If someone who makes 251k a year will be taxed at a certain percent then someone who makes 2k a year should also be taxed that same amount.
Actually, they are... for that $2k, or whatever the amount up to the top of the lowest bracket is. Marginal income taxes like the U.S. has only apply to the amount of income above the maximum amount of income in the the next bracket down.
Tax deductions, yes, but those only apply to your taxable income. You'd actually have to have tax credits to achieve what the grandparent is talking about.
The first of those two examples is the more relevant one; I just don't think that a 3% reduction in marginal income over 250k is particularly demotivating. What you're really talking about is the difference between 160k (250k after 36% taxes), 221k and 224k - the difference in the tax rate in that example changes your ultimate after-tax income by 1.3%.
Certainly there's some point at which additional taxation becomes demotivating. I just don't think that the actual change we're talking about is at all likely to have such an effect.
And thus, those groups that are unpopular in society get screwed while those that are wildly popular (churches, anyone?) overflow with cash and political influence.
Mutual support is part of being a member of society. Our society is founded on the principle of equality of opportunity, and charitable giving manifestly fails to provide such equality. Providing equality of opportunity is what the government is there for.
I use open source code exclusively for all of of the projects I'm involved in at work. When the code doesn't do what I want it to do, I patch it and contribute the patch. In a few cases, I've contributed enough that I've been made a committer on the relevant projects.
This is how open-source software works; we're all using it out of self-interest, and contributing our changes in the interest that they be merged with the mainline codebase so that we don't have to maintain a fork. And so the mainline code gets better.
Everyone has different use cases, so everyone contributes to whatever part of the system they personally need. When those use cases overlap, the code in the intersection gets polished by all the interested parties.
Git makes branches actually useful. Repeated merges under CVS or SVN (well, perhaps not the latest SVN, but every one before it) are the stuff of nightmares, with changes conflicting with themselves all over the place.
Ugh. I've used CVS, SVN, Perforce, Darcs, and Git over the years. Perforce was far and away the worst of the lot.
Whose bright idea was it to make the clientspec an unversioned artifact? In the company that I used Perforce at, which shall remain unnamed, it took me two weeks just to assemble a clientspec that would give a checked-out version of the repository that would actually build. Every developer in the place had their own personal flavor. What a ridiculous nightmare that was.
Git is far and away the best version control system I've ever used. Sure, it doesn't yet have decent IDE integration, but the command line interface is simple and gives you more power to rearrange your repository as needed than anything else I've seen. I love the fact that local development branches are so cheap; using independent branches for each of the features I'm working on at any given time helps make sure I don't let excessive coupling between subsystems creep in to my code, and merging (and rebasing, and rearranging commits) is faster and more painless than with any other system I've used.
I don't think that the breadth of one's experience is the most relevant factor in being a "really good programmer" these days. Given the complexity of modern systems you need to have a lot of depth of understanding of not just the language but also the standard and commonly used libraries, and all of that takes a lot of time to acquire. Without sufficient depth, even if you have the most productive language available for your task you're likely to be reinventing the wheel if you don't have sufficient knowledge of the relevant libraries and frameworks.
Ultimately, being a really good programmer is about being to efficiently solve problems with code; while having breadth of experience can inform you of tools that might make you more efficient at a given task it's having deep and consistent experience with your tools that really makes you productive.
Slashdot long ago ceded the technical discussion high ground, simply because it lacks focus. It's difficult for any forum to maintain quality of both breadth and depth, and Slashdot has clearly gone for breadth.
There are lots of voting systems that eliminate the "spoiler" effect that you're complaining about; the problem is that too few people seem to know about them, and of those that know, too few care enough to actually get anything changed.
And, of course, the two major parties are quite happy with their little duopoly, so the only way to fix things is by citizen initiatives to change state constitutions.
We're talking about Computer Science and IT. Nowadays just access to the Internet would be good enough. For practical IT stuff having your own PC would be good.
Anecdotal evidence and all, but I didn't discover that I loved computers until I was about to graduate from college, even though we had a computer in the house from the time that I was 10 (an IBM PS2, top of the line at the time.) Admittedly much of this time was before the rise of the web, but until I was introduced to Perl by a friend and realized that I could actually create things with a computer rather than just have it be a glorified word processor I simply had no idea of what was possible.
Exposure to the tools is critical, but so is giving kids some idea of what one can do with those tools. The only exposure I had to programming as a kid was from an uncle who worked as a systems programmer on big iron; from my point of view it was all about massive development teams working on boring financial applications. I decided to learn blacksmithing instead, which was fun but not nearly so fun as I find writing interesting code to be.
The mantle isn't actually molten; it's plastic and deformable but not liquid. Magma (the actual melt) forms in chambers in the crust at points where extra heat from the mantle rises to a level where the confining pressures lower enough to allow the phase transition.
The point of a bicameral legislature in the US is a compromise between equal and proportional representation of the states. One side is that all states should be treated equal, the other side is that population matters.
And of course, this is all geographically determined, while geography is becoming increasingly meaningless (or, at least, a less important factor) in the modern world.
What I'd like to see is a third body of the legislature to be formed, equal to the other two, where the seats are awarded in a parliamentary fashion with proportional representation so that the various ideological factions in the country could be represented.
Of course, conference committee would be a bitch...
I'm currently using Scala and the Lift web framework on a fairly significant internal project at my company, and I have to say that I'm very impressed with both the quality of the language and how easy it has been to integrate existing Java code, including the whole JEE5 stack.
The only thing I've found with Scala that takes a bit of time to get one's head around is the type system; if you're one of those developers who found Java generics to be difficult, the intricacies of the type system in Scala will probably give you the fits. For an example of why, check out this set of exercises
The way I see it, there isn't anything that would inherently prevent anonymous data from being "vouched for" in the web of trust. The source doesn't have to be identifiable for a piece of information to be valid and verified. However, the identity (and consequent authority) of the verifier is critical for a recipient of the data to be able to make an informed judgment about it's veracity.
With a system like this, the power of anonymous open communication that the web offers would be increased, not decreased. At the same time, if you've got all this information about document validity at the protocol level, it certainly could be used to empower censorship; the Great Firewall of China could, for example, exclude any content verified by Human Rights Watch. So there are risks as well.
I of course don't know the inside story, but sounds stupid enough. If this is the case, here's hoping Alcatel-Lucent loses a lot of money quickly and opens it back up.
Of course, if they lose a lot of money quickly, they'll be even *less* likely to open it back up. Fundamental research is incompatible with the short-term thinking that the current stock market rewards.
With respect to predatory lending, it sucks, but some people are stupid. Really stupid, or else they've been brought up in a culture where they've been actively discouraged from learning anything. If someone was too dumb to avoid being exploited, that doesn't necessarily mean that being exploited in such a manner was somehow deserved.
Being scammed by a con artist usually involves a bunch of voluntary steps, too. I don't think that a society where that kind of predatory behavior was unregulated would be a very pleasant one to live in.
(2) seems patently stupid to me. If you have to admit to a misdemeanor that carries a minor fine to to win, say, the cost of some massive medical bills, it seems like a no-brainer to admit that you didn't have insurance.
Makes sense to me. Of course, keeping unions from being able to dictate to the employers that workers must be in the union is tricky to do without government regulation, which of course the Libertarians would disdain. The only recourse employers might have otherwise would just be to take their capital and go elsewhere, or stage a lockout.
It all ends up being a great big game of chicken. The only reason that the UAW and the Teamsters have the power they do is that the employers flinched first.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone who makes 251k a year will be taxed at a certain percent then someone who makes 2k a year should also be taxed that same amount.
Actually, they are... for that $2k, or whatever the amount up to the top of the lowest bracket is. Marginal income taxes like the U.S. has only apply to the amount of income above the maximum amount of income in the the next bracket down.
Tax deductions, yes, but those only apply to your taxable income. You'd actually have to have tax credits to achieve what the grandparent is talking about.
The first of those two examples is the more relevant one; I just don't think that a 3% reduction in marginal income over 250k is particularly demotivating. What you're really talking about is the difference between 160k (250k after 36% taxes), 221k and 224k - the difference in the tax rate in that example changes your ultimate after-tax income by 1.3%.
Certainly there's some point at which additional taxation becomes demotivating. I just don't think that the actual change we're talking about is at all likely to have such an effect.
Forgive me if I don't see how reverting from a 36% tax rate for the top bracket to the old 39% is exactly comparable to your example.
Nice strawman, though. Just in time for Halloween!
What part of "establish justice" and "promote the general welfare" do you not understand?
And thus, those groups that are unpopular in society get screwed while those that are wildly popular (churches, anyone?) overflow with cash and political influence.
Mutual support is part of being a member of society. Our society is founded on the principle of equality of opportunity, and charitable giving manifestly fails to provide such equality. Providing equality of opportunity is what the government is there for.
I use open source code exclusively for all of of the projects I'm involved in at work. When the code doesn't do what I want it to do, I patch it and contribute the patch. In a few cases, I've contributed enough that I've been made a committer on the relevant projects.
This is how open-source software works; we're all using it out of self-interest, and contributing our changes in the interest that they be merged with the mainline codebase so that we don't have to maintain a fork. And so the mainline code gets better.
Everyone has different use cases, so everyone contributes to whatever part of the system they personally need. When those use cases overlap, the code in the intersection gets polished by all the interested parties.
Git makes branches actually useful. Repeated merges under CVS or SVN (well, perhaps not the latest SVN, but every one before it) are the stuff of nightmares, with changes conflicting with themselves all over the place.
Ugh. I've used CVS, SVN, Perforce, Darcs, and Git over the years. Perforce was far and away the worst of the lot.
Whose bright idea was it to make the clientspec an unversioned artifact? In the company that I used Perforce at, which shall remain unnamed, it took me two weeks just to assemble a clientspec that would give a checked-out version of the repository that would actually build. Every developer in the place had their own personal flavor. What a ridiculous nightmare that was.
Git is far and away the best version control system I've ever used. Sure, it doesn't yet have decent IDE integration, but the command line interface is simple and gives you more power to rearrange your repository as needed than anything else I've seen. I love the fact that local development branches are so cheap; using independent branches for each of the features I'm working on at any given time helps make sure I don't let excessive coupling between subsystems creep in to my code, and merging (and rebasing, and rearranging commits) is faster and more painless than with any other system I've used.
I don't think that the breadth of one's experience is the most relevant factor in being a "really good programmer" these days. Given the complexity of modern systems you need to have a lot of depth of understanding of not just the language but also the standard and commonly used libraries, and all of that takes a lot of time to acquire. Without sufficient depth, even if you have the most productive language available for your task you're likely to be reinventing the wheel if you don't have sufficient knowledge of the relevant libraries and frameworks.
Ultimately, being a really good programmer is about being to efficiently solve problems with code; while having breadth of experience can inform you of tools that might make you more efficient at a given task it's having deep and consistent experience with your tools that really makes you productive.
Slashdot long ago ceded the technical discussion high ground, simply because it lacks focus. It's difficult for any forum to maintain quality of both breadth and depth, and Slashdot has clearly gone for breadth.
Bush was somebody's hope for change???
It sounds good to say that, but how do you actually do it?
Condorcet voting systems, or range voting.
There are lots of voting systems that eliminate the "spoiler" effect that you're complaining about; the problem is that too few people seem to know about them, and of those that know, too few care enough to actually get anything changed.
And, of course, the two major parties are quite happy with their little duopoly, so the only way to fix things is by citizen initiatives to change state constitutions.
We're talking about Computer Science and IT. Nowadays just access to the Internet would be good enough. For practical IT stuff having your own PC would be good.
Anecdotal evidence and all, but I didn't discover that I loved computers until I was about to graduate from college, even though we had a computer in the house from the time that I was 10 (an IBM PS2, top of the line at the time.) Admittedly much of this time was before the rise of the web, but until I was introduced to Perl by a friend and realized that I could actually create things with a computer rather than just have it be a glorified word processor I simply had no idea of what was possible.
Exposure to the tools is critical, but so is giving kids some idea of what one can do with those tools. The only exposure I had to programming as a kid was from an uncle who worked as a systems programmer on big iron; from my point of view it was all about massive development teams working on boring financial applications. I decided to learn blacksmithing instead, which was fun but not nearly so fun as I find writing interesting code to be.
The mantle isn't actually molten; it's plastic and deformable but not liquid. Magma (the actual melt) forms in chambers in the crust at points where extra heat from the mantle rises to a level where the confining pressures lower enough to allow the phase transition.
The point of a bicameral legislature in the US is a compromise between equal and proportional representation of the states. One side is that all states should be treated equal, the other side is that population matters.
And of course, this is all geographically determined, while geography is becoming increasingly meaningless (or, at least, a less important factor) in the modern world.
What I'd like to see is a third body of the legislature to be formed, equal to the other two, where the seats are awarded in a parliamentary fashion with proportional representation so that the various ideological factions in the country could be represented.
Of course, conference committee would be a bitch...
... that the inventor isn't named "Reg"
I'm currently using Scala and the Lift web framework on a fairly significant internal project at my company, and I have to say that I'm very impressed with both the quality of the language and how easy it has been to integrate existing Java code, including the whole JEE5 stack.
The only thing I've found with Scala that takes a bit of time to get one's head around is the type system; if you're one of those developers who found Java generics to be difficult, the intricacies of the type system in Scala will probably give you the fits. For an example of why, check out this set of exercises
The way I see it, there isn't anything that would inherently prevent anonymous data from being "vouched for" in the web of trust. The source doesn't have to be identifiable for a piece of information to be valid and verified. However, the identity (and consequent authority) of the verifier is critical for a recipient of the data to be able to make an informed judgment about it's veracity.
With a system like this, the power of anonymous open communication that the web offers would be increased, not decreased. At the same time, if you've got all this information about document validity at the protocol level, it certainly could be used to empower censorship; the Great Firewall of China could, for example, exclude any content verified by Human Rights Watch. So there are risks as well.
I of course don't know the inside story, but sounds stupid enough. If this is the case, here's hoping Alcatel-Lucent loses a lot of money quickly and opens it back up.
Of course, if they lose a lot of money quickly, they'll be even *less* likely to open it back up. Fundamental research is incompatible with the short-term thinking that the current stock market rewards.
Sadly, I think that this is goodbye.
With respect to predatory lending, it sucks, but some people are stupid. Really stupid, or else they've been brought up in a culture where they've been actively discouraged from learning anything. If someone was too dumb to avoid being exploited, that doesn't necessarily mean that being exploited in such a manner was somehow deserved.
Being scammed by a con artist usually involves a bunch of voluntary steps, too. I don't think that a society where that kind of predatory behavior was unregulated would be a very pleasant one to live in.
(2) seems patently stupid to me. If you have to admit to a misdemeanor that carries a minor fine to to win, say, the cost of some massive medical bills, it seems like a no-brainer to admit that you didn't have insurance.
No doubt. But this definition of conservatism is orthogonal to conservatism as it is practiced as a political ideology in the United States.
That skeptoid article is interesting, but the lack of references means that it just adds to the confusion.
Makes sense to me. Of course, keeping unions from being able to dictate to the employers that workers must be in the union is tricky to do without government regulation, which of course the Libertarians would disdain. The only recourse employers might have otherwise would just be to take their capital and go elsewhere, or stage a lockout.
It all ends up being a great big game of chicken. The only reason that the UAW and the Teamsters have the power they do is that the employers flinched first.