thousand patents' does not count as notification.) The second you actually inform them of the actual infringement, you start collecting triple damages if they keep doing it and a court says it's infringement later.
The only reason to not be specific is if they are just creating FUD and don't actually have a case, like B&N asserts.
Ah, the Republican health care plan:
Part one, don't get sick. Part two, if you do get sick... Part three, die quickly.
Really? He'd rely on his hypothetical kids to take care of the $200,000 dollars a year his cancer treatments cost?
The broken window fallacy is when you destroy goods in order to stimulate the economy. Saying 'I will choose interactions that require human employees' is not the same thing at all.
In fact, the entire argument is stupid, as the breaking windows is correct, from the POV of what the parent is trying to do, which is keep people employed.
I love how so many people have internalized 'Everyone must do what is best of the economy' that they bring up the 'broken windows fallacy' in non-economic situations.
Breaking the windows of a store does not help 'the economy' in a global sense. And wasting the resources of a store by deliberately choosing interactions that require humans doesn't help the economy in a global sense. Those things are true.
But it sure as fuck help glass manufacturers, or, in this example, minimum wage cashiers, at the expense of the store.
And, you know what? Fuck the store. The parent, and me, will support the min wage cashier instead. We have rightly realized that giant corporations don't pass any savings on to anyone, so doesn't even slightly matter what we do.
I get the exact sort of bullshit in response when I talk about how offshoring is bad. I don't care if it helps the giant abstract economy. I will cheerfully admit it does that, but I don't fucking care at all. I care that it, you know, actually doesn't seem to help any actual workers, and harms quite a few. We do not exist to be ground up by 'the economy' and spit out.
Dude, where do you live that you have '4 blocks' nearby and can walk?
Do you even know what America looks like? You have described...New York. That's about it.
Fuck putting the refrigerated items back. I'm not stealing the stuff, but they just wasted thirty minutes of my time, they aren't wasting any more of it.
If they're lucky, they might get me calling the police for them.
If you're going to do that you should leave an I.O.U. with your name, phone number and Itemized list. This will protect you legally since an I.O.U is a legal form of payment if the other party accepts the I.O.U. Since, you could argue that that they accepted it by not telling you that you couldn't pay with it. So long as you make good on the note everything should be Okay.
Uh, no. An IOU is not a 'legal form of payment', because there is no such thing as 'legal form of payment'. Legally, you can pay for groceries with a paperclip, if the store accept it. (Do not confuse this with 'legal tender', which is for debts. You do not have a debt when buying stuff from a cashier.)
Now, if you were actually borrowing something, leaving your name and address might protect you...it's only theft if you intend to deprive the other person of it, which requires that you don't intend to return it. (Yes, really. I know your mother said otherwise. She was legally incorrect. Borrowing-with-intent-to-return is not theft, if you can prove you meant to return it before they were 'deprived' of it.), Leaving a way to be tracked down might help a claim that you intended to return it.
However, this doesn't work for purchases, which you are not intending to return, even if you leave your name. You're intending to keep them.
Also, perhaps rendering this all moot, how the hell do you total up your purchases if all the stupid displays are asking for alcohol authorization? You can't write 'IOU some amount of money'.
Before you say 'People should know math', the price usually isn't printed on the goods, so unless you have a really good memory, that's not going to be an option. (And then you have to figure out taxes, which are not obvious and are different rates for different items, although it's possible NZ has them easier.)
So how would you cover your medical costs when you're old?
Please note that insurance companies will not sell policies to old people.
So what's your answer?
You've even managed to exclude social security disability, which you would probably qualify for, being mentally handicapped like you are.
Yes, trees are a big clue.
But it's been demonstrated in testing that we think of distances utterly different in the horizontal and vertical axis, so there's some of that there also.
A fun trick is to lay down on the ground and look at a several story building from right next to it. Then look at the ground, and try to figure out the distance away on the ground that is the height of the building.
Then walk to that point, lay back on the ground, and look back at the top of the building, which should be at exactly 45 degree angle (Barring the height of your head or whatever.)...but isn't. Because you don't judge horizontal and vertical differences at all the same.
Strangely, this inability flips with distance. Like I said, we tend to judge everything out of our reach as 'sorta tree height', about 40 to 50 feet. (This might have something to do with our depth perception focal length, in fact.) You'll judge a two story building as taller than it should be, but a ten story building as shorter.
Or, to put it another way, studies have show we think of 'reachable', 'possibly climbable', and 'beyond everything', and that's about all the depth perception with height we have. we don't have anywhere near the gradients that we have vertically, probably because we never needed, evolution-wise, to figure if something in the air was 500 feet or three miles away. Unless it's close enough to throw a rock at, it's infinitely far away, unlike something on the ground, which we can walk to.
And when the moon is on the horizon it manages to flip from 'beyond everything', which is impossibly far and we literally have no idea how big it is, to 'a few miles away, behind that other stuff', suddenly making it huge. Exactly what it's behind can change the size, but it's always going to look somewhat larger no matter what. (Unless we were on a tiny asteroid with a very close horizon or something.)
Yes, they have turnkey window air conditioning units that are designed to work off solar, I suspect they just cut off when the power drops.
Although it might be cheaper to buy a mobile unit, like they have for campers and truckers.
Most solar systems can easily be hooked up where they provide only a specific range of power, and nothing outside that range. I.e., if the voltage drops too far, it gets shut off entirely. That's just a simple relay.
It should be possible to build a air conditioner that runs at any voltage, just slower as it drops. But I doubt any actual one does that.
Homeowner Associations are the bane of actual homeowners everywhere, and if it wasn't for the fact that your choices are to either live on a ranch in the middle of Texas or drop trou, take it up the ass like a man, and live in a homeowner-association-owned dwelling within 30 miles of a city, I wouldn't touch an HA with a 10 foot pole.
HOA are great if they're in charge of a pool and green space and streets and stuff. That was, in fact, their original point, to own community property, and even force people to pay 'taxes' to maintain that. It is not a bad idea.
However they then had power creep, over people's private property. I can see the rational for the start of that power, against people with absurdly unkempt lawns and rusted cars parked in yards, but somehow that turned into 'approving constructions' and then 'approving everything'.
I wouldn't live anywhere with an HOA that allowed the HOA to make whatever new rules they wanted about private property. Sadly, that appears to have become the default, with literally infinite power. If you have an HOA, check and see if you can find anything that stops them from calling your entire house 'unsightly' and requiring you to tear it down. I bet you can't.
I'd claim they were 'light antenna' and for the HOA to take it up with the FCC. People can put up any antennas they want, the HOA can't do anything about it.