News alert... The wealthy in the US already pay a lot of income taxes as the system is highly progressive. Looking at 2005 personal income tax statistics (the last year I pulled numbers for although I believe the IRS recently released newer numbers), 39% of the total personal income taxes came from top 1% (by count, not by total income) of the tax returns and 60% of the total personal income tax comes from the top 5% of the tax returns while only 3% of the income tax revenue comes from the bottom 50% of the returns (yep, that's right, basically, the bottom 50% of the returns result in virtually no income tax revenue).
This is correct, but you are missing something very important, the truly wealthy don't have a significant income. Yes, the highest earners pay the bulk of income tax, but Warren Buffet and Bill Gates earn very little "income". Most of their money comes from other sources.
The truly wealthy like income tax because most of their money comes from things that are not subject to income tax. It is the same with the "death" tax, the truly wealthy do not pay it. Their money is in trust funds and other vehicles that shields it from most forms of taxation.
1. What form of electronic voting could not be compromised?
2. What form of paper voting could not be compromised?
It may be that we must accept that no form of voting is "secure" in the sense of cannot be gamed.
At least, people have been gaming votes for as long as democracy has existed, so I don't know if they're going to stop just because we make it slightly less convenient.
They aren't going to stop because we make it less convenient, but why should we make it more convenient?
Every form of electronic voting I have seen makes it easier and more convenient to commit massive election fraud and easier and more convenient to hide such fraud. Actually, I can't think of any "voting reform" that has occurred in my life that doesn't make election fraud easier and more convenient.
I really hope a politician of some sort with some tech savvy (mod funny lol) gets a hold of this and realizes that opensource is the way to go for voting machines.
With open source, diebold (or whomever) is still making money because someone needs to build the machines, and someone needs to manage the opensource project, but all those who are concerned about the integrety of the vote who can understand the programming language being used can contribute and find/fix exploits like this.
And everyone else will just have to take their word that it is OK.
Oh yeah, how will those people know that the "open source" code they contributed to is actually the code running on any voting machine other than the one nearest them (or even on that one)?
So what happens when you cross the border from Finland into Norway or Sweden? How much additional does it cost to make a cell phone call?
Or a more relevant to most U.S. geography, what happens when a Belgian cell phone user crosses in the Netherlands or France? When I do the equivalent (New York to New Jersey or Connecticut)here, it has absolutely no effect on my cell phone bill.
. You want to make it progressive, you make the sales (or VAT) rate proportional to total price, so you pay more tax on more expensive things.
That will never happen, because unlike income tax the truly wealthy will actually be expected to pay VAT (probably one of the reasons that it has never gotten serious traction up until now).
I believe that you are overstating the degree of uniformity between the "Democratic" and "Republican" parties. However, I think there is significant merit in your idea of eliminating the involvement of political parties in voter registration.
I had never before noticed the connection between party politics and what I consider to be the largest flaw in current U.S. politics: the overemphasis on addressing problems at the highest level of government rather than at the lowest possible level of government. Party politics exacerbates this because the farther up the level of government a problem is addressed the more control the party machinery has over the nature of the "solution".
T. Sure, they make shiny products (that don't last), but the pervasive attitude is that they seem to think their customers are mind-blowingly stupid.
THEIR customers are.
And for nschubach, if Lenovo is starting down this path, then they will soon get the same hate that Sony does. Sony catches the flack for this sort of stuff before other companies because they have done this sort of thing repeatedly over the years. This doesn't let other companies off the hook, it just means that people aren't watching them as closely.
So thank you for pointing out that Lenovo is engaging in the same sort of behavior. They will now move up my list of companies to be very cautious about doing business with. Sony long ago got to the point where if any other manufacturer is still on the list after I have gotten done with the initial price/performance sort I don't buy Sony.
Various states have existed in the past, and only very few of them made any technological advance at all (e.g. the Jews failed to introduce any large technological advances in the (many) years Jewish tribes dominated Europe
You make some very good points, except for this one that makes absolutely no sense. Jewish tribes NEVER dominated Europe (or really any place). The Jews were a minor religio-ethnic group in the Fertile Crescent that were in between various world powers. Their position on the frontier between competing civilizations allowed them to develop somewhat independently of any of them without allowing them to ever become dominant.
The difference is that Krugman changes his recommendations based on the political party of the politician backing the economic policies. There were economic policies that he supported when the Clinton Administration proposed them and opposed when the Bush Administration proposed them. If he had said that he used to support such policies but now realized that they were wrong, it would have been one thing, but he instead wrote as if he had always opposed such policies and only an idiot would support them.
Very few states (if any) actually allow companies to decline liability via a standard contract. In all of the states I have even a passing familiarity with the law, the best that they can actually do is force you to pursue your dispute through arbitration before you go to court.
Right, cloud computing is client/server where someone else owns the server and only charges you for how much server time you use. The problem with the "You pay for the computing you need, and what you aren't using would be assigned to other cloud customers" is that if you track the computing needs of most businesses, they all tend to follow similar patterns of need for computing power. That is, when Business A needs more computing power is often the same time that Business B needs more computing power.
I don't know of any gas stations near me where you can recharge an electric car. I'm not sure about the motel or caravan park, but I'm pretty sure they would only let me recharge my electric car if I am a customer, which does me absolutely no good if I am on a day trip (I put over 200 miles on my car in one day several times a year).
If Tesla continues to make and sell cars this will gradually change, but right now I could not replace my gasoline powered car with an all electric vehicle. There are people this is not a problem for, which is why Tesla has made a profit. The point I made originally was that if Tesla stops making cars in the next five years it will be a major set back for the advancement of all electric vehicles as a potential replacement for conventional fuel vehicles.
That is because you replied to my reply to someone's reply to my original post (it may be one or two more replies down than that). My original post was about the fact that I believe that Tesla will indeed be in the business of manufacturing cars 3 years from now and if they aren't then probably no one will be. You are not alone. It seems that people think that posts on slashdot are independent of each other and can be understood without paying attention to the context in which they are posted.
You fail at math. My car has approximately 300 mile range. That means if I go more than 150 miles from home, I MUST refuel in order to make it home. That means that if my car only has a range of 200 miles my limit is 100 miles. 100 miles is about an hour and a half. I make trips like that in one day several times a year.
Exactly how would you make a 300 mile trip? By car a 300 mile trip takes less than 5 hours. As a general rule, I consider anything less than 1000 miles to be a car trip. The time saving does not compensate for the additional cost and hassle of flying until the distance is greater than that (1000 miles).
Where can I plug in my electric car to recharge it today? AS more people buy electric cars, more places will spring up where you can plug it in to charge it. But the only way that enough people will buy electric cars to make it practical to have places to charge them is if someone makes cars and markets them the way Tesla does. The major car manufacturers would not be successful marketing electric cars to the people that Tesla is selling to. If Tesla stops manufacturing cars in the next 5 years, not enough people will have electric cars to sustain the growth of the market.
How does a company that makes $1,000,000 in profit over 1 full year, get 465 Million dollars in loans from our government?? How will they pay that back in a reasonable time?
Hey, they have a better shot at it than Chrysler or Government Motors. Tesla at least made a profit last year. The other two have been losing money every year for multiple years now.
Key words "currently planning", as in they haven't done it YET. Which is the heart of my argument. If Tesla stops making electric cars in the next five years the odds of there being enough people with electric cars to make charging stations close enough to ubiquitous for electrical cars to be practical goes way down.
Does no one on slashdot have any reading comprehension skills? I at no point argued that the current lack of charging stations was an insurmountable barrier. My argument was that the strategy that Tesla is using to sell electric cars is the best I have seen for getting us from where we are to the stalled infrastructure that makes electric cars practical.
I, also, think that government charging stations are probably a mistake. They will most likely be in the wrong place and will make it harder for someone to start a successful business by putting in their own.
So where are these people set up to sell me electric to recharge my car?
I didn't say that new technology was needed. I said that the infrastructure needed to be installed. Can you tell me where, TODAY, I can plug in my electric car and recharge it while on the road? On the East Coast of the U.S.?
Until those facilities exist, the average person is not going to buy an electric car. As more early adopters and other special characters (who are the target demographic of Tesla) buy electric cars, more places will be set up to sell them electric to recharge their cars. As more places are set up to sell electric to recharge electric cars, the demographic who will buy electric cars will expand.
Tesla's target demographic is significantly less likely to buy an electric car from any of the established car companies.
Of course they will, BUT THEY HAVEN"T DONE IT YET. That is what I meant by the infrastructure needing to be installed. You really need to work on your reading comprehension.
I was responding to someone who said that Tesla was not going to be making cars in 3 years. I believe that if Tesla is not making cars in 5 years, the advent of the electric car will be indefinitely delayed.
The type of people buying Tesla's are the type of people that it is cost effective for companies to take a loss on charging stations in order to get their business. This will allow charging stations to become common enough that other people will buy electric cars and eventually enough people will have electric cars that charging stations will be common (this assumes that recharge times will come down far enough to make recharging "on the fly" practical).
The type of people who buy cars from Tesla, would be less likely to buy the exact same car from Ford or Toyota or BMW.
"Cloud" computing is just another way of saying client/server, except that "cloud" computing usually means that the Internet is involved somehow.
Then I was doing "cloud computing" in the '80s. Oh, hmmm, maybe I was doing "cloud computing" in 1972. Oh, it wasn't "the internet", it was a TDM multiplexed line between Sydney and Minneapolis.
Slashdot Mirror
News alert... The wealthy in the US already pay a lot of income taxes as the system is highly progressive. Looking at 2005 personal income tax statistics (the last year I pulled numbers for although I believe the IRS recently released newer numbers), 39% of the total personal income taxes came from top 1% (by count, not by total income) of the tax returns and 60% of the total personal income tax comes from the top 5% of the tax returns while only 3% of the income tax revenue comes from the bottom 50% of the returns (yep, that's right, basically, the bottom 50% of the returns result in virtually no income tax revenue).
This is correct, but you are missing something very important, the truly wealthy don't have a significant income. Yes, the highest earners pay the bulk of income tax, but Warren Buffet and Bill Gates earn very little "income". Most of their money comes from other sources.
The truly wealthy like income tax because most of their money comes from things that are not subject to income tax. It is the same with the "death" tax, the truly wealthy do not pay it. Their money is in trust funds and other vehicles that shields it from most forms of taxation.
1. What form of electronic voting could not be compromised? 2. What form of paper voting could not be compromised?
It may be that we must accept that no form of voting is "secure" in the sense of cannot be gamed.
At least, people have been gaming votes for as long as democracy has existed, so I don't know if they're going to stop just because we make it slightly less convenient.
They aren't going to stop because we make it less convenient, but why should we make it more convenient?
Every form of electronic voting I have seen makes it easier and more convenient to commit massive election fraud and easier and more convenient to hide such fraud. Actually, I can't think of any "voting reform" that has occurred in my life that doesn't make election fraud easier and more convenient.
I really hope a politician of some sort with some tech savvy (mod funny lol) gets a hold of this and realizes that opensource is the way to go for voting machines. With open source, diebold (or whomever) is still making money because someone needs to build the machines, and someone needs to manage the opensource project, but all those who are concerned about the integrety of the vote who can understand the programming language being used can contribute and find/fix exploits like this.
And everyone else will just have to take their word that it is OK.
Oh yeah, how will those people know that the "open source" code they contributed to is actually the code running on any voting machine other than the one nearest them (or even on that one)?
So what happens when you cross the border from Finland into Norway or Sweden? How much additional does it cost to make a cell phone call?
Or a more relevant to most U.S. geography, what happens when a Belgian cell phone user crosses in the Netherlands or France? When I do the equivalent (New York to New Jersey or Connecticut)here, it has absolutely no effect on my cell phone bill.
. You want to make it progressive, you make the sales (or VAT) rate proportional to total price, so you pay more tax on more expensive things.
That will never happen, because unlike income tax the truly wealthy will actually be expected to pay VAT (probably one of the reasons that it has never gotten serious traction up until now).
So, healthcare falls where in there? How about education?
I believe that you are overstating the degree of uniformity between the "Democratic" and "Republican" parties. However, I think there is significant merit in your idea of eliminating the involvement of political parties in voter registration.
I had never before noticed the connection between party politics and what I consider to be the largest flaw in current U.S. politics: the overemphasis on addressing problems at the highest level of government rather than at the lowest possible level of government. Party politics exacerbates this because the farther up the level of government a problem is addressed the more control the party machinery has over the nature of the "solution".
T. Sure, they make shiny products (that don't last), but the pervasive attitude is that they seem to think their customers are mind-blowingly stupid.
THEIR customers are.
And for nschubach, if Lenovo is starting down this path, then they will soon get the same hate that Sony does. Sony catches the flack for this sort of stuff before other companies because they have done this sort of thing repeatedly over the years. This doesn't let other companies off the hook, it just means that people aren't watching them as closely.
So thank you for pointing out that Lenovo is engaging in the same sort of behavior. They will now move up my list of companies to be very cautious about doing business with. Sony long ago got to the point where if any other manufacturer is still on the list after I have gotten done with the initial price/performance sort I don't buy Sony.
Various states have existed in the past, and only very few of them made any technological advance at all (e.g. the Jews failed to introduce any large technological advances in the (many) years Jewish tribes dominated Europe
You make some very good points, except for this one that makes absolutely no sense. Jewish tribes NEVER dominated Europe (or really any place). The Jews were a minor religio-ethnic group in the Fertile Crescent that were in between various world powers. Their position on the frontier between competing civilizations allowed them to develop somewhat independently of any of them without allowing them to ever become dominant.
The difference is that Krugman changes his recommendations based on the political party of the politician backing the economic policies. There were economic policies that he supported when the Clinton Administration proposed them and opposed when the Bush Administration proposed them. If he had said that he used to support such policies but now realized that they were wrong, it would have been one thing, but he instead wrote as if he had always opposed such policies and only an idiot would support them.
Or you can go into business for yourself if you prefer.
Very few states (if any) actually allow companies to decline liability via a standard contract. In all of the states I have even a passing familiarity with the law, the best that they can actually do is force you to pursue your dispute through arbitration before you go to court.
If you've ever owned a cat, you know that they are most decidedly authoritarian; namely, they are the self-appointed dictator-for-life of your home.
That's what he said, "...cats are clearly democrats."
I expect the Volt to be as well built as an MG from the 1970's.
Right, cloud computing is client/server where someone else owns the server and only charges you for how much server time you use. The problem with the "You pay for the computing you need, and what you aren't using would be assigned to other cloud customers" is that if you track the computing needs of most businesses, they all tend to follow similar patterns of need for computing power. That is, when Business A needs more computing power is often the same time that Business B needs more computing power.
Tow a trailer for a one day trip? (Most of my vacation trips are one day trips spread throughout the year).
I don't know of any gas stations near me where you can recharge an electric car. I'm not sure about the motel or caravan park, but I'm pretty sure they would only let me recharge my electric car if I am a customer, which does me absolutely no good if I am on a day trip (I put over 200 miles on my car in one day several times a year).
If Tesla continues to make and sell cars this will gradually change, but right now I could not replace my gasoline powered car with an all electric vehicle. There are people this is not a problem for, which is why Tesla has made a profit. The point I made originally was that if Tesla stops making cars in the next five years it will be a major set back for the advancement of all electric vehicles as a potential replacement for conventional fuel vehicles.
That is because you replied to my reply to someone's reply to my original post (it may be one or two more replies down than that). My original post was about the fact that I believe that Tesla will indeed be in the business of manufacturing cars 3 years from now and if they aren't then probably no one will be. You are not alone. It seems that people think that posts on slashdot are independent of each other and can be understood without paying attention to the context in which they are posted.
You fail at math. My car has approximately 300 mile range. That means if I go more than 150 miles from home, I MUST refuel in order to make it home. That means that if my car only has a range of 200 miles my limit is 100 miles. 100 miles is about an hour and a half. I make trips like that in one day several times a year.
Exactly how would you make a 300 mile trip? By car a 300 mile trip takes less than 5 hours. As a general rule, I consider anything less than 1000 miles to be a car trip. The time saving does not compensate for the additional cost and hassle of flying until the distance is greater than that (1000 miles).
Where can I plug in my electric car to recharge it today? AS more people buy electric cars, more places will spring up where you can plug it in to charge it. But the only way that enough people will buy electric cars to make it practical to have places to charge them is if someone makes cars and markets them the way Tesla does. The major car manufacturers would not be successful marketing electric cars to the people that Tesla is selling to. If Tesla stops manufacturing cars in the next 5 years, not enough people will have electric cars to sustain the growth of the market.
How does a company that makes $1,000,000 in profit over 1 full year, get 465 Million dollars in loans from our government?? How will they pay that back in a reasonable time?
Hey, they have a better shot at it than Chrysler or Government Motors. Tesla at least made a profit last year. The other two have been losing money every year for multiple years now.
Key words "currently planning", as in they haven't done it YET. Which is the heart of my argument. If Tesla stops making electric cars in the next five years the odds of there being enough people with electric cars to make charging stations close enough to ubiquitous for electrical cars to be practical goes way down.
Does no one on slashdot have any reading comprehension skills? I at no point argued that the current lack of charging stations was an insurmountable barrier. My argument was that the strategy that Tesla is using to sell electric cars is the best I have seen for getting us from where we are to the stalled infrastructure that makes electric cars practical.
I, also, think that government charging stations are probably a mistake. They will most likely be in the wrong place and will make it harder for someone to start a successful business by putting in their own.
So where are these people set up to sell me electric to recharge my car?
I didn't say that new technology was needed. I said that the infrastructure needed to be installed. Can you tell me where, TODAY, I can plug in my electric car and recharge it while on the road? On the East Coast of the U.S.?
Until those facilities exist, the average person is not going to buy an electric car. As more early adopters and other special characters (who are the target demographic of Tesla) buy electric cars, more places will be set up to sell them electric to recharge their cars. As more places are set up to sell electric to recharge electric cars, the demographic who will buy electric cars will expand.
Tesla's target demographic is significantly less likely to buy an electric car from any of the established car companies.
Of course they will, BUT THEY HAVEN"T DONE IT YET. That is what I meant by the infrastructure needing to be installed. You really need to work on your reading comprehension.
I was responding to someone who said that Tesla was not going to be making cars in 3 years. I believe that if Tesla is not making cars in 5 years, the advent of the electric car will be indefinitely delayed.
The type of people buying Tesla's are the type of people that it is cost effective for companies to take a loss on charging stations in order to get their business. This will allow charging stations to become common enough that other people will buy electric cars and eventually enough people will have electric cars that charging stations will be common (this assumes that recharge times will come down far enough to make recharging "on the fly" practical).
The type of people who buy cars from Tesla, would be less likely to buy the exact same car from Ford or Toyota or BMW.
"Cloud" computing is just another way of saying client/server, except that "cloud" computing usually means that the Internet is involved somehow.
Then I was doing "cloud computing" in the '80s. Oh, hmmm, maybe I was doing "cloud computing" in 1972. Oh, it wasn't "the internet", it was a TDM multiplexed line between Sydney and Minneapolis.
Yes, you were.