Except all "discoveries" of dinosaur DNA are generally believed to be caused by contamination. One, for example, turned out to be a human Y chromosome. To date, AFAIK, they haven't been able to extract nontrivial fragments of DNA from any samples that are more than a few hundred thousand years old, if that.
Current models suggest the complete destruction of DNA after about 6.8 million years, which is approximately an order of magnitude shorter than the time that has passed since dinosaurs last walked the earth. So unless the young Earth folks are correct, I suspect that recovering actual dinosaur DNA would take some as-yet undiscovered, spectacularly unlikely chemical reaction that replaces the base pairs uniquely with some other mineral or something. It just doesn't seem very likely to find DNA from anything not warm-blooded, i.e. from any animal that couldn't live far enough north or south to get frozen after its death. It is probably not possible even then, but it isn't entirely impossible, because the half-life of short fragments goes up dramatically as the storage temperature drops.
We have all the technology we need, in fact way beyond, do deploy space-to-space or space-to-ground weapon systems.
Depends on what you mean by "space-to-ground weapons systems". If you mean something that can hit a building from space, sure, we could do that today. But for any weapons system to be useful in modern-day asymmetrical warfare (e.g. terrorism), you need to be able to identify a target reliably. If you use ground-based surveillance to find the target, you're already in harm's way, so there's not much point in putting the weapons themselves in space. To some degree, this is also true for aircraft. So at least in my mind, the minimum level of resolution you really need to make those sorts of weapons truly useful is about 1 pixel per centimeter—high enough resolution to maybe identify a human face.
Unfortunately, atmospheric interference makes that sort of completely impractical from geostationary orbit; I think the state of the art is something like 25 cm per pixel, which means a human head is only one pixel tall. Right now, even from low Earth orbit, AFAIK, the state of the art is something like 8 cm resolution, which means a human head is only three pixels tall. So we're still a good order of magnitude away from satellites being even marginally useful for surveillance in modern warfare against anything other than an actual national military force or other large group of individuals working out of something resembling a traditional "base", and we're two orders of magnitude away from the images being what most people would consider acceptable for reliably identifying an assassination target.
But a platform that starts in LEO, dipping down far enough into the atmosphere to identify a target and shoot it before going back into space... that just might be within the realm of possibility, or if not, then it is at least a lot closer to being possible than it would be from orbit.
Close. I'm arguing for a policy in which I help pay for something that I want to see happen.
Unless you're in the top 80% of American income earners, you don't help pay for anything.
I won't give an exact number, but it suffices to say that like most people in the Silicon Valley, I'm in the top single-digit percent.
Giving prisoners an education tailored to their needs is not the same as giving a free education of their choice to middle-class kids; the studies don't apply.
If giving an education to prisoners significantly reduces the likelihood of them going back to prison, it stands to reason that giving those same people an education would also reduce the likelihood of them going to prison in the first place. Arguing to the contrary would require some serious evidence, as it seems pretty dubious prima facie.
Most of the folks who pick those programs because they hear it pays well end up dropping out or changing majors because they don't have the logical thinking ability to translate specifications into functioning code even at a basic level.
Which is why they shouldn't waste 2-4 years in college.
No, it's why they shouldn't waste 2–4 years in college studying that particular subject.
Actually, the two causes of excessive credit are simple: kids aren't taught basic economics or personal finance in public schools, and financial regulations protect individuals from the consequences of their actions and force credit issuers to issue credit to high-risk customers.
Citation needed. To the best of my knowledge, there is no law requiring credit issuers to issue credit to customers who don't have adequate income, and there is no law requiring them to give large amounts of credit to customers with debt that is a significant portion of their income. Companies choose to do so because they can then greedily charge usurious interest rates, and they do so in the hopes that most of the time they'll come out ahead. They base their rates on how often they'll come out ahead.
Well, they have been "conned" by people with your kind of bizarre ideas about economics, people like you who think that spending 2-6 years on a free college degree in a useless field is an economically sound decision.
I didn't say that. But it is. Realistically, college grads make substantially more money than non-college grads in nearly every area (with CS being a notable exception). Even degrees in underwater basketweaving prove that a student has matured to the point that he/she will be a good worker.
And I reject your argument that those degrees are useless, too. The actual knowledge portion of almost any college degree is likely to be useless in at most twenty years, because your field of study will have changed so much that what you learned is no longer even relevant. The main point of college is not to teach facts, but rather to teach students how to become lifelong learners—to inspire them to explore areas outside the very rigid set of subjects offered in K–12 education and encourage them to continue growing and learning throughout their lives. This is fundamentally impossible to do in the sort of strictly vocational education environment that you advocate, because not everyone will find any of those high-earning fields interesting.
Moreover, we're facing a harsh reality in which technology is making more and more jobs unnecessary. Already, IBM's Watson is frequently doing a better job of being a doctor than real doctors. No field is safe in the long term. So what the heck is the point of going into a field like medical care where you go deeply into debt in the hopes of making it back over the first two decades of your career, when there's a half-decent chance that your career won't last that long?
The lower density of solid water relative to liquid is due to the further-apart arrangement H2O molecules take when water crystallizes into a solid.
It certainly would be hard for something to be owed to an arrangement of molecules. I'll grant you that. Though somehow, I feel like some smart aleck will try....
The sentence you approve of, “The concert was canceled due to rain” would sound better substituting “because of” for “due to”: The concert was canceled because of the rain.” But I would also dump the passive voice: “Unlike what occurred at Woodstock, rain caused the promoters to cancel the concert.”
I never said it was a good sentence, just unambiguous.:-) That said, yours is still passive voice, just in the form of a passive infinitive construction. I'd go with "The promoters canceled the concert because of (or due to) rain to avoid another Woodstock '94." That said, I'm starting to think that this is ambiguous again, because the concert could be due to rain. Nah. Nobody would be crazy enough to interpret it that way, right? Right?:-/
I absolutely agree, although it has nothing to do with UBI. Cashier jobs are going away pretty darn rapidly. Those are prime jobs for automation. Most jobs that require little skill and which are incredibly repetitive are going away. It's cheaper to have a machine do them, even if it requires re-architecturing your business to do it.
Eventually, yes, but those jobs won't go away tomorrow. I meant in the short term, during which time society needs those folks to continue working so that we'll still have food. And we need to strongly encourage them to save up that money so that they can use it to get additional college education and/or vocational training after those jobs go away.
What we need to do to make this work, however, is to ensure that that money actually goes back into the economy, and doesn't just get pooled in the bosses' bank accounts and investment funds.
That's the hard part. You could maybe make it so that the businesses pay a significant percentage of the amount of money they saved back into the UBI fund,
but that would reduce the economic benefit. Or you could tax personal capital gains as ordinary income above a certain threshold. Or you could take the Republican approach and just borrow the money and print more, thus devaluing the dollar and effectively taxing everyone proportional to their wealth. (This is, of course, the great irony of our political system; the wealthy tend to vote Republican because they believe they are getting taxed less, when in reality they are probably getting taxed more, or at least a similar amount.)
You aren't helping anyone; you argue for a policy where other people pay for something you want to see happen.
Close. I'm arguing for a policy in which I help pay for something that I want to see happen.
You're confusing correlation and causation.
No, I'm not. Reread the studies that I linked to. Or just read about prison education studies—unless, of course, you're arguing that a fairly large number of well-respected scientists are all confusing correlation with causation.
The US already spends more per capita on healthcare, welfare, and other social issues than most other countries, yet we get no better, and often worse, results. So, obviously, the approach actually matters, and the approach of US progressives doesn't work.
The approach of U.S. progressives hasn't been tried in earnest. It more closely matches the approach in Europe, which has been tried, and does work, as proven by the fact that we get worse results. For example, we spend more money on healthcare primarily because of profit taking in the healthcare industry. Most other countries do not have for-profit insurance companies and for-profit hospitals. They have government-run hospitals with government-run insurance, which means there's no profit taking along the way to drive prices up.
As a matter of fact, I was born in a country that was much poorer than the US to parents who came from dirt poor families. Both my parents and I worked throughout our lives, including while at university. We all picked fields of study based on future earnings rather than interests. Now you want to tax my income more, not to send to people who were as "unfortunate" as me, but to send it to pampered, privileged American middle class teenagers to study critical theory in college. I'm sorry if I don't buy into your politics. Disregarding the question of whether that's fair to me, it simply is not fair to those pampered, privileged American middle class teenagers whose lives you are messing up.
Those "pampered middle-class teenagers" will get a rude awakening when they find themselves unable to find work with their useless degrees, and they'll teach their kids to have more common sense, so it will all work itself out in a generation at most.
The thing is, I've heard your argument before. You're arguing that the lack of a cost for college education is the reason that people choose to get degrees in useless subjects. It's classic Libertarian nonsense; in fact, it is exactly backwards. The reality is that only a small percentage of college students pay for their own education, and that would still be true even without student loans or other low-income scholarship programs. The people who get those loans and grants, at least in my anecdotal experience as an educator, tend to be more serious about their education because they recognize that they're lucky to have the opportunity. The people who get useless degrees tend to be the ones whose parents are paying for the degree. And lowering the cost of that education for them isn't going to change that behavior, because if the cost to their parents mattered to them, they would have chosen a degree based on projected earnings already.
Moreover, the argument that kids should choose their degree program based on how much money they will make is fundamentally harmful to society as a whole. One of the reasons certain degrees pay more money is that they are genuinely more difficult and require people whose brains work in certain ways. Not everybody is cut out to be a software engineer. Most of the folks who pick those programs because they hear it pays well end up dropping out or changing majors because they don't have the logical thinking ability to translate specifications into functioning code even at a basic level. So what you're a
There's a good chance that companies can pay less salary and give employees an overall higher take-home income with UBI. Provided we can pull back a little of that increased company income in taxes, we're giving the economy a big shot in the arm. If UBI is worth $8/hr and a business can reduce salaries by $6/hr, employees make more, the company makes more, and the profits on the company get taxed more.
I suspect that nobody is going to work a register at McDonald's for $2 an hour—particularly if 60 cents goes to taxes and 10 cents goes to paying for the drive over. There's a certain minimum threshold below which you'll make more money sitting on the street corner and asking for change.
One possible solution would be to require employers to report the dates of employment as part of their W-2s or 1099s. Then reclaim the UBI as part of the income tax for weeks in which you were working. This would reduce the perception that employees were only really making $2 per hour at the expense of a small increase in overhead, but it would only work if the UBI were paid through the employer to offset that tax.
Or we could just accept that a $6 UBI would likely result in an effective minimum wage of about $12 per hour. Either way. The resulting huge influx in resources among the working poor would likely introduce enough additional money into the economy to significantly reduce the cost of implementing a UBI.
I think there's something to be said about enjoying life while you're young enough to do so. I would not be surprised if a lot fewer people got jobs straight out of college if a UBI were implemented, choosing to wait several years while they partied (though I suppose they might have to work part-time to pay for the parties). That, in turn, would significantly raise the relative cost of the UBI.
On the flip side, a UBI would also mean that more people might consider trying to start small businesses, knowing that if the business fails, they'll still have an income. Obviously, that doesn't work if they have to secure loans against their personal finances, but that's kind of a separate problem. They would also be more willing to take jobs at startups for the same reason. In other words, a UBI might encourage the sorts of risk taking that drive capitalist societies forwards.
Both theories are pure speculation until some country actually tries it, and the behavior might vary from country to country, too, so you don't have any guarantees even after a country actually tries it. Either way, it will be a fascinating thing to watch.
Even as you pointed out; if my doctor charges too much I can stop using them as a doctor. Choosing a government, on the other hand, is a bit trickier of a situation.
Except that the existence of health insurance breaks that model by hiding the cost from you. The number of people who care about the cost of healthcare enough to change doctors is lost in the noise.
Or if you don't like the libertarian argument on that, how about this one: medical care is an essential service—something that in many cases people quite literally cannot live without. Competition cannot work for these services, because the people in need of those services cannot realistically price shop or choose to delay care until the cost is less. The entire capitalist model completely fails when applied to healthcare, and always will no matter how many layers of insurance you add to the mix.
As for social security, its most significant problem is that it was designed based on assumptions of how long people will live, and those assumptions are no longer valid. Ideally, the retirement age should be indexed to your individual life expectancy, but failing that, it should be indexed to the average life expectancy.
And it was also designed based on assumptions of population growth that are no longer valid. To make up for that, the wage cap on contributions should be raised, and the percentage should be increased if necessary.
Yeah, or to put it another way, "What do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?"
One obvious stepping stone towards weaponizing space would be developing advanced surveillance and precision tracking technology, and experimenting with it without actually building the weapon part. After all, once you build the weapon and use it, you're committed. Everybody knows you have it, and if the outcry is too strong, you've lost the PR war, and you're never going to get money for new R&D. So it makes sense to limit your laser testing to labs (because location doesn't matter much for that), and test only the tracking/optics in a real-world environment until you get that part exactly right, then merge the two after you have all the key pieces for your superweapon.
I'm not saying they're doing this, because how would I know, but that's certainly what I'd do if I wanted to pull a fast one on the general public. Just saying.
Many of them are parents who don't want to pay for their kids. And, of course, some people are just confused, like you are.
Wait, so wanting to help other people makes me confused? Okay, now I'm confused....
And your evidence that making college free leads to a "well-educated public means less crime and more economic output" is where exactly?
Decades of history. Look at Japan. Look at California prior to the 1970s. And so on. And variousstudies back up that statement, too.
Society only benefits from sending kids to college if the cost of college is small compared to the increased future earnings; when that is the case, student loans are the right mechanism to finance a college education. When that is not the case, "free" college education is harmful both to the kids and to society.
Uh, no. That's not true at all, and by that, I mean that it is objectively false, rather than subjectively. Statistically, even small increases in college attendance result in large drops in crime rate. So even if the cost is high compared with the increased future earnings, society still benefits from sending kids to college, and so do the kids.
Ah, the knee-jerk response that "billionaire = conservative". Of course, that's nonsense; if anything, billionaires tilt slightly left [politico.com]. They pay negligible income tax, and even if they lost 99% of their money to the government, they'd still be wealthy.
Okay, let me restate that by replacing the word "billionaire" with "wealthy person". It is inarguable that the wealthy are substantially more likely to lean to the right than the poor and middle class.
Nope, sorry, I don't believe it. I only know of one significant study that makes that claim (Margolis), and it is wrong (in fact, I'd call it dishonest).
I would argue that the other studies are, in fact, dishonest, as they treat 100% of donations to churches as charitable giving despite the fact that only about 10-15% of those donations typically are used for programs that help the less fortunate, and the rest tends to go towards operations of the church, from which the donor typically benefits to some degree as a member, thus placing it at least to some degree into that whole "self-interest" category that you say isn't charity.
In any case, it's also irrelevant. Charity necessarily involves a personal element that you yourself just admitted the left is denying that element. So, whatever the left is doing, it's not charity.
*shrugs*. The way I see it, what matters is the result, not the approach. I don't disagree that charity involves a personal element, but I do disagree that campaigning for laws/policies/candidates that help the poor isn't a personal element. My comment about protesters earlier was not intended to imply that protests, letter writing, campaigning for office, etc. aren't useful tools, nor to imply that all of (or even the majority of) the protesters are bozos. Many of them are legitimately trying to help.
Yes, and that's what makes the left so utterly evil, namely the view that when people are successful, it is because stuff was "given" to them.
Okay, here's a challenge for you. Be born in a country that has no roads, no sewers, no clean running water, and become a billionaire. Or heck, start out poor in this country and become one. In theory, it can happen, but it is statistically a fluke. On average, people who become enormously wealthy started out at least moderately wealthy. People near the botto
What folks on the left are voting for is "someone else/the rich/the privileged should pay for/do something causes I care about". That isn't "loving thy neighbor" or "clothing the poor", it is self-righteous, lazy, destructive social signaling. And often, it amounts to nothing more than naked self-interest, like students wanting free education and forgiveness of their student loans.
Wanting free education isn't naked self-interest. Only about ten or fifteen percent of Americans have student loan debt. The left is about 50%. So at least 35% of Americans support making public education cheap or free even though they won't benefit from it directly. Why? Because they realize that having a well-educated public means less crime and more economic output. It's self interest, but only in a very broad sense of the word.
Folks on the right believe in actual charity, which means (1) making personal sacrifices and donations, (2) personal interaction and volunteering, and (3) not parading around charity for social signaling or ulterior motives.
Let me know when I can watch hundreds of rich billionaires volunteering at a homeless shelter. I'm not saying that no rich people ever do those things, but the reality is that the vast majority of people (regardless of wealth) don't participate in charity very much. The difference between the right and the left is that the left believes that those to whom much is given, much is expected from, and that because most people aren't naturally charitable, government must intervene to ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable are protected, whereas the right believes that people should choose to be charitable on their own (and blindly hopes that enough do). And the people on the left tend to rely on government to figure out where the needs are so that they don't have to, whereas the people on the right tend to rely on churches to figure out where the needs are so that they don't have to.
All snark aside, if you look at charitable giving, the left and right are approximately equal, believe it or not, though they do approach it in very different ways.
That said, I can't disagree with you about the "social signaling" bit. There's definitely a small but vocal lunatic fringe on the left that seem to think that the world will only get better if they constantly protest. Half the folks don't even know what they're protesting. They just do it because everybody else is doing it. Most folks on the left see that happening and just roll their eyes. If everyone did that, eventually they'd stop trying to get attention and start trying to find ways to actually make a difference.
My newswriting prof always said that you should never use "due to" except when talking about owing an actual debt to someone. I would tend to argue that it is acceptable, but only in very limited contexts where its meaning is unambiguous, which basically means it is only okay after an action verb, and never after a linking verb.
"The rain was due to him" could mean either that he seeded the clouds to cause the rain or that he deserved it.
"The concert was cancelled due to rain" can have only one meaning because the action verb forces the word "due" to be interpreted as part of the compound preposition "due to" instead of as a standalone adjective.
Either way, it depends on your style guide. AP says it's fine; Chicago says it isn't.
Given that California's taxes are already among the highest in the nation, that argument is absurd. Other states manage to have better roads, better education, better government services with a fraction of the tax revenue and spending (per capita) of California.
Other states can afford to have lower taxes in part because they get a lot more gas tax money from the federal government than California does. One reason that California's roads are in bad shape, ironically, is because a higher percentage of people drive newer cars that use less (or no) fuel. As a result, the state brings in less money in gas taxes per capita-mile than they otherwise would.
Another reason is that a lot of California's gas tax money goes to support California's mass transit system—something that rural states don't have any need for, and thus get by without paying for. Comparing California to Tennessee really isn't a fair comparison; even Nashville's traffic, as awful as it can be, can't compare with the Bay Area or LA, and that's with an extensive mass transit system in California. Imagine how much worse things would be in California if that transit system didn't exist.
Finally, California's roads are worse than other places in part because of Prop 13 causing people to be unable to easily sell their homes and move closer to their jobs when they change jobs. This translates into more people driving further.... That one is a good example of government brokenness, and is something lots of us have been pushing to fix for a very long time.
Finally, if you actually look at the maps, you'll see that the coastal/rural divide just doesn't hold anyway; federal spending vs taxes is, literally, all over the map [mises.org].
Coastal/rural is a crude approximation on my part. It would be more accurate to group the northeast and the west coast into one bucket and most of the rest of the country into the other. BTW, those are the exact same maps from the exact same sources that I was referring to, so any differences here are purely a matter of word choice. The only part of the northeast that brings in drastically more money from the feds than it pays in taxes is Washington D.C., and that's largely because D.C. isn't a state.
Californians are welcome to vote for smaller government, smaller federal taxes, and less federal spending any time. Unfortunately, they always seem to vote for growing the federal government. You can be certain that that isn't out of altruism, it is because they (unlike you) understand that California is much more dependent on the federal government.
Actually, it mostly is out of altruism. Folks on the left tend to be pretty serious about that whole "love your neighbor, clothe the poor, and feed the hungry" thing. Folks on the right should really try it sometime.
Your roads argument is transparently false: roads are paid out of state and local taxes, and those are not traded off against federal taxes; in fact, California has some of the highest taxes on the state and local level.
There are limits to how high taxes can go. Every dollar that Californians pay to the federal government that doesn't come back to the state translates to a dollar that California couldn't collect in higher taxes and use within the state. So no, it isn't "transparently false". In fact, it is self-evident.
Sorry, I have looked at those analyses and they don't work out. The idea that California finances the rural populations of other states is a myth
Citation needed. The numbers don't lie. If a state gets fewer benefits from the federal government than it pays in taxes, then the country is a net drain on the state. If it gets more benefits, then the state is a net drain on the country. California is a net provider, rural states are net takers. It really doesn't get much simpler than that. Yes, you can argue that it is worth spending money on those rural areas because they grow our food, but the fact still remains that if those rural states were in better shape financially, California would directly benefit.
And we have about the same sales tax rate as CA (9.25%), but no state income tax.
Except that for businesses, there's a 6.5% state excise tax in Tennessee, which is effectively a 6.5% income tax on businesses. It's lower than California's 8.84%, but not by a lot. And you pay a lot more on average in property tax despite having a slightly lower rate, thanks to Prop 13 freezing everybody's assessment at the time of purchase.
CA is bad enough that we're getting companies of that size to literally pack up and move 3000 miles.
They're consolidating the staff of Carl's Jr. (Anaheim) and Hardees (St. Louis) and massively cutting their staff in the process. Given Anaheim's high cost of office space, I'm surprised it didn't happen long ago. There's no good reason for a business that owns property all over the nation to be concentrated in a major city with such high land costs, particularly when you can cut costs so dramatically by axing half the staff, moving the rest to a place with a lower cost of living, lower salaries, and cheaper office space. It has less to do with California being bad than with Tennessee being relatively inexpensive, in much the same way that China and Mexico are cheaper than Tennessee for manufacturing jobs. Don't worry. In thirty years, they'll find somewhere cheaper than Franklin, and the cycle of cost-cutting will continue.
Would it surprise you to know that our economy is thriving?
Would it surprise you to know that as soon as you move outside of the relatively wealthy area where you live, the state as a whole is doing pretty badly? I say this as someone who lived in rural West TN for 22 years and now lives in California. Republican policies have certainly made things good for folks in greater Nashville, but rural areas and Memphis are hurting badly.
Ah, so now you want to get into detailed analyses. Well, given the high cost of living in California, a lot of California's GDP isn't real output, it's just churning. That is, California's massive regulations and taxes may increase the GSP on paper, but they simply aren't productive. And wealth in California very unequally distributed, with a minority living in wealthy coastal enclaves while much of the rest of the state is urban slums and rural poverty.
So what you're saying is that California is basically a microcosm of the country as a whole. The wealth in America is very unequally distributed, with a minority living in wealthy coastal enclaves while much of the rest of the country is in urban slums and rural poverty.
What you should be comparing, then, is California's per-capita GDP to that of the entire country. It's about 12% higher than the country as a whole, in spite of paying more out in taxes to the federal government than it gets back in benefits. If California weren't helping to support all the red states with their larger rural populations, its per-capita GDP would be even better compared with the country as a whole (and its roads would be in better shape, too).
I'm not saying that taxing rockets based on how far they fly isn't stupid; it is. Lots of things California does are downright idiotic. But on the whole, the government at the state level is run better than the government at the federal level (which isn't saying much, but still...).
Which means if they haven't increased at an exponential pace, there's a reason that has nothing to do with lack of money.
One possible reason is that larger development teams don't scale well. At some point, unless you move into unrelated technology areas that are way outside your main focus area, you end up with teams working on similar projects who don't know that they're essentially competing internally. At that point, any advantage to hiring more people goes out the window.
Another possible reason is that there are a limited number of good programmers out there in the world; the faster you grow, the lower your average programmer quality is going to be, because you'll have to take more chaff along with the wheat.
A third reason is that management tends to get deeper as it gets wider, resulting in administrative bloat that makes it painful to grow beyond a certain size.
Whatever the reason, the point is that there are definite barriers to scaling up that occur particularly in large businesses, such that merely having spare capital isn't enough. When businesses get big enough, they often find that it is easier to just buy new startups in the space that they want to move into. Let the startups take the risk and fight it out, then consume the winner along with its staff....
California did not enact Proposition 13, the voters did.
California voters did, not voters in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Kentucky, etc. So yes California most certainly did enact that proposition....
It was enacted during a time when valuations were climbing at a high rate, and older homeowners were being forced from their homes by increased property taxes.
Tennessee recently had the same problem, but they were smart enough to learn from California's huge mistake and made it so that the "no reassessment" bit applies only to people over 65, applies only to people below a certain income threshold, doesn't cover rental properties, doesn't cover second homes, etc.
California's Prop 13 has been the single biggest train wreck in the history of California's proposition system. It has primarily benefitted people who own multiple homes and who use them as rental properties, rather than the elderly (who are having a harder and harder time buying homes at all because all the property is tied up in rentals, in part because nobody wants to give up that sweet tax break). It makes it exorbitantly expensive to move into the state, and has depressed essential property tax revenues that pay for our state's schools very badly. Worse, the impact on property tax revenue disproportionately impacts areas where the poor live because it is mostly rental property owned by people who have owned it for decades. The net result is that the schools that can least afford funding cuts have seen their funding cut more and more.
Yet despite the fact that experts consistently agree that Prop 13 is a net negative for the state of California and should be overhauled, this giant pile of hurt is still on the books, largely unchanged. It's one thing to say that it made sense at the time. It did. But we've learned a lot since then about how not to do things, and it is long past time to gut Prop 13 and replace it with something less ridiculous.
The next headline will be "Target Advertising Causes Teen Bulimia Epidemic".
Or worse, "Ill-timed handgun advertising causes 1500% increase in school shootings."
It isn't even hard to think of ways that this could be abused. Actually, it's rather hard to think of any use of this that isn't abuse, other than perhaps anti-bullying/anti-depression/suicide hotline PSAs. Pretty much any commercial use of that particular option falls so far on the evil side of the line that I can't imagine what sort of engineers would be sleazy enough to implement it. I feel icky just thinking about it....
Agreed. If I order via a website, I know that if the order gets screwed up, it's because I ordered the wrong thing (or they read the order wrong). Adding another person into that process just adds additional opportunities for transcription mistakes with no obvious benefits.
On the other hand, self-published books are less likely to provide new readers with enough context to jump right into the story in later books, because they tend to get less developmental editing.
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Except all "discoveries" of dinosaur DNA are generally believed to be caused by contamination. One, for example, turned out to be a human Y chromosome. To date, AFAIK, they haven't been able to extract nontrivial fragments of DNA from any samples that are more than a few hundred thousand years old, if that.
Current models suggest the complete destruction of DNA after about 6.8 million years, which is approximately an order of magnitude shorter than the time that has passed since dinosaurs last walked the earth. So unless the young Earth folks are correct, I suspect that recovering actual dinosaur DNA would take some as-yet undiscovered, spectacularly unlikely chemical reaction that replaces the base pairs uniquely with some other mineral or something. It just doesn't seem very likely to find DNA from anything not warm-blooded, i.e. from any animal that couldn't live far enough north or south to get frozen after its death. It is probably not possible even then, but it isn't entirely impossible, because the half-life of short fragments goes up dramatically as the storage temperature drops.
Depends on what you mean by "space-to-ground weapons systems". If you mean something that can hit a building from space, sure, we could do that today. But for any weapons system to be useful in modern-day asymmetrical warfare (e.g. terrorism), you need to be able to identify a target reliably. If you use ground-based surveillance to find the target, you're already in harm's way, so there's not much point in putting the weapons themselves in space. To some degree, this is also true for aircraft. So at least in my mind, the minimum level of resolution you really need to make those sorts of weapons truly useful is about 1 pixel per centimeter—high enough resolution to maybe identify a human face.
Unfortunately, atmospheric interference makes that sort of completely impractical from geostationary orbit; I think the state of the art is something like 25 cm per pixel, which means a human head is only one pixel tall. Right now, even from low Earth orbit, AFAIK, the state of the art is something like 8 cm resolution, which means a human head is only three pixels tall. So we're still a good order of magnitude away from satellites being even marginally useful for surveillance in modern warfare against anything other than an actual national military force or other large group of individuals working out of something resembling a traditional "base", and we're two orders of magnitude away from the images being what most people would consider acceptable for reliably identifying an assassination target.
But a platform that starts in LEO, dipping down far enough into the atmosphere to identify a target and shoot it before going back into space... that just might be within the realm of possibility, or if not, then it is at least a lot closer to being possible than it would be from orbit.
I won't give an exact number, but it suffices to say that like most people in the Silicon Valley, I'm in the top single-digit percent.
If giving an education to prisoners significantly reduces the likelihood of them going back to prison, it stands to reason that giving those same people an education would also reduce the likelihood of them going to prison in the first place. Arguing to the contrary would require some serious evidence, as it seems pretty dubious prima facie.
No, it's why they shouldn't waste 2–4 years in college studying that particular subject.
Citation needed. To the best of my knowledge, there is no law requiring credit issuers to issue credit to customers who don't have adequate income, and there is no law requiring them to give large amounts of credit to customers with debt that is a significant portion of their income. Companies choose to do so because they can then greedily charge usurious interest rates, and they do so in the hopes that most of the time they'll come out ahead. They base their rates on how often they'll come out ahead.
I didn't say that. But it is. Realistically, college grads make substantially more money than non-college grads in nearly every area (with CS being a notable exception). Even degrees in underwater basketweaving prove that a student has matured to the point that he/she will be a good worker.
And I reject your argument that those degrees are useless, too. The actual knowledge portion of almost any college degree is likely to be useless in at most twenty years, because your field of study will have changed so much that what you learned is no longer even relevant. The main point of college is not to teach facts, but rather to teach students how to become lifelong learners—to inspire them to explore areas outside the very rigid set of subjects offered in K–12 education and encourage them to continue growing and learning throughout their lives. This is fundamentally impossible to do in the sort of strictly vocational education environment that you advocate, because not everyone will find any of those high-earning fields interesting.
Moreover, we're facing a harsh reality in which technology is making more and more jobs unnecessary. Already, IBM's Watson is frequently doing a better job of being a doctor than real doctors. No field is safe in the long term. So what the heck is the point of going into a field like medical care where you go deeply into debt in the hopes of making it back over the first two decades of your career, when there's a half-decent chance that your career won't last that long?
It certainly would be hard for something to be owed to an arrangement of molecules. I'll grant you that. Though somehow, I feel like some smart aleck will try....
I never said it was a good sentence, just unambiguous. :-) That said, yours is still passive voice, just in the form of a passive infinitive construction. I'd go with "The promoters canceled the concert because of (or due to) rain to avoid another Woodstock '94." That said, I'm starting to think that this is ambiguous again, because the concert could be due to rain. Nah. Nobody would be crazy enough to interpret it that way, right? Right? :-/
It can't be that much worse than what we have now. Just saying.
Eventually, yes, but those jobs won't go away tomorrow. I meant in the short term, during which time society needs those folks to continue working so that we'll still have food. And we need to strongly encourage them to save up that money so that they can use it to get additional college education and/or vocational training after those jobs go away.
That's the hard part. You could maybe make it so that the businesses pay a significant percentage of the amount of money they saved back into the UBI fund, but that would reduce the economic benefit. Or you could tax personal capital gains as ordinary income above a certain threshold. Or you could take the Republican approach and just borrow the money and print more, thus devaluing the dollar and effectively taxing everyone proportional to their wealth. (This is, of course, the great irony of our political system; the wealthy tend to vote Republican because they believe they are getting taxed less, when in reality they are probably getting taxed more, or at least a similar amount.)
Close. I'm arguing for a policy in which I help pay for something that I want to see happen.
No, I'm not. Reread the studies that I linked to. Or just read about prison education studies—unless, of course, you're arguing that a fairly large number of well-respected scientists are all confusing correlation with causation.
The approach of U.S. progressives hasn't been tried in earnest. It more closely matches the approach in Europe, which has been tried, and does work, as proven by the fact that we get worse results. For example, we spend more money on healthcare primarily because of profit taking in the healthcare industry. Most other countries do not have for-profit insurance companies and for-profit hospitals. They have government-run hospitals with government-run insurance, which means there's no profit taking along the way to drive prices up.
Those "pampered middle-class teenagers" will get a rude awakening when they find themselves unable to find work with their useless degrees, and they'll teach their kids to have more common sense, so it will all work itself out in a generation at most.
The thing is, I've heard your argument before. You're arguing that the lack of a cost for college education is the reason that people choose to get degrees in useless subjects. It's classic Libertarian nonsense; in fact, it is exactly backwards. The reality is that only a small percentage of college students pay for their own education, and that would still be true even without student loans or other low-income scholarship programs. The people who get those loans and grants, at least in my anecdotal experience as an educator, tend to be more serious about their education because they recognize that they're lucky to have the opportunity. The people who get useless degrees tend to be the ones whose parents are paying for the degree. And lowering the cost of that education for them isn't going to change that behavior, because if the cost to their parents mattered to them, they would have chosen a degree based on projected earnings already.
Moreover, the argument that kids should choose their degree program based on how much money they will make is fundamentally harmful to society as a whole. One of the reasons certain degrees pay more money is that they are genuinely more difficult and require people whose brains work in certain ways. Not everybody is cut out to be a software engineer. Most of the folks who pick those programs because they hear it pays well end up dropping out or changing majors because they don't have the logical thinking ability to translate specifications into functioning code even at a basic level. So what you're a
I suspect that nobody is going to work a register at McDonald's for $2 an hour—particularly if 60 cents goes to taxes and 10 cents goes to paying for the drive over. There's a certain minimum threshold below which you'll make more money sitting on the street corner and asking for change.
One possible solution would be to require employers to report the dates of employment as part of their W-2s or 1099s. Then reclaim the UBI as part of the income tax for weeks in which you were working. This would reduce the perception that employees were only really making $2 per hour at the expense of a small increase in overhead, but it would only work if the UBI were paid through the employer to offset that tax.
Or we could just accept that a $6 UBI would likely result in an effective minimum wage of about $12 per hour. Either way. The resulting huge influx in resources among the working poor would likely introduce enough additional money into the economy to significantly reduce the cost of implementing a UBI.
I think there's something to be said about enjoying life while you're young enough to do so. I would not be surprised if a lot fewer people got jobs straight out of college if a UBI were implemented, choosing to wait several years while they partied (though I suppose they might have to work part-time to pay for the parties). That, in turn, would significantly raise the relative cost of the UBI.
On the flip side, a UBI would also mean that more people might consider trying to start small businesses, knowing that if the business fails, they'll still have an income. Obviously, that doesn't work if they have to secure loans against their personal finances, but that's kind of a separate problem. They would also be more willing to take jobs at startups for the same reason. In other words, a UBI might encourage the sorts of risk taking that drive capitalist societies forwards.
Both theories are pure speculation until some country actually tries it, and the behavior might vary from country to country, too, so you don't have any guarantees even after a country actually tries it. Either way, it will be a fascinating thing to watch.
Except that the existence of health insurance breaks that model by hiding the cost from you. The number of people who care about the cost of healthcare enough to change doctors is lost in the noise.
Or if you don't like the libertarian argument on that, how about this one: medical care is an essential service—something that in many cases people quite literally cannot live without. Competition cannot work for these services, because the people in need of those services cannot realistically price shop or choose to delay care until the cost is less. The entire capitalist model completely fails when applied to healthcare, and always will no matter how many layers of insurance you add to the mix.
As for social security, its most significant problem is that it was designed based on assumptions of how long people will live, and those assumptions are no longer valid. Ideally, the retirement age should be indexed to your individual life expectancy, but failing that, it should be indexed to the average life expectancy.
And it was also designed based on assumptions of population growth that are no longer valid. To make up for that, the wage cap on contributions should be raised, and the percentage should be increased if necessary.
Yeah, or to put it another way, "What do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?"
One obvious stepping stone towards weaponizing space would be developing advanced surveillance and precision tracking technology, and experimenting with it without actually building the weapon part. After all, once you build the weapon and use it, you're committed. Everybody knows you have it, and if the outcry is too strong, you've lost the PR war, and you're never going to get money for new R&D. So it makes sense to limit your laser testing to labs (because location doesn't matter much for that), and test only the tracking/optics in a real-world environment until you get that part exactly right, then merge the two after you have all the key pieces for your superweapon.
I'm not saying they're doing this, because how would I know, but that's certainly what I'd do if I wanted to pull a fast one on the general public. Just saying.
Wait, so wanting to help other people makes me confused? Okay, now I'm confused....
Decades of history. Look at Japan. Look at California prior to the 1970s. And so on. And various studies back up that statement, too.
Uh, no. That's not true at all, and by that, I mean that it is objectively false, rather than subjectively. Statistically, even small increases in college attendance result in large drops in crime rate. So even if the cost is high compared with the increased future earnings, society still benefits from sending kids to college, and so do the kids.
Okay, let me restate that by replacing the word "billionaire" with "wealthy person". It is inarguable that the wealthy are substantially more likely to lean to the right than the poor and middle class.
I would argue that the other studies are, in fact, dishonest, as they treat 100% of donations to churches as charitable giving despite the fact that only about 10-15% of those donations typically are used for programs that help the less fortunate, and the rest tends to go towards operations of the church, from which the donor typically benefits to some degree as a member, thus placing it at least to some degree into that whole "self-interest" category that you say isn't charity.
*shrugs*. The way I see it, what matters is the result, not the approach. I don't disagree that charity involves a personal element, but I do disagree that campaigning for laws/policies/candidates that help the poor isn't a personal element. My comment about protesters earlier was not intended to imply that protests, letter writing, campaigning for office, etc. aren't useful tools, nor to imply that all of (or even the majority of) the protesters are bozos. Many of them are legitimately trying to help.
Okay, here's a challenge for you. Be born in a country that has no roads, no sewers, no clean running water, and become a billionaire. Or heck, start out poor in this country and become one. In theory, it can happen, but it is statistically a fluke. On average, people who become enormously wealthy started out at least moderately wealthy. People near the botto
Wanting free education isn't naked self-interest. Only about ten or fifteen percent of Americans have student loan debt. The left is about 50%. So at least 35% of Americans support making public education cheap or free even though they won't benefit from it directly. Why? Because they realize that having a well-educated public means less crime and more economic output. It's self interest, but only in a very broad sense of the word.
Let me know when I can watch hundreds of rich billionaires volunteering at a homeless shelter. I'm not saying that no rich people ever do those things, but the reality is that the vast majority of people (regardless of wealth) don't participate in charity very much. The difference between the right and the left is that the left believes that those to whom much is given, much is expected from, and that because most people aren't naturally charitable, government must intervene to ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable are protected, whereas the right believes that people should choose to be charitable on their own (and blindly hopes that enough do). And the people on the left tend to rely on government to figure out where the needs are so that they don't have to, whereas the people on the right tend to rely on churches to figure out where the needs are so that they don't have to.
All snark aside, if you look at charitable giving, the left and right are approximately equal, believe it or not, though they do approach it in very different ways.
That said, I can't disagree with you about the "social signaling" bit. There's definitely a small but vocal lunatic fringe on the left that seem to think that the world will only get better if they constantly protest. Half the folks don't even know what they're protesting. They just do it because everybody else is doing it. Most folks on the left see that happening and just roll their eyes. If everyone did that, eventually they'd stop trying to get attention and start trying to find ways to actually make a difference.
My newswriting prof always said that you should never use "due to" except when talking about owing an actual debt to someone. I would tend to argue that it is acceptable, but only in very limited contexts where its meaning is unambiguous, which basically means it is only okay after an action verb, and never after a linking verb.
Either way, it depends on your style guide. AP says it's fine; Chicago says it isn't.
Other states can afford to have lower taxes in part because they get a lot more gas tax money from the federal government than California does. One reason that California's roads are in bad shape, ironically, is because a higher percentage of people drive newer cars that use less (or no) fuel. As a result, the state brings in less money in gas taxes per capita-mile than they otherwise would.
Another reason is that a lot of California's gas tax money goes to support California's mass transit system—something that rural states don't have any need for, and thus get by without paying for. Comparing California to Tennessee really isn't a fair comparison; even Nashville's traffic, as awful as it can be, can't compare with the Bay Area or LA, and that's with an extensive mass transit system in California. Imagine how much worse things would be in California if that transit system didn't exist.
Finally, California's roads are worse than other places in part because of Prop 13 causing people to be unable to easily sell their homes and move closer to their jobs when they change jobs. This translates into more people driving further.... That one is a good example of government brokenness, and is something lots of us have been pushing to fix for a very long time.
Coastal/rural is a crude approximation on my part. It would be more accurate to group the northeast and the west coast into one bucket and most of the rest of the country into the other. BTW, those are the exact same maps from the exact same sources that I was referring to, so any differences here are purely a matter of word choice. The only part of the northeast that brings in drastically more money from the feds than it pays in taxes is Washington D.C., and that's largely because D.C. isn't a state.
Actually, it mostly is out of altruism. Folks on the left tend to be pretty serious about that whole "love your neighbor, clothe the poor, and feed the hungry" thing. Folks on the right should really try it sometime.
There are limits to how high taxes can go. Every dollar that Californians pay to the federal government that doesn't come back to the state translates to a dollar that California couldn't collect in higher taxes and use within the state. So no, it isn't "transparently false". In fact, it is self-evident.
Citation needed. The numbers don't lie. If a state gets fewer benefits from the federal government than it pays in taxes, then the country is a net drain on the state. If it gets more benefits, then the state is a net drain on the country. California is a net provider, rural states are net takers. It really doesn't get much simpler than that. Yes, you can argue that it is worth spending money on those rural areas because they grow our food, but the fact still remains that if those rural states were in better shape financially, California would directly benefit.
Except that for businesses, there's a 6.5% state excise tax in Tennessee, which is effectively a 6.5% income tax on businesses. It's lower than California's 8.84%, but not by a lot. And you pay a lot more on average in property tax despite having a slightly lower rate, thanks to Prop 13 freezing everybody's assessment at the time of purchase.
They're consolidating the staff of Carl's Jr. (Anaheim) and Hardees (St. Louis) and massively cutting their staff in the process. Given Anaheim's high cost of office space, I'm surprised it didn't happen long ago. There's no good reason for a business that owns property all over the nation to be concentrated in a major city with such high land costs, particularly when you can cut costs so dramatically by axing half the staff, moving the rest to a place with a lower cost of living, lower salaries, and cheaper office space. It has less to do with California being bad than with Tennessee being relatively inexpensive, in much the same way that China and Mexico are cheaper than Tennessee for manufacturing jobs. Don't worry. In thirty years, they'll find somewhere cheaper than Franklin, and the cycle of cost-cutting will continue.
Would it surprise you to know that as soon as you move outside of the relatively wealthy area where you live, the state as a whole is doing pretty badly? I say this as someone who lived in rural West TN for 22 years and now lives in California. Republican policies have certainly made things good for folks in greater Nashville, but rural areas and Memphis are hurting badly.
So what you're saying is that California is basically a microcosm of the country as a whole. The wealth in America is very unequally distributed, with a minority living in wealthy coastal enclaves while much of the rest of the country is in urban slums and rural poverty.
What you should be comparing, then, is California's per-capita GDP to that of the entire country. It's about 12% higher than the country as a whole, in spite of paying more out in taxes to the federal government than it gets back in benefits. If California weren't helping to support all the red states with their larger rural populations, its per-capita GDP would be even better compared with the country as a whole (and its roads would be in better shape, too).
I'm not saying that taxing rockets based on how far they fly isn't stupid; it is. Lots of things California does are downright idiotic. But on the whole, the government at the state level is run better than the government at the federal level (which isn't saying much, but still...).
That's because he didn't shoot the deputy.
It tells us that at least half of all people in Silicon Valley don't work as software engineers or management. :-D
Which means if they haven't increased at an exponential pace, there's a reason that has nothing to do with lack of money.
One possible reason is that larger development teams don't scale well. At some point, unless you move into unrelated technology areas that are way outside your main focus area, you end up with teams working on similar projects who don't know that they're essentially competing internally. At that point, any advantage to hiring more people goes out the window.
Another possible reason is that there are a limited number of good programmers out there in the world; the faster you grow, the lower your average programmer quality is going to be, because you'll have to take more chaff along with the wheat.
A third reason is that management tends to get deeper as it gets wider, resulting in administrative bloat that makes it painful to grow beyond a certain size.
Whatever the reason, the point is that there are definite barriers to scaling up that occur particularly in large businesses, such that merely having spare capital isn't enough. When businesses get big enough, they often find that it is easier to just buy new startups in the space that they want to move into. Let the startups take the risk and fight it out, then consume the winner along with its staff....
California voters did, not voters in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Kentucky, etc. So yes California most certainly did enact that proposition....
Tennessee recently had the same problem, but they were smart enough to learn from California's huge mistake and made it so that the "no reassessment" bit applies only to people over 65, applies only to people below a certain income threshold, doesn't cover rental properties, doesn't cover second homes, etc.
California's Prop 13 has been the single biggest train wreck in the history of California's proposition system. It has primarily benefitted people who own multiple homes and who use them as rental properties, rather than the elderly (who are having a harder and harder time buying homes at all because all the property is tied up in rentals, in part because nobody wants to give up that sweet tax break). It makes it exorbitantly expensive to move into the state, and has depressed essential property tax revenues that pay for our state's schools very badly. Worse, the impact on property tax revenue disproportionately impacts areas where the poor live because it is mostly rental property owned by people who have owned it for decades. The net result is that the schools that can least afford funding cuts have seen their funding cut more and more.
Yet despite the fact that experts consistently agree that Prop 13 is a net negative for the state of California and should be overhauled, this giant pile of hurt is still on the books, largely unchanged. It's one thing to say that it made sense at the time. It did. But we've learned a lot since then about how not to do things, and it is long past time to gut Prop 13 and replace it with something less ridiculous.
Or worse, "Ill-timed handgun advertising causes 1500% increase in school shootings."
It isn't even hard to think of ways that this could be abused. Actually, it's rather hard to think of any use of this that isn't abuse, other than perhaps anti-bullying/anti-depression/suicide hotline PSAs. Pretty much any commercial use of that particular option falls so far on the evil side of the line that I can't imagine what sort of engineers would be sleazy enough to implement it. I feel icky just thinking about it....
Agreed. If I order via a website, I know that if the order gets screwed up, it's because I ordered the wrong thing (or they read the order wrong). Adding another person into that process just adds additional opportunities for transcription mistakes with no obvious benefits.
On the other hand, self-published books are less likely to provide new readers with enough context to jump right into the story in later books, because they tend to get less developmental editing.