Oh what the hell, it's like pissing on a house fire of bias and closed minded rhetoric.
Truer words were never spoken
Tearing ourselves from disciplines of Astronomy and Physics for a second and focusing on the bit of Anthropology atheists prefer to ignore; man has ALWAYS believed in a higher power. We have scientific evidence of this.
I can't even imagine what scientific evidence you have to prove that belief in a higher power has ALWAYS existed. Hopefully, it's not the No True Scotsman argument. Man has used "higher power" to explain things which are currently inexplicable and allow order in a confusing world. It makes the kids stop asking where the sun goes at night. It expresses our resignation to continue living when the hunt goes poorly, when storms flatten the wheat field, or when you get passed over for promotion. Personifying the "higher power" into a Thor, Nature, or Jesus figure adds the value of fun stories to tell the kids and satisfies mankind's inclination to anthropomorphize even inanimate objects. However, a "higher power" can also be "physical laws and properties." One of those higher powers allows cultural and technological advance; one of those higher powers encourages complacency and repression.
We know that abilities and quirks that we EVOLVE with are there for a reason. We can only theorize and therefore fork, but not discount at this point, Creationism as a possibility.
"For a reason" is that some mutation provided, at worst, no disadvantage to survival. Most of them don't. Each year, according to the CDC, "Major structural or genetic birth defects affect approximately 3% of births in the United States, are a major contributor to infant mortality." When you see abilities and quirks that we EVOLVE, you are looking at only the small fraction of changes that are not immediately fatal, and ignoring billions of people who died in utero or in infancy because of errors in gene replication. If you wish to argue that some creator goes about his work by slaughtering such a large fraction of his people, then I think your notion of "design" or "directed change" is indistinguishable from random. To make a distinction between "random changes" and "random changes because god said so" is a) unnecessary and b) a little silly. To infer a "reason" for every trait and quirk you display presupposes the existence of a plan and is circular logic (ie: we have trait X that allows behavior Y; Y facilitates survival; therefore Y is part of the plan, and X was planned to allow Y)
More importantly, the only evidence for creationism is a bunch of stories handed down by several generations of oral tradition before being collected into a convenient anthology. Oh, and I suppose, if you want to include your bit of Anthropology that atheists like to ignore, the observation that humans enjoy stories. The single greatest point of divergence between atheists and Christians is that Christians will appeal to any story in their favored anthology as literal fact worthy of as much weight as the observation that the sun rose this morning in the east. What if they're just stories? I mean, did Lazarus leave any evidence or documentation from his life after being raised from the dead: I'd think that's the kind of thing a whole community might have written about. Maybe earn him a trip to Rome to meet with historians and scientists. The literal veracity of the bible is a tenuous thread upon which to hang a whole theory of the cosmos.
Evolutionists and creationists are not even having the same discussion, but the creationists are very insistent on getting their irrelevant bit into the evolutionary conversation. It's like we're all talking about what to have for dinner, and some guy demands that we first agree that Viking ranges are much better than Wolf.
The management stream starts lower, but finishes higher than the fact that. That they'd be willing to move you laterally pay wise is a pretty reasonable concession.
I'd agree with that, except for the submitter's claim to 20 years' technical experience. He's not at the entry level, and asking him to move from a high echelon technical position to a low echelon managerial position of equivalent salary isn't necessarily reasonable. I have to say that the phrasing "You're more valuable to _us_ where you are, but the opportunities for _you_ in this new position are better" sounds a lot like a negotiating ruse, and I would make me suspicious. They've essentially said that they're not paying him his worth in his current position. The only way opportunities for _him_ are better in the new position is if he can actually create more value for the company in the new position, so the company is also saying they think he can be much more valuable to _them_ in the management track. They lack enough confidence in their judgement to pay him based on their own expectations of his performance, so they want him to take the new position but not be on the hook for appropriate salary unless it turns out he lives up to performance. Sure, experience on an assembly line doesn't prepare you to be a physician, or an accountant, but it would make you acutely aware of the issues, techniques, and problems associated with organizing and managing assembly line workers: this is not a completely orthogonal move.
He definitely needs to get some concrete performance metrics tied to concrete compensation. Few enough people would take an entry position under terms of "we'll pay you 30% below market rate for 3 months, after which time we'll either fire you or raise your salary closer to market." And this is a 40-something with 20 years of competent, relevant technical expertise. You don't hire someone out of that realm by offering an internship.
If they were in the US they'd be easily making 250k and potentially up over 300k whereas here they're stuck at 120 ish.
I think you may be slightly misinformed about US faculty salaries. In the sciences, you should keep in mind that faculty are generally expected to bring in some (varying, but at least 25%) of their salary from extramural sources, which generally means the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. The NIH salary cap is currently $199,700, which sets a de facto cap on most faculty salaries, because NIH frowns on double-billing (ie, on the university supplementing their maximum $16,642/month). In my experience, only senior administration - dean level and higher - are over $250k, but they're often not involved in science at that level.
And for the record, my opinion is that open source hardware is just as valid as open source software, however the entrenched interests lined up against it are powerful and determined to undermine it.
"Open source hardware" seems to mean "hardware standard not generated by a recognized professional organization." That is, the "closed source" hardware rack is an EIA standard from the 50s, not the kind of detailed drawing you could take to a local machine shop and say "give me 2 of these." Those industry groups have built-in bureaucracy and provide confidence that the next standard revision will be a small revision and completely compatible with all the preceding generations. I can buy rack mountable hardware today, and be extremely confident that it will plug into the rack I got in 1970. Standards produced by professional organizations like EIA, IEEE, and NEMA also have built-in credibility and implicit support of multiple industrial concerns. Of course, the bureaucracy and review means that they can be somewhat slow to accommodate changing demands, but that's kind of the point. "Open source" standards may be developed by professionals with support from multiple industry groups, too, but they may also be a bunch of high school kids in their parents' garage, and therefore require more review by whomever is going to use them. Especially if that user is considering building out a $100,000,000 production line. In either case, you still have your own manufacturing design work to do: the "open source" guidelines don't add any value.
Open source software, on the other hand, is a thing you can use directly, and (to the extent that it works) saves development time. For any sizeable project, it's easier to fix problems than to generate from scratch (unless its really bad), so open source software brings value
That said, a lot of professional organizations seem to use their standards as money-makers. The NEMA standard for welding electrode holders is $50. The ANSI standard for electrical meters is $150. The standards are developed at the cost of the member organizations, and I don't think royalties are paid to those organizations (who are generally the people paying the fees, anyway). It would be nice to see those organizations move toward zero cost electronic distribution of their standards, at least for individual use. One imagines that, as "O/S" hardware designs prove themselves, that they will get industry buy-in, and will get incorporated into formally blessed standards.
The parent poster is 100% correct that it's far, far, far more likely for someone triggering a radioactive sensor to have been recently subjected to some form of medical nuclear procedure than to be involved in terrorist activity.
So what? Are you saying police shouldn't even investigateunless they're 99.999999999999999% sure a crime has been committed?
Well, considering that it's well in excess of 99.99999% certain that detectable levels of radioactivity are not a sign of terrorists, yeah, I'd say the police need a somewhat higher threshhold of suspicion before they stop someone. There's something like 4 million NM procedures in the US each year, and I have yet to hear of a terrorist in actual possession of radioactivity, so odds of 1-in-40-100 million seems pretty fair.
Or do you suggest they stop everyone carrying a crowbar, because crowbars can be used for breaking and entering? Everyone transporting gasoline, because gasoline is a popular accelerant for arsonists?
Not saying that any kind of screening or abrogation of our rights and privileges can be justified. Just not feeling the honor system for flights would work out all that well
There is a vast middle ground between the invasive grope-and-scan system the TSA uses and the pre-DB Cooper honor system. The ease with which hijackings happened in the 70s-90s was largely due to the explicit policy of complying with hijackers demands. This policy was reversed about the same time the second plane hit the tower and, in combination with locked cockpit doors, pretty well assures that hijacked aircraft will not be effective guided missiles again.
Instead of making an attempt to balance the cost, inconvenience and, yes, risks of ever more invasive screening procedures, TSA throws up the terrorist bogeyman and tells us that if all this expense saves even one life, then it's all worth it. Events like this one serve to remind us that screening procedures, even those involving minuscule risks, when applied to hundreds of millions of people, cause morbidity. Morbidity that is much more predictable (and therefore more preventable) than terrorists. So, the question is: would you prefer safe magentometer-only screening and a 0.0000001% chance of hijacking, or body scanning, with a 0.0000001% chance of cancer and a 0.00000001% chance of hijacking?
No. It's copying certain data without permission. I cannot fathom how anyone could perceive that as being a much more severe problem than jaywalking. They may or may not be losing potential profit, but that is all.
Did you miss the part of the GP's post where he says pirated versions of software are on sale, cheap, at his local mall? A company, musician, or artist takes a big risk in creating the data you seem to dismiss so lightly. Maybe it takes three months out of their life; maybe it requires years of full-time effort from 20 or more coders, artists and coordinators, but the only way they have to recoup that risk is for someone to give them money. Shareware has taught us that a very small fraction of people who download software will pay for it voluntarily (although certain well-established names clearly have a fan-base that will yield good returns).
Physical distribution channels have losses - breakage, overproduction, theft - that get built into the distribution, and I rather think of piracy (or maybe "redistribution of unauthorized copies for profit") and sharing (maybe "redistribution of unauthorized copies without charge") as an unavoidable distribution loss on digital enterprises. As long as it's a small enough fraction of the income, it's not going to hurt, but you have to be terribly naive to imagine that it's no "more sever than jaywalking." The problem is it's hard to quantify: in a physical channel, you know how many copies you produced and how many you sold, so you can calculate exactly what your distribution loss is. In a digital channel, you only know how many copies you sold and not how many were produced, so you can justify almost any number at all for your distribution loss. The unquantifiable loss makes it very hard to guess how much risk is involved in starting a new, multimillion dollar digital production; makes the loans to support salaries more expensive, makes the venture capital a more expensive, makes failure to release a product a little more likely.
I cannot see how copying music is a "huge" problem even as someone who supports copyright. We have much, much, much larger problems to worry about
Oh, I see: you're not talking about whether copyright infringement affects the quality and quantity of digital products, but about whether copyright infringement is equivalent to genocide in Sudan, earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, or the risk of nuclear war. Yeah, I guess in that context, you could even argue that murder (which claims fewer than 15,000 US lives each year) is a small problem.
Re:This will go down well...lulz
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Introducing SlashBI
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"...the articles are aimed at getting page views."
It would be so much better if they posted stuff I wasn't interested in. I don't think I understand this comment...
Articles aimed at getting page views appeal to a broad audience. Even a general audience, like, say American Idol viewers. Slashdot has catered to an audience that Big Media considers a niche - technophiles with actual knowledge. The articles got page views from that (small but obsessive) group, and all of the changes in the last 5-8 years have been to dumb-down and broaden the appeal of articles, thus turning/. from News for Nerds into PC Magazine. This seems to be a common trend among tech-sites: start out focused and interesting, attract a sizeable readership, worry when readership growth slows, and add a bunch of peripheral but less "intimidating" content to bring in more readers, thus alienating the original crowd. You're old enough to know this.
Funny but I can't remember a single example of someone taking over an aircraft with box cutters. [I'm speaking from August 2001]
Your memory is poor. The lone All Nippon 61 hijacker used an 8" kitchen knife in July 1999. Not quite a box cutter, but 5 guys with 4" razor blades are a lot more threatening than one guy with a kitchen knife.
Funny but I can't remember a single example of someone trying to take over an aircraft with their underwear full of explosives.
By far, the most common pre-9/11 hijacking weapon is "claim of explosives," usually false. That's right: pre-9/11, it was as easy to hijack a plane as it is to rob a bank. You want to rob a bank, you go up to the teller with a note demanding money, and they will always give it to you. Pre-9/11, you want to hijack a plane, you tell them you have a bomb, and they will take you where ever you want. You may not get out of the bank/plane at the end, but company policy said it's just not worth risking lives over a little money or inconvenience. Now, of course, no one will have any of that, as has been demonstrated by passengers on the shoe-bomber, underpants-bomber, and crazy-pilot. Pre-TSA security, combined with locked cockpit doors and corporate policies forbidding appeasement, are all we need to prevent another 9/11
If you are so scared of terrorists that you're willing to give up your privacy and your presumption of innocence, then DON'T FLY!
Seriously. The rest of us rational people will appreciate the return of dignity and professionalism to travel. We'll appreciate the reduction in airfares associated with not having to pay for the equipment, renovations, and manpower required by the theater your paranoia requires. We'll appreciate the reduction in highway traffic and increase in scheduled flights as people again choose the convenience of air over the hazards of driving. Or do you think that every major airline in the US has declared bankruptcy at least once since 2001 because people love the experience of flying so much more than in the 1990s?
See, I think Larry Page has a fundamentally flawed belief:
When you find a great article, you want to share that knowledge with people who will find it interesting, too. If you see a great movie, you want to recommend it to friends.
I don't want that at all. Maybe I want to share my great find with a small circle of friends. People whom I'd like to reinforce my connection with by limited sharing of relevant, high quality stuff. I expect it to be quid-pro-quo, and if you can't give me good stuff, the I expect to be able to withhold my favor from you.
What I don't want is for any random person who wanders through to leech off of my effort. Or for people to think that because we both like funny pictures of cats that we share some deep, personal connection. A social network is useful because the people in it are screened for quality in some way. The (olde tyme) method of screening was that it required effort to maintain each and every contact, so less useful contacts naturally fall by the way.
I don't want, every time I browse a bookshelf at the local bookstore, each of my friends to come up and tell me what they thought of the book. I want to discover for myself. And frankly, some of my friends' threshold for "awesome" is shockingly low.
Besides that, people under 30 aren't the only ones who should have input into this.
This is very important to remember. People under 30 were under 19 when TSA was imposed. They've lived their entire traveling lives under the 'new' system, and have little or no recall of the more reasonable and traveler-friendly screening processes. By choosing a communication mode biased towards younger people, they're excluding a large portion of our greater social memory.
You don't understand the academic journal market. You don't publish articles in prestigious journals for the sake of publishing, or to make money, you publish articles in prestigious journals so that others read your work.
That's a great theory, but in practice people publish in prestigious journals because those journals are prestigious, and it looks good on a CV, during tenure review, etc. People reading a researcher's work often comes secondary to people reading the list of journals where a researcher has published their work.
But the reason those journals are "prestigious" is because people read and cite them. You can imagine that journal quality and impact factor have nothing to do with each other, then take the cynical view that people choose their publishing venue based solely on impact factor, but the reality is that impact and quality form a positive feedback loop which can be only slowly altered by reviewer and editorial process.
Sure, if I'm looking for something specific, then I go to a database, put in my keywords, and find a whole list of relevant material, independent of journal prestige. Even there, though, I'm much more likely to read a Nature paper than, say, International Journal of Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy. More importantly, journals like Science and Nature have people who just read them and get your work distributed into areas that are not directly your narrow specialty.
Journals are a little like blogs - if a blog has a decent moderation system, then you have a chance of finding more relevant comments than Hot Grits. With more relevant comments, the blog builds a reputation and readership. The more people read, the more likely they are to add insightful comments. A blog might monetize that readership by advertising and subscription fees, which they can do intrusively enough to destroy the readership. A journal monetizes the readership by advertising and subscription fees, and the boycott is researchers' way of saying that Elsevier has gone too far.
You have to wonder about the planes when they claim they are vulnerable to em interference
"Vulnerable" might be a generous term. They have 75 incidents, over 7 years and roughly 70 million flights, that got attributed to PEDs. Unexplained warning lights, weird readings... I'm guessing that no one did any rigorous testing, in flight, to verify this came from a device. I can imagine the event starting shortly after people were allowed to turn their devices on, or disappearing shortly after people are asked to turn off their devices. At 1-in-a-million, I'd be more willing to chalk that up to coincidence than to a PED.
Well and as I have learned the hard way lately, if it's going to cost 500k per year to run IT for a couple of hundred employee outfit when it's government money, someone will complain.
It's more general than that: When it's government money, no matter how much, someone will complain.
There is always some better way to spend a government dollar, and if there isn't then government shouldn't have collected it in the first place. Government is the only activity where we all get to sit back and feel/act like the PHB, and most of us will happily cut any function that doesn't directly benefit us, personally. That means government salaries are too high, almost by definition. Meanwhile, no one worries if private industries, like phone or electric companies, offer million-dollar bonuses. You can't buy your city councilman a cup of coffee without someone thinking it's quid-pro-quo, but I can't imagine an industry trade show without at least one open-bar event.
This is why government sucks. It is run by the cheapest, most arbitrary minds within the general public. People who would be rapidly identified as toxic employees can raise enough media furor to force policy. People who can not grasp the concept that you have to reward talented people to retain them are allowed to dominate budget and salary decisions.
Maybe I was naive, but it really felt like people used to have an _expectation of privacy_, for things as basic as person to person long distance communication. E.g. snail mail and phone calls back in the days.
Back in the day, long distance communication was mostly done through government-regulated monopolies: UPSP, Ma Bell... The idea of the government reading your mail, or listening in on your conversations is pretty abhorrent.
Along come ISPs. They aren't really government-regulated monopolies - in fact companies like ATT carefully segregate their government-oversight subsidiaries from their ISP subsidiary. Now it's not The Government reading your mail, it's just some company with whom you've contracted. Your contract specifically allows them to "read" your mail, or they can't transfer it to the destination. First, there's a secondary market for certain kinds of summary data from that mail, now a secondary market for extremely detailed, personal data from that mail. Still, a lot of people don't care, because it's not The Government, but just Time-Warner, the good people who bring me my TV.
My point is: we enforced privacy on Olde Tyme communication methods because they were government structures; we willingly abandon our privacy to a company in exchange for 25-cents off milk.
Total cost, $200. And half of that is the hard drive, so if you're willing to salvage the old hard drive and throw in an IDE to SATA conversion kit, you can put it together for about $120.
But the total cost not to upgrade is $0. Your basic argument is that computers must be replaced on a regular basis, though, so treating this $200 as a one-time cost is slightly inaccurate. Really, you mean that you have to spend $200+ every, what - 3 years? That is, you spend $70/year on computer hardware that will find its way into a landfill rapidly. Most of us were perfectly happy with the performance of our new computers 5 years ago, but that was using (now) 5 year old software. In the meantime, projects like Win7 and Firefox have bloated themselves on the power of ever-faster hardware, to the point that they have become unusable on those older platforms. If you keep hardware for 5, 10 years, you reduce your cost of ownership to $20/year, and reduce the landfill burden by 2-3x.
it'll use a fraction of the electricity, possibly low enough to cover the initial $120 outlay within a few months (and certainly within a year).
Holy crap, are you kidding? Do you have any idea how cheap electricity is in most of the world? I've got a 5 year old, moderate spec AMD system that draws around 60W at idle. I don't mean the processor TPD or the power supply rating, I mean the actual current coming out of the wall. Leave that on 24/7 and it amounts to about 40 kWhr/month, somewhere around $5. I've got a low spec, year old, diskless Atom that draws around 45W idle, for a cost difference of almost $1/month or $12/year. The electricity spent building the components of the new computer is probably more than that. Meanwhile, the power consumption and density of high-end systems has been moving steadily up, so if you're thinking of saving electricity by upgrading your gaming rig every three years, just forget about it.
I was looking at new refrigerators recently. According to the Energy Guide, the cheapest, least energy efficient refrigerator I can get will cost $50/year to run. For an extra $200, I can get the cheapest, high efficiency refrigerator, and save $10/year on electricity. 20 years for the electricity savings to break even (without present-value discounting).
So, the reason I should have to buy a seatbelt, even though it's only my life I risk, is because someone else might have to pay my medical bills when I find myself injured in an accident. But, I should not have to pay for a breathalyzer because I can choose not drive drunk? I hope you're only responding to the guy asking why seat belts are mandatory equipment and not to the whole thread, because those two claims are logically inconsistent.
If I choose not to wear a seat belt, it's either because I'm irresponsible and willing to bet my body that no one will hit me or because I consider the cost of wearing the belt higher than the likely cost of treatment following an accident. And you've said that society can not afford to let me make that choice, even at a risk of 2 in 100,000,000 miles, because of the probability that I won't be able to afford the cost, even if someone else causes my accident.
More than 10% of Americans admit to pollsters of driving drunk. If I choose to drive drunk, it's either because I'm irresponsible or because I consider the cost of finding alternate transportation greater than the likely cost of accident consequences. An accident that I am statistically, maybe ten fold more likely to cause. Here, though, the cost to society, at an incidence of 1 in 10 (even 1 in 3650, if it's only once a year that person drives drunk) is easily dismissed, and we can happily expect the drunk to bear the full consequences of his choice, and the lives he takes.
Of course, I'm a little biased. I've said since 2002 that if we used the TSA budget to install breathalyzers on all US cars at no cost to the owner, then we would save more lives than the most invasive airport screenings
Re:The stockholders can't afford a dividend
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Apple Has Too Much Money
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· Score: 3, Informative
One doesn't get to pay long-term capital gains rates on dividends, so the appropriate figure to use is the marginal rate. As an Apple shareholder, for me, that is over 30%.
Only if you flip your shares within 30 days of the dividend. If you hold for more than a 30 day window surrounding the div, it will almost certainly be "qualified" for th 15% rate cap. This is why Romney's effective tax rate is 15%: both cap gains and most dividends are taxed at 15%. When a company makes a major, one-time dividend, investors may even end up with capital losses on the share price to offset the dividend.
Additionally, you do not actually need to "blow up" a spacecraft, you just need to depressurize it, assuming there are human occupants, or mess with electronics etc.
I'm surprised no one has brought up submarine warfare for comparison here. When in a sub war, one does not try to destroy their opponent. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And THE enemy is water.
I'm pretty sure any spacecraft designed for combat will depressurize itself before combat. Suit the individual, maybe tethered to a workstation, and you reduce one of the main hazards of combat. You can't really do that in a submarine because water has a lot of mass, a lot of viscosity, and hampers the mobility of both the ship and crew. Why risk all that irreplaceable air when you can store it away in a dense, armored compartment, like they used to to with the captain's china.
I'd also expect combat either to depend on very intelligent drones capable tracking a target for a few days (while avoiding counter-drone drones), or to happen at distances equivalent to modern dogfights. ie: a muzzle velocity of 800 m/s makes for dogfight ranges of a few hundred meters with dumb bullets; maybe a couple of miles with guided missiles. At greater distances, countermeasures dramatically reduce weapon effectiveness. Of course, "space" velocities might be a 100 km/s, rather than 1 km/s, but it's hard to imagine effective combat if your opponent has minutes to respond, disable your ordinance, or just move out of the way
Believing your rights and liberties are granted to you by a creator not only doesn't make much sense (you don't have rights in the jungle), it's ALSO a bad idea
But that's the whole idea of "inalienable rights." They're things you can do alone in the jungle. You have the right to life, but that's different than obligating someone else to support you. You have the right to liberty, ie, not to do what you don't want. You have the right to pursue happiness - to do what you want. However you came into the world, whether by sentient Creator or stochastic chance, you alone in the jungle can exercise your own sentience.
Once you come out of the jungle, your actions interact with other people's rights, and the whole social system is supposed to prevent your liberty from interfering with my pursuit of happiness (and vice versa). You in the jungle are perfectly at liberty not to build shelter and not to gather food. You in society are obligated not to stink up the place with your rotting corpse.
Why aren't more factories in Colorado and Michigan then?
Terrible access to transportation limits export capacity. The only way to get anything out of those states reliably is by rail 1000 miles to a reliable port. Michigan produces a lot of iron and coal because it's physically located there, but shipping is essentially shut down all winter.
Sure, there's a labor cost, but it's no accident that all those big, Asian centers of production are shoreside cities with huge port facilities. Sure, there's a labor cost, but do you have any idea how expensive it is to heat a 200,000 square foot factory when it's -10 oC outside?
You don't get the point. The police were idiots for interpreting his message the way it was, but that still leaves the question of why it was read in the first place - apparently, the police had an interest in his communications even before this incident, enough to monitor them. And there really doesn't seem to be any explanation for that other than his origin.
I think you> don't get the point. The point is that electronic surveillance is now so cheap that you don't need a reason to target anyone specificially. Specific targeting would, in fact, raise the complaint of racial profiling, so it's much easier just to grep everyone's text messages for words like "explode" or "destroy." So, you get the 3rd degree on Allami because his text contained a suspicious name "Salem" and a suspicious phrase "exploser ACN." And you get English college students denied entry to the US because their texts contained threats to "destroy LA."
Your text messages, tweets, and facebook postings are being read by the same system.
He lowered taxes farther than he should then slowly raised them to help find the sweet spot, which is how it should be done.
He lowered them in the expectation that Congress would find ways to restrict spending to match revenues. Instead, they decided to decouple spending from revenues, and Reagan spent the rest of his tenure trying to catch revenue up with spending. Federal spending was 28% of national income in 1980 and 29% of national income in 1988. The notion that congress might manage to restrain spending, just because they didn't have any money, proved woefully naive.
The government would not pick up the tab, the company would go out of business.
The company goes out of business without reimbursing the government for any damage done, so the government foots the bill. The corporate principals then re-incorporate under a different name and continue business as usual.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh what the hell, it's like pissing on a house fire of bias and closed minded rhetoric.
Truer words were never spoken
Tearing ourselves from disciplines of Astronomy and Physics for a second and focusing on the bit of Anthropology atheists prefer to ignore; man has ALWAYS believed in a higher power. We have scientific evidence of this.
I can't even imagine what scientific evidence you have to prove that belief in a higher power has ALWAYS existed. Hopefully, it's not the No True Scotsman argument.
Man has used "higher power" to explain things which are currently inexplicable and allow order in a confusing world. It makes the kids stop asking where the sun goes at night. It expresses our resignation to continue living when the hunt goes poorly, when storms flatten the wheat field, or when you get passed over for promotion. Personifying the "higher power" into a Thor, Nature, or Jesus figure adds the value of fun stories to tell the kids and satisfies mankind's inclination to anthropomorphize even inanimate objects. However, a "higher power" can also be "physical laws and properties." One of those higher powers allows cultural and technological advance; one of those higher powers encourages complacency and repression.
We know that abilities and quirks that we EVOLVE with are there for a reason. We can only theorize and therefore fork, but not discount at this point, Creationism as a possibility.
"For a reason" is that some mutation provided, at worst, no disadvantage to survival. Most of them don't. Each year, according to the CDC, "Major structural or genetic birth defects affect approximately 3% of births in the United States, are a major contributor to infant mortality." When you see abilities and quirks that we EVOLVE, you are looking at only the small fraction of changes that are not immediately fatal, and ignoring billions of people who died in utero or in infancy because of errors in gene replication. If you wish to argue that some creator goes about his work by slaughtering such a large fraction of his people, then I think your notion of "design" or "directed change" is indistinguishable from random. To make a distinction between "random changes" and "random changes because god said so" is a) unnecessary and b) a little silly. To infer a "reason" for every trait and quirk you display presupposes the existence of a plan and is circular logic (ie: we have trait X that allows behavior Y; Y facilitates survival; therefore Y is part of the plan, and X was planned to allow Y)
More importantly, the only evidence for creationism is a bunch of stories handed down by several generations of oral tradition before being collected into a convenient anthology. Oh, and I suppose, if you want to include your bit of Anthropology that atheists like to ignore, the observation that humans enjoy stories. The single greatest point of divergence between atheists and Christians is that Christians will appeal to any story in their favored anthology as literal fact worthy of as much weight as the observation that the sun rose this morning in the east. What if they're just stories? I mean, did Lazarus leave any evidence or documentation from his life after being raised from the dead: I'd think that's the kind of thing a whole community might have written about. Maybe earn him a trip to Rome to meet with historians and scientists. The literal veracity of the bible is a tenuous thread upon which to hang a whole theory of the cosmos.
Evolutionists and creationists are not even having the same discussion, but the creationists are very insistent on getting their irrelevant bit into the evolutionary conversation. It's like we're all talking about what to have for dinner, and some guy demands that we first agree that Viking ranges are much better than Wolf.
The management stream starts lower, but finishes higher than the fact that. That they'd be willing to move you laterally pay wise is a pretty reasonable concession.
I'd agree with that, except for the submitter's claim to 20 years' technical experience. He's not at the entry level, and asking him to move from a high echelon technical position to a low echelon managerial position of equivalent salary isn't necessarily reasonable. I have to say that the phrasing "You're more valuable to _us_ where you are, but the opportunities for _you_ in this new position are better" sounds a lot like a negotiating ruse, and I would make me suspicious. They've essentially said that they're not paying him his worth in his current position. The only way opportunities for _him_ are better in the new position is if he can actually create more value for the company in the new position, so the company is also saying they think he can be much more valuable to _them_ in the management track. They lack enough confidence in their judgement to pay him based on their own expectations of his performance, so they want him to take the new position but not be on the hook for appropriate salary unless it turns out he lives up to performance. Sure, experience on an assembly line doesn't prepare you to be a physician, or an accountant, but it would make you acutely aware of the issues, techniques, and problems associated with organizing and managing assembly line workers: this is not a completely orthogonal move.
He definitely needs to get some concrete performance metrics tied to concrete compensation. Few enough people would take an entry position under terms of "we'll pay you 30% below market rate for 3 months, after which time we'll either fire you or raise your salary closer to market." And this is a 40-something with 20 years of competent, relevant technical expertise. You don't hire someone out of that realm by offering an internship.
If they were in the US they'd be easily making 250k and potentially up over 300k whereas here they're stuck at 120 ish.
I think you may be slightly misinformed about US faculty salaries. In the sciences, you should keep in mind that faculty are generally expected to bring in some (varying, but at least 25%) of their salary from extramural sources, which generally means the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. The NIH salary cap is currently $199,700, which sets a de facto cap on most faculty salaries, because NIH frowns on double-billing (ie, on the university supplementing their maximum $16,642/month). In my experience, only senior administration - dean level and higher - are over $250k, but they're often not involved in science at that level.
And for the record, my opinion is that open source hardware is just as valid as open source software, however the entrenched interests lined up against it are powerful and determined to undermine it.
"Open source hardware" seems to mean "hardware standard not generated by a recognized professional organization." That is, the "closed source" hardware rack is an EIA standard from the 50s, not the kind of detailed drawing you could take to a local machine shop and say "give me 2 of these." Those industry groups have built-in bureaucracy and provide confidence that the next standard revision will be a small revision and completely compatible with all the preceding generations. I can buy rack mountable hardware today, and be extremely confident that it will plug into the rack I got in 1970. Standards produced by professional organizations like EIA, IEEE, and NEMA also have built-in credibility and implicit support of multiple industrial concerns. Of course, the bureaucracy and review means that they can be somewhat slow to accommodate changing demands, but that's kind of the point. "Open source" standards may be developed by professionals with support from multiple industry groups, too, but they may also be a bunch of high school kids in their parents' garage, and therefore require more review by whomever is going to use them. Especially if that user is considering building out a $100,000,000 production line. In either case, you still have your own manufacturing design work to do: the "open source" guidelines don't add any value.
Open source software, on the other hand, is a thing you can use directly, and (to the extent that it works) saves development time. For any sizeable project, it's easier to fix problems than to generate from scratch (unless its really bad), so open source software brings value
That said, a lot of professional organizations seem to use their standards as money-makers. The NEMA standard for welding electrode holders is $50. The ANSI standard for electrical meters is $150. The standards are developed at the cost of the member organizations, and I don't think royalties are paid to those organizations (who are generally the people paying the fees, anyway). It would be nice to see those organizations move toward zero cost electronic distribution of their standards, at least for individual use. One imagines that, as "O/S" hardware designs prove themselves, that they will get industry buy-in, and will get incorporated into formally blessed standards.
So what? Are you saying police shouldn't even investigateunless they're 99.999999999999999% sure a crime has been committed?
Well, considering that it's well in excess of 99.99999% certain that detectable levels of radioactivity are not a sign of terrorists, yeah, I'd say the police need a somewhat higher threshhold of suspicion before they stop someone. There's something like 4 million NM procedures in the US each year, and I have yet to hear of a terrorist in actual possession of radioactivity, so odds of 1-in-40-100 million seems pretty fair.
Or do you suggest they stop everyone carrying a crowbar, because crowbars can be used for breaking and entering? Everyone transporting gasoline, because gasoline is a popular accelerant for arsonists?
Not saying that any kind of screening or abrogation of our rights and privileges can be justified. Just not feeling the honor system for flights would work out all that well
There is a vast middle ground between the invasive grope-and-scan system the TSA uses and the pre-DB Cooper honor system. The ease with which hijackings happened in the 70s-90s was largely due to the explicit policy of complying with hijackers demands. This policy was reversed about the same time the second plane hit the tower and, in combination with locked cockpit doors, pretty well assures that hijacked aircraft will not be effective guided missiles again.
Instead of making an attempt to balance the cost, inconvenience and, yes, risks of ever more invasive screening procedures, TSA throws up the terrorist bogeyman and tells us that if all this expense saves even one life, then it's all worth it. Events like this one serve to remind us that screening procedures, even those involving minuscule risks, when applied to hundreds of millions of people, cause morbidity. Morbidity that is much more predictable (and therefore more preventable) than terrorists. So, the question is: would you prefer safe magentometer-only screening and a 0.0000001% chance of hijacking, or body scanning, with a 0.0000001% chance of cancer and a 0.00000001% chance of hijacking?
No. It's copying certain data without permission. I cannot fathom how anyone could perceive that as being a much more severe problem than jaywalking. They may or may not be losing potential profit, but that is all.
Did you miss the part of the GP's post where he says pirated versions of software are on sale, cheap, at his local mall? A company, musician, or artist takes a big risk in creating the data you seem to dismiss so lightly. Maybe it takes three months out of their life; maybe it requires years of full-time effort from 20 or more coders, artists and coordinators, but the only way they have to recoup that risk is for someone to give them money. Shareware has taught us that a very small fraction of people who download software will pay for it voluntarily (although certain well-established names clearly have a fan-base that will yield good returns).
Physical distribution channels have losses - breakage, overproduction, theft - that get built into the distribution, and I rather think of piracy (or maybe "redistribution of unauthorized copies for profit") and sharing (maybe "redistribution of unauthorized copies without charge") as an unavoidable distribution loss on digital enterprises. As long as it's a small enough fraction of the income, it's not going to hurt, but you have to be terribly naive to imagine that it's no "more sever than jaywalking." The problem is it's hard to quantify: in a physical channel, you know how many copies you produced and how many you sold, so you can calculate exactly what your distribution loss is. In a digital channel, you only know how many copies you sold and not how many were produced, so you can justify almost any number at all for your distribution loss. The unquantifiable loss makes it very hard to guess how much risk is involved in starting a new, multimillion dollar digital production; makes the loans to support salaries more expensive, makes the venture capital a more expensive, makes failure to release a product a little more likely.
I cannot see how copying music is a "huge" problem even as someone who supports copyright. We have much, much, much larger problems to worry about
Oh, I see: you're not talking about whether copyright infringement affects the quality and quantity of digital products, but about whether copyright infringement is equivalent to genocide in Sudan, earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, or the risk of nuclear war. Yeah, I guess in that context, you could even argue that murder (which claims fewer than 15,000 US lives each year) is a small problem.
"...the articles are aimed at getting page views."
It would be so much better if they posted stuff I wasn't interested in. I don't think I understand this comment...
Articles aimed at getting page views appeal to a broad audience. Even a general audience, like, say American Idol viewers. Slashdot has catered to an audience that Big Media considers a niche - technophiles with actual knowledge. The articles got page views from that (small but obsessive) group, and all of the changes in the last 5-8 years have been to dumb-down and broaden the appeal of articles, thus turning /. from News for Nerds into PC Magazine. This seems to be a common trend among tech-sites: start out focused and interesting, attract a sizeable readership, worry when readership growth slows, and add a bunch of peripheral but less "intimidating" content to bring in more readers, thus alienating the original crowd. You're old enough to know this.
Funny but I can't remember a single example of someone taking over an aircraft with box cutters.
[I'm speaking from August 2001]
Your memory is poor. The lone All Nippon 61 hijacker used an 8" kitchen knife in July 1999. Not quite a box cutter, but 5 guys with 4" razor blades are a lot more threatening than one guy with a kitchen knife.
Funny but I can't remember a single example of someone trying to take over an aircraft with their underwear full of explosives.
By far, the most common pre-9/11 hijacking weapon is "claim of explosives," usually false. That's right: pre-9/11, it was as easy to hijack a plane as it is to rob a bank. You want to rob a bank, you go up to the teller with a note demanding money, and they will always give it to you. Pre-9/11, you want to hijack a plane, you tell them you have a bomb, and they will take you where ever you want. You may not get out of the bank/plane at the end, but company policy said it's just not worth risking lives over a little money or inconvenience. Now, of course, no one will have any of that, as has been demonstrated by passengers on the shoe-bomber, underpants-bomber, and crazy-pilot. Pre-TSA security, combined with locked cockpit doors and corporate policies forbidding appeasement, are all we need to prevent another 9/11
If you are so scared of radiation, DON'T FLY!
If you are so scared of terrorists that you're willing to give up your privacy and your presumption of innocence, then DON'T FLY!
Seriously. The rest of us rational people will appreciate the return of dignity and professionalism to travel. We'll appreciate the reduction in airfares associated with not having to pay for the equipment, renovations, and manpower required by the theater your paranoia requires. We'll appreciate the reduction in highway traffic and increase in scheduled flights as people again choose the convenience of air over the hazards of driving. Or do you think that every major airline in the US has declared bankruptcy at least once since 2001 because people love the experience of flying so much more than in the 1990s?
See, I think Larry Page has a fundamentally flawed belief:
When you find a great article, you want to share that knowledge with people who will find it interesting, too. If you see a great movie, you want to recommend it to friends.
I don't want that at all. Maybe I want to share my great find with a small circle of friends. People whom I'd like to reinforce my connection with by limited sharing of relevant, high quality stuff. I expect it to be quid-pro-quo, and if you can't give me good stuff, the I expect to be able to withhold my favor from you.
What I don't want is for any random person who wanders through to leech off of my effort. Or for people to think that because we both like funny pictures of cats that we share some deep, personal connection. A social network is useful because the people in it are screened for quality in some way. The (olde tyme) method of screening was that it required effort to maintain each and every contact, so less useful contacts naturally fall by the way.
I don't want, every time I browse a bookshelf at the local bookstore, each of my friends to come up and tell me what they thought of the book. I want to discover for myself. And frankly, some of my friends' threshold for "awesome" is shockingly low.
Besides that, people under 30 aren't the only ones who should have input into this.
This is very important to remember. People under 30 were under 19 when TSA was imposed. They've lived their entire traveling lives under the 'new' system, and have little or no recall of the more reasonable and traveler-friendly screening processes. By choosing a communication mode biased towards younger people, they're excluding a large portion of our greater social memory.
You don't understand the academic journal market. You don't publish articles in prestigious journals for the sake of publishing, or to make money, you publish articles in prestigious journals so that others read your work.
That's a great theory, but in practice people publish in prestigious journals because those journals are prestigious, and it looks good on a CV, during tenure review, etc. People reading a researcher's work often comes secondary to people reading the list of journals where a researcher has published their work.
But the reason those journals are "prestigious" is because people read and cite them. You can imagine that journal quality and impact factor have nothing to do with each other, then take the cynical view that people choose their publishing venue based solely on impact factor, but the reality is that impact and quality form a positive feedback loop which can be only slowly altered by reviewer and editorial process.
Sure, if I'm looking for something specific, then I go to a database, put in my keywords, and find a whole list of relevant material, independent of journal prestige. Even there, though, I'm much more likely to read a Nature paper than, say, International Journal of Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy. More importantly, journals like Science and Nature have people who just read them and get your work distributed into areas that are not directly your narrow specialty.
Journals are a little like blogs - if a blog has a decent moderation system, then you have a chance of finding more relevant comments than Hot Grits. With more relevant comments, the blog builds a reputation and readership. The more people read, the more likely they are to add insightful comments. A blog might monetize that readership by advertising and subscription fees, which they can do intrusively enough to destroy the readership. A journal monetizes the readership by advertising and subscription fees, and the boycott is researchers' way of saying that Elsevier has gone too far.
You have to wonder about the planes when they claim they are vulnerable to em interference
"Vulnerable" might be a generous term. They have 75 incidents, over 7 years and roughly 70 million flights, that got attributed to PEDs. Unexplained warning lights, weird readings... I'm guessing that no one did any rigorous testing, in flight, to verify this came from a device. I can imagine the event starting shortly after people were allowed to turn their devices on, or disappearing shortly after people are asked to turn off their devices. At 1-in-a-million, I'd be more willing to chalk that up to coincidence than to a PED.
Well and as I have learned the hard way lately, if it's going to cost 500k per year to run IT for a couple of hundred employee outfit when it's government money, someone will complain.
It's more general than that: When it's government money, no matter how much, someone will complain.
There is always some better way to spend a government dollar, and if there isn't then government shouldn't have collected it in the first place. Government is the only activity where we all get to sit back and feel/act like the PHB, and most of us will happily cut any function that doesn't directly benefit us, personally. That means government salaries are too high, almost by definition. Meanwhile, no one worries if private industries, like phone or electric companies, offer million-dollar bonuses. You can't buy your city councilman a cup of coffee without someone thinking it's quid-pro-quo, but I can't imagine an industry trade show without at least one open-bar event.
This is why government sucks. It is run by the cheapest, most arbitrary minds within the general public. People who would be rapidly identified as toxic employees can raise enough media furor to force policy. People who can not grasp the concept that you have to reward talented people to retain them are allowed to dominate budget and salary decisions.
Maybe I was naive, but it really felt like people used to have an _expectation of privacy_, for things as basic as person to person long distance communication. E.g. snail mail and phone calls back in the days.
Back in the day, long distance communication was mostly done through government-regulated monopolies: UPSP, Ma Bell... The idea of the government reading your mail, or listening in on your conversations is pretty abhorrent.
Along come ISPs. They aren't really government-regulated monopolies - in fact companies like ATT carefully segregate their government-oversight subsidiaries from their ISP subsidiary. Now it's not The Government reading your mail, it's just some company with whom you've contracted. Your contract specifically allows them to "read" your mail, or they can't transfer it to the destination. First, there's a secondary market for certain kinds of summary data from that mail, now a secondary market for extremely detailed, personal data from that mail. Still, a lot of people don't care, because it's not The Government, but just Time-Warner, the good people who bring me my TV.
My point is: we enforced privacy on Olde Tyme communication methods because they were government structures; we willingly abandon our privacy to a company in exchange for 25-cents off milk.
Total cost, $200. And half of that is the hard drive, so if you're willing to salvage the old hard drive and throw in an IDE to SATA conversion kit, you can put it together for about $120.
But the total cost not to upgrade is $0. Your basic argument is that computers must be replaced on a regular basis, though, so treating this $200 as a one-time cost is slightly inaccurate. Really, you mean that you have to spend $200+ every, what - 3 years? That is, you spend $70/year on computer hardware that will find its way into a landfill rapidly. Most of us were perfectly happy with the performance of our new computers 5 years ago, but that was using (now) 5 year old software. In the meantime, projects like Win7 and Firefox have bloated themselves on the power of ever-faster hardware, to the point that they have become unusable on those older platforms. If you keep hardware for 5, 10 years, you reduce your cost of ownership to $20/year, and reduce the landfill burden by 2-3x.
it'll use a fraction of the electricity, possibly low enough to cover the initial $120 outlay within a few months (and certainly within a year).
Holy crap, are you kidding? Do you have any idea how cheap electricity is in most of the world? I've got a 5 year old, moderate spec AMD system that draws around 60W at idle. I don't mean the processor TPD or the power supply rating, I mean the actual current coming out of the wall. Leave that on 24/7 and it amounts to about 40 kWhr/month, somewhere around $5. I've got a low spec, year old, diskless Atom that draws around 45W idle, for a cost difference of almost $1/month or $12/year. The electricity spent building the components of the new computer is probably more than that. Meanwhile, the power consumption and density of high-end systems has been moving steadily up, so if you're thinking of saving electricity by upgrading your gaming rig every three years, just forget about it.
I was looking at new refrigerators recently. According to the Energy Guide, the cheapest, least energy efficient refrigerator I can get will cost $50/year to run. For an extra $200, I can get the cheapest, high efficiency refrigerator, and save $10/year on electricity. 20 years for the electricity savings to break even (without present-value discounting).
So, the reason I should have to buy a seatbelt, even though it's only my life I risk, is because someone else might have to pay my medical bills when I find myself injured in an accident. But, I should not have to pay for a breathalyzer because I can choose not drive drunk? I hope you're only responding to the guy asking why seat belts are mandatory equipment and not to the whole thread, because those two claims are logically inconsistent.
If I choose not to wear a seat belt, it's either because I'm irresponsible and willing to bet my body that no one will hit me or because I consider the cost of wearing the belt higher than the likely cost of treatment following an accident. And you've said that society can not afford to let me make that choice, even at a risk of 2 in 100,000,000 miles, because of the probability that I won't be able to afford the cost, even if someone else causes my accident.
More than 10% of Americans admit to pollsters of driving drunk. If I choose to drive drunk, it's either because I'm irresponsible or because I consider the cost of finding alternate transportation greater than the likely cost of accident consequences. An accident that I am statistically, maybe ten fold more likely to cause. Here, though, the cost to society, at an incidence of 1 in 10 (even 1 in 3650, if it's only once a year that person drives drunk) is easily dismissed, and we can happily expect the drunk to bear the full consequences of his choice, and the lives he takes.
Of course, I'm a little biased. I've said since 2002 that if we used the TSA budget to install breathalyzers on all US cars at no cost to the owner, then we would save more lives than the most invasive airport screenings
One doesn't get to pay long-term capital gains rates on dividends, so the appropriate figure to use is the marginal rate. As an Apple shareholder, for me, that is over 30%.
Only if you flip your shares within 30 days of the dividend. If you hold for more than a 30 day window surrounding the div, it will almost certainly be "qualified" for th 15% rate cap. This is why Romney's effective tax rate is 15%: both cap gains and most dividends are taxed at 15%. When a company makes a major, one-time dividend, investors may even end up with capital losses on the share price to offset the dividend.
Additionally, you do not actually need to "blow up" a spacecraft, you just need to depressurize it, assuming there are human occupants, or mess with electronics etc.
I'm surprised no one has brought up submarine warfare for comparison here. When in a sub war, one does not try to destroy their opponent. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And THE enemy is water.
I'm pretty sure any spacecraft designed for combat will depressurize itself before combat. Suit the individual, maybe tethered to a workstation, and you reduce one of the main hazards of combat. You can't really do that in a submarine because water has a lot of mass, a lot of viscosity, and hampers the mobility of both the ship and crew. Why risk all that irreplaceable air when you can store it away in a dense, armored compartment, like they used to to with the captain's china.
I'd also expect combat either to depend on very intelligent drones capable tracking a target for a few days (while avoiding counter-drone drones), or to happen at distances equivalent to modern dogfights. ie: a muzzle velocity of 800 m/s makes for dogfight ranges of a few hundred meters with dumb bullets; maybe a couple of miles with guided missiles. At greater distances, countermeasures dramatically reduce weapon effectiveness. Of course, "space" velocities might be a 100 km/s, rather than 1 km/s, but it's hard to imagine effective combat if your opponent has minutes to respond, disable your ordinance, or just move out of the way
Believing your rights and liberties are granted to you by a creator not only doesn't make much sense (you don't have rights in the jungle), it's ALSO a bad idea
But that's the whole idea of "inalienable rights." They're things you can do alone in the jungle. You have the right to life, but that's different than obligating someone else to support you. You have the right to liberty, ie, not to do what you don't want. You have the right to pursue happiness - to do what you want. However you came into the world, whether by sentient Creator or stochastic chance, you alone in the jungle can exercise your own sentience.
Once you come out of the jungle, your actions interact with other people's rights, and the whole social system is supposed to prevent your liberty from interfering with my pursuit of happiness (and vice versa). You in the jungle are perfectly at liberty not to build shelter and not to gather food. You in society are obligated not to stink up the place with your rotting corpse.
Why aren't more factories in Colorado and Michigan then?
Terrible access to transportation limits export capacity. The only way to get anything out of those states reliably is by rail 1000 miles to a reliable port. Michigan produces a lot of iron and coal because it's physically located there, but shipping is essentially shut down all winter.
Sure, there's a labor cost, but it's no accident that all those big, Asian centers of production are shoreside cities with huge port facilities. Sure, there's a labor cost, but do you have any idea how expensive it is to heat a 200,000 square foot factory when it's -10 oC outside?
You don't get the point. The police were idiots for interpreting his message the way it was, but that still leaves the question of why it was read in the first place - apparently, the police had an interest in his communications even before this incident, enough to monitor them. And there really doesn't seem to be any explanation for that other than his origin.
I think you> don't get the point. The point is that electronic surveillance is now so cheap that you don't need a reason to target anyone specificially. Specific targeting would, in fact, raise the complaint of racial profiling, so it's much easier just to grep everyone's text messages for words like "explode" or "destroy." So, you get the 3rd degree on Allami because his text contained a suspicious name "Salem" and a suspicious phrase "exploser ACN." And you get English college students denied entry to the US because their texts contained threats to "destroy LA."
Your text messages, tweets, and facebook postings are being read by the same system.
He lowered taxes farther than he should then slowly raised them to help find the sweet spot, which is how it should be done.
He lowered them in the expectation that Congress would find ways to restrict spending to match revenues. Instead, they decided to decouple spending from revenues, and Reagan spent the rest of his tenure trying to catch revenue up with spending. Federal spending was 28% of national income in 1980 and 29% of national income in 1988. The notion that congress might manage to restrain spending, just because they didn't have any money, proved woefully naive.
The government would not pick up the tab, the company would go out of business.
The company goes out of business without reimbursing the government for any damage done, so the government foots the bill. The corporate principals then re-incorporate under a different name and continue business as usual.