That "fair" breakdown, from a legal perspective, is, in fact, an outright lie. It claims that Medicare and Social Security trust fund payments to individuals are part of the federal budget. According to 42 USC section 911 paragraph (a), payments from those trust funds are NOT considered part of the federal budget. There's simply no grey area or ambiguity here. They aren't part of the federal budget, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to push a political agenda.
Calling Medicare and Social Security part of the federal budget is as misleading as calling sales taxes part of a retailer's budget, or calling customer withdrawals part of a bank's budget. The money does flow through the federal government, but it was never theirs to begin with.
Medicare and Social Security are paid for by separate taxes that cover those programs explicitly. In each case, those taxes go into a separate fund that is used to pay for the ongoing operations of the appropriate administration. Each administration is run as a separate financial entity that operates pretty much independently from the federal government's budgeted spending. This makes them highly unique as taxes go; they are not part of the government's general fund, and short of changing the laws in question (42 USC section 911), the government has no legal authority to redirect those funds towards any use other than Social Security and Medicare. And that is why payouts by those trust funds are not considered part of the federal budget. The law is very clear on that point.
A closer (but still not quite accurate) picture of the federal budget comes from looking at federal discretionary spending. That covers the money that the federal government chooses to spend. Note that only 5% of that money in 2013 is expected to be spent on health care in total, whereas 58% is expected to be spent on the military. Those numbers are both slightly inflated, however, because they ignore of the interest on loans that the federal government has to pay.
The amount of the actual federal budget that goes towards Medicare and Social Security (apart from paying back loans with interest) is remarkably close to zero. (If memory serves, salaries for the relevant administrative organizations do come out of the general fund, but those expenses are basically lost in the noise compared with the military's budget.)
You might think that not having to pony up the cash yourself means it's a sure thing, but if you don't know your provider's track record, it could turn into a shambles.
If it were a particular model of gold Rolex, that might have some credibility. But it's a Casio watch that costs $8.22 from Amazon and has been in continuous production for more than two decades. Probably half the under-ten children in America own this watch. Slight exaggeration, but not much of one.
Is that page serious? When did our government cross the line into bats**t crazy territory? That actually makes Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks seem sane and reasonable.
In fact, it reads like a classic example of how a statement does not prove its converse—all terrorists are people who wear Casio watches, therefore all people who wear Casio watches are terrorists. It's the sort of fundamentally faulty logic that would cause you to fail 10th grade math, assuming you even made it that far.
It is only temporary. Someday, we will increase it to 1,000 miles.
(For those who don't get the joke, except for maybe a tiny patch near Lebanon, KS, the entire continental United States lies within 1,000 miles of a border, give or take.)
But in all seriousness, nearly two-thirds the population of the United States lives within 100 miles of our nation's borders. The DHS's claims are tantamount to an outright abrogation of the fourth amendment for the overwhelming majority of Americans—an irrefutable and egregious violation of their sworn oath to uphold the Constitution. So the only real question that we should be asking is this:
Why aren't these usurpers in jail yet?
Freedom is a myth if our nation is unwilling to take people like this to task for wiping its a** with our nation's highest law. If we do not prosecute the DHS and anyone who commits illegal searches based on their borderline treasonous guidance, then our nation's highest law will have no teeth, and we might as well start calling ourselves the American Democratic Republic right now.
One watt is up near the top end of transmit power for Wi-Fi. Most Wi-Fi hardware transmits at a quarter watt or less so that when the end user couples it with a moderately directional antenna, they don't hit the maximum ERP.
But the one that is easiest for you to remember is likely to be the one where all the words fall into the top 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language (the words that most people use almost daily), at which point the search space for a dictionary attack just dropped by another order of magnitude per word.
Every time you make something easier for a human to remember, you're making it easier for a computer to guess. Want to make it hard to guess? Make it impossible for a human to remember, and store the resulting 100-character pseudorandom password in your keychain where it belongs. Then eliminate security questions entirely, and make the password recovery process involve a notarized letter sent by snail mail along with a photocopy of the government-issued ID card of your choice.
Your definition of "common words" is off by about an order of magnitude from reality, though. A typical person only uses about 10,000–25,000 words on a regular basis, depending on their level of education.
Even assuming the upper end of that, nearly all people would typically choose from about 3 * 10^17 possibilities, which at 350 billion attempts per second, would take only around ten days to crack. On the lower end, a sizable percentage of people would choose from about 1 * 10^16, which would take about eight hours to crack.
As evidenced by its popular use dating back for nearly a century as seen in this 1936 comic book, by itself, the term "space marine" is a descriptive and generic term that is ineligible for trademark protection, in much the same way that you cannot trademark the term "laptop computer" or "space ship". Whereas this trademark should never have been granted in the first place, the petitioner requests summary judgment in invalidating the errantly issued trademark.
Once the trademark has been invalidated, inform Amazon. They will restore your book, and the entire publishing and software world will rejoice in your space marines' victory over the egregiously evil trademark abuser.
Five years isn't enough time to start making money if you're a small business or individual author. I have books that I started writing more than five years ago that aren't even finished yet. But five years is an eternity if you're a corporate author or inventor. The problem is that there is no one time frame that makes sense for both, because the resources involved are vastly unequal.
A better solution, at least for patents, is to ban the practice of transferring patents to corporations, period, and to ban the transfer to individuals except in your will after you die, and to ban contracts that mandate who inherits those rights after you die (to prevent certain abuses that could otherwise occur with such a system).
Small companies wouldn't have a problem with that. They would continue to pay patent licensing fees to the original inventors. The larger the company got, the more infeasible such a scheme would become, and at some size, they would likely resort to not encouraging employees to obtain patents on their inventions in the first place, at which point patents would be solving the problem that they were originally intended to solve—protecting inventors from companies who steal their inventions—.without having all of the side effects that our current system has.
Meh. Once upon a time I would have agreed with you, but now I actually run Windows 7 on a PC that is less powerful than my phone, and it doesn't seem too bad, so I think the idea of resource constraints stopping you from running a desktop OS on a mobile device is something that will soon be consigned to history.
Now try it with Windows 8. When the OS and bundled software on your tablet is so big that it wouldn't even fit on the largest iPhone 4, and would fill nearly 3/4ths of the capacity of the largest iPhone 5, you have a very serious problem.
Helpful hint: the wolf may not particularly like to eat cabbage, but he'll darn well eat you if you leave him on one side of the river with nothing but cabbage to eat. Just saying.
One doesn't get that experience either from social security safety nets. I would say instead that education and experience are better strategies than a safety net.
Most people are incapable of gaining the needed experience, either because they do not have sufficient math skills or because they do not have time to constantly monitor their investments at the level required.
And before you say, "Yeah, but that's why you have stock analysts and brokers," I would point out that not all of them know what they're doing, nor do they all have enough math background to give correct advice even on simple things, and unlike you, they don't have any real liability if the advice they give is crap. So unless you just get lucky, you might as well put your faith in the tooth fairy to bring you money for retirement.
Also, statistically speaking, in the U.S., a sizable percentage of people don't earn enough money to usefully save for retirement. If there were no social security, and you wanted to live above the poverty line (let's say $25k per year for a family), assuming you'll only live for another 25 years (and you can never be certain of such a thing), you would need somewhere around $625,000. I'm ignoring growth from interest, so the real number is probably a little lower, but with today's interest rates, not a lot. A family earning $26,000 per year from two minimum-wage jobs can barely pay their bills. And if you assume that they did this for 45 years, assuming a 5% annual return on investment, they would have to put away about $11,000 per year for retirement. After taxes, this leaves you a whopping $833 per month (approximately) to live on. Yeah. Right.
We have a safety net in large part because minimum wage has not been a fair wage for a very long time. If you want to taper off that safety net, in theory, that would be fine, so long as you simultaneously raise the minimum wage in the U.S. to a more reasonable $25 adjusted annually for inflation. We can certainly talk about this over $20 burgers and $8 french fries. But as long as a substantial percentage of the population are not making a wage sufficient to allow them to retire, that's not going to work.
And truthfully, it won't work even if you do raise the minimum wage, because they still won't be able to afford to put away money for retirement while paying for those $20 burgers. The cost of goods will just go up to match. So there's really only one valid way to get rid of that safety net, and that would be to create a tax structure that makes it difficult or impossible for you to have such a big disparity between the income of the rich and the income of the poor.
This is not to say that you should go so far as pure communism, where there's no benefit to working harder, mind you, but you do need to swing far enough in that direction that you don't have people who die penniless on the streets because they are no longer physically able to work, did not earn enough money to usefully save for retirement, and have no safety net to allow them to retire in spite of that. The money to pay for that has to come from somewhere, and realistically, it has to come from the wealthiest people, or else you're just cascading the inability to retire up to a different group of people.
Since a third of the population of the U.S. lives at or below twice the federal poverty line (and that's pretty much the bottom threshold for being able to usefully retire, IMO), with that number growing steadily, it won't be long before you're spending more than half what you were spending for the safety net, but without having the safety net to protect you from circumstances that are truly beyond your control. And that's ignoring the fact that most of the money you put in now eventually comes back to you, which means that your average person, over the span of a lifetime, would effectively be putting in almost the same amount that they do now, but would have no protection if, for example, the stock market crashes aga
I would argue that there should be a limited safety net for individuals, simply because a basic sense of humanity requires it, and because people don't always have a great deal of choice in the matter when it comes to deciding where they want to work; they work for whoever was hiring when they lost their last job. Any risk they might take by taking a job pales compared with the risk of being unable to pay the bills, so a lack of a safety net doesn't help them avoid bad decisions in any useful or practical way.
There should be no safety net for businesses, because businesses are not individuals; they do not have feelings; they do not need to be fed; they do not need roofs over their heads. If the safety net for individuals is sufficient, the individuals that work for failed businesses should be able to land on their feet. If it isn't, then the problem is the broken safety net for individuals.
Of course, there's still the question of whether eliminating the social security safety net would discourage poor investing choices, but again, I think that where individuals are concerned, the answer is "no", if only because most individuals cannot possibly be expected to have the depth of understanding required to recognize toxic assets and other such problems.
Sounds like Nikon is in violation of the law, at least if they are selling products in California.
California Civil Code, Section 1793.03.
(a) Every manufacturer making an express warranty with
respect to an electronic or appliance product described in
subdivision (h), (i), (j), or (k) of Section 9801 of the Business and
Professions Code, with a wholesale price to the retailer of not less
than fifty dollars ($50) and not more than ninety-nine dollars and
ninety-nine cents ($99.99), shall make available to service and
repair facilities sufficient service literature and functional parts
to effect the repair of a product for at least three years after the
date a product model or type was manufactured, regardless of whether
the three-year period exceeds the warranty period for the product.
(b) Every manufacturer making an express warranty with respect to
an electronic or appliance product described in subdivision (h), (i),
(j), or (k) of Section 9801 of the Business and Professions Code,
with a wholesale price to the retailer of one hundred dollars ($100)
or more, shall make available to service and repair facilities
sufficient service literature and functional parts to effect the
repair of a product for at least seven years after the date a product
model or type was manufactured, regardless of whether the seven-year
period exceeds the warranty period for the product.
I'd have probably taken them to Goodwill. In most places, when they get things that nobody wants, they turn around and sell them on eBay or Amazon, and the revenue goes to fund their continuing operations. Plus if you're itemizing anyway, it's a tax write-off.
It's interesting to wave your hand and say, "Build superconducting grids." It's got that nifty science fiction sound to it, but it's not practical at this point. With current technology, it would *take* energy to maintain and in no small quantities. Engineering expertise too. It's an incredibly high maintenance solution, until and unless room temperature superconductor becomes available at a price that's affordable. That time is not yet.
What are you talking about? We already have superconducting power transmission lines in active use in the United States, with several more scheduled to go live over the next few years. Yes, the cooling adds some cost, but it is considerably less than the cost of resistive loss when you're dealing with sufficiently high-capacity bulk power transmission.
We already have superconducting power grid segments. They are underground, so temperature is mostly a non-issue. I wasn't suggesting using superconductive power grids for the last few feet to charge a car. I was suggesting using them around the world so that sunlight in parts of North America, Australia, and Asia could power Europe at night and vice versa.
You're right that the power storage demands for cars are problematic. It might be possible to run power into the car at a much higher voltage and provide each capacitor with a DC-DC converter with a very short duty cycle... ostensibly... but I'm not sure if it is possible in practice. You'd still need some way to smooth that kind of current....
Either way, the storage problem is only a problem for a very small number of applications (automobiles being the main one), and even those applications could be eliminated by removing the need for storage. For example, if you built charge coils into the road, you could cut the storage requirements to almost nothing. Or build cars that connect to overhead power lines (though I'll warrant that's harder to do with rubber tires than with trains). Or just build out a viable national network of light rails and high-speed electric trains and stuff so that nobody would need to drive a car in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
That "fair" breakdown, from a legal perspective, is, in fact, an outright lie. It claims that Medicare and Social Security trust fund payments to individuals are part of the federal budget. According to 42 USC section 911 paragraph (a), payments from those trust funds are NOT considered part of the federal budget. There's simply no grey area or ambiguity here. They aren't part of the federal budget, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to push a political agenda.
Calling Medicare and Social Security part of the federal budget is as misleading as calling sales taxes part of a retailer's budget, or calling customer withdrawals part of a bank's budget. The money does flow through the federal government, but it was never theirs to begin with.
Medicare and Social Security are paid for by separate taxes that cover those programs explicitly. In each case, those taxes go into a separate fund that is used to pay for the ongoing operations of the appropriate administration. Each administration is run as a separate financial entity that operates pretty much independently from the federal government's budgeted spending. This makes them highly unique as taxes go; they are not part of the government's general fund, and short of changing the laws in question (42 USC section 911), the government has no legal authority to redirect those funds towards any use other than Social Security and Medicare. And that is why payouts by those trust funds are not considered part of the federal budget. The law is very clear on that point.
A closer (but still not quite accurate) picture of the federal budget comes from looking at federal discretionary spending. That covers the money that the federal government chooses to spend. Note that only 5% of that money in 2013 is expected to be spent on health care in total, whereas 58% is expected to be spent on the military. Those numbers are both slightly inflated, however, because they ignore of the interest on loans that the federal government has to pay.
The amount of the actual federal budget that goes towards Medicare and Social Security (apart from paying back loans with interest) is remarkably close to zero. (If memory serves, salaries for the relevant administrative organizations do come out of the general fund, but those expenses are basically lost in the noise compared with the military's budget.)
I see what you did there.
If it were a particular model of gold Rolex, that might have some credibility. But it's a Casio watch that costs $8.22 from Amazon and has been in continuous production for more than two decades. Probably half the under-ten children in America own this watch. Slight exaggeration, but not much of one.
Groupies?
Is that page serious? When did our government cross the line into bats**t crazy territory? That actually makes Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks seem sane and reasonable.
In fact, it reads like a classic example of how a statement does not prove its converse—all terrorists are people who wear Casio watches, therefore all people who wear Casio watches are terrorists. It's the sort of fundamentally faulty logic that would cause you to fail 10th grade math, assuming you even made it that far.
Wow. Just. Wow.
Pro tip: Countries with "Democratic Republic" in their names tend to be neither.
Close enough for government work.
It is only temporary. Someday, we will increase it to 1,000 miles.
(For those who don't get the joke, except for maybe a tiny patch near Lebanon, KS, the entire continental United States lies within 1,000 miles of a border, give or take.)
But in all seriousness, nearly two-thirds the population of the United States lives within 100 miles of our nation's borders. The DHS's claims are tantamount to an outright abrogation of the fourth amendment for the overwhelming majority of Americans—an irrefutable and egregious violation of their sworn oath to uphold the Constitution. So the only real question that we should be asking is this:
Freedom is a myth if our nation is unwilling to take people like this to task for wiping its a** with our nation's highest law. If we do not prosecute the DHS and anyone who commits illegal searches based on their borderline treasonous guidance, then our nation's highest law will have no teeth, and we might as well start calling ourselves the American Democratic Republic right now.
One watt is up near the top end of transmit power for Wi-Fi. Most Wi-Fi hardware transmits at a quarter watt or less so that when the end user couples it with a moderately directional antenna, they don't hit the maximum ERP.
But the point is well taken.
But the one that is easiest for you to remember is likely to be the one where all the words fall into the top 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language (the words that most people use almost daily), at which point the search space for a dictionary attack just dropped by another order of magnitude per word.
Every time you make something easier for a human to remember, you're making it easier for a computer to guess. Want to make it hard to guess? Make it impossible for a human to remember, and store the resulting 100-character pseudorandom password in your keychain where it belongs. Then eliminate security questions entirely, and make the password recovery process involve a notarized letter sent by snail mail along with a photocopy of the government-issued ID card of your choice.
And then you have a password that you won't readily remember, because you haven't seen the word "turgid" since the SAT.
Your definition of "common words" is off by about an order of magnitude from reality, though. A typical person only uses about 10,000–25,000 words on a regular basis, depending on their level of education.
Even assuming the upper end of that, nearly all people would typically choose from about 3 * 10^17 possibilities, which at 350 billion attempts per second, would take only around ten days to crack. On the lower end, a sizable percentage of people would choose from about 1 * 10^16, which would take about eight hours to crack.
As I understand it, they're trademarking a video game about space marines. So it is, in fact, descriptive with regards to the product they're selling.
It would, however, be entirely reasonable to trademark "Space Marine" brand soap.
As evidenced by its popular use dating back for nearly a century as seen in this 1936 comic book, by itself, the term "space marine" is a descriptive and generic term that is ineligible for trademark protection, in much the same way that you cannot trademark the term "laptop computer" or "space ship". Whereas this trademark should never have been granted in the first place, the petitioner requests summary judgment in invalidating the errantly issued trademark.
See the USPTO's appeals process page for information about how you can proceed with or without an attorney.
Once the trademark has been invalidated, inform Amazon. They will restore your book, and the entire publishing and software world will rejoice in your space marines' victory over the egregiously evil trademark abuser.
Five years isn't enough time to start making money if you're a small business or individual author. I have books that I started writing more than five years ago that aren't even finished yet. But five years is an eternity if you're a corporate author or inventor. The problem is that there is no one time frame that makes sense for both, because the resources involved are vastly unequal.
A better solution, at least for patents, is to ban the practice of transferring patents to corporations, period, and to ban the transfer to individuals except in your will after you die, and to ban contracts that mandate who inherits those rights after you die (to prevent certain abuses that could otherwise occur with such a system).
Small companies wouldn't have a problem with that. They would continue to pay patent licensing fees to the original inventors. The larger the company got, the more infeasible such a scheme would become, and at some size, they would likely resort to not encouraging employees to obtain patents on their inventions in the first place, at which point patents would be solving the problem that they were originally intended to solve—protecting inventors from companies who steal their inventions—.without having all of the side effects that our current system has.
Now try it with Windows 8. When the OS and bundled software on your tablet is so big that it wouldn't even fit on the largest iPhone 4, and would fill nearly 3/4ths of the capacity of the largest iPhone 5, you have a very serious problem.
Helpful hint: the wolf may not particularly like to eat cabbage, but he'll darn well eat you if you leave him on one side of the river with nothing but cabbage to eat. Just saying.
Only in French. And you forgot the apostrophe.
Most people are incapable of gaining the needed experience, either because they do not have sufficient math skills or because they do not have time to constantly monitor their investments at the level required.
And before you say, "Yeah, but that's why you have stock analysts and brokers," I would point out that not all of them know what they're doing, nor do they all have enough math background to give correct advice even on simple things, and unlike you, they don't have any real liability if the advice they give is crap. So unless you just get lucky, you might as well put your faith in the tooth fairy to bring you money for retirement.
Also, statistically speaking, in the U.S., a sizable percentage of people don't earn enough money to usefully save for retirement. If there were no social security, and you wanted to live above the poverty line (let's say $25k per year for a family), assuming you'll only live for another 25 years (and you can never be certain of such a thing), you would need somewhere around $625,000. I'm ignoring growth from interest, so the real number is probably a little lower, but with today's interest rates, not a lot. A family earning $26,000 per year from two minimum-wage jobs can barely pay their bills. And if you assume that they did this for 45 years, assuming a 5% annual return on investment, they would have to put away about $11,000 per year for retirement. After taxes, this leaves you a whopping $833 per month (approximately) to live on. Yeah. Right.
We have a safety net in large part because minimum wage has not been a fair wage for a very long time. If you want to taper off that safety net, in theory, that would be fine, so long as you simultaneously raise the minimum wage in the U.S. to a more reasonable $25 adjusted annually for inflation. We can certainly talk about this over $20 burgers and $8 french fries. But as long as a substantial percentage of the population are not making a wage sufficient to allow them to retire, that's not going to work.
And truthfully, it won't work even if you do raise the minimum wage, because they still won't be able to afford to put away money for retirement while paying for those $20 burgers. The cost of goods will just go up to match. So there's really only one valid way to get rid of that safety net, and that would be to create a tax structure that makes it difficult or impossible for you to have such a big disparity between the income of the rich and the income of the poor.
This is not to say that you should go so far as pure communism, where there's no benefit to working harder, mind you, but you do need to swing far enough in that direction that you don't have people who die penniless on the streets because they are no longer physically able to work, did not earn enough money to usefully save for retirement, and have no safety net to allow them to retire in spite of that. The money to pay for that has to come from somewhere, and realistically, it has to come from the wealthiest people, or else you're just cascading the inability to retire up to a different group of people.
Since a third of the population of the U.S. lives at or below twice the federal poverty line (and that's pretty much the bottom threshold for being able to usefully retire, IMO), with that number growing steadily, it won't be long before you're spending more than half what you were spending for the safety net, but without having the safety net to protect you from circumstances that are truly beyond your control. And that's ignoring the fact that most of the money you put in now eventually comes back to you, which means that your average person, over the span of a lifetime, would effectively be putting in almost the same amount that they do now, but would have no protection if, for example, the stock market crashes aga
I would argue that there should be a limited safety net for individuals, simply because a basic sense of humanity requires it, and because people don't always have a great deal of choice in the matter when it comes to deciding where they want to work; they work for whoever was hiring when they lost their last job. Any risk they might take by taking a job pales compared with the risk of being unable to pay the bills, so a lack of a safety net doesn't help them avoid bad decisions in any useful or practical way.
There should be no safety net for businesses, because businesses are not individuals; they do not have feelings; they do not need to be fed; they do not need roofs over their heads. If the safety net for individuals is sufficient, the individuals that work for failed businesses should be able to land on their feet. If it isn't, then the problem is the broken safety net for individuals.
Of course, there's still the question of whether eliminating the social security safety net would discourage poor investing choices, but again, I think that where individuals are concerned, the answer is "no", if only because most individuals cannot possibly be expected to have the depth of understanding required to recognize toxic assets and other such problems.
Sounds like Nikon is in violation of the law, at least if they are selling products in California.
That's so they can play the music from Iron Eagle during air-to-air combat.
I'd have probably taken them to Goodwill. In most places, when they get things that nobody wants, they turn around and sell them on eBay or Amazon, and the revenue goes to fund their continuing operations. Plus if you're itemizing anyway, it's a tax write-off.
What are you talking about? We already have superconducting power transmission lines in active use in the United States, with several more scheduled to go live over the next few years. Yes, the cooling adds some cost, but it is considerably less than the cost of resistive loss when you're dealing with sufficiently high-capacity bulk power transmission.
We already have superconducting power grid segments. They are underground, so temperature is mostly a non-issue. I wasn't suggesting using superconductive power grids for the last few feet to charge a car. I was suggesting using them around the world so that sunlight in parts of North America, Australia, and Asia could power Europe at night and vice versa.
You're right that the power storage demands for cars are problematic. It might be possible to run power into the car at a much higher voltage and provide each capacitor with a DC-DC converter with a very short duty cycle... ostensibly... but I'm not sure if it is possible in practice. You'd still need some way to smooth that kind of current....
Either way, the storage problem is only a problem for a very small number of applications (automobiles being the main one), and even those applications could be eliminated by removing the need for storage. For example, if you built charge coils into the road, you could cut the storage requirements to almost nothing. Or build cars that connect to overhead power lines (though I'll warrant that's harder to do with rubber tires than with trains). Or just build out a viable national network of light rails and high-speed electric trains and stuff so that nobody would need to drive a car in the first place.