In the 18th Century, cities were so small and mixed that the rich **had to see the poor** daily. They had to see how they lived, open on the streets.
And so a common solution at the time was to occasionally have the cops beat all the beggars out of town with cudgels. No more problem with seeing the homeless.
The issue isn't seeing, the issue is caring. (And personally, my charity goes to people around the world with much worse problems than America's "poor", people whom I will never see, but that's just me.)
People sent texts from protest marches in Iran and some of the Arab spring stuff, and the governments weren't successful in stopping that. Also, you need a bigger hammer to keep people from using their phones to record police shooting at the crowd or other abuses. Remotely wiping the phones is a great win for dictators everywhere.
Wow, I quite the HL franchise halfway through Ep 2 it stank so badly. All subjective I guess.
I still go back and play HL1 every couple of years, followed by OpFor and BlueShift. I think that was the peak of single player FPS gaming, and it's been gradually downhill ever since as focus shifted to multiplayer, or incorporated RPG elements. (Quake 4 was also pretty good, but it was a deliberate throwback to those days).
Not that I hate FPS RPGs, but it's a different genre.
Just watch for the first riot in 2016 under some authoritarian government. They'll "kill" all the cellphones of all the rioters to prevent organization and photography of police, not even a question about it.
Most employers match that at least a little. Long term tax-free growth of "double every 10 years" is reasonable to expect from stocks. After 30 years, having 70 years of savings is a reasonable goal. Of course, your pay's going up and inflation is too and so on, but still, becoming a millionaire from 30 years of 401K savings is quite practical. Doing the same for "millionaire in today's dollars", a far more interesting goal, is quite practical given 40 years of 401K savings.
Of course, best to save more elsewhere, and try to retire earlier than 40 years.
Gold is a good measure of inflation if you take the 10-year-average, or maybe the 20-year, of gold prices. While gold is hopelessly volatile in the short term, it seems to keep reasonably equivalent purchasing power century-by-century.
Home prices work out about the same, BTW. While real estate markets can be just as volatile, long term house prices are flat with inflation, which makes a lot of sense (the % of income people are willing/able to spend on housing won't change unless human nature changes, so you expect the average house to represent a given amount of purchasing power).
Unless the meaning of millionaire is changing to mean "a seven figure income", then why would anyone with a six figure income not expect to become a millionaire? Are people just really bad at saving? That's too low to even be a good retirement goal, unless you're sure of Social Security to compliment it (in which case it's about right - but who doesn't expect SS to be "means tested" and taken away from those who save?)
That's just one of many angles. The biggest may be early access to games for reviewers. A game review is of course more valuable if it's out before the game is, but that requires playing nice with the publishers.
You've never worked for a start up? It's all about the IPO. Technological advancement for the past 15 years or so anyway has been driven by the hopes of IPO, or as "plan B", acquisition by a big company at a price established by what an IPO might bring.
The secondary market sets the benchmark for what a successful small company is worth, which in turn drives the availability of investment in start-ups and other small businesses.
You know, I've argued in the past that modern politics has become about "tribal identification" and not about what's best for the nation. But wow; just wow.
Huh, what? You're talking about the first bill Obama signed into law? The GOP is reliably management-vs-labor, to be sure (after all, organized labor is a key element of the Dem constituency, so at least the parties are representing their constituents by their sides there), but how did they kill it?
I did think you were trying to construe the "people can pay for their own birth control" as a women's rights issue, since that's recently in the news - OK, I guessed wrong. So what are you on about?
(BTW, I do wish there was a party I was aligned with, but I just want a small government party, and there's no such animal any more).
Car makers have been constantly pushing very over-priced terrible in-car GPS systems for a while,
I'll have you know my car has a very over-priced mediocre in-car GPS system! Actually, its flaw is no good interface to set a destination address (voice recognition and arbitrary proper nouns is just a bad combination in general). I really want a way to attach a keyboard, or to pull an address from my phone contacts list in some sane and reliable way.
One thing I really wish would happen would be to have the car industry be also mandated to provide third-party access to all of the screens that will be mandated in cars soon because of the back-up cameras... that could lead to a real renaissance in what smart-phones can do for you in-car.
There's real potential there, but I want it to work both ways: the car should accept any screen though some standard interface (2-way HDMI maybe?). The built-in screens will have terrible resolution, no doubt, but it seems like a good part for an aftermarket upgrade.
Well, they show suggestions for what you might watch next when you finish whatever you're streaming. But Netflix also has original content now, so it's hard to see suggesting those shows as anything but ads.
I'm sure their catalog continues to shrink (not that it's really Netflix's fault, they studios they license this stuff from seem to have an inflated idea of what 30 year old sitcoms are worth), but they're pretty good at new releases.
The worst part is, the DVD catalog is shrinking too. I loved Netflix for their deep back-catalog, but they're slowly becoming Redbox.
Even if we view this as blatant bribery to game reviews, above and beyond the usual swag, how is this news? Do we not understand how the game review scene works? Few reviewers start with any but the best intentions, but the machine to subvert them slowly over time is very fine tuned.
Abortion is a difficult moral issue, and it's fine that we're divided as a nation on it. I don't have a problem with the parties on this one.
No one is against women's rights (though I could name a president that pays the women working for him 78% of what he pays the men).
Is anyone advocating creationism at the federal level? For sure both parties are to blame for the crazy common core math nonsense now spreading (it's the new new math, the same "whole word reading" mistake all over again).
Both parties advocate tax breaks for their supporters.
The Left seems to strongly oppose free speech these days. Justice Breyer was just joined by 3 more in a dissenting opinion that free speech was not an individual right. That right - a left-leaning bloc in the SCOTUS is anti-free-speech now.
No one on either side is serious about reducing spending, because soon all that will be left to cut are social programs, and no one has the courage to go there. This will end in tears.
Short term capital gains are taxed as income, and thus progressive.
Long term capital gains depend on total income in a complex way, but the gains have a 0% bracket for those with low income (and gains, combined), a 15% bracket for most, a 20% bracket, and a 3.8% (I think) surcharge at ~200k.
Remember, there are no deductions on the capital gains, but a $10k+ standard deduction on the income tax. Long term works out a bit cheaper tax-wise than income because that's the incentive to invest long term, but it's not a huge difference. You don't pay more than 15% total tax on income until you pass around $50k, if you're single and have no deductions.
If your income is sub-median, you're not paying more than 15% overall on your income taxes.
Preach it, brother. But I think the days of small-government conservatives in the GOP are dead. We have two big-government parties, fighting over who gets the pork and just which liberties get removed next. It will end in tears.
All those stocks traded in the secondary market? They create the market for IPOs. They establish the playing field for new businesses. When one sort of business gets high P/Es relative to the others, that sort of business is more likely to get new competitors.
Here's a better question - why not just a flat tax?
Taxes exist to fund the government, not for some social agenda (that we'll never agree on anyway). Tax all income, dividends, and capital gains at X%, and be done with it. You might be surprised how low X% is, when there are no loopholes.
I can tolerate the ads Netflix runs now, where during the closing credits you'll see some image pimping some original Netflix content, with the credits pushed to one corner, and something to watch next in the other. That's just barely non-intrusive enough for me. But I bet they go farther and ruin it.
Again, my point is: with good judges, we don't need this. With bad judges, this doesn't help. I think it would be fine parliamentary process, but congress will never adopt any such process that would reduce their ability to lard up the bill with pork of every kind.
Wow, do you do stretches and warm-ups before such mental contortionism, or are you just naturally limber.
BTW, you might consider how negotiations work: each side must have something the other finds valuable, and must be willing to withhold that thing until compromise is reached.
Now if you just said "The congress is wrong on virtually all the issues b/c they operate for funding from donors, not to be competent legislators" you'd be onto something, rather than a partisan hack.
judge would literally have to abandon all pretense of interpreting rights and other complex laws and simply state, "BECAUSE I SAY SO!"
So, someone like Roberts then. "The law says dozens of times this is not a tax, and the law originated in the Senate, not the House, so it can't be a tax law, but nevertheless it's a tax BECAUSE I SAY SO!". That ship has sailed.
There is no "come into inheritance" (wait, where do you live?) Debts are settled against he estate. If there's anything left, assets are divided amongst inheritors. There's this whole complex probate process. Occasionally, an inheritor will choose to take an asset with debts attached (such as a house with a mortgage), sometimes even one with clearly negative net worth, perhaps for sentimental reasons. But there no "all assets and debts pass from person A to person B" - primogeniture hasn't been a thing for centuries.
But the important thing about probate is that it's time-bound - while assets may be "in probate" for some time, when its done its done, and no further claims can be made.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 18th Century, cities were so small and mixed that the rich **had to see the poor** daily. They had to see how they lived, open on the streets.
And so a common solution at the time was to occasionally have the cops beat all the beggars out of town with cudgels. No more problem with seeing the homeless.
The issue isn't seeing, the issue is caring. (And personally, my charity goes to people around the world with much worse problems than America's "poor", people whom I will never see, but that's just me.)
People sent texts from protest marches in Iran and some of the Arab spring stuff, and the governments weren't successful in stopping that. Also, you need a bigger hammer to keep people from using their phones to record police shooting at the crowd or other abuses. Remotely wiping the phones is a great win for dictators everywhere.
Wow, I quite the HL franchise halfway through Ep 2 it stank so badly. All subjective I guess.
I still go back and play HL1 every couple of years, followed by OpFor and BlueShift. I think that was the peak of single player FPS gaming, and it's been gradually downhill ever since as focus shifted to multiplayer, or incorporated RPG elements. (Quake 4 was also pretty good, but it was a deliberate throwback to those days).
Not that I hate FPS RPGs, but it's a different genre.
Just watch for the first riot in 2016 under some authoritarian government. They'll "kill" all the cellphones of all the rioters to prevent organization and photography of police, not even a question about it.
Most employers match that at least a little. Long term tax-free growth of "double every 10 years" is reasonable to expect from stocks. After 30 years, having 70 years of savings is a reasonable goal. Of course, your pay's going up and inflation is too and so on, but still, becoming a millionaire from 30 years of 401K savings is quite practical. Doing the same for "millionaire in today's dollars", a far more interesting goal, is quite practical given 40 years of 401K savings.
Of course, best to save more elsewhere, and try to retire earlier than 40 years.
Gold is a good measure of inflation if you take the 10-year-average, or maybe the 20-year, of gold prices. While gold is hopelessly volatile in the short term, it seems to keep reasonably equivalent purchasing power century-by-century.
Home prices work out about the same, BTW. While real estate markets can be just as volatile, long term house prices are flat with inflation, which makes a lot of sense (the % of income people are willing/able to spend on housing won't change unless human nature changes, so you expect the average house to represent a given amount of purchasing power).
Unless the meaning of millionaire is changing to mean "a seven figure income", then why would anyone with a six figure income not expect to become a millionaire? Are people just really bad at saving? That's too low to even be a good retirement goal, unless you're sure of Social Security to compliment it (in which case it's about right - but who doesn't expect SS to be "means tested" and taken away from those who save?)
That's just one of many angles. The biggest may be early access to games for reviewers. A game review is of course more valuable if it's out before the game is, but that requires playing nice with the publishers.
You've never worked for a start up? It's all about the IPO. Technological advancement for the past 15 years or so anyway has been driven by the hopes of IPO, or as "plan B", acquisition by a big company at a price established by what an IPO might bring.
The secondary market sets the benchmark for what a successful small company is worth, which in turn drives the availability of investment in start-ups and other small businesses.
And that's a terrible, terrible thing. We should stop doing that.
You know, I've argued in the past that modern politics has become about "tribal identification" and not about what's best for the nation. But wow; just wow.
Huh, what? You're talking about the first bill Obama signed into law? The GOP is reliably management-vs-labor, to be sure (after all, organized labor is a key element of the Dem constituency, so at least the parties are representing their constituents by their sides there), but how did they kill it?
I did think you were trying to construe the "people can pay for their own birth control" as a women's rights issue, since that's recently in the news - OK, I guessed wrong. So what are you on about?
(BTW, I do wish there was a party I was aligned with, but I just want a small government party, and there's no such animal any more).
Car makers have been constantly pushing very over-priced terrible in-car GPS systems for a while,
I'll have you know my car has a very over-priced mediocre in-car GPS system! Actually, its flaw is no good interface to set a destination address (voice recognition and arbitrary proper nouns is just a bad combination in general). I really want a way to attach a keyboard, or to pull an address from my phone contacts list in some sane and reliable way.
One thing I really wish would happen would be to have the car industry be also mandated to provide third-party access to all of the screens that will be mandated in cars soon because of the back-up cameras... that could lead to a real renaissance in what smart-phones can do for you in-car.
There's real potential there, but I want it to work both ways: the car should accept any screen though some standard interface (2-way HDMI maybe?). The built-in screens will have terrible resolution, no doubt, but it seems like a good part for an aftermarket upgrade.
Well, they show suggestions for what you might watch next when you finish whatever you're streaming. But Netflix also has original content now, so it's hard to see suggesting those shows as anything but ads.
I'm sure their catalog continues to shrink (not that it's really Netflix's fault, they studios they license this stuff from seem to have an inflated idea of what 30 year old sitcoms are worth), but they're pretty good at new releases.
The worst part is, the DVD catalog is shrinking too. I loved Netflix for their deep back-catalog, but they're slowly becoming Redbox.
Even if we view this as blatant bribery to game reviews, above and beyond the usual swag, how is this news? Do we not understand how the game review scene works? Few reviewers start with any but the best intentions, but the machine to subvert them slowly over time is very fine tuned.
Abortion is a difficult moral issue, and it's fine that we're divided as a nation on it. I don't have a problem with the parties on this one.
No one is against women's rights (though I could name a president that pays the women working for him 78% of what he pays the men).
Is anyone advocating creationism at the federal level? For sure both parties are to blame for the crazy common core math nonsense now spreading (it's the new new math, the same "whole word reading" mistake all over again).
Both parties advocate tax breaks for their supporters.
The Left seems to strongly oppose free speech these days. Justice Breyer was just joined by 3 more in a dissenting opinion that free speech was not an individual right. That right - a left-leaning bloc in the SCOTUS is anti-free-speech now.
No one on either side is serious about reducing spending, because soon all that will be left to cut are social programs, and no one has the courage to go there. This will end in tears.
Short term capital gains are taxed as income, and thus progressive.
Long term capital gains depend on total income in a complex way, but the gains have a 0% bracket for those with low income (and gains, combined), a 15% bracket for most, a 20% bracket, and a 3.8% (I think) surcharge at ~200k.
Remember, there are no deductions on the capital gains, but a $10k+ standard deduction on the income tax. Long term works out a bit cheaper tax-wise than income because that's the incentive to invest long term, but it's not a huge difference. You don't pay more than 15% total tax on income until you pass around $50k, if you're single and have no deductions.
If your income is sub-median, you're not paying more than 15% overall on your income taxes.
Preach it, brother. But I think the days of small-government conservatives in the GOP are dead. We have two big-government parties, fighting over who gets the pork and just which liberties get removed next. It will end in tears.
All those stocks traded in the secondary market? They create the market for IPOs. They establish the playing field for new businesses. When one sort of business gets high P/Es relative to the others, that sort of business is more likely to get new competitors.
Here's a better question - why not just a flat tax?
Taxes exist to fund the government, not for some social agenda (that we'll never agree on anyway). Tax all income, dividends, and capital gains at X%, and be done with it. You might be surprised how low X% is, when there are no loopholes.
Capital gains taxes already are progressive, of course.
I can tolerate the ads Netflix runs now, where during the closing credits you'll see some image pimping some original Netflix content, with the credits pushed to one corner, and something to watch next in the other. That's just barely non-intrusive enough for me. But I bet they go farther and ruin it.
Again, my point is: with good judges, we don't need this. With bad judges, this doesn't help. I think it would be fine parliamentary process, but congress will never adopt any such process that would reduce their ability to lard up the bill with pork of every kind.
Wow, do you do stretches and warm-ups before such mental contortionism, or are you just naturally limber.
BTW, you might consider how negotiations work: each side must have something the other finds valuable, and must be willing to withhold that thing until compromise is reached.
Now if you just said "The congress is wrong on virtually all the issues b/c they operate for funding from donors, not to be competent legislators" you'd be onto something, rather than a partisan hack.
judge would literally have to abandon all pretense of interpreting rights and other complex laws and simply state, "BECAUSE I SAY SO!"
So, someone like Roberts then. "The law says dozens of times this is not a tax, and the law originated in the Senate, not the House, so it can't be a tax law, but nevertheless it's a tax BECAUSE I SAY SO!". That ship has sailed.
There is no "come into inheritance" (wait, where do you live?) Debts are settled against he estate. If there's anything left, assets are divided amongst inheritors. There's this whole complex probate process. Occasionally, an inheritor will choose to take an asset with debts attached (such as a house with a mortgage), sometimes even one with clearly negative net worth, perhaps for sentimental reasons. But there no "all assets and debts pass from person A to person B" - primogeniture hasn't been a thing for centuries.
But the important thing about probate is that it's time-bound - while assets may be "in probate" for some time, when its done its done, and no further claims can be made.