You asked, I answer. Yes, there are right companies to get the money, and yes, robbing Peter to pay Paul often is quite valuable.
For example, "we will collect taxes to pay to build a wall around our city", or "we will collect taxes to pay for a sewer", or "we will collect taxes to pay for lighthouses in remote areas that our ships pass near".
In those cases, the result is: fewer homes being flattened by invaders, substantially less stench, and rather many fewer dead sailors and lost cargoes.
In more modern times: it was government funding to a private company that created the Internet.
That's odd -- everywhere I look, I see government intervention done well. The road outside my door? Government. FedEx charges 20x what the government does for a letter (and delvers to fewer places). Even the Internet was a created by the government very thoughtfully creating a computer network.
In this case, our government has seen that batteries are important (which should be a "duh" -- a big chunk of the cost of, e.g., Tesla is the batteries), that advanced chemistry and processes will win, and that we really ought to fight to keep that here.
Ick -- WSAAsynGetHostByName? In this day and age, you have a window handle lying around?
I'm the Program Manager for WinSock at Microsoft. Have you looked at GetAddrInfoEx? In Windows 8/Server 2012, the DNS team added some Async features into it. Even better, it will properly handle IPv6 AND international domain names.
And if you're doing the new "Runtime" programming for Windows 8, we done our best to make sure that most network programs never have to deal with IP addresses at all -- that means that new new RT apps should be IPv6 ready out of the box.
(We also do the dual-stack thing with our sockets, so listener sockets just specify a port (or service) to listen on, and we automatically listen to both IPv6 and IPv4. We updates.NET 4.5 in the same way to make dual-stack be simpler.)
OK, let's play this game and assume that wineries are a good proxy for temperature. A quick web search shows three wineries in Alaska; they started in 1999, 2003, and unknown (but apparently recent)
By your rules, this is positive evidence of global warming.
Reality check: Romans grew wine in Britain because Romans drank wine. They stopped growing it because they left. As soon as wine was popular again, they started growing grapes and making wine again
You, yourself said just a few posts ago that Methane contributed about 10% to greenhouse effects and that CO2 contributes 30%. That doesn't jibe with this comment that CO2 has "minor effects". Your earlier claims is that the actual atmospheric CO2 is currently 3x more effectful than methane.
And the other people here make sense: methane doesn't linger, so as soon as we stop emitting it, it goes away. CO2 lingers more, multiplying it's effectiveness.
My father's been in software since the 1950's. There were arguments in favor of octal machine code as being superior to assembler -- on the grounds that if you programmed in assembler, you didn't really understand what the machine is doing.
And all those arguments are...dead. Along with the C-is-slower-than-FORTRAN battles, and the C++-is-slower-than-C, and the bytecode-languages-are-slower-than-compiled.
It turns out that developer productivity is actually more important than almost anything. Sure, there are a couple of niches. But they are small.
Heck, I've got developer customers inspecting over 100K packets per second in C#: they want computer performance, but they need developer performance.
I can tell you're correct because the last 100 years have been nothing but crap. Those great factory towns, and the rampant bribery of Senators -- those were the good old days.
And when you say "entitlement" -- are you including roads in that? Because I'm of the opinion that I'm entitled to use the roads. Does this mean that only people who NEVER use roads can vote?
(Or, to be more freaky-logical: am I entitled to vote in a building with a roof?)
I'd believe it was "just about how to pay for it" -- except that the republicans didn't bat an eyelash over the extensions to the bush tax holiday. Indeed, they were pretty clear and unambiguous that if millionaires didn't a tax cut, then they would hold their breath until they turned blue.
Not just labor unions support this -- as a taxpayer, I support it, too. Otherwise, every time a bad president came into office, they'd get rid of all of the "non supporters" and replace them with useless hacks. The way we have it, people can get a job with the government as a first choice ("I can make a career here" and "I won't be fired summarily") instead of a last choice ("it's only for a few years, but I need money now").
May apologies, but you are on the wrong side of history. In the 50's, there were "old guard" programmers who wanted to program in octal instead of assembly so they could really understand what the computer was doing. In the 60's, the "old guard" fought COBOL and FORTRAN in favor of assembly so "they could understand what the computer was doing". In then 70's, they fought virtual memory because "only with real memory could you understand what the computer was doing". In the 80's, they fought SQL and wanted to keep COBOL so "they could understand what the computer was really doing". In the 90's they fought GUIs because "only with a command line could you really understand what the computer was doing". And in the last decade, they fought bytecode and interpreted languages because "only with a compiled language can you really understand what the computer is doing".
This is not to say that every proposed new language and concept is good -- they aren't. There was an research computer where the compiler was in hardware (yes, individual gates and thing to parse your source code), along with the entire OS. There have been visual languages by the dozen; almost all were losers.
But, overall, history isn't on your side. The higher level languages and abstractions actual make people more productive programmers. Both Java and.NET have been accepted as "good" by an enormous number of working programmers and their hard-nosed managers; they are here to stay.
The British felt the same way about the American and German "bubbles" in manufacturing and steel, too. But they just knew that eventually the two small upstart countries would slow down, resulting in Britain continuing to have a comfortable lead over all other industrialized countries.
Sometimes the view in the rear view mirror is true.
Imagine a world with no government interference -- with no long private railroads (no eminent domain, no free land parcels out west, no westwards expansion). Imagine a world where cars are always slow (no roads mean no cars; no cars mean no roads). Imagine a world with no sewers, and no telephone (telephones are possible only because of telegraphs; telegraphs are only possible because of the railroads).
But imagine a world with lots smallpox, diptheria, and polio. A world with short, nasty lives. A world with plenty of Victorian virtues like polluted water and air, and childen living and dying in poverty.
For your item #3 -- "doing nothing to encourage bright young minds" -- except for the honors courses. And the accelerated courses. And the IQ tests that can get you in to them.
We just had a very successful auction for $24 billion of 10-year notes. Rich people don't think that we're a credit risk (and they also don't think that inflation is coming back any time soon).
One simple way to tell if we've "spent all the money": do really, really rich people still feel comfortable lending us money for long periods at low interest rates? 'Cause those people aren't dumb, and they'd sell their own grandparent to make more.....survey says.... we just sold $24 billion of 10-year notes at 3.66%. I'd say that everyone who is rich disagrees with you.
And lastly: basic economic data is that when countries are in a recession, they should increase government spending (especially on infrastructure like rails). Countries that cut spending then tend to fall further into recession.
Oven thermostats -- how do they work? I mean, the coils are one temperature, the racks another, I take ten measurements of the air, and they are all different. There's clearly no way to usefully average the temperature, or have my baking rely on a simple "oven temperature" controlled by a single knob!
So I'll just set some random value on the knob. I hope the cupcakes turn out!
You've never read the actual ruling, have you? The court went far beyond the actual legal issues at hand and ruled that not only were slaves slaves, but that everyone who was black was a slave, and that furthermore they had no rights at all in any state (including states that had outlawed slavery). These were new and horrible doctrines, and were completely unfounded by any words in the constitution.
1. "Regulations" are the mechanism society has for enforcing a common concensus. As a society, "we" decided that cholera was bad. The solution (alongside education and convincing, of course) is regulation: all houses in area "x" must have sewer connections and must not have an outhouse. And there's a team of people to take water samples. And there are regulations on how to test the water. 2. Laws are created by congress. There's too many to talk all at once; the solution they and every other large organization in the world have picked is to make smaller groups. These groups are called "committee"s. Are you objecting to dividing into smaller groups and attacking problems in-depth? Or is your object to the word "committee"? Did you know the libertarian party has a committee? 3. There are no "czars" in this government. Some people are more senior, and have more authority; other people are less senior and have less authority. Are you in favor of everyone having the same authority? Or do you object to the word "czar"? Heaven knows it's an objectionable word, but it's one that the media uses to describe otherwise boring titles. 4. I don't understand your problem with agencies. One of the agencies, for example, is the Presidio trust (I picked them at random). Do you object to a group of people, experts in the Presidio, from managing the place? Or is your objection that this group of people has a common name, "The Presidio Trust". Would you be happier if we called them group 184? Perhaps you think that we should simply sell off this land -- does this mean that you think there should be no parks at all?
Really, I don know why you got moderated as "insiteful". It sounds more like "thoughtless".
No, they're all thick as posts. So dumb, several types of rocks have more intelligence. They are so woefully short of understanding their instruments, they regularly burn down their labs. They have so little knowledge of the animals they study, they leave out saucers of milk for the lions. Heck, most of the vulcanologists think the red oozy stuff is badly made jello!
And they thank you for pointing out that you, a mere Slashdot reader, have managed to understand more about global climate change in five minutes of careful study (six, if you include the fox news commercials) then they've learned in ten years of careful data collection and vigorous debate. Wow! What a champ you are!
This may sound a little weird -- but that time you're spending tutoring other kids is going to pay off. There's nothing like teaching someone how to do something to really, really drill it in to you. Earlier in my career as a programmer, my absolute best programming class was the time I spent as a grader for a data structures course -- it showed me plenty of ways to do things wrong, and therefore the best way to get things right.
The highest rate is 1.5%. Retailers come in at.5%. Again, that's for normal businesses; the highest rates are actually paid by nuclear waste disposal companies.
And yes, one individual business might well swear at the tax -- they can see their overall profits at 3.5% (and as you say, mall retailers in that one survey at 0%), and the individual owner thinks that if only the tax were lower, they would make money. That wouldn't actually change the economics of the situation. If they charge less, the lack of profit means that the business isn't worth it. If they charge more, they lose customers to cheaper stores. If everyone had smaller expenses, everyone would charge a hair less, and the overall profits would be unchanged.
Stated more broadly: if a set of stores can't make money with the.5% tax, they won't make money with a.4% tax, either. Or a.3% tax.
(And BTW: my immediate assumption when I see the phrase 'so I decided to get the fact' is 'that person is a troll'. You're not helping your case by citing as your source an 'ask the expert' column that quote data from shoe stores from 1999. Luckily the facts that they do cite match my pre-existing knowledge, so I'm not kicking about it. But it's not a very definitive set of data.)
Where "taxes the shit out of" means, "swapping a high percent of the net with a much lower percent of the gross". The tax rates are posted at http://dor.wa.gov/Content/FindTaxesAndRates/BAndOTax/BandOrates.aspx. Note that the highest normal rate is 1.5% of the gross (Radioactive waste disposal has a 3.3% tax). Frankly, if that 1.5% is the difference between your small company making money and not, you've got other problems.
The B&O tax, by being on the gross and not the net, means that the tax revenues don't totally dry up in bad years.
Slashdot Mirror
You asked, I answer. Yes, there are right companies to get the money, and yes, robbing Peter to pay Paul often is quite valuable.
For example, "we will collect taxes to pay to build a wall around our city", or "we will collect taxes to pay for a sewer", or "we will collect taxes to pay for lighthouses in remote areas that our ships pass near".
In those cases, the result is: fewer homes being flattened by invaders, substantially less stench, and rather many fewer dead sailors and lost cargoes.
In more modern times: it was government funding to a private company that created the Internet.
That's odd -- everywhere I look, I see government intervention done well. The road outside my door? Government. FedEx charges 20x what the government does for a letter (and delvers to fewer places). Even the Internet was a created by the government very thoughtfully creating a computer network.
In this case, our government has seen that batteries are important (which should be a "duh" -- a big chunk of the cost of, e.g., Tesla is the batteries), that advanced chemistry and processes will win, and that we really ought to fight to keep that here.
Ick -- WSAAsynGetHostByName? In this day and age, you have a window handle lying around?
I'm the Program Manager for WinSock at Microsoft. Have you looked at GetAddrInfoEx? In Windows 8/Server 2012, the DNS team added some Async features into it. Even better, it will properly handle IPv6 AND international domain names.
And if you're doing the new "Runtime" programming for Windows 8, we done our best to make sure that most network programs never have to deal with IP addresses at all -- that means that new new RT apps should be IPv6 ready out of the box.
(We also do the dual-stack thing with our sockets, so listener sockets just specify a port (or service) to listen on, and we automatically listen to both IPv6 and IPv4. We updates .NET 4.5 in the same way to make dual-stack be simpler.)
Links: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms738518(v=vs.85).asp
OK, let's play this game and assume that wineries are a good proxy for temperature. A quick web search shows three wineries in Alaska; they started in 1999, 2003, and unknown (but apparently recent)
By your rules, this is positive evidence of global warming.
Reality check: Romans grew wine in Britain because Romans drank wine. They stopped growing it because they left. As soon as wine was popular again, they started growing grapes and making wine again
You, yourself said just a few posts ago that Methane contributed about 10% to greenhouse effects and that CO2 contributes 30%. That doesn't jibe with this comment that CO2 has "minor effects". Your earlier claims is that the actual atmospheric CO2 is currently 3x more effectful than methane.
And the other people here make sense: methane doesn't linger, so as soon as we stop emitting it, it goes away. CO2 lingers more, multiplying it's effectiveness.
Good news, then -- the MSRP is $31,645
Source: http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car/
MSRP: $31,645
Source: http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car/
My father's been in software since the 1950's. There were arguments in favor of octal machine code as being superior to assembler -- on the grounds that if you programmed in assembler, you didn't really understand what the machine is doing.
And all those arguments are...dead. Along with the C-is-slower-than-FORTRAN battles, and the C++-is-slower-than-C, and the bytecode-languages-are-slower-than-compiled.
It turns out that developer productivity is actually more important than almost anything. Sure, there are a couple of niches. But they are small.
Heck, I've got developer customers inspecting over 100K packets per second in C#: they want computer performance, but they need developer performance.
I can tell you're correct because the last 100 years have been nothing but crap. Those great factory towns, and the rampant bribery of Senators -- those were the good old days.
And when you say "entitlement" -- are you including roads in that? Because I'm of the opinion that I'm entitled to use the roads. Does this mean that only people who NEVER use roads can vote?
(Or, to be more freaky-logical: am I entitled to vote in a building with a roof?)
I'd believe it was "just about how to pay for it" -- except that the republicans didn't bat an eyelash over the extensions to the bush tax holiday. Indeed, they were pretty clear and unambiguous that if millionaires didn't a tax cut, then they would hold their breath until they turned blue.
"...and you can't just do the math and ignore the fringe effects! With electric motors, it's all fringe effects" (Carnegie Mellon EE professor).
Real theorists are painfully aware of how their models don't reflect reality, and are careful to say so.
Not just labor unions support this -- as a taxpayer, I support it, too. Otherwise, every time a bad president came into office, they'd get rid of all of the "non supporters" and replace them with useless hacks. The way we have it, people can get a job with the government as a first choice ("I can make a career here" and "I won't be fired summarily") instead of a last choice ("it's only for a few years, but I need money now").
TL;DR: "You kids get off my lawn"
May apologies, but you are on the wrong side of history. In the 50's, there were "old guard" programmers who wanted to program in octal instead of assembly so they could really understand what the computer was doing. In the 60's, the "old guard" fought COBOL and FORTRAN in favor of assembly so "they could understand what the computer was doing". In then 70's, they fought virtual memory because "only with real memory could you understand what the computer was doing". In the 80's, they fought SQL and wanted to keep COBOL so "they could understand what the computer was really doing". In the 90's they fought GUIs because "only with a command line could you really understand what the computer was doing". And in the last decade, they fought bytecode and interpreted languages because "only with a compiled language can you really understand what the computer is doing".
This is not to say that every proposed new language and concept is good -- they aren't. There was an research computer where the compiler was in hardware (yes, individual gates and thing to parse your source code), along with the entire OS. There have been visual languages by the dozen; almost all were losers.
But, overall, history isn't on your side. The higher level languages and abstractions actual make people more productive programmers. Both Java and .NET have been accepted as "good" by an enormous number of working programmers and their hard-nosed managers; they are here to stay.
The British felt the same way about the American and German "bubbles" in manufacturing and steel, too. But they just knew that eventually the two small upstart countries would slow down, resulting in Britain continuing to have a comfortable lead over all other industrialized countries.
Sometimes the view in the rear view mirror is true.
Imagine a world with no government interference -- with no long private railroads (no eminent domain, no free land parcels out west, no westwards expansion). Imagine a world where cars are always slow (no roads mean no cars; no cars mean no roads). Imagine a world with no sewers, and no telephone (telephones are possible only because of telegraphs; telegraphs are only possible because of the railroads).
But imagine a world with lots smallpox, diptheria, and polio. A world with short, nasty lives. A world with plenty of Victorian virtues like polluted water and air, and childen living and dying in poverty.
Yup, that's the world for me!
For your item #3 -- "doing nothing to encourage bright young minds" -- except for the honors courses. And the accelerated courses. And the IQ tests that can get you in to them.
We just had a very successful auction for $24 billion of 10-year notes. Rich people don't think that we're a credit risk (and they also don't think that inflation is coming back any time soon).
One simple way to tell if we've "spent all the money": do really, really rich people still feel comfortable lending us money for long periods at low interest rates? 'Cause those people aren't dumb, and they'd sell their own grandparent to make more. ....survey says.... we just sold $24 billion of 10-year notes at 3.66%. I'd say that everyone who is rich disagrees with you.
And lastly: basic economic data is that when countries are in a recession, they should increase government spending (especially on infrastructure like rails). Countries that cut spending then tend to fall further into recession.
Oven thermostats -- how do they work? I mean, the coils are one temperature, the racks another, I take ten measurements of the air, and they are all different. There's clearly no way to usefully average the temperature, or have my baking rely on a simple "oven temperature" controlled by a single knob!
So I'll just set some random value on the knob. I hope the cupcakes turn out!
You've never read the actual ruling, have you? The court went far beyond the actual legal issues at hand and ruled that not only were slaves slaves, but that everyone who was black was a slave, and that furthermore they had no rights at all in any state (including states that had outlawed slavery). These were new and horrible doctrines, and were completely unfounded by any words in the constitution.
1. "Regulations" are the mechanism society has for enforcing a common concensus. As a society, "we" decided that cholera was bad. The solution (alongside education and convincing, of course) is regulation: all houses in area "x" must have sewer connections and must not have an outhouse. And there's a team of people to take water samples. And there are regulations on how to test the water.
2. Laws are created by congress. There's too many to talk all at once; the solution they and every other large organization in the world have picked is to make smaller groups. These groups are called "committee"s. Are you objecting to dividing into smaller groups and attacking problems in-depth? Or is your object to the word "committee"? Did you know the libertarian party has a committee?
3. There are no "czars" in this government. Some people are more senior, and have more authority; other people are less senior and have less authority. Are you in favor of everyone having the same authority? Or do you object to the word "czar"? Heaven knows it's an objectionable word, but it's one that the media uses to describe otherwise boring titles.
4. I don't understand your problem with agencies. One of the agencies, for example, is the Presidio trust (I picked them at random). Do you object to a group of people, experts in the Presidio, from managing the place? Or is your objection that this group of people has a common name, "The Presidio Trust". Would you be happier if we called them group 184? Perhaps you think that we should simply sell off this land -- does this mean that you think there should be no parks at all?
Really, I don know why you got moderated as "insiteful". It sounds more like "thoughtless".
No, they're all thick as posts. So dumb, several types of rocks have more intelligence. They are so woefully short of understanding their instruments, they regularly burn down their labs. They have so little knowledge of the animals they study, they leave out saucers of milk for the lions. Heck, most of the vulcanologists think the red oozy stuff is badly made jello!
And they thank you for pointing out that you, a mere Slashdot reader, have managed to understand more about global climate change in five minutes of careful study (six, if you include the fox news commercials) then they've learned in ten years of careful data collection and vigorous debate. Wow! What a champ you are!
This may sound a little weird -- but that time you're spending tutoring other kids is going to pay off. There's nothing like teaching someone how to do something to really, really drill it in to you. Earlier in my career as a programmer, my absolute best programming class was the time I spent as a grader for a data structures course -- it showed me plenty of ways to do things wrong, and therefore the best way to get things right.
The highest rate is 1.5%. Retailers come in at .5%. Again, that's for normal businesses; the highest rates are actually paid by nuclear waste disposal companies.
And yes, one individual business might well swear at the tax -- they can see their overall profits at 3.5% (and as you say, mall retailers in that one survey at 0%), and the individual owner thinks that if only the tax were lower, they would make money. That wouldn't actually change the economics of the situation. If they charge less, the lack of profit means that the business isn't worth it. If they charge more, they lose customers to cheaper stores. If everyone had smaller expenses, everyone would charge a hair less, and the overall profits would be unchanged.
Stated more broadly: if a set of stores can't make money with the .5% tax, they won't make money with a .4% tax, either. Or a .3% tax.
(And BTW: my immediate assumption when I see the phrase 'so I decided to get the fact' is 'that person is a troll'. You're not helping your case by citing as your source an 'ask the expert' column that quote data from shoe stores from 1999. Luckily the facts that they do cite match my pre-existing knowledge, so I'm not kicking about it. But it's not a very definitive set of data.)
Where "taxes the shit out of" means, "swapping a high percent of the net with a much lower percent of the gross". The tax rates are posted at http://dor.wa.gov/Content/FindTaxesAndRates/BAndOTax/BandOrates.aspx. Note that the highest normal rate is 1.5% of the gross (Radioactive waste disposal has a 3.3% tax). Frankly, if that 1.5% is the difference between your small company making money and not, you've got other problems. The B&O tax, by being on the gross and not the net, means that the tax revenues don't totally dry up in bad years.