1 is demonstrably incorrect, because the top 1% own more than one third of all the wealth in America. Unless you're arguing that the problem is not resolvable at all, then clearly tapping into one third of the wealth will be an important part of fixing the problem. But not the whole of it, obviously, as you implied by saying "How long before that [taxing the wealthy] is [alone, you imply] able to balance our annual deficit?"
The risk you are addressing in your answer to 2 is that the government misspends the increased revenues it gets instead of paying down the deficit. I think this is a material risk, but vastly outweighed by the risk that spending cuts alone are likely to spike the deficit by causing an enormous shrinkage in aggregate demand.
3. Well, sort of. I agree that the current system is badly broken. I agree that complexity is one part of how it is broken (although far from the only factor and not even the most important). I completely disagree that simplicity is the obvious answer. Simple systems can favor special interests just as much as complex systems. That is, after all, the most important of the critiques of Herman Cain's 999 plan. I can't believe you wouldn't call it absurd. It would involve a gigantic shift of wealth from the poor to the rich -- capital gains, which poor people by-and-large don't have because they can't put money aside to save enough to benefit from a capital gain, move from taxed to untaxed, while sales tax is applied to everything, which affects the poor much more than the rich because they have to spend virtually all of their income as they have no discretionary monies left for savings. The main beneficiaries would be the richest people, who would see their tax burden fall dramatically from a level that is already incredibly low, thanks to low rates and a series of complex opt-outs, as you describe. Simplicity is not a self-evident virtue: there are lots of solutions to difficult problems that are inherently complex, both in human life (eg computers) and in the natural world (eg the brain). Lots of simple solutions are, frankly, simplistic. 999 is one of them.
Who, besides you, has suggested confiscating all the wealth of the rich?
What is needed is a sustainable increase in taxation on the rich to help balance the budget and pay for the things you hold dear. Bending the trend is what's needed, not trying to eliminate the deficit in a single year. And while increasing the tax burden on the rich won't do all of it, it'll obviously do a significant proportion of it, given that the rich account for a large percentage of all income and wealth in the US.
You have now advanced three completely separate arguments for why there's no point taxing the rich more: 1) it won't raise enough revenue to make a difference 2) it's immoral 3) it's more important to simplify the tax code and then get them to just pay what they owe
1) is demonstrably incorrect. 2) is a point of view, and to put it mildly, not one I share. 3) is a utilitarian argument and I am skeptical of the validity of either the analysis of the problem or the proposed solution. Most proposed simplifications, like Cain's absurd 999 plan, are likely to be highly regressive in their impact, ie will lead to a net decrease in the tax burden on the rich and a net increase in the tax burden on the poor.
Oh, by the way, I note how the one thing you *don't* say in your specious little twonk of a response is, "oops, my bad. I thought that the richest 1% of don't make enough taxable dollars to make a difference. You've pointed out that this is factually inaccurate. Thanks, I've learned something new today."
I guess there are a few possible explanations for this: 1) You didn't learn. 2) You learned, didn't like being wrong, and figured the best thing to do was just ignore the fact that your central argument was counter-factual and instead shift the attack.
I genuinely don't know which is more likely with you, incompetence or malice. Perhaps some kind of malicious incompetence?
I'd prefer D: tax them, and spend the money on things like healthcare, infrastructure, the justice system, etc. Radical, I know. Virtually communisteric. I love how people like you "think" [sic] that money spent by the government is not spent in the economy. As though Microsoft's sales to GSK are real and those to the Justice Department are illusory.
Rich people are not all business owners, hiring people to work for them -- not by a long shot. If you don't know how economists measure how hard money works, perhaps you should piss off and read a few textbooks on economics and stop splashing your ignorance around in public. It makes a mess on Slashdot and other people have to clear it up. I'll give you a hint: "multiplier".
Horseshit twice over. 1) The "lofty 1% realm" now takes home a quarter -- *a quarter* -- of all US income. And the wealth disparities are even greater, because there are huge accumulated assets. 2) Money works harder in the hands of poor people than in the hands of rich people. Rich people save or buy assets like land, more than they spend. Poor people spend money on daily necessities.
When you make $50,000 a year, and you've got $48,000 on the credit card. You need a raise and you need to turn off cable, internet, stop eating out, and pay off that credit card.
And the great thing is, once you do it, you find you've got about $1,000 a month more money to spend. [snip]
This home-spun shit really gets on my tits. It ignores the enormous scale effects which differentiate national economics from household economics. It's the same category of error as not understanding the cube-square law in biology. A national economy in which everyone, including the government, pays down debt and stops spending is an economy that is shrinking. When economies shrink, demand for goods and services shrink, tax take falls, and companies are forced to lay off workers... there's no point in ignoring this reality just because it doesn't fit your homely philosophising.
Why should a hospital "be treated just like any other public space"? A hospital is stuffed full of sick people, who a) have compromised immune systems, and are thus much more susceptible to disease b) are a more potent source of infection than the typical public space
Hospitals need to be cleaned more than other places.
I have a 5 year old Loewe Xelos 37" telly, hooked up to a Blu-ray player. I sit a good 8' away from the telly. It is blindingly obvious when I'm playing a Blu-ray vs a DVD, even though the telly is limited to 720p (1366*768). When I first got the Blu-ray player, I even got a couple of films in both formats, to check. The difference is very very stark.
The telly is still fantastic and the sound quality is outstanding. It cost a stupid amount of money but it is a beautiful product.
Wow. Do you really think that: a) Other major manufacturers don't also outsource? Like Sony: http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/sony-taiwan-lcd-tv-panels-half-20101207950.htm b) That Apple's problems with establishing minimum standards for employees of its contractors is materially different from any other manufacturer?
Wow, suspend/sleep/hibernation continues to be painfully awful on my work Win7 lenovo compared with my home macbookpro: - while the screen lights up immediately, all sorts of functionality takes 30secs to one minute to come back after waking up, and in the meantime I get that annoying stuttery mouse thing happening - trackpad input often breaks after waking up - hardware issue, but the stupid lenovo lid latch is mechanical and prone to fail to secure the lid, which wakes the laptop up in my bag and leaves it churning through the battery
The single biggest annoyance I have in Win7, though, is the truly -- spectacularly -- dumb new workflow for shutdown, in which you can no longer close applications and make save/discard decisions as part of the shutdown process, but must do it all first and only then shut-down. I hate hate hate the person who did that.
What I was saying is that those variables should be irrelevant. The only people still clinging to those are the real racists. A great deal of racism and discrimination is kept alive and perpetuated by a lot of those claiming to be against it.
Oooookaaaaay....world as it is vs world as you would like it to be. "Variables *should* be irrelevant" Talk about missing the point. Yes, of course those variables should be irrelevant. What if they are not? They certainly haven't been irrelevant in the past, why should we not investigate whether they're relevant now?
You are saying "because these variables *ought* to be irrelevant, we therefore are morally obliged to abstain from testing whether they *are* in fact irrelevant, because to do that kind of testing means we are looking for an axe to grind". That is spectacularly broken logic. I hope you are no kind of scientist in your dayjob.
If you think men were, for the most part, the only people doing truly dangerous jobs, you have a stunted appreciation of history. Victorian mills were quite as dangerous as Victorian mines. Women healers and midwives were killed as witches by the hundreds of thousands. There are dozens more examples.
Nurses do not get a particularly good wage, although it varies from country to country. There are scholarly articles looking at pay differentials between this and similar jobs (eg firefighters, police officers) and nurses routinely come out worse off.
Cleaning is a crap job. Poor pay, hard physical work, unsociable hours, no job security, social isolation, treated like crap or ignored by the people you're cleaning for, etc etc. Are you a cleaner? If not, I suggest you have no idea what you're talking about.
The bias to test is whether jobs are unevenly distributed across the population on a basis other than talent and luck. I can't believe I'm having to spell this out, but then you've not proved particularly bright so far, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
I said that I prefer empirical investigation. I didn't say I had evidence. I did say that I didn't think ignoring evidence of unusual distributions of jobs among a population was a sensible approach. It's hardly a wild reach to test whether bias might exist, given a lengthy history of explicit discrimination against all sorts of minorities in the job market.
In case you hadn't noticed, the horrible jobs that were done by men were (and continue to be) largely better paid than the horrible jobs done by women. The statistical evidence is out there.
"don't look at variables and see if there's an issue, just close your eyes and hope there isn't"
Who said that? I said don't try to invent a problem that doesn't exist because you're trying to enforce your personal bias on a situation.
Who said that? You did. You said: "Stop looking at people like men, women, black, white, yellow, and look at them like people, and simply hope the best person is chosen for the job." "Stop looking at people like men, women, black, white, yellow" = "don't look at variables" "simply hope the best person is chosen for the job" = "just close your eyes and hope there isn't [an issue] That's a pretty straightforward interpretation of what you wrote.
Wow, you really are dumb: "You talk about those kinds of job being pigeonholed as womens work as though its not a bad thing, but I bet you'd bitch if someone said don't worry about their not being enough women in tech because it's generally pigeonholed as mens work." is a sentence bearing only a passing resemblance to English, and the clarity of thought is no better, either. As you didn't understand me before, let me spell it out for you. It is a bad thing that women are pigeonholed into the caring professions. Jobs in the caring and cleaning trades are underpaid, often involve unsocial hours, and often involve doing not very nice things like cleaning people's arses. It is the flipside of the bad thing that is men being over-represented in cushy, well-paid, jobs.
This is a tech site. What kind of a tech guy are you, saying "don't look at variables and see if there's an issue, just close your eyes and hope there isn't"? I prefer actual empirical investigation, myself. And then practical action to fix problems that are uncovered.
Aha. So, what you're saying is that you're guessing that Samsung has actually sold more S2s than Apple sold iPhones in the last quarter, but you don't actually know, as that would require you to know the split-out of sales by model for Samsung, which is data they don't release. Incidentally, Samsung releases shipping but not sales data, so channel stuffing is a distinct possibility. And of course iPhone 4S sales will only show up in Q4, which is what really counts. And the 4m opening sales was Apple's most successful release ever, and the largest opening sales of any phone ever, but it's "not that impressive", according to you. Keep living the dream!
You are both unobservant and dumb. There are lots of articles about why white men are underrepresented in the caring and cleaning trades. The generally accepted answer is that it's work that's been pigeonholed as women's work and it pays shit and often involves crapnhours and kowtowing to a Big Swinging Dentist. Most men have other choices available ago they don't do that kind of job
The issue is not about perfect representation, it's about really striking underrepresentation in jobs that are pretty damned cushy
Hmmm...let's think about the causality here. I think giving her a Merc and supporting her financially is frankly only a part of what he ought to be doing by way of recompensing her for beating her like that. What do you think is the likelihood that this is the only time she was beaten?
Your "cheap crappy" PC is likely to last longer than the overpriced Mac simply due to boneheaded design
Wow. Just wow.
What specific boneheaded design decisions do you think mean that Macs have poor durability? I write as someone whose Lenovo work laptop has a shitty latch that has now broken on two separate machines -- something that couldn't happen on my MBP for the simple reason that it doesn't have a latch. So I am pretty skeptical, but eager to hear...
Wow, way to miss the point about what Jobs was saying. It wasn't that no-one will have a use for a higher-end machine than a tablet. It was that many millions of people would do just fine with an iPad or its successor devices. And that is indeed the case.
Slashdot Mirror
1 is demonstrably incorrect, because the top 1% own more than one third of all the wealth in America. Unless you're arguing that the problem is not resolvable at all, then clearly tapping into one third of the wealth will be an important part of fixing the problem. But not the whole of it, obviously, as you implied by saying "How long before that [taxing the wealthy] is [alone, you imply] able to balance our annual deficit?"
The risk you are addressing in your answer to 2 is that the government misspends the increased revenues it gets instead of paying down the deficit. I think this is a material risk, but vastly outweighed by the risk that spending cuts alone are likely to spike the deficit by causing an enormous shrinkage in aggregate demand.
3. Well, sort of. I agree that the current system is badly broken. I agree that complexity is one part of how it is broken (although far from the only factor and not even the most important). I completely disagree that simplicity is the obvious answer. Simple systems can favor special interests just as much as complex systems. That is, after all, the most important of the critiques of Herman Cain's 999 plan. I can't believe you wouldn't call it absurd. It would involve a gigantic shift of wealth from the poor to the rich -- capital gains, which poor people by-and-large don't have because they can't put money aside to save enough to benefit from a capital gain, move from taxed to untaxed, while sales tax is applied to everything, which affects the poor much more than the rich because they have to spend virtually all of their income as they have no discretionary monies left for savings. The main beneficiaries would be the richest people, who would see their tax burden fall dramatically from a level that is already incredibly low, thanks to low rates and a series of complex opt-outs, as you describe. Simplicity is not a self-evident virtue: there are lots of solutions to difficult problems that are inherently complex, both in human life (eg computers) and in the natural world (eg the brain). Lots of simple solutions are, frankly, simplistic. 999 is one of them.
Who, besides you, has suggested confiscating all the wealth of the rich?
What is needed is a sustainable increase in taxation on the rich to help balance the budget and pay for the things you hold dear. Bending the trend is what's needed, not trying to eliminate the deficit in a single year. And while increasing the tax burden on the rich won't do all of it, it'll obviously do a significant proportion of it, given that the rich account for a large percentage of all income and wealth in the US.
You have now advanced three completely separate arguments for why there's no point taxing the rich more:
1) it won't raise enough revenue to make a difference
2) it's immoral
3) it's more important to simplify the tax code and then get them to just pay what they owe
1) is demonstrably incorrect.
2) is a point of view, and to put it mildly, not one I share.
3) is a utilitarian argument and I am skeptical of the validity of either the analysis of the problem or the proposed solution. Most proposed simplifications, like Cain's absurd 999 plan, are likely to be highly regressive in their impact, ie will lead to a net decrease in the tax burden on the rich and a net increase in the tax burden on the poor.
Oh, by the way, I note how the one thing you *don't* say in your specious little twonk of a response is, "oops, my bad. I thought that the richest 1% of don't make enough taxable dollars to make a difference. You've pointed out that this is factually inaccurate. Thanks, I've learned something new today."
I guess there are a few possible explanations for this:
1) You didn't learn.
2) You learned, didn't like being wrong, and figured the best thing to do was just ignore the fact that your central argument was counter-factual and instead shift the attack.
I genuinely don't know which is more likely with you, incompetence or malice. Perhaps some kind of malicious incompetence?
I'd prefer D: tax them, and spend the money on things like healthcare, infrastructure, the justice system, etc. Radical, I know. Virtually communisteric. I love how people like you "think" [sic] that money spent by the government is not spent in the economy. As though Microsoft's sales to GSK are real and those to the Justice Department are illusory.
Rich people are not all business owners, hiring people to work for them -- not by a long shot. If you don't know how economists measure how hard money works, perhaps you should piss off and read a few textbooks on economics and stop splashing your ignorance around in public. It makes a mess on Slashdot and other people have to clear it up. I'll give you a hint: "multiplier".
Erm. You've confused income and expenditure. But never mind.
More people means more income *and* more expenditure. As the poster said a ways up, better to think of share of national income being spent.
Horseshit twice over.
1) The "lofty 1% realm" now takes home a quarter -- *a quarter* -- of all US income. And the wealth disparities are even greater, because there are huge accumulated assets.
2) Money works harder in the hands of poor people than in the hands of rich people. Rich people save or buy assets like land, more than they spend. Poor people spend money on daily necessities.
When you make $50,000 a year, and you've got $48,000 on the credit card. You need a raise and you need to turn off cable, internet, stop eating out, and pay off that credit card.
And the great thing is, once you do it, you find you've got about $1,000 a month more money to spend. [snip]
This home-spun shit really gets on my tits. It ignores the enormous scale effects which differentiate national economics from household economics. It's the same category of error as not understanding the cube-square law in biology. A national economy in which everyone, including the government, pays down debt and stops spending is an economy that is shrinking. When economies shrink, demand for goods and services shrink, tax take falls, and companies are forced to lay off workers... there's no point in ignoring this reality just because it doesn't fit your homely philosophising.
Why should a hospital "be treated just like any other public space"? A hospital is stuffed full of sick people, who
a) have compromised immune systems, and are thus much more susceptible to disease
b) are a more potent source of infection than the typical public space
Hospitals need to be cleaned more than other places.
I want 6 but not via a cable. I want my TV on a wall and I don't want to plug cables into it. I want to just auto-mirror what's on the iPad or MBP.
I have a 5 year old Loewe Xelos 37" telly, hooked up to a Blu-ray player. I sit a good 8' away from the telly. It is blindingly obvious when I'm playing a Blu-ray vs a DVD, even though the telly is limited to 720p (1366*768). When I first got the Blu-ray player, I even got a couple of films in both formats, to check. The difference is very very stark.
The telly is still fantastic and the sound quality is outstanding. It cost a stupid amount of money but it is a beautiful product.
Wow. Do you really think that:
a) Other major manufacturers don't also outsource? Like Sony: http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/sony-taiwan-lcd-tv-panels-half-20101207950.htm
b) That Apple's problems with establishing minimum standards for employees of its contractors is materially different from any other manufacturer?
That is deluded.
How about Adobe?! They've recently said they'll stop supporting mobile Flash, after all.
Wow, suspend/sleep/hibernation continues to be painfully awful on my work Win7 lenovo compared with my home macbookpro:
- while the screen lights up immediately, all sorts of functionality takes 30secs to one minute to come back after waking up, and in the meantime I get that annoying stuttery mouse thing happening
- trackpad input often breaks after waking up
- hardware issue, but the stupid lenovo lid latch is mechanical and prone to fail to secure the lid, which wakes the laptop up in my bag and leaves it churning through the battery
The single biggest annoyance I have in Win7, though, is the truly -- spectacularly -- dumb new workflow for shutdown, in which you can no longer close applications and make save/discard decisions as part of the shutdown process, but must do it all first and only then shut-down. I hate hate hate the person who did that.
What I was saying is that those variables should be irrelevant. The only people still clinging to those are the real racists. A great deal of racism and discrimination is kept alive and perpetuated by a lot of those claiming to be against it.
Oooookaaaaay....world as it is vs world as you would like it to be. "Variables *should* be irrelevant" Talk about missing the point. Yes, of course those variables should be irrelevant. What if they are not? They certainly haven't been irrelevant in the past, why should we not investigate whether they're relevant now?
You are saying "because these variables *ought* to be irrelevant, we therefore are morally obliged to abstain from testing whether they *are* in fact irrelevant, because to do that kind of testing means we are looking for an axe to grind". That is spectacularly broken logic. I hope you are no kind of scientist in your dayjob.
I'm not going to do the research for you. To start you on your way, you could look at this:
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=male+vs+female+pay&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
Or you could choose not to. I don't really care, as you've already said you don't think it's a subject worthy of study.
If you think men were, for the most part, the only people doing truly dangerous jobs, you have a stunted appreciation of history. Victorian mills were quite as dangerous as Victorian mines. Women healers and midwives were killed as witches by the hundreds of thousands. There are dozens more examples.
Nurses do not get a particularly good wage, although it varies from country to country. There are scholarly articles looking at pay differentials between this and similar jobs (eg firefighters, police officers) and nurses routinely come out worse off.
Cleaning is a crap job. Poor pay, hard physical work, unsociable hours, no job security, social isolation, treated like crap or ignored by the people you're cleaning for, etc etc. Are you a cleaner? If not, I suggest you have no idea what you're talking about.
The bias to test is whether jobs are unevenly distributed across the population on a basis other than talent and luck. I can't believe I'm having to spell this out, but then you've not proved particularly bright so far, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
I said that I prefer empirical investigation. I didn't say I had evidence. I did say that I didn't think ignoring evidence of unusual distributions of jobs among a population was a sensible approach. It's hardly a wild reach to test whether bias might exist, given a lengthy history of explicit discrimination against all sorts of minorities in the job market.
In case you hadn't noticed, the horrible jobs that were done by men were (and continue to be) largely better paid than the horrible jobs done by women. The statistical evidence is out there.
Who said that? I said don't try to invent a problem that doesn't exist because you're trying to enforce your personal bias on a situation.
Who said that? You did. You said: "Stop looking at people like men, women, black, white, yellow, and look at them like people, and simply hope the best person is chosen for the job."
"Stop looking at people like men, women, black, white, yellow" = "don't look at variables"
"simply hope the best person is chosen for the job" = "just close your eyes and hope there isn't [an issue]
That's a pretty straightforward interpretation of what you wrote.
Wow, you really are dumb: "You talk about those kinds of job being pigeonholed as womens work as though its not a bad thing, but I bet you'd bitch if someone said don't worry about their not being enough women in tech because it's generally pigeonholed as mens work." is a sentence bearing only a passing resemblance to English, and the clarity of thought is no better, either. As you didn't understand me before, let me spell it out for you. It is a bad thing that women are pigeonholed into the caring professions. Jobs in the caring and cleaning trades are underpaid, often involve unsocial hours, and often involve doing not very nice things like cleaning people's arses. It is the flipside of the bad thing that is men being over-represented in cushy, well-paid, jobs.
This is a tech site. What kind of a tech guy are you, saying "don't look at variables and see if there's an issue, just close your eyes and hope there isn't"? I prefer actual empirical investigation, myself. And then practical action to fix problems that are uncovered.
Aha. So, what you're saying is that you're guessing that Samsung has actually sold more S2s than Apple sold iPhones in the last quarter, but you don't actually know, as that would require you to know the split-out of sales by model for Samsung, which is data they don't release. Incidentally, Samsung releases shipping but not sales data, so channel stuffing is a distinct possibility. And of course iPhone 4S sales will only show up in Q4, which is what really counts. And the 4m opening sales was Apple's most successful release ever, and the largest opening sales of any phone ever, but it's "not that impressive", according to you. Keep living the dream!
Ooh, ooh, I see the racism! It's that NYC taxi drivers won't stop for a person simply because of the colour of their skin.
Glad we cleared that up.
You are both unobservant and dumb. There are lots of articles about why white men are underrepresented in the caring and cleaning trades. The generally accepted answer is that it's work that's been pigeonholed as women's work and it pays shit and often involves crapnhours and kowtowing to a Big Swinging Dentist. Most men have other choices available ago they don't do that kind of job
The issue is not about perfect representation, it's about really striking underrepresentation in jobs that are pretty damned cushy
Wow, did you just say that the Galaxy S II has sold as well as the iPhone? Care to cite some research to justify that claim?
Cos this is just one of many articles that says you're talking out of your nether regions:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/samsung-galaxy-s-and-s2-reach-humungous-30-million-sales-50005685/
A bit of of Python. Nice.
Hmmm...let's think about the causality here. I think giving her a Merc and supporting her financially is frankly only a part of what he ought to be doing by way of recompensing her for beating her like that. What do you think is the likelihood that this is the only time she was beaten?
Your "cheap crappy" PC is likely to last longer than the overpriced Mac simply due to boneheaded design
Wow. Just wow.
What specific boneheaded design decisions do you think mean that Macs have poor durability? I write as someone whose Lenovo work laptop has a shitty latch that has now broken on two separate machines -- something that couldn't happen on my MBP for the simple reason that it doesn't have a latch. So I am pretty skeptical, but eager to hear...
And a Learjet has to compete with a Greyhound ticket.
Who goes out shopping for a laptop and really compares a MPB and an Inspiron? ie might have bought the former but finds the latter meets their needs?
Wow, way to miss the point about what Jobs was saying. It wasn't that no-one will have a use for a higher-end machine than a tablet. It was that many millions of people would do just fine with an iPad or its successor devices. And that is indeed the case.