There are even additional hassles. I'm no longer a Maryland resident, but I'd probably have to file a non-resident income tax form at the end of the year just to pay this tax.
Previous experience shows that when you file such forms, the state of Maryland tries to tax your entire income for the year, not just the income you earned in Maryland. Simply submitting the form opens you up to all sorts of legal hassles and inquiries from an extremely incompetent government agency. When I lived there, I had such a problem with one of my tax forms that took over a year to correct.
A full grown human is "literally a mass of cells." You have to draw the line somewhere when you define what is human life and what isn't. Where you draw it and remain ethical isn't as clear cut as you seem to believe.
The only cogent logical argument for definition of life other than "life begins at conception" that I've heard is that the definition of life should be the opposite of the definition of death as it is currently defined. No heartbeat, brain waves, etc. In other words, when you can't medically define a mass of cells that will eventually develop into a human as "dead," then it's a human life.
If there's any other logical definition, please let me know. Otherwise, the definition of what is human life really is just an emotional plea to support whatever you want to advocate. But "it doesn't even look like a baby!" isn't a rock-solid basis on which to form an ethical argument.
And certainly the potential of the mass of cells has to be considered. If you were in a coma on life-support with little or no brain function, but we were 99% certain that in nine months you'd recover completely, could you justify pulling the plug on the machines keeping you alive?
If not, how do you ethically justify doing the same thing to that mass of cells?
It's funny you mention that, I read recently that the 70-74 age group has the highest average wealth of any group in the country.
That's wealth, not taxable income or earned income, which aren't a really accurate measure of the wealth of a retired person. You'll always hear those inaccurate numbers quoted to make it seem like old folks are destitute, however, which justifies massive government spending to buy their extremely reliable votes.
While I'm sure that there are poor old people, on average, they're better off than most, since they own their homes, cars, and have some amount of income from retirement accounts and social security.
Admittedly I haven't been keeping up with recent Maryland history, as further research indicates they had a budget surplus of $1.3 billion last year. I'm assuming that didn't go to paying off the overall state debt, as they're facing just as huge a shortfall this year.
Reading more into it, apparently their large surplus was from the booming real-estate bubble. This matches my experience, making a huge profit on the house I bought there before selling at the peak of the market.
Interestingly, the housing bubble was fueled by massive speculation and ridiculous lending practices, hurting a lot of poor people. Where did this surplus money come from? Well, ultimately, from the Fed which will continue to bail out mortgage lenders. See that dollar's value plummet? Add that to the hidden taxes imposed on every citizen of the country, including those in Maryland who are probably struggling to remain solvent in the disastrous housing market.
So how rich a state is Maryland really? Were it not for a constant, massive infusion of federal dollars, the state would collapse, starting with Baltimore. Who pays for massive infusion of federal money? The rest of the country.
Maybe it will continue, maybe it won't. A good long term plan would include measure to make the state of Maryland self-sufficient, but this isn't politically advantageous there. Kind of like the U.S. as a whole.
This whole house of cards will come crashing down, hopefully not as quickly and as soon as it should.
My wife has a Sony e-book reader and prefers it over paper books because she doesn't have to hold it open (bending the spine of the book) as she reads. With small paperback books this can be a pain as they're usually tightly bound and don't hold themselves open. With larger books holding the book with one hand can be tiring. You also don't have to keep moving your fingers out of the way of the text.
Another plus is the ability to enlarge and shrink the font on the e-book, which can enhance readability.
So, she likes curling up on the couch with the e-book much better.
We initially bought it because it's a great way to go through all of the books on Project Gutenberg, so the reader will easily pay for itself over its lifetime. Yeah, yeah, I know the books are free from the library, but you do have to get to the library to get them.
"The state of Maryland will lose the tax it used to receive from the work I did there."
Sorry to reply to my own post, but this requires clarification. Simply being in Maryland and doing work meant that I'd be paying other taxes -- eating, buying supplies, etc. There was no direct sales tax on the work I did.
Good or bad depends on who you are. What's meaningful to discuss are the effects of this tax. Maryland IT in general is now 6% less productive, overnight.
This will factor into the "cost of doing business." Some number of employers who would have paid for services before will now either do without or look somewhere else where they don't pay the 6% penalty, ultimately they'll do without the productivity boost they previously would have had.
Those are the facts, it's simple supply and demand. What can be argued is that this money will be better off in hands of the Maryland government than being used to make Maryland business more productive. That's a judgement call. You can also argue that the higher tax will drive business out of Maryland and essentially provide little to no (or even a negative) revenue boost.
I used to do web development as a side job in Maryland for a few small businesses. They could pay very little, so I'd do for them what they could afford, and they were fairly happy with what I could provide. I was happy enough with what they could pay.
A 6% sales tax means that it's no longer worth it for me to do any work in Maryland. The companies I provided services to will be hard pressed to find someone who will work as cheaply as I did, so they'll likely keep going with what they've got, hoping it doesn't break substantially. The state of Maryland will lose the tax it used to receive from the work I did there.
While my individual contribution is a drop in the bucket, I'm sure this particular circumstance will repeat itself many times.
Having lived and owned a home for nearly ten years in Maryland, one of the most taxed states in the nation, this doesn't surprise me in the least.
It's one more reason for those heavily dependent on government services to flock to and continue to live in the state, and those who are actually productive to leave. And it's a downward spiral, they'll kill their small businesses and find new things to tax when they can't balance the budget for the umpteenth year in a row.
But the people of Maryland will keep voting the same bozos into office that will continue this spiral. Watching the election ads there was hilarious -- they catered to imbeciles like I've never seen -- and it worked.
Hell, it's a microcosm for our entire stinking, failing republic-turned-democracy.
You're probably operating under the mistaken assumption that anything those people say is what they actually think, and not just what plays well to an audience.
The author of the paper is claiming that E8 contains the Standard Model (SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)), plus the symmetries belonging to gravity. / /O\ O --- --- | | / \ / \
________________
When I look at you, you make the patterns in the floor tiles vanish. / /O\ O --- --- | \| / \ / \
"The disposable income is even more skewed. 90% of all the disposable income in the country is in the hands of 10% of the people."
Isn't that kind of a useless statistic? If disposable income is what you have left over after you pay for the basic necessities to not die, isn't it obvious that rich people are going to have most of the disposable income?
And that's not to say that the other 90% of the people can't afford DVD's or cable. You're using percentages when absolute numbers are required.
And broadcasters are not going after the rich 10%, or you'd see a lot more ads for caviar and yachts, and the guy with the green question mark jacket that shows you how to get free money from the government wouldn't be screaming at you from in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he'd be whispering to you from his lobbying company dressed in a Ralph Lauren question mark sweater.
I'd posit that Microsoft is more like Garfield, Cathy, or Family Circus. They're all there on the comics page, sometimes called the "funny papers," so week after week, you expect them to be at least mildly funny.
And yet, they never are. Not only that, but they're pitifully unfunny in the exact same way every week, and it's almost impossible not to read them in the vain hope the authors got a sense of humor, especially since they're practically FORCED down your throat by virtue of them appearing on the comic page by default.
I'd compare The Far Side to FreeBSD, Calvin and Hobbes to Linux, and those "dramatic" cartoons that are about romance and supposed to be artsy to the Mac, but we're already stretching the analogy too far.
"Of course, when I've mentioned this to some of the people out there, they're terrified of the "warning, voltage" and "warranty void if removed" stickers plastered all over their stuff."
Those warnings actually mean something when it comes to CRT's and some amplifiers. Please don't tell your mom to open up her TV and fiddle with the capacitors inside.
Unless she sucks and has good life insurance, and you're an only child. Then tell her to have at it.
While I'm not positive this is the case, I'd bet it's more profitable to sell you a replacement cord that costs 10 cents to produce and sells for a couple of bucks than it is to sell you a $10 iron.
But then you open yourself up to a barrage of lawsuits when people try to replace the cord on their iron without unplugging it first, replace it incorrectly, etc. Not to mention that it's not fashionable to be competent enough to be able to fix things, and a new iron is so cheap that it's hardly worth anyone's time to do so to save the six bucks, so people able to fix these are less inclined to do so, so that replacement cord taking up space on the shelves costs stores money.
The good news is that you can find discarded stuff that you can easily fix without too much trouble if you're so inclined, and that landfill space is not in short supply. In the event that landfill space should become in short supply, you'd see disposal costs rise through the roof, and everyone would fix everything again.
Oh no this just isn't happening! Hardware is so cheap and replaceable now that we're all going to be paying for software that comes with its own FREE hardware in just a few years! Welcome to our brave new electronic commodity frontier!
This brings up an interesting point -- what defines an environmentalist?
A lot of people are Bambi environmentalists. Everything in nature is good, stable, and peaceful, until Man comes into the forest and ruins everything. It's ridiculous but gains a lot of traction in places so far removed from nature that they glorify it. That's what we're seeing here with this moon guy. The moon in the natural state is perfect, and all we can do as Man is wreck its perfect state.
It's too bad these people are called environmentalists along with people who realize that there is a cause and effect, there is no perfect natural state, and man is a part of environment every bit as much as trees are.
My third party observation is that 99% girls will look at the comfortable and stable guys, wonder why THEY can't find a guy like that, and then hop in the M3 with the asshole.
Confucius say, a small dick is still better than an unused one.
Yeah, Girls Town has to be one of the best episodes ever, and that was a Mike one. He had a number of my favorites. I think Joel had a certain drugged-out-genius quality that made him funnier on average, but the bigger reason most of the later episodes don't stack up because Trace left and Mary Jo Pehl was annoying as hell.
Trace did the best Crow, I thought the show deteriorated after he left. I've heard the very last few seasons were great, but I had stopped watching by then.
Slashdot Mirror
There are even additional hassles. I'm no longer a Maryland resident, but I'd probably have to file a non-resident income tax form at the end of the year just to pay this tax.
Previous experience shows that when you file such forms, the state of Maryland tries to tax your entire income for the year, not just the income you earned in Maryland. Simply submitting the form opens you up to all sorts of legal hassles and inquiries from an extremely incompetent government agency. When I lived there, I had such a problem with one of my tax forms that took over a year to correct.
No thanks.
A full grown human is "literally a mass of cells." You have to draw the line somewhere when you define what is human life and what isn't. Where you draw it and remain ethical isn't as clear cut as you seem to believe.
The only cogent logical argument for definition of life other than "life begins at conception" that I've heard is that the definition of life should be the opposite of the definition of death as it is currently defined. No heartbeat, brain waves, etc. In other words, when you can't medically define a mass of cells that will eventually develop into a human as "dead," then it's a human life.
If there's any other logical definition, please let me know. Otherwise, the definition of what is human life really is just an emotional plea to support whatever you want to advocate. But "it doesn't even look like a baby!" isn't a rock-solid basis on which to form an ethical argument.
And certainly the potential of the mass of cells has to be considered. If you were in a coma on life-support with little or no brain function, but we were 99% certain that in nine months you'd recover completely, could you justify pulling the plug on the machines keeping you alive?
If not, how do you ethically justify doing the same thing to that mass of cells?
It's funny you mention that, I read recently that the 70-74 age group has the highest average wealth of any group in the country.
That's wealth, not taxable income or earned income, which aren't a really accurate measure of the wealth of a retired person. You'll always hear those inaccurate numbers quoted to make it seem like old folks are destitute, however, which justifies massive government spending to buy their extremely reliable votes.
You can read more about it here:
Thomas Sowell income confusion article.
While I'm sure that there are poor old people, on average, they're better off than most, since they own their homes, cars, and have some amount of income from retirement accounts and social security.
Admittedly I haven't been keeping up with recent Maryland history, as further research indicates they had a budget surplus of $1.3 billion last year. I'm assuming that didn't go to paying off the overall state debt, as they're facing just as huge a shortfall this year.
Reading more into it, apparently their large surplus was from the booming real-estate bubble. This matches my experience, making a huge profit on the house I bought there before selling at the peak of the market.
Interestingly, the housing bubble was fueled by massive speculation and ridiculous lending practices, hurting a lot of poor people. Where did this surplus money come from? Well, ultimately, from the Fed which will continue to bail out mortgage lenders. See that dollar's value plummet? Add that to the hidden taxes imposed on every citizen of the country, including those in Maryland who are probably struggling to remain solvent in the disastrous housing market.
So how rich a state is Maryland really? Were it not for a constant, massive infusion of federal dollars, the state would collapse, starting with Baltimore. Who pays for massive infusion of federal money? The rest of the country.
Maybe it will continue, maybe it won't. A good long term plan would include measure to make the state of Maryland self-sufficient, but this isn't politically advantageous there. Kind of like the U.S. as a whole.
This whole house of cards will come crashing down, hopefully not as quickly and as soon as it should.
My wife has a Sony e-book reader and prefers it over paper books because she doesn't have to hold it open (bending the spine of the book) as she reads. With small paperback books this can be a pain as they're usually tightly bound and don't hold themselves open. With larger books holding the book with one hand can be tiring. You also don't have to keep moving your fingers out of the way of the text.
Another plus is the ability to enlarge and shrink the font on the e-book, which can enhance readability.
So, she likes curling up on the couch with the e-book much better.
We initially bought it because it's a great way to go through all of the books on Project Gutenberg, so the reader will easily pay for itself over its lifetime. Yeah, yeah, I know the books are free from the library, but you do have to get to the library to get them.
"The state of Maryland will lose the tax it used to receive from the work I did there."
Sorry to reply to my own post, but this requires clarification. Simply being in Maryland and doing work meant that I'd be paying other taxes -- eating, buying supplies, etc. There was no direct sales tax on the work I did.
Good or bad depends on who you are. What's meaningful to discuss are the effects of this tax. Maryland IT in general is now 6% less productive, overnight.
This will factor into the "cost of doing business." Some number of employers who would have paid for services before will now either do without or look somewhere else where they don't pay the 6% penalty, ultimately they'll do without the productivity boost they previously would have had.
Those are the facts, it's simple supply and demand. What can be argued is that this money will be better off in hands of the Maryland government than being used to make Maryland business more productive. That's a judgement call. You can also argue that the higher tax will drive business out of Maryland and essentially provide little to no (or even a negative) revenue boost.
I used to do web development as a side job in Maryland for a few small businesses. They could pay very little, so I'd do for them what they could afford, and they were fairly happy with what I could provide. I was happy enough with what they could pay.
A 6% sales tax means that it's no longer worth it for me to do any work in Maryland. The companies I provided services to will be hard pressed to find someone who will work as cheaply as I did, so they'll likely keep going with what they've got, hoping it doesn't break substantially. The state of Maryland will lose the tax it used to receive from the work I did there.
While my individual contribution is a drop in the bucket, I'm sure this particular circumstance will repeat itself many times.
Having lived and owned a home for nearly ten years in Maryland, one of the most taxed states in the nation, this doesn't surprise me in the least.
It's one more reason for those heavily dependent on government services to flock to and continue to live in the state, and those who are actually productive to leave. And it's a downward spiral, they'll kill their small businesses and find new things to tax when they can't balance the budget for the umpteenth year in a row.
But the people of Maryland will keep voting the same bozos into office that will continue this spiral. Watching the election ads there was hilarious -- they catered to imbeciles like I've never seen -- and it worked.
Hell, it's a microcosm for our entire stinking, failing republic-turned-democracy.
Man, I'm bitter. But who wouldn't be?
You're probably operating under the mistaken assumption that anything those people say is what they actually think, and not just what plays well to an audience.
Don't count on any help there. BadAnalogyGuy is like a leftover acorn in the summer, long after the bears have woken from hibernation.
Damn slashdot formatting. Pretend that the bodies of the stick figures are shifted over to the left 1em.
Since you asked:
/O\ O
/O\ O
The author of the paper is claiming
that E8 contains the Standard Model (SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)),
plus the symmetries belonging to gravity.
/
--- ---
| |
/ \ / \
________________
When I look at you, you make the
patterns in the floor tiles
vanish.
/
--- ---
| \|
/ \ / \
"The disposable income is even more skewed. 90% of all the disposable income in the country is in the hands of 10% of the people."
Isn't that kind of a useless statistic? If disposable income is what you have left over after you pay for the basic necessities to not die, isn't it obvious that rich people are going to have most of the disposable income?
And that's not to say that the other 90% of the people can't afford DVD's or cable. You're using percentages when absolute numbers are required.
And broadcasters are not going after the rich 10%, or you'd see a lot more ads for caviar and yachts, and the guy with the green question mark jacket that shows you how to get free money from the government wouldn't be screaming at you from in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he'd be whispering to you from his lobbying company dressed in a Ralph Lauren question mark sweater.
I think that's an imperfect analogy.
I'd posit that Microsoft is more like Garfield, Cathy, or Family Circus. They're all there on the comics page, sometimes called the "funny papers," so week after week, you expect them to be at least mildly funny.
And yet, they never are. Not only that, but they're pitifully unfunny in the exact same way every week, and it's almost impossible not to read them in the vain hope the authors got a sense of humor, especially since they're practically FORCED down your throat by virtue of them appearing on the comic page by default.
I'd compare The Far Side to FreeBSD, Calvin and Hobbes to Linux, and those "dramatic" cartoons that are about romance and supposed to be artsy to the Mac, but we're already stretching the analogy too far.
It just struck me how shocking the Lewinsky scandal news must have been to native speakers of Asian languages.
It's not only slave labor, but automation. You can make thousands of copies of an item in the time it would take a human to diagnose and repair one.
"But hey, the picture makes it all worthwhile, right?"
YES!
"Of course, when I've mentioned this to some of the people out there, they're terrified of the "warning, voltage" and "warranty void if removed" stickers plastered all over their stuff."
Those warnings actually mean something when it comes to CRT's and some amplifiers. Please don't tell your mom to open up her TV and fiddle with the capacitors inside.
Unless she sucks and has good life insurance, and you're an only child. Then tell her to have at it.
While I'm not positive this is the case, I'd bet it's more profitable to sell you a replacement cord that costs 10 cents to produce and sells for a couple of bucks than it is to sell you a $10 iron.
But then you open yourself up to a barrage of lawsuits when people try to replace the cord on their iron without unplugging it first, replace it incorrectly, etc. Not to mention that it's not fashionable to be competent enough to be able to fix things, and a new iron is so cheap that it's hardly worth anyone's time to do so to save the six bucks, so people able to fix these are less inclined to do so, so that replacement cord taking up space on the shelves costs stores money.
The good news is that you can find discarded stuff that you can easily fix without too much trouble if you're so inclined, and that landfill space is not in short supply. In the event that landfill space should become in short supply, you'd see disposal costs rise through the roof, and everyone would fix everything again.
How cool is that?
LA LA LA *fingers in the ears*
Oh no this just isn't happening! Hardware is so cheap and replaceable now that we're all going to be paying for software that comes with its own FREE hardware in just a few years! Welcome to our brave new electronic commodity frontier!
This brings up an interesting point -- what defines an environmentalist?
A lot of people are Bambi environmentalists. Everything in nature is good, stable, and peaceful, until Man comes into the forest and ruins everything. It's ridiculous but gains a lot of traction in places so far removed from nature that they glorify it. That's what we're seeing here with this moon guy. The moon in the natural state is perfect, and all we can do as Man is wreck its perfect state.
It's too bad these people are called environmentalists along with people who realize that there is a cause and effect, there is no perfect natural state, and man is a part of environment every bit as much as trees are.
You're over-analyzing everything. All I was trying to say is that you can't take what women say about men's penises at face value.
Your treatise on the ups and downs of dating with multiple personality disorder was a fun read, however.
It's not innovative because you can do the same thing with an Atari 2600.
My third party observation is that 99% girls will look at the comfortable and stable guys, wonder why THEY can't find a guy like that, and then hop in the M3 with the asshole.
Confucius say, a small dick is still better than an unused one.
Yeah, Girls Town has to be one of the best episodes ever, and that was a Mike one. He had a number of my favorites. I think Joel had a certain drugged-out-genius quality that made him funnier on average, but the bigger reason most of the later episodes don't stack up because Trace left and Mary Jo Pehl was annoying as hell.
Trace did the best Crow, I thought the show deteriorated after he left. I've heard the very last few seasons were great, but I had stopped watching by then.