The above statement is simply false. The article that you quote says as much, pointing out that not paying income tax is not the same as not paying any taxes. People with low income pay SS and Medicare taxes, state and local taxes, personal property tax, and sales tax. The total tax burden on low income people is substantial.
The reason that low income people do not pay federal income tax is that they are making so little money, and when you add in exemptions, credits, deductions, etc, they are not supposed to pay anything. Retired people, veterans, handicapped people with MS, students, unemployed people don't make enough to justify any taxes as they are written. We can argue about whether those exemptions, deductions, and credits are justifiable. A better idea would be to make sure that they make enough that taxes are justified.
Mother Teresa was responsible for many more deaths than lives she helped. Her fanatic opposition to birth control (yeah, I know she was Catholic) combined with her fame, political power, and control over funding meant that she was able to completely block even the most basic birth control use, condoms. The result was spread of disease (esp. HIV) and many unwanted pregnancies, largely causing the overpopulation, poverty, malnutrition, and early childhood death that she was supposed to be so committed to stopping.
Can they then submit a take-down notice? What do they have to do to support it? Since there does not appear to be a cost associated with submitting incorrect / false take-down notices, then they could take a shotgun approach and take-down pretty much everything. Of course, mega won't have to implement this (not being US based), but the question is: what happens then? Another raid?
I live next to someone who tried to do this for Washington, D.C. There were lots of regulatory, political, economic barriers. He specifically helped put wifi at the Smithsonian so people could get info when they were walking on the Mall. In addition to the 'what if someone does kiddie porn' issue, the biggest problem was the commercial providers who wanted someone to pay. If you provide a service for free by the government, then you are stealing from a business, seems to be their point of view; even when it was a non-profit trying to do it, the businesses still objected. They would rather a small percentage of the people pay $10/day to get data than a huge number get it for free.
The only wonder is more cities don't just build these networks and subsidize them with tax dollars as a way to bring in businesses, consumers, and property owners. It is damn cheap compared to the benefits the city is getting.
Sometimes the people calling the shots are not interested in the greater good. If it hurts their bottom line, then it must be stopped.
I do that all the time in Java using Eclipse. If I have a problem in a function, I have a breakpoint there. When it gets there, I can see what all the variables are set to, and what the code has done. I can change the code, save, and it restarts at the beginning of the function.
I occassionally copy the code out of Eclipse, paste it in Emacs, do what I want to do, and then copy and paste it back into Eclipse.
I coded in emacs for a good 15-20 years. The usefulness of macros is so strong that it is really hard to part with. That said, Eclipse is my now main tool because it is integrated. Everything is right there, with a nice source code tree (showing me what things I've changed relative to svn), obvious what things are in the classpath, what maven is doing (built-in pom editor), checkstyle integration, autocompile, live debugging (i.e. change the code during debugging and it restarts the function you were in, sweet!), etc.
emacs is better for text editing. For most programming tasks, I'm only editing text for some of the time and Eclipse is much better for those non-text editing things.
International agreements and treaties trump state law....
and then quoted something that does not back up your statement:
... all treaties made...
There is a significant difference between an agreement and a treaty. A treaty requires 2/3 of the Senate; and agreement just requires (I think) the sitting President. A treaty supercedes US law; an agreement does not.
Is this OSNE thing an agreement or treaty?
My wife has a Kindle, and we've been planning on me getting a different reader because of the library issue. I either read junk popular books very quickly that I don't want forever (so don't need to buy) or technical books that I want a hardback that I can write in. If this works, then we'll be happy to get another Kindle.
After a while, though - it really started to "grow on me". The first shift occurred when I started driving a lot - both in US and in Europe. For reasons, that are purely subjective, I began to feel like a mile (statutory or nautical, your pick) is a more "natural" unit of distance. Kilometer always fell short. In a way mile represented what I feel a "decent distance" should feel like.
Doing things in mph is nice when you are driving on the highway because a mile takes a minute (yes, due to traffic, I actually usually drive at right around 60).
I can't answer your CAD program question, but if it can't do either one by toggling a box, then as a professional computer programmer, I can tell you it sucks.
As to the other question, since street signs get replaced on a regular basis anyway, not any more than currently replacing them would cost.
Maps are computerized now, and most can do both units. Things like google maps which are based on photography and satellite imagery largely use metric as the natural unit, and they convert to imperial. It would be relatively minor.
I do wonder how much of the resistance is the fact that it's called SI (for System Internationale d'unites, minus the stupid accents of course). That's just too much for a red-blood American to take. Ain't no way we're gettin' our units from a bunch of cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys.
As someone who works with the military, it's a nightmare trying to keep track of the inconsistent units. I'm currently working with aerostats, and the distances (slant ranges) are measured in kilometers ('klicks'), except for the fucking altitude of the thing, which everybody expresses in feet. I don't know why. Converting to distance on the ground using mixed units sucks. I can do it on the computer, but it would be sooooo much easier if alt. was in meters, and then I could do it approximately in my head.
I knew that someone was going to bring up knots. Knots are useful only because they, unlike Imperial measures, are directly tied to the physical size of the earth and that was important when you were trying to figure out where you were in the ocean. If you go north at 1 knot for an hour, then you go one arc minute in latitude; on your sextant, that's the unit of measurement, and well within the measurable range. If you are not going north (or south), you can use your compass, geometry and your speed (in knots) to calculate where you are on the earth (approximately).
When you are doing navigation on the earth, knots just work. Everything 'fits' in terms of determining where you are without significant translation. That's why they are still used by people all over the planet. So, in terms of the Imperial vs SI argument, they actually support the idea of standardization to a useful, consistent measurement system, and that would be SI, not Imperial.
No, the pitch could have been much, much faster. If they had a real catcher there, it would have made sense for them to send one in there pretty fast. But they had the stupid mascot there, who can't see very well, and so had to dial it down. See discussion at PCMag. There are numerous arm pitching machines that can throw ~100 mpg, though not as many as the wheel-based ones.
Until we fill all the galaxy. It's only a matter of time, you know.
And I always ask an never get answer - what if the aliens think the same way?
Here's an answer: If the aliens existed, they would have done it already. Look up the Fermi Paradox. The only answer I can come up with is that intelligent / spreading life is exceedingly rare.
And more importantly, you cannot 'discriminate' against the moron because of his beliefs. That's the important part of the legislation: you cannot hold their belief in something that contradicts the known evidence against them in academic matters. They get tenure, and if you don't give them tenure, they sue the school's ass off.
Oy, your argument has more holes than swiss cheese
1. The vast majority of them did their work before 1859.
2. The list is of scientists who believe in God, not those that believe in creationism
3. For a number of them the 'God' that they believed in was not the Evangelical, Literalist, Christian God, which is the god of creationism
4. Including Einstein in that list is simply wrong; they admit as much when they point out that he did not believe in a personal god.
Sadly, your arguments are par for the course for creationists.
If it's evaporative, then yes, you'd end up with a clogged system very quickly. If it's simply an open system and they are dumping the water, then it's possible. The Navy has used salt water cooling for a while now. Still, it's a bit of a pain because salt water is a pain to work with and tends to corrode things. It's possible, but more costly.
Correct, running the simulation of the ant brain would be a cake walk, assuming you knew what to put in the simulation:-)
And determining what the model should be, ah..there's the rub. How do all of those 250k neurons connect? What do they do? That's a hugely hard problem.
The best work I know of is on the sea slug, Aplysia californica. Do a google search for neural system, simulations or models of it. A lot of work has gone into determining the types and connections for every neuron in the organism, where they came from developmentally, what they do and how they work. There are about 19,000 neurons. We do not have a complete model for it yet. So, we're a really, really long way from doing a mosquito brain, though I'm not sure how many neurons they have. Honeybees have about 1 million and we have barely started thinking about modeling something like that. It's ridiculous how hard it is.
BTW, there was lots of noise about modeling a 'cat's brain' by IBM a little while ago. It didn't model a cats brain however. It was a simulation of the same number of neurons as in a cat's brain. The difference is that the model they used did not model the connections or learning that occurs in a real brain. It was just X number of neurons in a big soup. The real hard work is determining what the connections are between all the neurons, what the connections do, and what the dynamic nature is. That's why there is a big connectome project going on (Google that too).
Why has this not happened in the past? There has already been an enormous shift in the types of work that people do. Previously, most people did menials tasks on farms, and now they do not. After farming was manufacturing, and that is largely automated (though not entirely obviously, cf China). What are people doing now that they did not do then? How did that shift happen such that we did not have 50% unemployment? What does that imply for the future? I think that it means that people will still be people and do 'jobs' that are more abstract, interpersonal, and less directed at manufacturing. Does that imply 'creative' work? I'm not so sure, since that hasn't happened in the past.
The logical extension of the 'robots take over pretty much everything' is science fiction. As usual, science fiction authors have thought about this and written stories about it. I can't remember the name, but there was a Ray Bradbury story about this (can anyone help me out here?) and some of the Asimov stories apply too. If you really are concerned about what will happen to society, read some science fiction. They have at least thought about it.
You're simply repeating the standard naive argument from 60 or more years ago. Eliminating "menial" labor, more commonly called "blue collar jobs," is neither scalable nor survivable. Those people will not become engineers, scientists, professionals, or "white collar" employees as your model will effectively require. While many products and services may diminish in price, a great many people will become under- or unemployed. The poverty line will go up, not down. Beware of simply accepting pop-culture notions of capitalism, they are wrong. Many counter-intuitive results will come from making machines do all the work. Those who don't own robots will be increasingly unable to participate in the economy.
You haven't given me any reason to think that his 'naive' argument is not correct other than you saying so. Is life worse now than 60 years ago because automation has replaced people in a number of menial tasks? I don't see it. I can buy an iPod for a small amount of money because the factories that create them are largely automated, and the ships that transport them from there to here are largely automated, and the packaging and delivery system is largely automated. The same applies to food, and clothing, and housing. In pretty much every aspect of life, bits and pieces are automated and function semi-autonomously. Each of those is denying a person a job.
When you get on an elevator and push a button, you have denied a job to the elevator driver. But the elevator driver is not starving in the street because they got another job. It was a stupid job that did not require a human and automation of that task has made life better for everyone. It sounds like you are upset because we use front end loaders rather than having a team of people dig ditches, and now all those ditch diggers are penniless. It doesn't work that way.
If, and this is a huge if, almost all tasks that required human intervention for 'menial' tasks was taken over instantly by robots, then yes we would have a problem. A huge percentage of our workforce would suddenly not have a job, we'd have social unrest, etc. But the way that it's been happening for the past couple hundred years is that the automation has been creeping, slowly replacing tasks. Yes, people who used to work looms are no longer needed with modern cloth manufacturing, but people shift and move and retrain. There is not an additional 1% permanent underclass of loom workers out there.
Are there huge numbers of unemployed buggy whip manufacturers? No, of course not, because economics works such that those people go and do something else. Can you name 3 menial tasks that have been replaced by automated processes that have caused long term increases in unemployment? One?
That doesn't make any sense. Government is not designed to ramp up a large number of workers in a technical area, especially if you want them to be leading edge or research positions. The government is better equipped to evaluate proposals and give contracts to contractors to do the real work. It's been that way for a while and it's a good thing. Government people are next to impossible to get rid of; contractors can be fired, or if that's too hard, you don't renew their contract.
A major problem is the overly cozy relationship between the very large contractors and the government people handling the contracts. But, it works pretty well when the contracts go to small to medium size, aggressive companies.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not really. Considering that somewhere around half of the population pays no taxes at all.
The above statement is simply false. The article that you quote says as much, pointing out that not paying income tax is not the same as not paying any taxes. People with low income pay SS and Medicare taxes, state and local taxes, personal property tax, and sales tax. The total tax burden on low income people is substantial.
The reason that low income people do not pay federal income tax is that they are making so little money, and when you add in exemptions, credits, deductions, etc, they are not supposed to pay anything. Retired people, veterans, handicapped people with MS, students, unemployed people don't make enough to justify any taxes as they are written. We can argue about whether those exemptions, deductions, and credits are justifiable. A better idea would be to make sure that they make enough that taxes are justified.
Mother Teresa was responsible for many more deaths than lives she helped. Her fanatic opposition to birth control (yeah, I know she was Catholic) combined with her fame, political power, and control over funding meant that she was able to completely block even the most basic birth control use, condoms. The result was spread of disease (esp. HIV) and many unwanted pregnancies, largely causing the overpopulation, poverty, malnutrition, and early childhood death that she was supposed to be so committed to stopping.
I must be getting slow. It took me a good 20 seconds to see it even after reading your response. I was on my way to googling calcium bentonite.
Can they then submit a take-down notice? What do they have to do to support it? Since there does not appear to be a cost associated with submitting incorrect / false take-down notices, then they could take a shotgun approach and take-down pretty much everything. Of course, mega won't have to implement this (not being US based), but the question is: what happens then? Another raid?
I live next to someone who tried to do this for Washington, D.C. There were lots of regulatory, political, economic barriers. He specifically helped put wifi at the Smithsonian so people could get info when they were walking on the Mall. In addition to the 'what if someone does kiddie porn' issue, the biggest problem was the commercial providers who wanted someone to pay. If you provide a service for free by the government, then you are stealing from a business, seems to be their point of view; even when it was a non-profit trying to do it, the businesses still objected. They would rather a small percentage of the people pay $10/day to get data than a huge number get it for free.
The only wonder is more cities don't just build these networks and subsidize them with tax dollars as a way to bring in businesses, consumers, and property owners. It is damn cheap compared to the benefits the city is getting.
Sometimes the people calling the shots are not interested in the greater good. If it hurts their bottom line, then it must be stopped.
I do that all the time in Java using Eclipse. If I have a problem in a function, I have a breakpoint there. When it gets there, I can see what all the variables are set to, and what the code has done. I can change the code, save, and it restarts at the beginning of the function.
I coded in emacs for a good 15-20 years. The usefulness of macros is so strong that it is really hard to part with. That said, Eclipse is my now main tool because it is integrated. Everything is right there, with a nice source code tree (showing me what things I've changed relative to svn), obvious what things are in the classpath, what maven is doing (built-in pom editor), checkstyle integration, autocompile, live debugging (i.e. change the code during debugging and it restarts the function you were in, sweet!), etc.
emacs is better for text editing. For most programming tasks, I'm only editing text for some of the time and Eclipse is much better for those non-text editing things.
International agreements and treaties trump state law....
and then quoted something that does not back up your statement:
... all treaties made ...
There is a significant difference between an agreement and a treaty. A treaty requires 2/3 of the Senate; and agreement just requires (I think) the sitting President. A treaty supercedes US law; an agreement does not.
Is this OSNE thing an agreement or treaty?
My wife has a Kindle, and we've been planning on me getting a different reader because of the library issue. I either read junk popular books very quickly that I don't want forever (so don't need to buy) or technical books that I want a hardback that I can write in. If this works, then we'll be happy to get another Kindle.
After a while, though - it really started to "grow on me". The first shift occurred when I started driving a lot - both in US and in Europe. For reasons, that are purely subjective, I began to feel like a mile (statutory or nautical, your pick) is a more "natural" unit of distance. Kilometer always fell short. In a way mile represented what I feel a "decent distance" should feel like.
Doing things in mph is nice when you are driving on the highway because a mile takes a minute (yes, due to traffic, I actually usually drive at right around 60).
I can't answer your CAD program question, but if it can't do either one by toggling a box, then as a professional computer programmer, I can tell you it sucks.
As to the other question, since street signs get replaced on a regular basis anyway, not any more than currently replacing them would cost.
Maps are computerized now, and most can do both units. Things like google maps which are based on photography and satellite imagery largely use metric as the natural unit, and they convert to imperial. It would be relatively minor.
I do wonder how much of the resistance is the fact that it's called SI (for System Internationale d'unites, minus the stupid accents of course). That's just too much for a red-blood American to take. Ain't no way we're gettin' our units from a bunch of cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys.
As someone who works with the military, it's a nightmare trying to keep track of the inconsistent units. I'm currently working with aerostats, and the distances (slant ranges) are measured in kilometers ('klicks'), except for the fucking altitude of the thing, which everybody expresses in feet. I don't know why. Converting to distance on the ground using mixed units sucks. I can do it on the computer, but it would be sooooo much easier if alt. was in meters, and then I could do it approximately in my head.
I have to keep two sets of sockets and wrenches and allen wrenches, and can't ever remember which one to use on which vehicle.
I know, it's not like it's the end of the world, but it is a pain in the ass and costs me money and time.
I knew that someone was going to bring up knots. Knots are useful only because they, unlike Imperial measures, are directly tied to the physical size of the earth and that was important when you were trying to figure out where you were in the ocean. If you go north at 1 knot for an hour, then you go one arc minute in latitude; on your sextant, that's the unit of measurement, and well within the measurable range. If you are not going north (or south), you can use your compass, geometry and your speed (in knots) to calculate where you are on the earth (approximately).
When you are doing navigation on the earth, knots just work. Everything 'fits' in terms of determining where you are without significant translation. That's why they are still used by people all over the planet. So, in terms of the Imperial vs SI argument, they actually support the idea of standardization to a useful, consistent measurement system, and that would be SI, not Imperial.
No, the pitch could have been much, much faster. If they had a real catcher there, it would have made sense for them to send one in there pretty fast. But they had the stupid mascot there, who can't see very well, and so had to dial it down. See discussion at PCMag. There are numerous arm pitching machines that can throw ~100 mpg, though not as many as the wheel-based ones.
Until we fill all the galaxy. It's only a matter of time, you know.
And I always ask an never get answer - what if the aliens think the same way?
Here's an answer: If the aliens existed, they would have done it already. Look up the Fermi Paradox. The only answer I can come up with is that intelligent / spreading life is exceedingly rare.
And more importantly, you cannot 'discriminate' against the moron because of his beliefs. That's the important part of the legislation: you cannot hold their belief in something that contradicts the known evidence against them in academic matters. They get tenure, and if you don't give them tenure, they sue the school's ass off.
Oy, your argument has more holes than swiss cheese
1. The vast majority of them did their work before 1859.
2. The list is of scientists who believe in God, not those that believe in creationism
3. For a number of them the 'God' that they believed in was not the Evangelical, Literalist, Christian God, which is the god of creationism
4. Including Einstein in that list is simply wrong; they admit as much when they point out that he did not believe in a personal god.
Sadly, your arguments are par for the course for creationists.
If it's evaporative, then yes, you'd end up with a clogged system very quickly. If it's simply an open system and they are dumping the water, then it's possible. The Navy has used salt water cooling for a while now. Still, it's a bit of a pain because salt water is a pain to work with and tends to corrode things. It's possible, but more costly.
Correct, running the simulation of the ant brain would be a cake walk, assuming you knew what to put in the simulation :-)
And determining what the model should be, ah..there's the rub. How do all of those 250k neurons connect? What do they do? That's a hugely hard problem.
The best work I know of is on the sea slug, Aplysia californica. Do a google search for neural system, simulations or models of it. A lot of work has gone into determining the types and connections for every neuron in the organism, where they came from developmentally, what they do and how they work. There are about 19,000 neurons. We do not have a complete model for it yet. So, we're a really, really long way from doing a mosquito brain, though I'm not sure how many neurons they have. Honeybees have about 1 million and we have barely started thinking about modeling something like that. It's ridiculous how hard it is.
BTW, there was lots of noise about modeling a 'cat's brain' by IBM a little while ago. It didn't model a cats brain however. It was a simulation of the same number of neurons as in a cat's brain. The difference is that the model they used did not model the connections or learning that occurs in a real brain. It was just X number of neurons in a big soup. The real hard work is determining what the connections are between all the neurons, what the connections do, and what the dynamic nature is. That's why there is a big connectome project going on (Google that too).
Why has this not happened in the past? There has already been an enormous shift in the types of work that people do. Previously, most people did menials tasks on farms, and now they do not. After farming was manufacturing, and that is largely automated (though not entirely obviously, cf China). What are people doing now that they did not do then? How did that shift happen such that we did not have 50% unemployment? What does that imply for the future? I think that it means that people will still be people and do 'jobs' that are more abstract, interpersonal, and less directed at manufacturing. Does that imply 'creative' work? I'm not so sure, since that hasn't happened in the past.
The logical extension of the 'robots take over pretty much everything' is science fiction. As usual, science fiction authors have thought about this and written stories about it. I can't remember the name, but there was a Ray Bradbury story about this (can anyone help me out here?) and some of the Asimov stories apply too. If you really are concerned about what will happen to society, read some science fiction. They have at least thought about it.
You're simply repeating the standard naive argument from 60 or more years ago. Eliminating "menial" labor, more commonly called "blue collar jobs," is neither scalable nor survivable. Those people will not become engineers, scientists, professionals, or "white collar" employees as your model will effectively require. While many products and services may diminish in price, a great many people will become under- or unemployed. The poverty line will go up, not down. Beware of simply accepting pop-culture notions of capitalism, they are wrong. Many counter-intuitive results will come from making machines do all the work. Those who don't own robots will be increasingly unable to participate in the economy.
You haven't given me any reason to think that his 'naive' argument is not correct other than you saying so. Is life worse now than 60 years ago because automation has replaced people in a number of menial tasks? I don't see it. I can buy an iPod for a small amount of money because the factories that create them are largely automated, and the ships that transport them from there to here are largely automated, and the packaging and delivery system is largely automated. The same applies to food, and clothing, and housing. In pretty much every aspect of life, bits and pieces are automated and function semi-autonomously. Each of those is denying a person a job.
When you get on an elevator and push a button, you have denied a job to the elevator driver. But the elevator driver is not starving in the street because they got another job. It was a stupid job that did not require a human and automation of that task has made life better for everyone. It sounds like you are upset because we use front end loaders rather than having a team of people dig ditches, and now all those ditch diggers are penniless. It doesn't work that way.
If, and this is a huge if, almost all tasks that required human intervention for 'menial' tasks was taken over instantly by robots, then yes we would have a problem. A huge percentage of our workforce would suddenly not have a job, we'd have social unrest, etc. But the way that it's been happening for the past couple hundred years is that the automation has been creeping, slowly replacing tasks. Yes, people who used to work looms are no longer needed with modern cloth manufacturing, but people shift and move and retrain. There is not an additional 1% permanent underclass of loom workers out there.
Are there huge numbers of unemployed buggy whip manufacturers? No, of course not, because economics works such that those people go and do something else. Can you name 3 menial tasks that have been replaced by automated processes that have caused long term increases in unemployment? One?
That doesn't make any sense. Government is not designed to ramp up a large number of workers in a technical area, especially if you want them to be leading edge or research positions. The government is better equipped to evaluate proposals and give contracts to contractors to do the real work. It's been that way for a while and it's a good thing. Government people are next to impossible to get rid of; contractors can be fired, or if that's too hard, you don't renew their contract.
A major problem is the overly cozy relationship between the very large contractors and the government people handling the contracts. But, it works pretty well when the contracts go to small to medium size, aggressive companies.