There's always Enoch and Elijah. Course they get to return and be the two witnesses in Jerusalem and have their own resurrection moment after 3 days seriously bumming out the Earth's population to say nothing of the Antichrist.
X-Ray before, prayed for Sunday, X-Ray Monday morning showing problem gone in one case - doctor's opinion was that something miraculous had happened as he hadn't done anything. Another person was confined to wheel chair, prayed for Sunday night, walked out without needing a wheel chair. Another person with hands that shook who was getting ready to go to a specialist since the regular Dr. couldn't pin the problem down without more extensive tests - prayed for Sunday morning - came back without shaking and steady since. Different local people going to two different local churches with two different pastors and one lay person doing the praying over a course of many years. Like I said - they don't happen often enough to please the scientists.
I fully understand that the body is marvelously made and that the mind can do some incredible things. That's why I suggested that people who are skeptical actually start attending services where the Holy Spirit was free to operate (which He isn't in many denominations) to judge for themselves after getting to know the people who attend and staff well enough to know they aren't out for their own glory. I knew these people and know that the descriptions above are accurate, but you don't.
My comments here won't convince anyone any more than the accounts in the New Testament. My point in making them is simply to get people to think outside their box. I don't have any problem with peer reviewed science. You need to investigate God with the same open mind, observe for yourself over a long period of time - He probably won't perform on demand for you. When you see enough things happen outside of the natural realm for yourself that happen according to what the Bible says, you tend to believe that what it says is correct (if interpreted correctly and you cut the translators some slack to try to avoid a bunch of other comments that aren't useful). Pushing what you observe into the corner of a box because it makes you uncomfortable is no more honest than a scientist who discards data because it inconveniently blows his theory. The work I've mentioned wasn't done by highly advanced dinosaurs from outer space.
The things that get the most attention are healings, but other miraculous things happen all the time that aren't as spectacular. I would be remiss if I didn't mention Christ's warnings about those who seek after a sign and His blessings on those who believe without needing to see proof.
There is only one unconditional promise in the Bible. All others are conditional. Some have many conditions. He always fulfills His unconditional promise of salvation if you ask. He'll answer the others as well if you meet His conditions. If you don't meet the conditions, you shouldn't expect an answer.
If you want to observe miracles, you should go to a Pentecostal church and observe with the same dedication and studiousness that you would make your observations at an observatory. Big miracles don't happen every day, but they do happen. If you choose to never place yourself in a position that you might by chance observe one and at the same time have spent enough time getting to know the people involved to realize that it isn't a stunt or faked, then that is hardly God's fault.
This isn't a defense of all religion. I realize that the religions of the world have been plagued by charlatans as long as religion has existed. To reject all religion because of these people is no more defensible than to reject all science because of some of the charlatans in it.
I have seen people who I know well healed of problems that the doctors could not fix. It wasn't done for the glory of man - the people involved were pretty humble people and went on about their daily business with thanks for what God did. God isn't going to undo these acts of his to satisfy your need for scientific reproducibility. Yet if you stick around long enough, you will see miracles happen. Who knows. If you get things straightened out between God and you, he might even use you to perform a miracle. Wouldn't that blow your mind.
A good reference to look through is "Guide to the Secure Configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5" issued by the Operating Systems Division Unix Team of the Systems and Network Analysis Center, National Security Agency.
It goes over most of the daemons - how to lock them down - which ones to disable completely.
Although oriented toward Red Hat, its concepts can be extended to most Linux and many Unix environments.
Beyond that, most concepts related to best practices tend to be universal. If you're a good system administrator in Windows, you'll be a good system administrator in Linux once you learn the equivalents. Set up test environments whenever possible. Make sure patches work in the test environment before rolling out to production. Many distributions have a much higher patch frequency than Windows and also patch more parts of the system frequently. Fedora tends to be one of the most cutting edge distributions out there and changes massively without necessarily guaranteeing that a particular patch won't cause you some level of grief. CentOS distributions will follow the patch frequency of RHEL, just a bit delayed. These, and other equivalents, try very hard not to change APIs in between major releases. With other distributions, very little is left untouched between releases. Test on non-critical systems first and thoroughly. Back up securely and test your backups.
The manufacturing facilities were spun off to Global Foundries. The last report I saw said they had dropped their stake in the manufacturing side from 30 to 14%.
I think most people stopped caring about the HTML standards a long time ago anyway. That is fine with me.
Today, everybody is focused on how the latest incarnation of a particular browser does on the latest incarnation of the acid test page. Does it render it correctly or not? If it renders OK, how fast does it do it? That's the bottom line anyway since most standards are not defined tightly enough to prevent various browser manufacturers from interpreting them ever so slightly differently while still claiming to be 100% (or less - cough) compliant.
It isn't a bad thing to say our site will work on any browser that can render the latest acid test page correctly. You can look at that page and limit yourself to a subset of those features during development of your site or your CMS system. A well developed test suite should work as well as some randomly numbered standard. Your browser either renders the page correctly or you go back and work on it some more till it does. Even if you're a big company, pages like the acid test page will eventually force you to make changes towards meeting a particular implementation of a standard, regardless of how much you like to resist change or how you'd like to interpret the standard.
Sorry I caused you to take the Lord's name in vain.
I added another post currently above yours that attempts to explain my view of the problem we have now and why I offered equal burden as a possible solution. Please post your ideas of how to reign in government spending, start reducing the debt, and still keep essential services running. I can't figure out a way to do it until people actually start caring about what their elected officials are doing. Until it starts costing everybody something, there's no incentive to even vote, much less try to influence what is going on. Equal would be awful for me as I have a large family and fit in the middle class demographic. I would be paying much more in taxes than I am now due to child tax credits. But what we have now isn't working at all and shows no signs of changing.
If nothing changed and there was an equal burden, then yes - it would be very hard or impossible for most of the population to pay the cost. My feelings would be that an equal share would never be passed without a massive reduction in the cost of government. At that point, the bill might not be horribly unreasonable for each person.
I don't expect to ever be rich (although most Americans are rich by much of the world's standards). Yet I still can't begin to feel there is any justice or rightness in making those better off than I am pay a greater share of my government's expense than I do. They get no benefits that I don't get. The companies they work for might, but those same benefits help everyone who works in them. Should those who are rich be more charitable. I'm sure they should. But it should be done voluntarily and not taken by force.
My dad was an auto mechanic working at a local dealership for one of the big three. My mom was a part-time bookkeeper/secretary. Neither ever made as much in a single year as I made when I started working as a programmer. Yet they gradually bought small amounts of stocks and my mom now uses the proceeds of those years of investing to live without having to rely solely on social security as neither had pensions. Mom benefited from the step up provisions at dad's death and paid all taxes they had to pay as they came due. My mom isn't rich, but she's better off than most of her friends.
You don't get rich by the way you suggested.
You get rich by not spending money you don't have, by waiting to buy things (other than a house) till you can pay cash, and by paying off your mortgage as quickly as possible. You stay well off by taking care of your health so you don't have huge bills, by covering risks of big medical bills by insurance, by not having bad habits like drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, and by not breaking the law. You stay well off by marrying one person and staying married for better or worse. Giving charitable donations and putting God first helps too, although not a popular concept on Slashdot.
Live well within your means and you'll have a decent life, whether you ever are considered rich by the immensely wealthy.
I realize that posting to an anonymous coward isn't usually fruitful, but the point he is making has to be answered.
Until everyone in the country starts paying an equal share, there is no incentive to change the amount of money being spent. If everyone was paying an exactly equal share, you'd very, very, very quickly find that government expenditures would decrease until that equal share was a bearable amount for everyone or everyone would go to Washington D.C. in revolt.
Some of the people in government would be out of a job (working for government at least). If the service they were providing was truly important to the people, the private sector would take it on and those interested in it would support it. The previous federal employees could find jobs there if they were qualified. If it wasn't worth any private entity taking over, then it isn't worth the government doing either. There are a large number of functions of government that most would choose to fund (and would hope might even get more funding). I doubt that the CDC would have to worry or the food inspectors (although this at least could be done privately as well). The various intelligence services might have to shape up, but would still exist. The military might have a reduced role but would still exist. NASA might have to shape up a lot or go private. The Education dept? Poof. Back to the states where it belongs. Same with several other departments. But government would still exist at some federal level.
People would decide that entitlements really could be reduced and their legislators would follow through quickly. Families might start caring for their own elderly again or let charitable organizations do it as they did in the past. People would decide they really didn't care if terrorists were ever found or not and that most of the world could just degenerate into anarchy if it wanted to instead of having our military presence foot the bill for being a police keeper. You'd be amazed at how fast the equal share would become bearable.
As it is, you can't even get 1/2 the people to vote in an election (give or take and depending on the election) because it doesn't matter who wins to them - they'll still get their government handouts.
The point of taxes is to fund required goverment services in the most efficient manner possible.
Social engineering should not have anything to do with taxes.
Before you blow a gasket, my charitable giving is historically higher than the taxes I am required to pay. Freewill charitable giving is where social engineering belongs and not the tax code.
Although wealthy people like Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates are choosing to enjoy most of the fruits of their labor while they are alive, they have pledged to give away obscene amounts of money to charity when they die (and have already given away very large amounts of their own volition). Mr. Buffett is a particularly poor choice to hold up as a bad guy. These men are not exceptions. Many of the business magnates through history donated much money to charity.
So you're implying that the police and fire deparments make more calls to millionaire's homes than poor people?
The military of the US is considered an asset to multinational companies - it gives enemies slight pause before attacking them, but everyone who works for those companies benefits from that and not just the C?Os.
This isn't an endorsement for cheating on your taxes - it is merely a reflection that the tax code is unjust and unfairly penalizes success. The fact that such a large percentage of the US pay little or no federal taxes is part of the reason the federal debt is so high. Politicans have no incentive to reign in spending because pleasing people who have no stake in the system keeps them in office.
In general, no corporation actually pays taxes unless it is not making a profit.
As long as it is making a profit, the expense line item called taxes (regardless of their destination - federal, state, county, city, or foreign country) merely indicates how much of the money they took in selling their products or services or knowledge to another company or individual that they sent on to the indicated taxing authority. If they are actually paying taxes (not making a profit) they're not going to be in business very long.
In the end, the consumer pays all corporate taxes of a profitable company, marked up by every company's desired profit margin at each step between the consumer and the companies who dig up the raw materials that went into the product.
I know there are funky tax law quirks that don't make this a hard and fast rule, but it's mostly correct. They can situate their headquarters and development and manpower to try to reduce the amount of taxes they have to pay, but end result doesn't change. Any dollar that goes out as taxes is covered by sales or the company isn't going to be in business for very long.
And yes, I would agree that most upper management is very much overpaid and I would personally like to see all stock options and perks removed and converted to a straight salary figure for everybody so people could really see just how bad it is and everyone would be on the same tax footing. On the other hand, I also support flat taxation for everyone - and flat in terms of dollars and not percent. There is no reason that Mr. Gates or Mr. Buffett should have to pay more to support the government than a single mom in dire straits does. They probably use less government services at every level than she does. Their companies benefit from the protections of the government, but everyone from the janitors and lawn care people to the C?Os who work for their companies benefit from that and not just them.
But the 65802 and 65816 are much better if you're really going to program anything 6502 based. It's too bad they never officially came out with their 65832. That would have been an awesome chip. We might still be using them in our embedded designs if they had. As it is we stopped with the 816. People lavish praise on the new stuff, but having even the weirdest addressing modes execute in 7 cycles and many only take 2 cycles with no wait states is awesome if you are doing basic control operations. On the 65816 you can move zero page around as well as the stack so you can have multiple zero pages (one for each task you're running). We developed our own assembler, linker, and ANSI C compiler cross-development environment that runs on Linux to support our embedded controllers along with a multi-tasking priority based small O/S, along with a 65816 simulator that let us test our software on Linux before putting it in the board. Lots of these are still in use in the oil field at least, along with many other embedded markets.
Calculators were forbidden in high school chemistry till we could show the teacher that we could use a slide rule properly. Then we could use calculators. If I remember correctly, this was the first class where calculators were allowed / suggested at all.
If they want to see us, then they should continuously display the image of the head of homeland security, the TSA, whatever agent is currently in the booth looking at us, and whatever agents are assigned to pat-downs to each passenger who goes through the scanner.
Another interpretation is that in order for a camel to go through the gate in a city wall not designed for commerce or that was presently configured to just allow people to pass (the needle's eye), it had to be unloaded first of its burdens. The driver, burdens, and camel could then go through the narrow gate and then load up again. This was obviously a lot of work - hence easier for that operation to be done than a rich man to enter heaven.
You don't technically have to fire anybody (other than some people in the IRS who wouldn't have a job anymore). You just reallocate the existing budget burden fairly under some fixed formula. It would be very disruptive for a while for some, but it doesn't have to immediately cause many to be fired. Use the current year's budget and census figures to compute the bill and adjust each year till things stabilize. The goal should be to reduce the bill over time, and if everyone had to pay a decent sized chunk each year that would happen. I think 75% is hopelessly optimistic, but a 30% reduction should be possible over time. If we could just eliminate the duplication of information between all the agencies that would be a start. At any rate, there would be actual pressure on government to slim down and reduce waste where there is none now since it is mostly a shrinking middle class that is shouldering most of the tax load. There simply aren't enough rich people to soak to make up for the large number of exempted from tax families. The poor and middle class vote for whoever will promise them the most, regardless of their ability to deliver what they promise.
Many of the government services that are being provided might be able to be privatized or moved out of the federal level to the state level. While I'm generally in favor of moving government closer to local control when possible, there are occasionally economies of scale in grouping functions together. Sometimes, this just creates more paperwork with less true oversight. At least private businesses have an incentive to maximize profit so some of the waste would be eliminated there assuming the federal government doesn't enforce so many regulations and checks and balances that the private entity can't hope to turn a profit any more than the government. The balance is hard to set, but some federal agencies have gotten so large that there is no essential responsibility for their job anymore and way too much is falling through the gaping cracks. The USPS is an example of the difficulties. FedEx, UPS, and others are more profitable, but they aren't mandated to deliver to everyone in the country either. They also charge enough that they don't have to deliver the junk mail that we get so much of via USPS. You couldn't privatize the USPS function with the same mandates and ever hope to make a profit with it. On the other hand, although blueberries are one of my favorite foods, it irritates me when the blueberry lobby sneaks something into the federal budget to provide for some study about them. While each of these is small, they add up. The military could be drastically reduced while keeping the actual United States of America safe if we stopped trying to be the world's policeman.
Regardless, when everyone is paying a single bill each time it comes due and not getting a phantom refund which simply means they gave the government a tax free loan for part of a year, pressure will be exerted to reign in any unnecessary expenses. The taxes taken out of each paycheck is entirely too painless to be effective in reigning in government largess. Knowing that everyone around you is paying the same amount as you has a resonating feel of fairness that is truly American.
The only real problem with this would be letting the local taxing authorities know when you moved from one place to another. You could have done this with the mail change of address at one time, but these days there isn't much real mail delivered. It would be invasive for some to have to let the local taxing authorities know where you were if over some minimum threshold of time. If this wasn't implemented then you could pretend to live in a low tax area and then move to a high tax area without helping them out. I'm sure there are lots of ways to track that these days from monitoring license plates to looking where credit cards are used in person without actually filing a change of address, but people wouldn't like that either.
I haven't run the math, but with my large family the child tax credit does make things exciting as each of those credits phase out in sync with higher income. A single credit might not be an issue, but the child tax credit is a strange animal. It may still be a net gain, but I would expect that at some crossover points in the tax tables the original poster might have a point.
Please back that statement up with facts. How does the richest man in America today use a higher percentage of gov't services than the poor? Is his house more likely to burn down? Do police have to go to his neighborhood more often because there is higher crime rate there? Does he have to go to the hospital more often on our tab? Do the military personally protect his castle any more than they protect any of the rest of us who may also work for the companies they run? About the only place where I can think of that they might be higher is in auditing their income taxes but that would go away in a truly flat tax situation.
Charge every individual in the country a flat fee for living here. You can graduate it by age giving higher breaks to children through age 18 (paid by the parents) or elderly whether based on some notional retirement age or the truly elderly if you want, but make it completely flat otherwise. Spread the burden out wide enough and it wouldn't be enormous for any.
Let every state, county, and town/city do the same based on their needs.
Get rid of all sales tax, property tax, income tax, business taxes and credits, and the other various fees and petty governmental charges we all face. Just levy one bill - each entity could levy its charge in a different quarter (Apr 15 for the feds by historical precedent. Oct 15 for the states, Jul 15 for the cities, and Jan 15 for the counties - I put them after Christmas since I suspect their bill would be smallest). Stop collecting it from everybody's paycheck and getting an interest free loan. For people who move, prorate the bill based on how long they are in each place. (This would also work for snowbirds who live in the south for the winter).
Adjust the fee each year so each government level is covering its respective budget (or perhaps running a bit of a surplus to start to pay down the ballooning deficits our various governmental agencies have run up.) If a government is taking in income from mining industries or duties or other sources and has more than it needs, it can send the money on down the chain.
If you want to get a handle on run-away government spending at any level and restore some sanity to the system, everyone has to have an equal burden. As long as you think you can just soak the rich for more, nothing is going to change around here, particularly with our federal mess where a majority of people don't pay any taxes at all. It would put a lot of accountants, lobbyists, and a fair number of lawyers out of work, but they're reasonably smart folks and I'm sure they can find something else to do. Everybody else would be better off.
There are a few spots where the original documents were damaged and some minor errors in translation have occurred. Some translations have silently fixed these errors and others have let them stand as is. Some translations of the Bible are simply bad and introduce problems where there were none in earlier translations. This is the fault of the translators and not the original Author. There is also controversy, even in religious circles over some of the symbolic language that is used that can be construed in a way that appears inconsistent for those looking for inconsistency but can also be interpreted in a consistent fashion. In many cases, the passages in question reflect future prophecy that we won't know for sure about them till the events happen.
Other than that, it is remarkably consistent in its purpose of showing the relationship of God to man and His expectations and requirements of man toward Him considering it was written by multiple authors over a period of several thousand years and spanning many cultures and peoples. You won't find any other extant document that meets those criteria for publishing that is any where near as consistent as the Bible.
Its instructions to individual groups of people were consistent for their times and claiming inconsistency in His instructions to people living centuries apart is wrong. The Bible truly only has a couple of main purposes - to illuminate the path to Christ, to show our sinful state, to show that there is nothing we can do on our own to cure that, and explain how to be reconciled to God through Christ. There's a lot of recorded history and recommendations for how to live and act, but that is the main theme to grasp and the Bible does a very good job in its presentation.
You can pick it apart and rail against it for minor things you think are wrong. That is your right and any student of the Bible should do the same. But if you pick it apart by each jot and tittle in its text and don't read it at a high level and see the scope of the book, you're missing the big picture.
I'm currently reading the last couple of books in the Dune series made from Herbert's notes. There are typographical errors in it as well. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy the work and appreciate its completeness.
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Finally. Now if they track every product they'll finally be able to fairly compare themselves to Linux distributions.
There's always Enoch and Elijah. Course they get to return and be the two witnesses in Jerusalem and have their own resurrection moment after 3 days seriously bumming out the Earth's population to say nothing of the Antichrist.
He's dead, Jim.
X-Ray before, prayed for Sunday, X-Ray Monday morning showing problem gone in one case - doctor's opinion was that something miraculous had happened as he hadn't done anything. Another person was confined to wheel chair, prayed for Sunday night, walked out without needing a wheel chair. Another person with hands that shook who was getting ready to go to a specialist since the regular Dr. couldn't pin the problem down without more extensive tests - prayed for Sunday morning - came back without shaking and steady since. Different local people going to two different local churches with two different pastors and one lay person doing the praying over a course of many years. Like I said - they don't happen often enough to please the scientists.
I fully understand that the body is marvelously made and that the mind can do some incredible things. That's why I suggested that people who are skeptical actually start attending services where the Holy Spirit was free to operate (which He isn't in many denominations) to judge for themselves after getting to know the people who attend and staff well enough to know they aren't out for their own glory. I knew these people and know that the descriptions above are accurate, but you don't.
My comments here won't convince anyone any more than the accounts in the New Testament. My point in making them is simply to get people to think outside their box. I don't have any problem with peer reviewed science. You need to investigate God with the same open mind, observe for yourself over a long period of time - He probably won't perform on demand for you. When you see enough things happen outside of the natural realm for yourself that happen according to what the Bible says, you tend to believe that what it says is correct (if interpreted correctly and you cut the translators some slack to try to avoid a bunch of other comments that aren't useful). Pushing what you observe into the corner of a box because it makes you uncomfortable is no more honest than a scientist who discards data because it inconveniently blows his theory. The work I've mentioned wasn't done by highly advanced dinosaurs from outer space.
The things that get the most attention are healings, but other miraculous things happen all the time that aren't as spectacular. I would be remiss if I didn't mention Christ's warnings about those who seek after a sign and His blessings on those who believe without needing to see proof.
There is only one unconditional promise in the Bible. All others are conditional. Some have many conditions. He always fulfills His unconditional promise of salvation if you ask. He'll answer the others as well if you meet His conditions. If you don't meet the conditions, you shouldn't expect an answer.
If you want to observe miracles, you should go to a Pentecostal church and observe with the same dedication and studiousness that you would make your observations at an observatory. Big miracles don't happen every day, but they do happen. If you choose to never place yourself in a position that you might by chance observe one and at the same time have spent enough time getting to know the people involved to realize that it isn't a stunt or faked, then that is hardly God's fault.
This isn't a defense of all religion. I realize that the religions of the world have been plagued by charlatans as long as religion has existed. To reject all religion because of these people is no more defensible than to reject all science because of some of the charlatans in it.
I have seen people who I know well healed of problems that the doctors could not fix. It wasn't done for the glory of man - the people involved were pretty humble people and went on about their daily business with thanks for what God did. God isn't going to undo these acts of his to satisfy your need for scientific reproducibility. Yet if you stick around long enough, you will see miracles happen. Who knows. If you get things straightened out between God and you, he might even use you to perform a miracle. Wouldn't that blow your mind.
A good reference to look through is "Guide to the Secure Configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5" issued by the Operating Systems Division Unix Team of the Systems and Network Analysis Center, National Security Agency.
It goes over most of the daemons - how to lock them down - which ones to disable completely.
Although oriented toward Red Hat, its concepts can be extended to most Linux and many Unix environments.
Beyond that, most concepts related to best practices tend to be universal. If you're a good system administrator in Windows, you'll be a good system administrator in Linux once you learn the equivalents. Set up test environments whenever possible. Make sure patches work in the test environment before rolling out to production. Many distributions have a much higher patch frequency than Windows and also patch more parts of the system frequently. Fedora tends to be one of the most cutting edge distributions out there and changes massively without necessarily guaranteeing that a particular patch won't cause you some level of grief. CentOS distributions will follow the patch frequency of RHEL, just a bit delayed. These, and other equivalents, try very hard not to change APIs in between major releases. With other distributions, very little is left untouched between releases. Test on non-critical systems first and thoroughly. Back up securely and test your backups.
The manufacturing facilities were spun off to Global Foundries. The last report I saw said they had dropped their stake in the manufacturing side from 30 to 14%.
I think most people stopped caring about the HTML standards a long time ago anyway. That is fine with me.
Today, everybody is focused on how the latest incarnation of a particular browser does on the latest incarnation of the acid test page. Does it render it correctly or not? If it renders OK, how fast does it do it? That's the bottom line anyway since most standards are not defined tightly enough to prevent various browser manufacturers from interpreting them ever so slightly differently while still claiming to be 100% (or less - cough) compliant.
It isn't a bad thing to say our site will work on any browser that can render the latest acid test page correctly. You can look at that page and limit yourself to a subset of those features during development of your site or your CMS system. A well developed test suite should work as well as some randomly numbered standard. Your browser either renders the page correctly or you go back and work on it some more till it does. Even if you're a big company, pages like the acid test page will eventually force you to make changes towards meeting a particular implementation of a standard, regardless of how much you like to resist change or how you'd like to interpret the standard.
Sorry I caused you to take the Lord's name in vain.
I added another post currently above yours that attempts to explain my view of the problem we have now and why I offered equal burden as a possible solution. Please post your ideas of how to reign in government spending, start reducing the debt, and still keep essential services running. I can't figure out a way to do it until people actually start caring about what their elected officials are doing. Until it starts costing everybody something, there's no incentive to even vote, much less try to influence what is going on. Equal would be awful for me as I have a large family and fit in the middle class demographic. I would be paying much more in taxes than I am now due to child tax credits. But what we have now isn't working at all and shows no signs of changing.
If nothing changed and there was an equal burden, then yes - it would be very hard or impossible for most of the population to pay the cost. My feelings would be that an equal share would never be passed without a massive reduction in the cost of government. At that point, the bill might not be horribly unreasonable for each person.
I don't expect to ever be rich (although most Americans are rich by much of the world's standards). Yet I still can't begin to feel there is any justice or rightness in making those better off than I am pay a greater share of my government's expense than I do. They get no benefits that I don't get. The companies they work for might, but those same benefits help everyone who works in them. Should those who are rich be more charitable. I'm sure they should. But it should be done voluntarily and not taken by force.
My dad was an auto mechanic working at a local dealership for one of the big three. My mom was a part-time bookkeeper/secretary. Neither ever made as much in a single year as I made when I started working as a programmer. Yet they gradually bought small amounts of stocks and my mom now uses the proceeds of those years of investing to live without having to rely solely on social security as neither had pensions. Mom benefited from the step up provisions at dad's death and paid all taxes they had to pay as they came due. My mom isn't rich, but she's better off than most of her friends.
You don't get rich by the way you suggested.
You get rich by not spending money you don't have, by waiting to buy things (other than a house) till you can pay cash, and by paying off your mortgage as quickly as possible. You stay well off by taking care of your health so you don't have huge bills, by covering risks of big medical bills by insurance, by not having bad habits like drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, and by not breaking the law. You stay well off by marrying one person and staying married for better or worse. Giving charitable donations and putting God first helps too, although not a popular concept on Slashdot.
Live well within your means and you'll have a decent life, whether you ever are considered rich by the immensely wealthy.
I realize that posting to an anonymous coward isn't usually fruitful, but the point he is making has to be answered.
Until everyone in the country starts paying an equal share, there is no incentive to change the amount of money being spent. If everyone was paying an exactly equal share, you'd very, very, very quickly find that government expenditures would decrease until that equal share was a bearable amount for everyone or everyone would go to Washington D.C. in revolt.
Some of the people in government would be out of a job (working for government at least). If the service they were providing was truly important to the people, the private sector would take it on and those interested in it would support it. The previous federal employees could find jobs there if they were qualified. If it wasn't worth any private entity taking over, then it isn't worth the government doing either. There are a large number of functions of government that most would choose to fund (and would hope might even get more funding). I doubt that the CDC would have to worry or the food inspectors (although this at least could be done privately as well). The various intelligence services might have to shape up, but would still exist. The military might have a reduced role but would still exist. NASA might have to shape up a lot or go private. The Education dept? Poof. Back to the states where it belongs. Same with several other departments. But government would still exist at some federal level.
People would decide that entitlements really could be reduced and their legislators would follow through quickly. Families might start caring for their own elderly again or let charitable organizations do it as they did in the past. People would decide they really didn't care if terrorists were ever found or not and that most of the world could just degenerate into anarchy if it wanted to instead of having our military presence foot the bill for being a police keeper. You'd be amazed at how fast the equal share would become bearable.
As it is, you can't even get 1/2 the people to vote in an election (give or take and depending on the election) because it doesn't matter who wins to them - they'll still get their government handouts.
The point of taxes is to fund required goverment services in the most efficient manner possible.
Social engineering should not have anything to do with taxes.
Before you blow a gasket, my charitable giving is historically higher than the taxes I am required to pay. Freewill charitable giving is where social engineering belongs and not the tax code.
Although wealthy people like Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates are choosing to enjoy most of the fruits of their labor while they are alive, they have pledged to give away obscene amounts of money to charity when they die (and have already given away very large amounts of their own volition). Mr. Buffett is a particularly poor choice to hold up as a bad guy. These men are not exceptions. Many of the business magnates through history donated much money to charity.
So you're implying that the police and fire deparments make more calls to millionaire's homes than poor people?
The military of the US is considered an asset to multinational companies - it gives enemies slight pause before attacking them, but everyone who works for those companies benefits from that and not just the C?Os.
This isn't an endorsement for cheating on your taxes - it is merely a reflection that the tax code is unjust and unfairly penalizes success. The fact that such a large percentage of the US pay little or no federal taxes is part of the reason the federal debt is so high. Politicans have no incentive to reign in spending because pleasing people who have no stake in the system keeps them in office.
In general, no corporation actually pays taxes unless it is not making a profit.
As long as it is making a profit, the expense line item called taxes (regardless of their destination - federal, state, county, city, or foreign country) merely indicates how much of the money they took in selling their products or services or knowledge to another company or individual that they sent on to the indicated taxing authority. If they are actually paying taxes (not making a profit) they're not going to be in business very long.
In the end, the consumer pays all corporate taxes of a profitable company, marked up by every company's desired profit margin at each step between the consumer and the companies who dig up the raw materials that went into the product.
I know there are funky tax law quirks that don't make this a hard and fast rule, but it's mostly correct. They can situate their headquarters and development and manpower to try to reduce the amount of taxes they have to pay, but end result doesn't change. Any dollar that goes out as taxes is covered by sales or the company isn't going to be in business for very long.
And yes, I would agree that most upper management is very much overpaid and I would personally like to see all stock options and perks removed and converted to a straight salary figure for everybody so people could really see just how bad it is and everyone would be on the same tax footing. On the other hand, I also support flat taxation for everyone - and flat in terms of dollars and not percent. There is no reason that Mr. Gates or Mr. Buffett should have to pay more to support the government than a single mom in dire straits does. They probably use less government services at every level than she does. Their companies benefit from the protections of the government, but everyone from the janitors and lawn care people to the C?Os who work for their companies benefit from that and not just them.
But the 65802 and 65816 are much better if you're really going to program anything 6502 based. It's too bad they never officially came out with their 65832. That would have been an awesome chip. We might still be using them in our embedded designs if they had. As it is we stopped with the 816. People lavish praise on the new stuff, but having even the weirdest addressing modes execute in 7 cycles and many only take 2 cycles with no wait states is awesome if you are doing basic control operations. On the 65816 you can move zero page around as well as the stack so you can have multiple zero pages (one for each task you're running). We developed our own assembler, linker, and ANSI C compiler cross-development environment that runs on Linux to support our embedded controllers along with a multi-tasking priority based small O/S, along with a 65816 simulator that let us test our software on Linux before putting it in the board. Lots of these are still in use in the oil field at least, along with many other embedded markets.
Calculators were forbidden in high school chemistry till we could show the teacher that we could use a slide rule properly. Then we could use calculators. If I remember correctly, this was the first class where calculators were allowed / suggested at all.
If they want to see us, then they should continuously display the image of the head of homeland security, the TSA, whatever agent is currently in the booth looking at us, and whatever agents are assigned to pat-downs to each passenger who goes through the scanner.
Another interpretation is that in order for a camel to go through the gate in a city wall not designed for commerce or that was presently configured to just allow people to pass (the needle's eye), it had to be unloaded first of its burdens. The driver, burdens, and camel could then go through the narrow gate and then load up again. This was obviously a lot of work - hence easier for that operation to be done than a rich man to enter heaven.
I do like your explanation as well.
Where in WY out of curiosity... It's a big state.
You don't technically have to fire anybody (other than some people in the IRS who wouldn't have a job anymore). You just reallocate the existing budget burden fairly under some fixed formula. It would be very disruptive for a while for some, but it doesn't have to immediately cause many to be fired. Use the current year's budget and census figures to compute the bill and adjust each year till things stabilize. The goal should be to reduce the bill over time, and if everyone had to pay a decent sized chunk each year that would happen. I think 75% is hopelessly optimistic, but a 30% reduction should be possible over time. If we could just eliminate the duplication of information between all the agencies that would be a start. At any rate, there would be actual pressure on government to slim down and reduce waste where there is none now since it is mostly a shrinking middle class that is shouldering most of the tax load. There simply aren't enough rich people to soak to make up for the large number of exempted from tax families. The poor and middle class vote for whoever will promise them the most, regardless of their ability to deliver what they promise.
Many of the government services that are being provided might be able to be privatized or moved out of the federal level to the state level. While I'm generally in favor of moving government closer to local control when possible, there are occasionally economies of scale in grouping functions together. Sometimes, this just creates more paperwork with less true oversight. At least private businesses have an incentive to maximize profit so some of the waste would be eliminated there assuming the federal government doesn't enforce so many regulations and checks and balances that the private entity can't hope to turn a profit any more than the government. The balance is hard to set, but some federal agencies have gotten so large that there is no essential responsibility for their job anymore and way too much is falling through the gaping cracks. The USPS is an example of the difficulties. FedEx, UPS, and others are more profitable, but they aren't mandated to deliver to everyone in the country either. They also charge enough that they don't have to deliver the junk mail that we get so much of via USPS. You couldn't privatize the USPS function with the same mandates and ever hope to make a profit with it. On the other hand, although blueberries are one of my favorite foods, it irritates me when the blueberry lobby sneaks something into the federal budget to provide for some study about them. While each of these is small, they add up. The military could be drastically reduced while keeping the actual United States of America safe if we stopped trying to be the world's policeman.
Regardless, when everyone is paying a single bill each time it comes due and not getting a phantom refund which simply means they gave the government a tax free loan for part of a year, pressure will be exerted to reign in any unnecessary expenses. The taxes taken out of each paycheck is entirely too painless to be effective in reigning in government largess. Knowing that everyone around you is paying the same amount as you has a resonating feel of fairness that is truly American.
The only real problem with this would be letting the local taxing authorities know when you moved from one place to another. You could have done this with the mail change of address at one time, but these days there isn't much real mail delivered. It would be invasive for some to have to let the local taxing authorities know where you were if over some minimum threshold of time. If this wasn't implemented then you could pretend to live in a low tax area and then move to a high tax area without helping them out. I'm sure there are lots of ways to track that these days from monitoring license plates to looking where credit cards are used in person without actually filing a change of address, but people wouldn't like that either.
I haven't run the math, but with my large family the child tax credit does make things exciting as each of those credits phase out in sync with higher income. A single credit might not be an issue, but the child tax credit is a strange animal. It may still be a net gain, but I would expect that at some crossover points in the tax tables the original poster might have a point.
Please back that statement up with facts. How does the richest man in America today use a higher percentage of gov't services than the poor? Is his house more likely to burn down? Do police have to go to his neighborhood more often because there is higher crime rate there? Does he have to go to the hospital more often on our tab? Do the military personally protect his castle any more than they protect any of the rest of us who may also work for the companies they run? About the only place where I can think of that they might be higher is in auditing their income taxes but that would go away in a truly flat tax situation.
Charge every individual in the country a flat fee for living here. You can graduate it by age giving higher breaks to children through age 18 (paid by the parents) or elderly whether based on some notional retirement age or the truly elderly if you want, but make it completely flat otherwise. Spread the burden out wide enough and it wouldn't be enormous for any.
Let every state, county, and town/city do the same based on their needs.
Get rid of all sales tax, property tax, income tax, business taxes and credits, and the other various fees and petty governmental charges we all face. Just levy one bill - each entity could levy its charge in a different quarter (Apr 15 for the feds by historical precedent. Oct 15 for the states, Jul 15 for the cities, and Jan 15 for the counties - I put them after Christmas since I suspect their bill would be smallest). Stop collecting it from everybody's paycheck and getting an interest free loan. For people who move, prorate the bill based on how long they are in each place. (This would also work for snowbirds who live in the south for the winter).
Adjust the fee each year so each government level is covering its respective budget (or perhaps running a bit of a surplus to start to pay down the ballooning deficits our various governmental agencies have run up.) If a government is taking in income from mining industries or duties or other sources and has more than it needs, it can send the money on down the chain.
If you want to get a handle on run-away government spending at any level and restore some sanity to the system, everyone has to have an equal burden. As long as you think you can just soak the rich for more, nothing is going to change around here, particularly with our federal mess where a majority of people don't pay any taxes at all. It would put a lot of accountants, lobbyists, and a fair number of lawyers out of work, but they're reasonably smart folks and I'm sure they can find something else to do. Everybody else would be better off.
Various credits and deductions are phased out at higher income levels. Thus it is entirely possible that a raise would be consumed by higher taxes.
There are a few spots where the original documents were damaged and some minor errors in translation have occurred. Some translations have silently fixed these errors and others have let them stand as is. Some translations of the Bible are simply bad and introduce problems where there were none in earlier translations. This is the fault of the translators and not the original Author. There is also controversy, even in religious circles over some of the symbolic language that is used that can be construed in a way that appears inconsistent for those looking for inconsistency but can also be interpreted in a consistent fashion. In many cases, the passages in question reflect future prophecy that we won't know for sure about them till the events happen.
Other than that, it is remarkably consistent in its purpose of showing the relationship of God to man and His expectations and requirements of man toward Him considering it was written by multiple authors over a period of several thousand years and spanning many cultures and peoples. You won't find any other extant document that meets those criteria for publishing that is any where near as consistent as the Bible.
Its instructions to individual groups of people were consistent for their times and claiming inconsistency in His instructions to people living centuries apart is wrong. The Bible truly only has a couple of main purposes - to illuminate the path to Christ, to show our sinful state, to show that there is nothing we can do on our own to cure that, and explain how to be reconciled to God through Christ. There's a lot of recorded history and recommendations for how to live and act, but that is the main theme to grasp and the Bible does a very good job in its presentation.
You can pick it apart and rail against it for minor things you think are wrong. That is your right and any student of the Bible should do the same. But if you pick it apart by each jot and tittle in its text and don't read it at a high level and see the scope of the book, you're missing the big picture.
I'm currently reading the last couple of books in the Dune series made from Herbert's notes. There are typographical errors in it as well. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy the work and appreciate its completeness.