That's what I was wondering. It sounds like BitLocker for porn—a special app that lets you use a gesture and a password to decrypt hidden layers in your filesystem with all the stuff you don't want your significant other to see....
So what's the objection to everyone using BT headsets? People hate wires today.
In no particular order:
Hitting pause on NetFlix, then hitting play again, and having no sound for the first two seconds, thus missing half a line of dialog
Relatively poor sound quality
Having a radio transmitter basically in my ear
Having another device to charge every day, and possibly more than once per day
That first one by itself is a showstopper for me. The rest just add more reasons to question the sanity of Apple's upper management. Not that I needed more reasons to question their sanity given that they're still trying to make the d**n things thinner even after they were forced to reengineer parts of the iPhone 6 Plus to fix bending problems....
This has been my experience as well. Not every jack fails - but it still happens more often than for any other jack type that I commonly use.
If that is true, then it is true because it is the jack that you use far more often than any other type of jack. I treat headphones like crap, and headphone jacks even more horribly. The last time I had one actually break was on a PowerBook 145 (where I broke at least two or three headphone jacks). Even with massive abuse, I haven't broken one in any hardware built in the past twenty years.
On my first iPhone, I did have one instance where the jack thought headphones were plugged in when they weren't. That took a little bit of jiggling with a pair of headphones to resolve. But at no point have I ever seen a modern jack break. Not in my gear, not in gear belonging to anyone I know.
I have, however, seen Lightning plugs break off in the jacks. Not only will you lose your headphones when that happens, but also the ability to charge your phone. On the plus side, Apple is going to sell a LOT more AppleCare plans after people break their third or fourth Lightning jack. So my stock loves the idea....
The reason that companies like Logitech get cranky is that they assume the goods are probably grey market imports, which you're allowed to do, but you have to clearly advertise the fact that it has no U.S. warranty. But if you have receipts to prove that it was purchased in the U.S., they have no legal grounds to challenge you reselling it as new.
Last I checked, most (if not all) major retailers routinely take unopened returns and put them back on the shelves as new. So if the law considers those to not be new, then that is the most consistently ignored law in the history of the world. And I've dug through California's code, and I see nothing that defines "new" in any way other than "not used". And an unopened package clearly precludes use of the product, so at least in California, I'm about 99% sure that you're wrong. Obviously the answer may vary from state to state, but it seems unlikely that an unopened product could ever be considered anything but new by a reasonable person.
Again, as I said, for automobiles, the law is explicitly different. Once it is transferred to a non-dealer, it is considered used. But as far as I know, that is the only product for which this is the case, and only because there is a specific body of law that explicitly defines the transfer of an automobile to a consumer as "use".
They can cut you off in the middle of a two-year contract. If you read the fine print, it isn't a guarantee of service, just a guarantee that you will keep paying them unless they choose to terminate the contract early.
"Unlimited" to Verizon means "unlimited as long as you use less than 300 kilobits per second continuously". Which just happens to be almost exactly the minimum bandwidth for a Skype video call. Ponder that for a moment.
Yes, even to a toaster oven, there is a legal definition of "NEW" and if you buy it at Walmart and resell it on Amazon, it is actually no longer "NEW".
As far as I know, there's no commonly accepted legal definition of "new". That's why various companies like eBay and Amazon explicitly describe what is meant by "new". Through most of those channels, "new" does not mean "sold by a licensed dealer", but rather "unopened". Up until you open the packaging, something is generally considered "new", no matter how many times it changes hands, and no matter whose hands it goes through in the process, because there's no practical difference between purchasing a product directly from a store and purchasing it from someone who purchased it from a store, so long as no warranty registration occurred. (You should, of course, apply for a tax exemption if you resell new items frequently, because otherwise you're getting charged sales tax twice, but that's orthogonal.)
The only absolute exceptions I can think of are vehicle sales, where "new" means "never previously owned by anyone who isn't a car dealer licensed by the manufacturer," but that's more an artifact of the way cars are sold than anything else (no packaging, franchise dealerships, etc.), and doesn't really apply to consumer goods.
Not sure how this changes the facts—that ASN.1 is a niche language used in a few narrow areas, that it doesn't get a lot of attention because only a tiny percentage of engineers understand or use it, and that we'd all be better off if everyone just used more sensible data formats, such as JSON, XML property lists, or any number of other similar formats that are well understood, broadly used, and thus thoroughly debugged. The same is true for all the usual binary formats that people define using ASN.1 (BER, DER, etc.), but doubly true for the ASN.1 format itself.
If they're really passing the actual ASN.1 syntax data around over an insecure channel and providing a compiler that compiles the abstract syntax into a new parser to parse a data stream... that's just a recipe for failure in every possible way. Such a design means taking ASN.1 compiler code that most people assume will be used only by software engineers in a controlled setting, and deploying it in such a way that communication equipment all around the world has to use it on the fly to create executable code and run it. Such a design precludes code signing, because the device has to be able to run unsigned, freshly generated parser code derived from the ASN.1. This means that the security of the device is weakened fundamentally, and any security holes in either the ASN.1 compiler or in the resulting parsers are likely to be easier to exploit as a result.
More importantly, it means that arbitrary third parties can create parsers and then provide incompatible data to feed to those parsers, maximizing the chances that there will be an exploitable bug in those parsers that can result in privilege escalation.
ASN.1 should die already, and so should all of the various binary encodings derived from it. IMO, they're fundamentally bad for security, they're hard to audit, and when used in dangerous ways like this, they represent a major security risk.
Wouldn't virtualization make this pretty trivial, concentrating your workloads on hosts served by a single zone?
Depends on what you mean. It makes reorganizing the machines pretty trivial, potentially, assuming they all have similar hardware capabilities (which may or may not be a safe assumption). But there is a cost (both in power and time) to moving large quantities of data from one machine to another, so you can't necessarily shift load around instantly, depending on what the machines are doing and how many other machines are configured to do the same job.
Yeah, it's baffling how many security people seem to like ASN.1 as a means of encoding various cryptographic data. It's an awful format. It isn't human-readable, and the parser is fairly complex, which means that creating one is likely error-prone.
While this is awesome, it's light on details. I assume they loaded their datacenter with all kinds of sensors and have an advanced HVAC system that can mix external air when desired. So you look at current server load, predicted load based on past patterns, external temp, predicted external temp, along with internal temp, and then decide what air supply and cooling mix to use. So if you have CRAC units that are more advanced than on/off, and can use outside air with add/remove humidity, you can really draw down your cooling power usage.
I have no idea what they're actually doing with AI, but one other thing you could maybe do is improve the data center organization so that machines whose temperature spikes at the same time of day are all on the same air handler. Then again, there are limits to how far you can go in that direction without the equipment overheating, so that might not work too well. Hard to say.
You're making the erroneous assumption that the capital gains tax is the tax on the return on an investment, but that's wrong. The tax on the return on an investment is the sum of the capital gains tax and the taxes on corporate profits, which are already higher than income tax rates in the US.
I'm not making any assumption. You're making the erroneous assumption that the sum of those numbers is somehow relevant. All the statistics prove that it isn't. The people who invest the money into corporations don't pay the business's taxes. The business does. The value of a stock is not based on how much money a company makes, but rather based on people's predictions of how much they think the business might make in the future....
Also, even if the value were strictly based on the current year's profits, you still can't add percentages that way. You have to multiply them. If the business pays 12.6% of its income to the government (that's the average U.S. corporate tax rate paid by large corporations, FYI), that leaves 87.4% of the original remaining. If you pay 39.6% in capital gains tax (the highest U.S. marginal tax rate), you have 60.4% of 87.4%, or 52.79% left. That's quite a bit more than if you added 39.6% to 12.6% (though not a lot, because most corporations don't actually pay nearly as much in taxes as you seem to think they do).
If you do that same math with 15%, it is 85% of 87.4%, which is 74%, or 26% tax rate. That's way less than anyone making over about $100k pays on earned income, and that's not even considering the fact that earned income also requires spending time, which is a tax in and of itself in a way.
But it gets worse, since capital gains taxes also tax inflation. Therefore, taxes on returns on investment ("unearned income") are already higher than taxes on labor ("earned income") in the US.
Yes, you can have capital gains resulting purely from inflation, but if you're only keeping up with inflation, you're doing very badly. The big flaw in your concept here is that the U.S. typically has low single-digit inflation, and even if you add that to the capital gains tax rate (which is flawed math, but it isn't worth bothering to do it right when you're only dealing with 2–3%), the capital gains tax rate is still nowhere near the rate on earned income.
(What I also find disturbing about the whole discussion about "unearned income" is that this was a key part of Nazi ideology and the Nazi party program; it was the association of Jews with banking and investments that was a key part of the genocidal antisemitism of the Nazis. And people like Piketty, Clinton, and Sanders are right in that tradition.)
Not everything the Nazis did was wrong or bad. For example, the Nazis created a road system that was the inspiration for our interstate highway system. That entire paragraph is basically nothing more than an ad hominem.
That's simply not correct. Every study that has ever evaluated the economic impact of changes to capital gains tax rates has found that raising or lowering the capital gains tax rate has had essentially zero impact on the actual rate of investment. Now I know that's going to sound shocking to a lot of people, but that's pure, hard, fact based on real-world numbers evaluated on both sides of various capital gains tax rate changes.
That argument doesn't work because we are not dealing with independent variables. For example, you could interpret the same data to mean that government simply keeps adjusting the capital gains rates in order to maintain a constant level of investment. There are many other interpretations. Your "facts" are naive fictions.
No, such an interpretation is just not plausible. They are, in fact, largely independent variables, but even if they weren't, the changes in tax rates would still occur as a stepwise change, rather
This. And there's pertinent case law from the Lexmark case. Hint: Lexmark lost handily. If it looks like a sale, the courts take a dim view of treating it otherwise. And this case also has Magnusson Moss going against them on top of the existing DMCA abuse case law.
WTF are you talking about? What "capital gains tax exemption" are "high-income earners" supposed to have?
Capital gains in the U.S. are taxed at a lower percentage rate than earned income. The government is effectively giving a partial exemption for taxes earned via capital gains. I guess "discount" would be a better word. Either way, you get the point.
And it isn't limited to high-income earners. I was just proposing reducing that tax discount for high-wage earners so that it has minimal income on average people who are saving money for retirement. With that said, that capital gains tax break does disproportionately benefit the wealthy, because they have enough extra income to invest much of it in the stock market, whereas the people down in the bottom quartile are barely able to make ends meet, and can't usefully invest at all.
Furthermore, the higher you crank up capital gains taxes, the less inclined people are to invest in the economy. Where are companies going to get the capital from to grow, expand, and hire new workers?
That's simply not correct. Every study that has ever evaluated the economic impact of changes to capital gains tax rates has found that raising or lowering the capital gains tax rate has had essentially zero impact on the actual rate of investment. Now I know that's going to sound shocking to a lot of people, but that's pure, hard, fact based on real-world numbers evaluated on both sides of various capital gains tax rate changes.
And it's actually pretty easy to explain why there's no effect, when you really stop to think about it. The reason that the Laffer curve and so many other right-wing economic theories are pure bulls**t is that people always evaluate whether to invest based on the benefits of investing relative to doing other things with that money that will similarly grow the value of their money or otherwise benefit them in some way. If you raise the capital gains tax rate to be the same rate as ordinary income, what are people going to do with their money instead? Put it under a mattress? Of course not. They're going to keep investing it, because there's not anything else that will earn them a greater return. You'd pretty much have to be an idiot to say, "I'm only getting 8% ROI instead of 10%, so I'm not going to invest." At best, you might invest in other things or in different ways that earn money through something other than capital gains (because there's suddenly no loophole), but either way, the effect on the economy as a whole is going to be basically the same.
Now perhaps if you got to the point where taxes approached 100%, you might get to the point where the rich would choose to spend the money rather than investing it. However, that would not actually be bad for the economy, because putting money into the economy by buying stuff is roughly functionally equivalent to investing it. Either way, you're still contributing money that can be used for the operation of businesses that pay people to do work who buy stuff from companies that pay people to do work, etc.
The unlimited ability to accumulate personal property and wealth is fundamentally contrary to everyone else's opportunities to advance. The greater the divide between the wealthy and the poor, the more the poor invariably become subjugated to the point where their advancement is impossible.
That's utter bullshit. And even your premise were true, it wouldn't mean that taxing the rich and redistributing the money would improve anything.
Call it what you want, but the numbers don't lie. Our country's growth has always been the most solid when its marginal tax rate on the rich was the highest. Any economist worth his weight in dung will tell you that the best way to stimulate growth in the economy is to give it to the poor. They spend every penny they earn, and that money trickles up throughout all tiers of the economy. And the rich gain the most from that scheme by keeping the poor employed and off the streets, thus reducing the chances of them snapping and going on a shooting rampage in some rich neighborhood.
They, unlike you, recognized that the ability to accumulate wealth and living free lives without the fear of government are one and the same thing.
That's just not true. The ability to accumulate wealth is only possible because of a strong government. Without a functioning police force, a military to defend the country, etc., it is basically impossible to accumulate wealth in any long-term-sustainable fashion. In exchange, the government demands a certain portion of your income to pay for that safety and security, and to ensure that everyone is afforded similar opportunities.
That last part is the part you're missing. The unlimited ability to accumulate personal property and wealth is fundamentally contrary to everyone else's opportunities to advance. The greater the divide between the wealthy and the poor, the more the poor invariably become subjugated to the point where their advancement is impossible. Thus, it is the government's fundamental responsibility to put some limits on the rate of advancement so that everyone at least has a chance.
Taking away the capital gains tax exemption for high-income earners doesn't prevent people from accumulating wealth. It just limits the rate of advancement and uses the resulting money to help everyone else advance to a lesser degree.
Yes, hence the "You just have to have a government that is willing to do it" part. In practice it isn't likely to happen, because everybody in Congress is in the top few percent income-wise, but that's a problem of the government being incapable of passing the laws, not a problem of the laws themselves being impossible to create.
Here is the thing, you can tax the poor but you can't tax the rich. For one simple reason, the poor can't do anything about it where as the rich have enough money to pack up their bags and leave. It might take a few years and an exit strategy to make sure they pay as little as possible on the way out but you can bet there will be an exodus if you try,
Actually, it is pretty easy to tax the rich. You just have to have a government that is willing to do it. You first pass a law that says that assets above $1 million are taxed at 90% if you renounce your citizenship, payable immediately, with no deductions, no exceptions, including all assets, regardless of whether they are held in the U.S. or not. You then eliminate the capital gains tax exemption on any income above the $250,000 per year mark. There won't be an exodus when you do that, because the first law would ensure that leaving the U.S. would cost more than it would likely save over the life of the investor.
Deposit $1 million in an index fund and expect 7% annual return averaged over 40 years.
By your numbers, providing for a few thousand out of ten or fifteen million would only help a tenth of a percent of the people put out of work by just the two things you described alone. That's such a small percentage that it is noise. To do this for the whole country would mean $300 trillion dollars, or approximately the federal budget for the next 100 years. To do it even for all of the people who are either retired or unable to find work would mean 90 trillion dollars, or approximately the entire federal budget for the next 30 years. And yes, you could get $2.7 trillion of that from raiding Social Security, but that still leaves you spending the entire federal budget for more than 29 years just to build up the trust fund, not counting the money you're taking out at the same time.
So in theory, a basic income is a great idea, but in practice, the numbers just don't work so well.
The GGP is, though possibly not intentionally. The only way to enforce the "a person who does nothing deserves nothing" rule would be to eliminate the stock market, eliminate corporations, and basically throw out the entire system as it is now. After all, the people at the top of our economic system make money by doing basically nothing other than loaning out their money.
In fact, capitalism in its purest form can best be described as "Those who have get; those who have not get bent." It is basically the exact opposite of the fanciful notion that people should be rewarded for their hard work; the people at the bottom invariably work the hardest (to the point that they get home from work physically exhausted) and get the least benefit from that work, and the people at the top do the least work and reap the biggest rewards.
A universal basic income is really the only way to make it possible for people to be rewarded semi-equally for equal amounts of work. It takes away the necessity to work for your most basic needs, thus freeing up time for people to learn new skills and improve their abilities so that the time they spend working is actually valuable to society instead of just continuing to do things that a robot will soon be able to do for less money. And whether they choose to improve themselves or not becomes entirely under their own control, rather than having menial labor forced upon them by the need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Certainly, but when those bugs are discovered, they typically get patched automatically as part of your normal OS update schedule, not as a specific patch to the web frontend (which often gets heavily customized for a particular site, and thus are messier to upgrade). And those bugs are hopefully rare.
As for Drupal, that's actually just another example of the problem I'm describing. A high-level CMS should not provide its own database drivers that construct SQL queries themselves. From a security perspective, IMO, that's really not significantly different from building SQL queries by string concatenation, except that the Drupal solution is cleaner and more general-purpose. It is still a user-facing web front end that is doing its own SQL construction when it could get that functionality almost for free by using code that the PHP core already provides.
IMO, Drupal should be working with various groups that provide the drivers that are built into PHP already, adding features as needed to support their requirements, with the goal of eventually removing their own drivers entirely. Every time you reinvent the wheel, you significantly increase the risk of adding bugs. More code requires more maintainers, and there are only so many people who care about improving SQL drivers. Thus, the more SQL drivers available for each SQL implementation, the lower quality each one will be. And if every large web service provided its own driver, you'd have hundreds of these things, each with its own bugs.
This really is one of those areas where less is more. I'll give Drupal a partial pass for now, because they were doing this back in a day when parameterized queries probably weren't supported in the PHP core. But in the long run, all that custom driver code needs to die and be replaced with one of the standard drivers. From a security perspective, that's the only approach that really makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I was wondering. It sounds like BitLocker for porn—a special app that lets you use a gesture and a password to decrypt hidden layers in your filesystem with all the stuff you don't want your significant other to see....
In no particular order:
That first one by itself is a showstopper for me. The rest just add more reasons to question the sanity of Apple's upper management. Not that I needed more reasons to question their sanity given that they're still trying to make the d**n things thinner even after they were forced to reengineer parts of the iPhone 6 Plus to fix bending problems....
If that is true, then it is true because it is the jack that you use far more often than any other type of jack. I treat headphones like crap, and headphone jacks even more horribly. The last time I had one actually break was on a PowerBook 145 (where I broke at least two or three headphone jacks). Even with massive abuse, I haven't broken one in any hardware built in the past twenty years.
On my first iPhone, I did have one instance where the jack thought headphones were plugged in when they weren't. That took a little bit of jiggling with a pair of headphones to resolve. But at no point have I ever seen a modern jack break. Not in my gear, not in gear belonging to anyone I know.
I have, however, seen Lightning plugs break off in the jacks. Not only will you lose your headphones when that happens, but also the ability to charge your phone. On the plus side, Apple is going to sell a LOT more AppleCare plans after people break their third or fourth Lightning jack. So my stock loves the idea....
The reason that companies like Logitech get cranky is that they assume the goods are probably grey market imports, which you're allowed to do, but you have to clearly advertise the fact that it has no U.S. warranty. But if you have receipts to prove that it was purchased in the U.S., they have no legal grounds to challenge you reselling it as new.
Last I checked, most (if not all) major retailers routinely take unopened returns and put them back on the shelves as new. So if the law considers those to not be new, then that is the most consistently ignored law in the history of the world. And I've dug through California's code, and I see nothing that defines "new" in any way other than "not used". And an unopened package clearly precludes use of the product, so at least in California, I'm about 99% sure that you're wrong. Obviously the answer may vary from state to state, but it seems unlikely that an unopened product could ever be considered anything but new by a reasonable person.
Again, as I said, for automobiles, the law is explicitly different. Once it is transferred to a non-dealer, it is considered used. But as far as I know, that is the only product for which this is the case, and only because there is a specific body of law that explicitly defines the transfer of an automobile to a consumer as "use".
They can cut you off in the middle of a two-year contract. If you read the fine print, it isn't a guarantee of service, just a guarantee that you will keep paying them unless they choose to terminate the contract early.
"Unlimited" to Verizon means "unlimited as long as you use less than 300 kilobits per second continuously". Which just happens to be almost exactly the minimum bandwidth for a Skype video call. Ponder that for a moment.
As far as I know, there's no commonly accepted legal definition of "new". That's why various companies like eBay and Amazon explicitly describe what is meant by "new". Through most of those channels, "new" does not mean "sold by a licensed dealer", but rather "unopened". Up until you open the packaging, something is generally considered "new", no matter how many times it changes hands, and no matter whose hands it goes through in the process, because there's no practical difference between purchasing a product directly from a store and purchasing it from someone who purchased it from a store, so long as no warranty registration occurred. (You should, of course, apply for a tax exemption if you resell new items frequently, because otherwise you're getting charged sales tax twice, but that's orthogonal.)
The only absolute exceptions I can think of are vehicle sales, where "new" means "never previously owned by anyone who isn't a car dealer licensed by the manufacturer," but that's more an artifact of the way cars are sold than anything else (no packaging, franchise dealerships, etc.), and doesn't really apply to consumer goods.
Presumably because dubious manufacturing companies are cheaper....
Not sure how this changes the facts—that ASN.1 is a niche language used in a few narrow areas, that it doesn't get a lot of attention because only a tiny percentage of engineers understand or use it, and that we'd all be better off if everyone just used more sensible data formats, such as JSON, XML property lists, or any number of other similar formats that are well understood, broadly used, and thus thoroughly debugged. The same is true for all the usual binary formats that people define using ASN.1 (BER, DER, etc.), but doubly true for the ASN.1 format itself.
If they're really passing the actual ASN.1 syntax data around over an insecure channel and providing a compiler that compiles the abstract syntax into a new parser to parse a data stream... that's just a recipe for failure in every possible way. Such a design means taking ASN.1 compiler code that most people assume will be used only by software engineers in a controlled setting, and deploying it in such a way that communication equipment all around the world has to use it on the fly to create executable code and run it. Such a design precludes code signing, because the device has to be able to run unsigned, freshly generated parser code derived from the ASN.1. This means that the security of the device is weakened fundamentally, and any security holes in either the ASN.1 compiler or in the resulting parsers are likely to be easier to exploit as a result.
More importantly, it means that arbitrary third parties can create parsers and then provide incompatible data to feed to those parsers, maximizing the chances that there will be an exploitable bug in those parsers that can result in privilege escalation.
ASN.1 should die already, and so should all of the various binary encodings derived from it. IMO, they're fundamentally bad for security, they're hard to audit, and when used in dangerous ways like this, they represent a major security risk.
Depends on what you mean. It makes reorganizing the machines pretty trivial, potentially, assuming they all have similar hardware capabilities (which may or may not be a safe assumption). But there is a cost (both in power and time) to moving large quantities of data from one machine to another, so you can't necessarily shift load around instantly, depending on what the machines are doing and how many other machines are configured to do the same job.
Oh, and it is used exclusively in a few niche technologies, which means the odds of bugs getting found and fixed are relatively small.
Yeah, it's baffling how many security people seem to like ASN.1 as a means of encoding various cryptographic data. It's an awful format. It isn't human-readable, and the parser is fairly complex, which means that creating one is likely error-prone.
I have no idea what they're actually doing with AI, but one other thing you could maybe do is improve the data center organization so that machines whose temperature spikes at the same time of day are all on the same air handler. Then again, there are limits to how far you can go in that direction without the equipment overheating, so that might not work too well. Hard to say.
You missed an "L", and you spelled "No" wrong. The "N" goes before the "O".
I'm not making any assumption. You're making the erroneous assumption that the sum of those numbers is somehow relevant. All the statistics prove that it isn't. The people who invest the money into corporations don't pay the business's taxes. The business does. The value of a stock is not based on how much money a company makes, but rather based on people's predictions of how much they think the business might make in the future....
Also, even if the value were strictly based on the current year's profits, you still can't add percentages that way. You have to multiply them. If the business pays 12.6% of its income to the government (that's the average U.S. corporate tax rate paid by large corporations, FYI), that leaves 87.4% of the original remaining. If you pay 39.6% in capital gains tax (the highest U.S. marginal tax rate), you have 60.4% of 87.4%, or 52.79% left. That's quite a bit more than if you added 39.6% to 12.6% (though not a lot, because most corporations don't actually pay nearly as much in taxes as you seem to think they do).
If you do that same math with 15%, it is 85% of 87.4%, which is 74%, or 26% tax rate. That's way less than anyone making over about $100k pays on earned income, and that's not even considering the fact that earned income also requires spending time, which is a tax in and of itself in a way.
Yes, you can have capital gains resulting purely from inflation, but if you're only keeping up with inflation, you're doing very badly. The big flaw in your concept here is that the U.S. typically has low single-digit inflation, and even if you add that to the capital gains tax rate (which is flawed math, but it isn't worth bothering to do it right when you're only dealing with 2–3%), the capital gains tax rate is still nowhere near the rate on earned income.
Not everything the Nazis did was wrong or bad. For example, the Nazis created a road system that was the inspiration for our interstate highway system. That entire paragraph is basically nothing more than an ad hominem.
No, such an interpretation is just not plausible. They are, in fact, largely independent variables, but even if they weren't, the changes in tax rates would still occur as a stepwise change, rather
The Goodfeathers are suing for prior art.
This. And there's pertinent case law from the Lexmark case. Hint: Lexmark lost handily. If it looks like a sale, the courts take a dim view of treating it otherwise. And this case also has Magnusson Moss going against them on top of the existing DMCA abuse case law.
Capital gains in the U.S. are taxed at a lower percentage rate than earned income. The government is effectively giving a partial exemption for taxes earned via capital gains. I guess "discount" would be a better word. Either way, you get the point.
And it isn't limited to high-income earners. I was just proposing reducing that tax discount for high-wage earners so that it has minimal income on average people who are saving money for retirement. With that said, that capital gains tax break does disproportionately benefit the wealthy, because they have enough extra income to invest much of it in the stock market, whereas the people down in the bottom quartile are barely able to make ends meet, and can't usefully invest at all.
That's simply not correct. Every study that has ever evaluated the economic impact of changes to capital gains tax rates has found that raising or lowering the capital gains tax rate has had essentially zero impact on the actual rate of investment. Now I know that's going to sound shocking to a lot of people, but that's pure, hard, fact based on real-world numbers evaluated on both sides of various capital gains tax rate changes.
And it's actually pretty easy to explain why there's no effect, when you really stop to think about it. The reason that the Laffer curve and so many other right-wing economic theories are pure bulls**t is that people always evaluate whether to invest based on the benefits of investing relative to doing other things with that money that will similarly grow the value of their money or otherwise benefit them in some way. If you raise the capital gains tax rate to be the same rate as ordinary income, what are people going to do with their money instead? Put it under a mattress? Of course not. They're going to keep investing it, because there's not anything else that will earn them a greater return. You'd pretty much have to be an idiot to say, "I'm only getting 8% ROI instead of 10%, so I'm not going to invest." At best, you might invest in other things or in different ways that earn money through something other than capital gains (because there's suddenly no loophole), but either way, the effect on the economy as a whole is going to be basically the same.
Now perhaps if you got to the point where taxes approached 100%, you might get to the point where the rich would choose to spend the money rather than investing it. However, that would not actually be bad for the economy, because putting money into the economy by buying stuff is roughly functionally equivalent to investing it. Either way, you're still contributing money that can be used for the operation of businesses that pay people to do work who buy stuff from companies that pay people to do work, etc.
Call it what you want, but the numbers don't lie. Our country's growth has always been the most solid when its marginal tax rate on the rich was the highest. Any economist worth his weight in dung will tell you that the best way to stimulate growth in the economy is to give it to the poor. They spend every penny they earn, and that money trickles up throughout all tiers of the economy. And the rich gain the most from that scheme by keeping the poor employed and off the streets, thus reducing the chances of them snapping and going on a shooting rampage in some rich neighborhood.
That's just not true. The ability to accumulate wealth is only possible because of a strong government. Without a functioning police force, a military to defend the country, etc., it is basically impossible to accumulate wealth in any long-term-sustainable fashion. In exchange, the government demands a certain portion of your income to pay for that safety and security, and to ensure that everyone is afforded similar opportunities.
That last part is the part you're missing. The unlimited ability to accumulate personal property and wealth is fundamentally contrary to everyone else's opportunities to advance. The greater the divide between the wealthy and the poor, the more the poor invariably become subjugated to the point where their advancement is impossible. Thus, it is the government's fundamental responsibility to put some limits on the rate of advancement so that everyone at least has a chance.
Taking away the capital gains tax exemption for high-income earners doesn't prevent people from accumulating wealth. It just limits the rate of advancement and uses the resulting money to help everyone else advance to a lesser degree.
Yes, hence the "You just have to have a government that is willing to do it" part. In practice it isn't likely to happen, because everybody in Congress is in the top few percent income-wise, but that's a problem of the government being incapable of passing the laws, not a problem of the laws themselves being impossible to create.
Actually, it is pretty easy to tax the rich. You just have to have a government that is willing to do it. You first pass a law that says that assets above $1 million are taxed at 90% if you renounce your citizenship, payable immediately, with no deductions, no exceptions, including all assets, regardless of whether they are held in the U.S. or not. You then eliminate the capital gains tax exemption on any income above the $250,000 per year mark. There won't be an exodus when you do that, because the first law would ensure that leaving the U.S. would cost more than it would likely save over the life of the investor.
By your numbers, providing for a few thousand out of ten or fifteen million would only help a tenth of a percent of the people put out of work by just the two things you described alone. That's such a small percentage that it is noise. To do this for the whole country would mean $300 trillion dollars, or approximately the federal budget for the next 100 years. To do it even for all of the people who are either retired or unable to find work would mean 90 trillion dollars, or approximately the entire federal budget for the next 30 years. And yes, you could get $2.7 trillion of that from raiding Social Security, but that still leaves you spending the entire federal budget for more than 29 years just to build up the trust fund, not counting the money you're taking out at the same time.
So in theory, a basic income is a great idea, but in practice, the numbers just don't work so well.
The GGP is, though possibly not intentionally. The only way to enforce the "a person who does nothing deserves nothing" rule would be to eliminate the stock market, eliminate corporations, and basically throw out the entire system as it is now. After all, the people at the top of our economic system make money by doing basically nothing other than loaning out their money.
In fact, capitalism in its purest form can best be described as "Those who have get; those who have not get bent." It is basically the exact opposite of the fanciful notion that people should be rewarded for their hard work; the people at the bottom invariably work the hardest (to the point that they get home from work physically exhausted) and get the least benefit from that work, and the people at the top do the least work and reap the biggest rewards.
A universal basic income is really the only way to make it possible for people to be rewarded semi-equally for equal amounts of work. It takes away the necessity to work for your most basic needs, thus freeing up time for people to learn new skills and improve their abilities so that the time they spend working is actually valuable to society instead of just continuing to do things that a robot will soon be able to do for less money. And whether they choose to improve themselves or not becomes entirely under their own control, rather than having menial labor forced upon them by the need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Certainly, but when those bugs are discovered, they typically get patched automatically as part of your normal OS update schedule, not as a specific patch to the web frontend (which often gets heavily customized for a particular site, and thus are messier to upgrade). And those bugs are hopefully rare.
As for Drupal, that's actually just another example of the problem I'm describing. A high-level CMS should not provide its own database drivers that construct SQL queries themselves. From a security perspective, IMO, that's really not significantly different from building SQL queries by string concatenation, except that the Drupal solution is cleaner and more general-purpose. It is still a user-facing web front end that is doing its own SQL construction when it could get that functionality almost for free by using code that the PHP core already provides.
IMO, Drupal should be working with various groups that provide the drivers that are built into PHP already, adding features as needed to support their requirements, with the goal of eventually removing their own drivers entirely. Every time you reinvent the wheel, you significantly increase the risk of adding bugs. More code requires more maintainers, and there are only so many people who care about improving SQL drivers. Thus, the more SQL drivers available for each SQL implementation, the lower quality each one will be. And if every large web service provided its own driver, you'd have hundreds of these things, each with its own bugs.
This really is one of those areas where less is more. I'll give Drupal a partial pass for now, because they were doing this back in a day when parameterized queries probably weren't supported in the PHP core. But in the long run, all that custom driver code needs to die and be replaced with one of the standard drivers. From a security perspective, that's the only approach that really makes sense.
So I am a kernel because you are HTML?