Sounds about right to me... the top 5% of wage earners earn about 60% of the wages in the country, so it seems fair that they should be paying 60% of the taxes.
Sounds like you advocate a flat tax. That's funny, seeing as how the current tax rates are progressive. A change to a flat tax would be a tax cut for the wealthy, and most likely an increase for the poor (unless we also reduced ways to get tax credits). I think you're trying to argue for the opposite, though -- a more progressive tax rate -- and all the while talking about increasing taxes in the name of "fairness."
Granted, the wealthy currently find ways to get tax breaks by making charitable contributions and the like, so their effective tax rate is probably a good bit less than the nominal. But if they're getting tax cuts by being charitable, I say good for them. I'm sure the charities have a lower overhead for doing good with the money than the federal government.
If we want to be more "fair," how about we just prosecute the crooked people at the top? And fine them heavily, too? But as long as he plays by the rules, what's wrong with a man being wealthy? He pays a greater portion of his income out to taxes and charitable contributions than the non-wealthy men. He pays property and capital gains taxes in large amounts, as well. I must say that that's more than fair to the non-wealthy. And I can't in good conscience ask them to continue paying more and more just because I want to pay less.
I find that a very dubious claim. The Constitution enumerates the powers that the federal legislative bodies should hold, and grants them the authority to do so. The problem is that politicians use the clause giving them power to regulate interstate commerce, combined with the necessary-and-proper clause, to put their hands into everything. The typical defense of this view is McCulloch v. Maryland, in which SCOTUS granted the federal government the power to institute a bank. Given that the Constitution grants the power "To coin Money, [and] regulate the Value thereof," this isn't too troubling. But today you'll find all sorts of situations where powers have been stretched much, much further.
While recent Republicans have been quite guilty of this, I view the Democrats as the worse offenders. You won't find federal authority over education in the Constitution. Or welfare. Or science subsidies. Or health care.
I'm not saying these are bad ideas. I'm saying the Constitution does not grant that authority to the federal government. Implied or correlated powers are one thing, but completely unrelated powers are another. Someone who's read and understood the Constitution by itself should conclude that these are issues that should be handled by the several states. It's sad that neither party represents the viewpoint that a lot of people hold -- that the federal government should be made weaker, not stronger.
I don't think Biden did any better. They both just repeatedly misstated the other campaign's position while only extolling the virtues of their own. Neither campaign will tell the whole truth. So, if nobody won, I guess it technically is a tie. The problem is that all of America loses.
It comes from their hoity toity way of referring to themselves.
"I'm not an artist! An artist just paints a painstakingly realistic and beautifullandscape. I'm an artiste! I splatter paint in a haphazard way, revealing raw emotions."
I haven't jumped on the DS bandwagon yet, so I wonder if this will be an opportunity to snatch up the old DS model for less? That is, before Nintendo stops production and makes them unavailable. (Sure, there's always eBay, but I avoid that place as much as possible.)
Right. So riders are a huge problem. But so also is the current sound-bite mentality the public and media bring to politics. A candidate can be accused of supporting or not support a certain issue because it was a rider on a bill, and he had to make a difficult, real-world decision between varying amounts of good and bad contained in that bill. Oh, and the accusers will never have their feet held to the fire.
These campaigns are run on public image propped up by half-truths.
Yeah, because the accusation that the notoriously violent leader of a nation-state is harboring illegal weapons of mass destruction in plain sight is more reasonable?
We couldn't know beforehand that he DIDN'T have WMDs, because anybody with two brain cells would be smart enough to hide them. Of course that doesn't mean we should invade every country just to check for WMDs, but when Saddam refuses mandated inspections, doesn't that at least make you suspicious? Yes, and justifiably so.
I'm not saying that the war was justified -- I don't even know all the facts, nor can I rattle off the supposed evidence for WMDs that was used to support it. All I'm saying is that your condemnation of the administration is weaker than weak. There are plenty of strong cases to be made, but you decide to go with "well, Bush said they were HIDING the illegal WMDs instead of showing them off to us, so Bush is obviously a retard." Yeah, nice one.
I completely agree. Tests should check for absolutely necessary skills, not trivia. Fizzbuzz tests are fair game, because it checks for the most basic level of programming competence. Asking which command you would use to do X on a machine running Y is trivia --unless all the company runs is Y, they really need someone who is already a guru at Y, and X is a very commonly performed task. Otherwise, that's what reference manuals are for.
Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
I know I'll be labeled pedantic, but that summary was just incomprehensible. Several grammar errors, unclear phrasing...I had to go watch the video to understand what the hell this item is all about.
1 sievert (SV) = 100 rem
So, we're talking about tens of milli-rems per hour. Great. You get cosmic radiation at a higher rate than that by flying on an airliner.
a no-dive zone was self imposed by Greenpeace's radio-protection officer
Yeah, like that means anything. Just more food for the FUD.
French Environment and Health Ministries commissioned an official epidemiological study of leukaemia around La Hague
Over ten years ago, studying a quickly-appearing illness. No results? No surprise.
Measurements taken by OPRI near the beaches detected no radioactivity above the natural radioactivity level
See? Greenpeace has no substance to their argument.
I'll admit that no plant should circumvent the guidelines, nor should they then hide that fact. But the facts are that the safety guidelines are many times more strict for nuclear power than for any other type of power. I don't mean precautionary measures, I mean environmental impact. Coal plants release many times more radiation, spreading it over large areas via their smokestacks, than nuclear plants could even dream of. Even wind power has a greater carbon impact than nuclear power -- from start to finish, including building infrastructure, mining uranium, and handling the waste. Again, La Hague seems to be acting in an unethical manner, but I just can't stand all the ignorance about nuclear power.
Also, the link mentions the radiated water affecting beaches...nevermind that just GOING to the beach means you'll take in more radiation in one day than you'd get living next door to a nuclear plant all year. Oh, and if you FLY to the beach, you can add more to that total. (And airline pilots don't develop mutations.)
You're right. That's what I meant, but I didn't say it explicitly like that. They can have a policy forbidding photography, but the only way to enforce it is to make violators leave. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
That's my understanding as well. However, the specific locales mentioned in the summary are private places. While the guards' reasons are certainly suspect, they are well within their rights to forbid professional-appearing photography. Or even amateur/compact-digital-camera photography, though that would be harder to enforce.
Well, it's a piece in the Style section. So it's not really a scientific piece as much as an anecdote.
"The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'" "And the plural of 'datum' is not 'proof.'"
Yeah, I know that there are many variables with much greater importance. But I'd think that if it had no bearing, then the relationship would be significantly weaker. So it does make one wonder about how much importance image plays into the aggregate decision. Maybe even subconsciously, though I always shudder at attributing anything to the subconscious.
Hey, I'm just citing an author who noticed a trend. I didn't attribute any meaning or reason to it. If you read it that way, maybe it says more about how you consume information.:-p
Yes, that's what the article says 4 sentences in. It's not a ban to keep him from getting Nintendo employees excited about developing the next game about an innocuous task; it's a ban to keep him from giving his ideas away to potential competitors.
Freedom of religion is a slippery slope that leads to nationalized forced religious states. At least that is the goal of the christian religion.
You have it backwards. Having no freedom of religion guarantees those things.
The truth is that most of the world is religious in some way. So when there's no freedom to worship, the most populous or powerful faction can get its extremist shills elected and consequently sets the rules. Those opposed to that faction, or even those peacefully just believing something else, become brutally oppressed.
I don't think he was trying to force the whole nation to believe in a given religion. I think he was making the point for freedom of religion. That allowing, for example, Christians to exist peacefully in China and worship without being oppressed is fairly harmless. (I say "fairly" because I know someone will bring up the Christian = voting anti-science argument.)
/. may be anti-religion in general, but it's also pretty pro-freedom, is it not?
16 of the last 20 US presidential elections (80%) were won by the taller candidate (sorry, registration required). Treating the system as a two-party system, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds about right to me... the top 5% of wage earners earn about 60% of the wages in the country, so it seems fair that they should be paying 60% of the taxes.
Sounds like you advocate a flat tax. That's funny, seeing as how the current tax rates are progressive. A change to a flat tax would be a tax cut for the wealthy, and most likely an increase for the poor (unless we also reduced ways to get tax credits). I think you're trying to argue for the opposite, though -- a more progressive tax rate -- and all the while talking about increasing taxes in the name of "fairness."
Granted, the wealthy currently find ways to get tax breaks by making charitable contributions and the like, so their effective tax rate is probably a good bit less than the nominal. But if they're getting tax cuts by being charitable, I say good for them. I'm sure the charities have a lower overhead for doing good with the money than the federal government.
If we want to be more "fair," how about we just prosecute the crooked people at the top? And fine them heavily, too? But as long as he plays by the rules, what's wrong with a man being wealthy? He pays a greater portion of his income out to taxes and charitable contributions than the non-wealthy men. He pays property and capital gains taxes in large amounts, as well. I must say that that's more than fair to the non-wealthy. And I can't in good conscience ask them to continue paying more and more just because I want to pay less.
I find that a very dubious claim. The Constitution enumerates the powers that the federal legislative bodies should hold, and grants them the authority to do so. The problem is that politicians use the clause giving them power to regulate interstate commerce, combined with the necessary-and-proper clause, to put their hands into everything. The typical defense of this view is McCulloch v. Maryland, in which SCOTUS granted the federal government the power to institute a bank. Given that the Constitution grants the power "To coin Money, [and] regulate the Value thereof," this isn't too troubling. But today you'll find all sorts of situations where powers have been stretched much, much further.
While recent Republicans have been quite guilty of this, I view the Democrats as the worse offenders. You won't find federal authority over education in the Constitution. Or welfare. Or science subsidies. Or health care.
I'm not saying these are bad ideas. I'm saying the Constitution does not grant that authority to the federal government. Implied or correlated powers are one thing, but completely unrelated powers are another. Someone who's read and understood the Constitution by itself should conclude that these are issues that should be handled by the several states. It's sad that neither party represents the viewpoint that a lot of people hold -- that the federal government should be made weaker, not stronger.
I don't think Biden did any better. They both just repeatedly misstated the other campaign's position while only extolling the virtues of their own. Neither campaign will tell the whole truth. So, if nobody won, I guess it technically is a tie. The problem is that all of America loses.
It comes from their hoity toity way of referring to themselves.
"I'm not an artist! An artist just paints a painstakingly realistic and beautifullandscape. I'm an artiste! I splatter paint in a haphazard way, revealing raw emotions."
Seriously, though, how hard is it to look it up?
(The short answer: French.)
I haven't jumped on the DS bandwagon yet, so I wonder if this will be an opportunity to snatch up the old DS model for less? That is, before Nintendo stops production and makes them unavailable. (Sure, there's always eBay, but I avoid that place as much as possible.)
Not that uncommon. I remember playing the background music from many of my game discs in a CD player.
Right. So riders are a huge problem. But so also is the current sound-bite mentality the public and media bring to politics. A candidate can be accused of supporting or not support a certain issue because it was a rider on a bill, and he had to make a difficult, real-world decision between varying amounts of good and bad contained in that bill. Oh, and the accusers will never have their feet held to the fire.
These campaigns are run on public image propped up by half-truths.
Parties make me sick.
What if they're LAN parties?
Why? They'll just end up loading the tubes with chairs anyway.
Yeah, because the accusation that the notoriously violent leader of a nation-state is harboring illegal weapons of mass destruction in plain sight is more reasonable?
We couldn't know beforehand that he DIDN'T have WMDs, because anybody with two brain cells would be smart enough to hide them. Of course that doesn't mean we should invade every country just to check for WMDs, but when Saddam refuses mandated inspections, doesn't that at least make you suspicious? Yes, and justifiably so.
I'm not saying that the war was justified -- I don't even know all the facts, nor can I rattle off the supposed evidence for WMDs that was used to support it. All I'm saying is that your condemnation of the administration is weaker than weak. There are plenty of strong cases to be made, but you decide to go with "well, Bush said they were HIDING the illegal WMDs instead of showing them off to us, so Bush is obviously a retard." Yeah, nice one.
I completely agree. Tests should check for absolutely necessary skills, not trivia. Fizzbuzz tests are fair game, because it checks for the most basic level of programming competence. Asking which command you would use to do X on a machine running Y is trivia --unless all the company runs is Y, they really need someone who is already a guru at Y, and X is a very commonly performed task. Otherwise, that's what reference manuals are for.
...they were on a linear line.
That's a descriptive description.
I know I'll be labeled pedantic, but that summary was just incomprehensible. Several grammar errors, unclear phrasing...I had to go watch the video to understand what the hell this item is all about.
up to 500 micro-sieverts each hour
1 sievert (SV) = 100 rem So, we're talking about tens of milli-rems per hour. Great. You get cosmic radiation at a higher rate than that by flying on an airliner.
a no-dive zone was self imposed by Greenpeace's radio-protection officer
Yeah, like that means anything. Just more food for the FUD.
French Environment and Health Ministries commissioned an official epidemiological study of leukaemia around La Hague
Over ten years ago, studying a quickly-appearing illness. No results? No surprise.
Measurements taken by OPRI near the beaches detected no radioactivity above the natural radioactivity level
See? Greenpeace has no substance to their argument.
I'll admit that no plant should circumvent the guidelines, nor should they then hide that fact. But the facts are that the safety guidelines are many times more strict for nuclear power than for any other type of power. I don't mean precautionary measures, I mean environmental impact. Coal plants release many times more radiation, spreading it over large areas via their smokestacks, than nuclear plants could even dream of. Even wind power has a greater carbon impact than nuclear power -- from start to finish, including building infrastructure, mining uranium, and handling the waste. Again, La Hague seems to be acting in an unethical manner, but I just can't stand all the ignorance about nuclear power.
Also, the link mentions the radiated water affecting beaches...nevermind that just GOING to the beach means you'll take in more radiation in one day than you'd get living next door to a nuclear plant all year. Oh, and if you FLY to the beach, you can add more to that total. (And airline pilots don't develop mutations.)
Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, written by a former skeptic. Read it. Everybody. Please.
The more Youtube "police oppression" videos I see, the more I hate the police. The more police I meet, the more I like the police. Observer bias?
You're right. That's what I meant, but I didn't say it explicitly like that. They can have a policy forbidding photography, but the only way to enforce it is to make violators leave. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
That's my understanding as well. However, the specific locales mentioned in the summary are private places. While the guards' reasons are certainly suspect, they are well within their rights to forbid professional-appearing photography. Or even amateur/compact-digital-camera photography, though that would be harder to enforce.
Well, it's a piece in the Style section. So it's not really a scientific piece as much as an anecdote. "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'" "And the plural of 'datum' is not 'proof.'" Yeah, I know that there are many variables with much greater importance. But I'd think that if it had no bearing, then the relationship would be significantly weaker. So it does make one wonder about how much importance image plays into the aggregate decision. Maybe even subconsciously, though I always shudder at attributing anything to the subconscious.
Did you mean casual, or causal?
:-p
Hey, I'm just citing an author who noticed a trend. I didn't attribute any meaning or reason to it. If you read it that way, maybe it says more about how you consume information.
Yes, that's what the article says 4 sentences in. It's not a ban to keep him from getting Nintendo employees excited about developing the next game about an innocuous task; it's a ban to keep him from giving his ideas away to potential competitors.
Freedom of religion is a slippery slope that leads to nationalized forced religious states. At least that is the goal of the christian religion.
You have it backwards. Having no freedom of religion guarantees those things.
The truth is that most of the world is religious in some way. So when there's no freedom to worship, the most populous or powerful faction can get its extremist shills elected and consequently sets the rules. Those opposed to that faction, or even those peacefully just believing something else, become brutally oppressed.
I don't think he was trying to force the whole nation to believe in a given religion. I think he was making the point for freedom of religion. That allowing, for example, Christians to exist peacefully in China and worship without being oppressed is fairly harmless. (I say "fairly" because I know someone will bring up the Christian = voting anti-science argument.)
/. may be anti-religion in general, but it's also pretty pro-freedom, is it not?
16 of the last 20 US presidential elections (80%) were won by the taller candidate (sorry, registration required). Treating the system as a two-party system, of course.
Yesterday I heard that some ITT employees claimed to have the first industrial safety rap song. Maybe you'll like it, but I was not impressed.