I love it when folks say that Democrats "rammed" the health care reform.
You love the truth, then.
Between House and Senate, exactly 1 Republican voted for it. Exactly 1. You can call that bipartisan if you want, but everyone knows that you are full of shit when you do it.
However, the world we currently live in has few if any countries where the overwhelming majority agree that the bulk of government spending is on important things for the government to spend money on.
Indeed. In America, between federal, state and local governments more than $21,000 per person is spent per year (FY 2012).
Now think how much easier it is for someone that only pays $4,000 a year in taxes to go around not thinking that their tax dollar isnt being greatly wasted.... after all, even if "only" 80% of the money is being wasted, they still get (on average) $4,200 worth of value for their $4,000.... a net win for them.
Its when they turn around and say that the rich arent paying their "fair share" that it goes into the absurd.. The guy paying $20,000 a year in taxes is also only getting (on average) $4,200 worth of value with that same 80% waste.. its simply not possible to explain to this person that their $20,000 isnt a "fair share" because the claim is absurd.
A case in point. We spend more per student than any other country on earth, and what do we have to show for it? Very large amounts of systemic waste, obviously.
As an example 15-years ago there were far more government employees than there are know and the national debt was about 3-trillion dollars, yet now in 2012 after all the out-sourcing, and privatizations the national debt is approaching 16-trillion.
The thing that started this began more than 15 years ago. It was the creation of an unofficial 4th branch of government, called private contractors. Not all private contractors belong to this branch, but the ones that do.. oh boy..
They arent called federal employees, but these 4th branch payrolls mainly consists of federal money. When you count these 4th branch employees, federal employment has gone way way up over the past few decades. It isnt just the growth of defense contractors either, as a lot of technical and social services are now contracted out and they are growing rapidly too.
Its actually plainly obvious that this is the case when you consider that spending must ultimately end up somewhere. If spending grows rapidly then the number of people dependent upon federal money for their wage also grows rapidly. Plainly obvious stuff. You've got to get pretty convoluted with your argument before you can hide this truth.
Yes, that sucks for low margin companies with lots of revenue
The oil industry, and the Insurance industry.
Companies in both of these industries normally have single digit profit margins. Many people dont know that, but instead respond to headlines of "record profits" and "rising costs," neither of which actually tell a meaningful story.
Again, no amount of name calling is going to change reality.
What name calling? You are clearly thick if the plain facts are trumped by the convoluted shit you have to conjure in order to ignore those plain facts.
The Senate has sent many economic bills to the House over the past four years
The Democrats controlled the senate for 2 of those years, with enough power to pass health care reform without any Republican support at all. What happened there, eh? Could it possibly be that Harry Reid is so corrupt that even the House Democrats cant support the over-the-top corporate handouts in his "economic" (*) bills?
and almost every one has been blocked by the Republicans.
Sure, just like the Republicans blocked the health care reform that none of them voted for... oh wait..
The Democrats didnt need the Republicans in one case, but did in another? Really?
The plain truth. The Democrats didn't need any help at all passing things, except when it looks bad for them that they didnt pass things.. then of course its all someone elses fault.. and here is this complex convoluted reason why...
There has been, and appears to still be, a deliberate policy to obstruct any legislation that originates from the Democratic side of Congress.
So let me get this straight. Over the past 2 years, the Republicans in the House passed several budgets.. budgets that never got voted on in the Senate because the Democrats who control the Senate refused to even put them on the floor (allowing them to be amended and sent back to the House) and thereby killing the budgets immediately, and its the Republicans that are the obstructionists?
That is because both parties support domestic spying, but the Republicans have been actively obstructing any economic legislation that the Democrats have introduced.
Are you really this thick?
It is the Democrats, that had the power to ram through health care reform without any Republican support at all (only 1 vote from a Republican, and it wasnt needed), that are telling you that the Republics are the reason that the senate hasn't once brought a budget up for a vote the entire time Harry Reid has been majority leader.
This isnt rational thought telling you that. Its the Democrats telling you that. But since you believe everything the Democrats say, even when its so obvious that they are lying, well... we know what that makes you. Thick. Sheep. A Thick sheep.
Last I heard, xenon was a gas, and that sure sounds like an awful lot of it - how much is left (on our planet)?
Seriously man.. 770kg shouldnt sound like "an awful lot of it" when you are asking about how much we have "on our planet." You do know how massive the atmosphere is, right?
Extracting a liter of xenon from the atmosphere requires 798000 joules of energy, and 770 kg of xenon is 131804 liters. So thats 104388768000 joules of energy.
(yes, I am shooting for "oh noes big number")
Thats equivalent to under 3 minutes of output of the typical (average American) coal plant that puts out 667MW.
Your numbers only tell part of the story. Try factoring in concentration of wealth and re-running the numbers.
Its broken up by quintiles, so already does factor in concentration of income. The top 20% of the people are paying 67.9% of the taxes, the bottom 20% of the people are paying 0.3% of the taxes.
Wealth is a red herring. We don't tax wealth for a very good reason. We tax income.
Also, as someone whose workspace is in Times Square facing said billboards, it's much better to be in the building with the ads on it than the building that faces the ads.
Lets say you own a small chain of hardware stores, and you need a place for your offices, so you rent this place out. Then Home Depot buys time on that build-board... hows that going for you?
The existence of the advertisements reduces demand for the building as a work space.
Tax rates are a record low in the past two decades, and Obama has so far done little to change that.
..a nice factoid that is being misused here, since it doesnt tell us anything about the (lack of) redistribution that you are trying to use it for.
I don't have figures in front of me for exactly the last 2 decades.. the numbers I have right now are for 1979 to 2009 (XLS spreadsheet), so I am using 1979 to 2009:
The lowest quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 2.1% in 1979:: 0.3% in 2009.
The second quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 7.4% in 1979:: 3.8% in 2009.
The middle quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 13.6% in 1979:: 9.4% in 2009.
The fourth quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 21.6% in 1979:: 18.3% in 2009.
The highest quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 55.3% in 1979:: 67.9% in 2009.
I'm no genius, but it looks to me like everyone is paying less of a share than they used to for their government except for the top 20%, and before you go there, the top 1% went from a 14.2% share of the liability to a 22.3% share of the liability.
People wanted a progressive tax system, and they got it in spades.
Now we have a president that wants to raise taxes "on the rich" because they arent paying "their fair share", and in light of the evidence that "the rich" already pay most of the taxes, its hard not to conclude that this is pure class warfare unless you don't actually know the evidence.
These numbers I give arent from some right wing blog, and they arent from fox news. They come verbatim from the Congressional Budget Office. I didnt "adjust" them, nor am I misrepresenting what the figures are actually of.
I also didn't cherry pick, as is evident because I did not use the individual income tax data (which excludes among other things the social insurance taxes) which puts that bottom quintile at -6.6% (yes, NEGATIVE 6.6%) and the top quintile at 94.1% (yes, 19 out of 20 dollars in income tax is paid by the top 20%)
Your turn. Please argue that Obama is not trying to redistribute the wealth, but do so by using actual data instead of supposition and innuendo, and neither "adjust" nor cherry pick the data. Can you do that, or are you just a bunch of opinion?
And yet, we have cases where government forcibly quarantines people.
Let me quote you:
And we do, which is why we quarantine dangerous infectious disease carriers, to limit their rights and freedoms, in order that they don't harm others.
Either we do this, or we don't. Do we quarantine people with AIDS? Is AIDS not dangerous? Is AIDS not infectious? Is AIDS not carried by un-quarantined people?
So the reality is that we do not quarantine people with dangerous infectious diseases. We actually only quarantine people with highly contagious diseases, ones that will spread with near certainty, completely destroying the house of cards you tried to build on a false premise.
But hey, why be intellectually honest when your emotions are in the way, right?
Actually, the main problem is that there isnt a problem..at least not one worth actually complain about, so the people intent on complaining pick some random statistic and without any justification at all call it a problem.
The real question is, why are some people so intent on complaining in this case?
It seems to me that some people are under the false assumption that there must be a winner and loser, and then they take certain queues to mean that China is winning and so by induction that we must be losing. It doesnt occur to them that both sides benefit because the respective situations are asymmetric, that we each assign different values to various things and we benefit from the differences.
You see, even in spite of passenger rail leveraging the existing infrastructure of freight rail, it still requires further subsidies just to exist at all.
And we do, which is why we quarantine dangerous infectious disease carriers, to limit their rights and freedoms, in order that they don't harm others.
In American we do not quarantine all dangerous infectious disease carriers. What country do you live in, the fake one that plays fast and loose with facts?
Slashdot Mirror
I love it when folks say that Democrats "rammed" the health care reform.
You love the truth, then.
Between House and Senate, exactly 1 Republican voted for it. Exactly 1. You can call that bipartisan if you want, but everyone knows that you are full of shit when you do it.
However, the world we currently live in has few if any countries where the overwhelming majority agree that the bulk of government spending is on important things for the government to spend money on.
Indeed. In America, between federal, state and local governments more than $21,000 per person is spent per year (FY 2012).
Now think how much easier it is for someone that only pays $4,000 a year in taxes to go around not thinking that their tax dollar isnt being greatly wasted.... after all, even if "only" 80% of the money is being wasted, they still get (on average) $4,200 worth of value for their $4,000.... a net win for them.
Its when they turn around and say that the rich arent paying their "fair share" that it goes into the absurd.. The guy paying $20,000 a year in taxes is also only getting (on average) $4,200 worth of value with that same 80% waste.. its simply not possible to explain to this person that their $20,000 isnt a "fair share" because the claim is absurd.
A case in point. We spend more per student than any other country on earth, and what do we have to show for it? Very large amounts of systemic waste, obviously.
As an example 15-years ago there were far more government employees than there are know and the national debt was about 3-trillion dollars, yet now in 2012 after all the out-sourcing, and privatizations the national debt is approaching 16-trillion.
The thing that started this began more than 15 years ago. It was the creation of an unofficial 4th branch of government, called private contractors. Not all private contractors belong to this branch, but the ones that do.. oh boy..
They arent called federal employees, but these 4th branch payrolls mainly consists of federal money. When you count these 4th branch employees, federal employment has gone way way up over the past few decades. It isnt just the growth of defense contractors either, as a lot of technical and social services are now contracted out and they are growing rapidly too.
Its actually plainly obvious that this is the case when you consider that spending must ultimately end up somewhere. If spending grows rapidly then the number of people dependent upon federal money for their wage also grows rapidly. Plainly obvious stuff. You've got to get pretty convoluted with your argument before you can hide this truth.
Yes, that sucks for low margin companies with lots of revenue
The oil industry, and the Insurance industry.
Companies in both of these industries normally have single digit profit margins. Many people dont know that, but instead respond to headlines of "record profits" and "rising costs," neither of which actually tell a meaningful story.
They can be justified, just not by ethics. They are justified by force.
The tax system is the way it is because it gives power to legislators, who then "trade" their powers to all concentrations of capital.
They will never give up that power.
Again, no amount of name calling is going to change reality.
What name calling? You are clearly thick if the plain facts are trumped by the convoluted shit you have to conjure in order to ignore those plain facts.
The Senate has sent many economic bills to the House over the past four years
The Democrats controlled the senate for 2 of those years, with enough power to pass health care reform without any Republican support at all. What happened there, eh? Could it possibly be that Harry Reid is so corrupt that even the House Democrats cant support the over-the-top corporate handouts in his "economic" (*) bills?
(*) translation: special-interest spending appropriations
and almost every one has been blocked by the Republicans.
Sure, just like the Republicans blocked the health care reform that none of them voted for... oh wait..
The Democrats didnt need the Republicans in one case, but did in another? Really?
The plain truth. The Democrats didn't need any help at all passing things, except when it looks bad for them that they didnt pass things.. then of course its all someone elses fault.. and here is this complex convoluted reason why...
There has been, and appears to still be, a deliberate policy to obstruct any legislation that originates from the Democratic side of Congress.
So let me get this straight. Over the past 2 years, the Republicans in the House passed several budgets.. budgets that never got voted on in the Senate because the Democrats who control the Senate refused to even put them on the floor (allowing them to be amended and sent back to the House) and thereby killing the budgets immediately, and its the Republicans that are the obstructionists?
Thick. Very thick sheep,.
That is because both parties support domestic spying, but the Republicans have been actively obstructing any economic legislation that the Democrats have introduced.
Are you really this thick?
It is the Democrats, that had the power to ram through health care reform without any Republican support at all (only 1 vote from a Republican, and it wasnt needed), that are telling you that the Republics are the reason that the senate hasn't once brought a budget up for a vote the entire time Harry Reid has been majority leader.
This isnt rational thought telling you that. Its the Democrats telling you that. But since you believe everything the Democrats say, even when its so obvious that they are lying, well... we know what that makes you. Thick. Sheep. A Thick sheep.
Last I heard, xenon was a gas, and that sure sounds like an awful lot of it - how much is left (on our planet)?
Seriously man.. 770kg shouldnt sound like "an awful lot of it" when you are asking about how much we have "on our planet." You do know how massive the atmosphere is, right?
Extracting a liter of xenon from the atmosphere requires 798000 joules of energy, and 770 kg of xenon is 131804 liters. So thats 104388768000 joules of energy.
(yes, I am shooting for "oh noes big number")
Thats equivalent to under 3 minutes of output of the typical (average American) coal plant that puts out 667MW.
Only as a retail space.
Your response to an example that doesnt use the property as a retail space, is to say "only as a retail space"
How about learning to read. Can you do that for me, or are you a bit thick?
Your numbers only tell part of the story. Try factoring in concentration of wealth and re-running the numbers.
Its broken up by quintiles, so already does factor in concentration of income. The top 20% of the people are paying 67.9% of the taxes, the bottom 20% of the people are paying 0.3% of the taxes.
Wealth is a red herring. We don't tax wealth for a very good reason. We tax income.
Also, as someone whose workspace is in Times Square facing said billboards, it's much better to be in the building with the ads on it than the building that faces the ads.
Lets say you own a small chain of hardware stores, and you need a place for your offices, so you rent this place out. Then Home Depot buys time on that build-board... hows that going for you?
The existence of the advertisements reduces demand for the building as a work space.
Tax rates are a record low in the past two decades, and Obama has so far done little to change that.
I don't have figures in front of me for exactly the last 2 decades.. the numbers I have right now are for 1979 to 2009 (XLS spreadsheet), so I am using 1979 to 2009:
The lowest quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 2.1% in 1979
The second quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 7.4% in 1979
The middle quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 13.6% in 1979
The fourth quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 21.6% in 1979
The highest quintiles share of the federal tax liability was 55.3% in 1979
I'm no genius, but it looks to me like everyone is paying less of a share than they used to for their government except for the top 20%, and before you go there, the top 1% went from a 14.2% share of the liability to a 22.3% share of the liability.
People wanted a progressive tax system, and they got it in spades.
Now we have a president that wants to raise taxes "on the rich" because they arent paying "their fair share", and in light of the evidence that "the rich" already pay most of the taxes, its hard not to conclude that this is pure class warfare unless you don't actually know the evidence.
These numbers I give arent from some right wing blog, and they arent from fox news. They come verbatim from the Congressional Budget Office. I didnt "adjust" them, nor am I misrepresenting what the figures are actually of.
I also didn't cherry pick, as is evident because I did not use the individual income tax data (which excludes among other things the social insurance taxes) which puts that bottom quintile at -6.6% (yes, NEGATIVE 6.6%) and the top quintile at 94.1% (yes, 19 out of 20 dollars in income tax is paid by the top 20%)
Your turn. Please argue that Obama is not trying to redistribute the wealth, but do so by using actual data instead of supposition and innuendo, and neither "adjust" nor cherry pick the data. Can you do that, or are you just a bunch of opinion?
It could easily be argued that we have been in "the cheap and abundant energy" phase for a century... oil, coal, gas...
Nice try reaching for the emotional card.
And yet, we have cases where government forcibly quarantines people.
Let me quote you:
And we do, which is why we quarantine dangerous infectious disease carriers, to limit their rights and freedoms, in order that they don't harm others.
Either we do this, or we don't. Do we quarantine people with AIDS? Is AIDS not dangerous? Is AIDS not infectious? Is AIDS not carried by un-quarantined people?
So the reality is that we do not quarantine people with dangerous infectious diseases. We actually only quarantine people with highly contagious diseases, ones that will spread with near certainty, completely destroying the house of cards you tried to build on a false premise.
But hey, why be intellectually honest when your emotions are in the way, right?
Guns are low risk as well.
Manipulating currency is not the problem
Actually, the main problem is that there isnt a problem..at least not one worth actually complain about, so the people intent on complaining pick some random statistic and without any justification at all call it a problem.
The real question is, why are some people so intent on complaining in this case?
It seems to me that some people are under the false assumption that there must be a winner and loser, and then they take certain queues to mean that China is winning and so by induction that we must be losing. It doesnt occur to them that both sides benefit because the respective situations are asymmetric, that we each assign different values to various things and we benefit from the differences.
As opposed to rail?
As opposed to passenger rail.
You see, even in spite of passenger rail leveraging the existing infrastructure of freight rail, it still requires further subsidies just to exist at all.
For example: It is possible for your refusal to use the public domain to take away from my freedom to use the public domain.
Examples come with things called examples. You clearly couldnt provide one.
I'll let you go ahead and Google the cases where Americans were forcibly quarantined to prevent the spread of dangerous diseases.
All I have to do is find cases where this doesnt happen, chief.
HIV/AIDS
Need I go on?
You seem to have a problem with logic.
The public domain gives developers the freedom to restrict others' freedom.
Its impossible for my use of the Public Domain to take away your freedom to also use the Public Domain.
Licenses like the GPL guarantee the freedom can't be taken away.
That thing that you are calling freedom, isn't. Freedom is not a contract with obligations.
"What we actually mean by 'Free' is this set of restrictions on freedom.."
The only free source code and/or software is Public Domain.
I think the elephant in the room is that more efficient hashing makes it less secure simply by being more efficient.
.. whatever... greater efficiency for a given key size is weaker.
Whatever the metric is, be it keys/second, bytes/watt,
And we do, which is why we quarantine dangerous infectious disease carriers, to limit their rights and freedoms, in order that they don't harm others.
In American we do not quarantine all dangerous infectious disease carriers. What country do you live in, the fake one that plays fast and loose with facts?