Well the story that was actually posted with the summary doesn't mention or even allude to any violence against people, and the others I'd originally read said less than a dozen serious injuries were incurred. Not to diminish a serious injury, but just a dozen of them in a riot encompassing 10,000 people or more hardly sounds like it was a mob war or as if attacking other people was anyone's focus. I understand now that it was worse than I originally perceived, but I don't think my comments are invalidated. Also, forgive my indignation, but I try to rely on hard journalism rather than let myself get swept up in the emotions evoked by Time magazine-style photo essays. I understand it was a very serious riot; I also believe that keeping vengeful and fearful emotions in check matters greatly in responding correctly to it.
Although I'm sure I'm wasting my time responding to you. This particular comment of yours sounds basically reasonable, but I see above that another comment of yours calls me a "dickhead" for daring to disagree with the popular opinion and ends with "go fuck yourself troll".
There's a difference between expressing and standing by an unpopular opinion and deliberately trolling. If you can't understand that you have no place whatsoever in civilized debate.
You're full of shit. I acted as if they'd meant those things once they'd explicitly stated them, not before. The original comment was purely an aside, not an attempt to turn the conversation. Just because a bunch of militant fuckheads responded that yes, they would shoot someone over property crime doesn't mean I attacked a straw man.
The only time these people willing to kill for the sake of their property entered the picture was when you conjured them up as a strawman.
I didn't "conjure it up as a strawman", I said that people's responses to what I'd originally said reminded me of the sort of hard-core libertarians willing to do so. To my surprise, many responded that they would indeed rather kill than let their property walk away in a burglar's or looter's hands and it became a separate point of contention. In no way did I ever claim or in any way imply that someone had raised the idea of killing as property protection in the riots. If you can interpret a statement prefaced with "sound like" as conjuring a strawman and fiendishly conflating unlike issues rather than as making a comment on the side then you're just not reading very carefully.
Not one single other person has mentioned that there were multiple sources for so many of these pictures; they've all been too busy telling me to fuck myself. That makes a large difference for the correctness of a conviction based on this evidence. I'm still doubtful about how well this follows decent police procedure and whether the precedents are worth it, but at least the convictions couldn't be wrongful.
At least one guy trying to fend off protesters was a restaurant owner who had his family in the restaurant. If my family were threatened, I'd kill to protect them. Wouldn't you?
Killing to protect other human beings, whether or not my family, I would do, but that's not at all what was being talked about. I criticized killing purely for the sake of property, and I'm rather surprised to find that a controversial stance.
You have a "well ordered, and well behaved society" and your entry into an earnest debate begins with "fuck you. No seriously fuck you"? Perhaps your society is civilized, but you fall well short. Forgive me for valuing proper police procedure more than I value a dozen assault convictions and a slew of larceny and vandalism arrests. It's been accepted for a very, very long time now that sometimes a civilized society has to let the criminal go rather than compromise its principles. Rioting is a serious problem and a PITA to prosecute, but I still I don't think a video from one guy containing a person identified by another guy constitutes sufficient evidence for a conviction given the normal chain of custody rules for evidence and the "shadow of a doubt" criterion used for criminal convictions (at least in the US). I guess that makes me an anarchist or an ACLU boot-licker or whatever else you want to call me, but I'm not going to apologize and despite the concerted campaign to mod me down this is absolutely not flamebait. I'm trying to have a serious discussion; if all you people can respond with is curses and systematic attempts to bury my words under digital red ink you're not going to have any luck changing my mind. Enjoy your apoplexy; it was a complete waste of your time.
Who the fuck called it "harmless fun"? Jesus Christ....
As for your insistence that I would "run" from police asking me to provide testimony of a murder I witnessed, it's not the same thing and you god damn well know it. I don't know just how everyone decided I'm an anarchist or that I find prosecution of *anything* objectionable; I merely find prosecuting things based solely on crowd-sourced identifications of people in photos and videos with a convoluted chain of custody a worse precedent than letting people get away with looting and even some serious assaults.
I get that apparently everything I say is wanton flamebait, so feel free to ignore this and tell me to go fuck myself some more.
People willing to *kill* for the sake of their property are, in fact, much worse than people who would smash it for no reason. And thank you for being the 10th person in this discussion to tell me to fuck myself. That was the magic number; I now concede that all of you are completely reasonable people and I'm just a random asshole who values human life, and being careful about precedent and chain of custody, in law enforcement more than televisions, police cars and prosecuting mob violence.
Knock it off with the straw men and shelve the insults. Only willful misinterpretation could lead you to believe that I'm fine and dandy with vandalism and beating people on the street. I simply believe that this manner of searching for suspects could change the way we procure evidence and the way we determine guilt in ways that are more damaging to our society than a single riot, however major, ever could be.
I have read stories, and some of them were quite specific about the nature of the injuries suffered. According to what I've read exactly one person is in critical condition, there were three stabbings, and one officer received 14 stitches for a brick to the face.
Serious wounds and serious crimes, but hardly the utter chaos one is lead to believe by the phrase "150 injured". Forgive me if I don't think that theft, vandalism, and a half-dozen major injuries warrant an all-out digital dragnet. Frankly, I'd be more frightened of meeting any of the angry vigilante-sounding people who've responded to my post in a dark alley than of meeting the most dangerous of the rioters. At least rioters are just violent pricks and adrenaline-fueled idiots; you guys sound like the sort of vengeful, soulless libertarians who would shoot a man rather than let him walk away with your TV; the kind of people who want all crimes prosecuted to the 'fullest extent of the law', who cares the methods and damn the financial, social, or philosophical cost.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather not 'crowdsource' the manhunt for perpetrators of isolated property crimes. I'd bet the vast majority of these people have no criminal record and that almost nobody did anything violent during these riots. It's not worth setting a precedent that we'll all analyze video for the police merely to get justice for a few totaled cars.
It reminds me a little of the "lets all open our windows and see if we can spot the fleeing criminal" scene in Fahrenheit 451. I'm not helping the police find anyone short of a murderer or rapist through video coverage, if even then.
The Senator to whom I referred was talking about a national sales tax, hence my specificity that he was a US senator. Not to mention the fact that sales tax is "state level" only as it's currently being used, not by some law of nature. Your groundless assumptions about where sales taxes do and do not apply are not my problem.
As for the idea that the congress can successfully work on both raising taxes and managing the budget, they certainly could, I'm simply arguing that the most efficient use of a legislator's time would be in finding ways to reduce or more efficiently use the $3.82 trillion the government plans to spend this year, with or without revenue increases, than to hound after a revenue increase that would raise just 0.7% of the needed funds per year (30 billion / 3.82 trillion).
The government is us. So when the say 'cheat the government' that are saying exactly what you said.
You know this, and I know this; my point was that a surprising number of congressmen and long-time federal bureaucrats don't seem to see it this way anymore. They discharge their jobs and run their mouths off in such a way that they appear to believe the government has life and priorities all its own, which it absolutely should not. It certainly should be pointless semantics to differentiate between cheating the government and cheating the citizenry, but unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case right now. Such theoretical non-distinctions do, in fact, need to be specifically stated when dealing with many government officials.
Uh...yeah. Just how you read "illegitimate government" into my statements I don't know. I'm saying the government works for us, and thus doesn't have any rights or need for income other than to serve us. I'm not even distantly implying any sort of strict Constitutionalist militia bullshit here. It's a perfectly nice and legitimate government, it just needs some god damn priorities.
Well, the article seems to say otherwise. It talks about tracking down not just businesses, but handymen, tutors, individual online buyers, and others via comparing their internet purchases and other financial information against their 'legitimate' income. I only addressed the sales tax part that the summary talked about, but in fact the system does specifically target individuals and it does so for even more than sales taxes.
the USA has had a deficit for almost every year of its existence
That's not only completely false, it would be misleading even if it were completely true. There have been several dozen years during which the debt was paid down at least slightly, and many others in which the increase in GDP far outweighed the increase in the debt. On that last point, I'm not saying anyone should ever count on growing their way out of debt (as a few of the more delusional Republican potential candidates, especially Pawlenty, seem to advocate today), but it's perfectly reasonable for a fiscally stable government to borrow some money in periods of preexisting economic growth, and of course there are times when you can cause economic growth by spending borrowed money in the right places.
So in a word, no. The US government has not spent substantially more than it took in throughout most of it's history, or when it did economic growth or fiscal responsibility closed the gap in following years. The only times we've had truly massive debt spikes were major wars, and the last thirty years of total irresponsibility. And that irresponsibility caught up with us about five years ago, truth be told. Most politicians are barely edging their way around to admitting the possible existence of a problem right now, but this crap reached crisis levels a while ago.
No government can spend more than it takes in for any impressively long time, and it certainly isn't the regular order of things.
This reminds me of the US Senator who declared the necessity of an Internet sales tax on the grounds that people were "cheating the government" by not remitting tax voluntarily on their online purchases. This program seems to come from the same sentiments, and thus I feel towards it as I did towards that Senator: first, the government is not a legitimate entity unto itself. I can't cheat the government, I can only cheat my fellow citizens and myself out of some worthy use of those potential tax dollars. Change your attitude before you start bitching about what people do and don't pay. Second, between better handling the multiple trillions of dollars you already manage in a year and hounding the public for yet another thirty billion you feel you're owed in internet sales taxes, you seriously choose the thirty billion? Third, collecting money at retail is already the most regressive and indirect way of taxing the economy to run the government. You should be abolishing the sales tax entirely and making a more sensible personal and corporate income tax structure, not worrying about the fraction of the sales tax people do not pay.
Bottom line, systems like this are missing the forest in favor of getting self righteous and nit picky about the trees.
I'm not an especially strong Apple hater, but haven't there been other stories on slashdot about Apple blatantly rolling over other companies copyrights or trademarks for names and concepts that sound similar to potential Apple products?
Oh God dammit I'm an idiot. I did find the original source, it was right on that page. I'd now like to point out, however, that the "study" appears to be a bunch of market research tidbits, for which even the ESA's original presentation doesn't provide a concrete source other than crediting them all to the NPD group. At least, with a few dozen random facts on every page they stop every three pages or so to attribute a particular graph to NPD; other than that and about a million quotes, they don't source anything at all.
This so called study is nothing but the ESA trying to spin a bunch of market research babble into a factual narrative about gamers. They're trying to create the story and history of gaming as it's still developing rather than let it play out naturally.
So now we're posting submissions without sources that try to make an entire discussion out of a single alleged factoid? Seriously?
Most links I can find on this topic point to CNET, but this is the closest thing I can find to the original source. One website high in the google results links to pdf of this supposed study, but the link is dead.
Is it only masturbation or do sex and masturbation work equally well?
The way this is phrased looks like an incomplete story. Why wouldn't sex work just as well as masturbation? What plausible reason would there be that wanking your doodle by hand works better than wanking it in a soft, pleasant vagina?
Well, the abstract doesn't tell us what comparisons they made other than more coffee drunk vs less, but given that it's a Harvard study I'll extend the trust that they had decent control groups and biostatistics (and I'm not saying that just because I'm all doe-eyed about a big name school, I'm saying that because Harvard has probably the best public health program in the world).
Tea would be a pretty poor control, however; when testing a biochemical cocktail for health effects, when you want a control that measures hydration and fluid intake why on earth would you use a different biochemical cocktail rather than controlling statistically for overall hydration or having some sort of water-drinking control group? How do we know that tea doesn't have a whole host of different effects as opposed to coffee that could totally boink the study data? In fact, it probably does.
When you make $250k, it's a lot harder to decide whether you want the money or your weekend.
I'm completely lost. Shouldn't it make it easier for you, with an income of 250k+, to decide you'd like that weekend off rather than get $2000 when you don't need more money for your lifestyle and $2000 represents an increase of less than 1 percent for your gross income vs. someone else making the same decision who, at 50k, makes barely over the median wage and for whom $2000 is a 4% increase in income? Because it's tough to expand a business without increasing income? Why should we pity people already in the wealthiest 0.1% of the human race when they can't decide whether the take days off many people couldn't ever afford or spend those days chasing even more money?
after the high marginal tax rates of 1981 were cut, tax payments and the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent climbed sharply. For example, in 1981 the top 1 percent paid 17.6 percent of all personal income taxes, but by 1988 their share had jumped to 27.5 percent, a 10 percentage point increase.
The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.
Look, I'm simply fed up and exhausted with people such as yourself endlessly spouting these same statistics about the supposedly ever increasing relative tax burden on the rich and how this supposedly makes everyone with a 7 figure income some kind of martyr. Claiming or even unequivocally proving that the rich account for higher percentages of total tax paid today than yesterday does not amount to proving that the rich are getting screwed or that their taxes are rising at a faster relative rate than other people's.
What percentage of all personal income earned by US citizens do the top 10% make, today vs. yesterday? The top 1%? It's complete chicanery to bemoan the rich paying an ever increasing percentage of the tax pie without addressing whose income is rising and whose is falling. If the rich have been claiming an ever increasing percentage of total gross income earned by US citizens then no shit their taxes should be going up. That is, in fact, the claim of every liberal economist in the US: that the relative wealth of the top 1-5% continues to increase by a couple points per year while the middle and lower classes have experienced year-over-year losses in relative economic power for 39 years straight (I seem to recall claims that 1972 was the modern-era maximum for purchasing power and financial stability in the lower 90% of earners).
Convince me that the rich don't have all the money and then I'll agree that they shouldn't pay all the taxes.
The 1993 Clinton tax increase appears to [sic] having the opposite effect on the willingness of wealthy taxpayers to expose income to taxation. According to IRS data, the income generated by the top one percent of income earners actually declined in 1993.
There shouldn't be any fucking choice about whether you "expose" income to taxation! If it's income, it gets taxed. This quote in comparison with your other choices amounts to admitting flat-out that while claiming they're sad little martyrs who pay all the taxes for everyone the rich are simultaneously hiding money from taxation. I can see things like a slightly lower (and by "slightly" I mean "sure as fuck not 20%+ lower") capital gains rate or a respectable deduction for capital gains to create investment incentives, but there should be no category of income, no method of accounting, that makes millions of dollars totally tax free.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the story that was actually posted with the summary doesn't mention or even allude to any violence against people, and the others I'd originally read said less than a dozen serious injuries were incurred. Not to diminish a serious injury, but just a dozen of them in a riot encompassing 10,000 people or more hardly sounds like it was a mob war or as if attacking other people was anyone's focus. I understand now that it was worse than I originally perceived, but I don't think my comments are invalidated. Also, forgive my indignation, but I try to rely on hard journalism rather than let myself get swept up in the emotions evoked by Time magazine-style photo essays. I understand it was a very serious riot; I also believe that keeping vengeful and fearful emotions in check matters greatly in responding correctly to it.
Although I'm sure I'm wasting my time responding to you. This particular comment of yours sounds basically reasonable, but I see above that another comment of yours calls me a "dickhead" for daring to disagree with the popular opinion and ends with "go fuck yourself troll".
There's a difference between expressing and standing by an unpopular opinion and deliberately trolling. If you can't understand that you have no place whatsoever in civilized debate.
You're full of shit. I acted as if they'd meant those things once they'd explicitly stated them, not before. The original comment was purely an aside, not an attempt to turn the conversation. Just because a bunch of militant fuckheads responded that yes, they would shoot someone over property crime doesn't mean I attacked a straw man.
The only time these people willing to kill for the sake of their property entered the picture was when you conjured them up as a strawman.
I didn't "conjure it up as a strawman", I said that people's responses to what I'd originally said reminded me of the sort of hard-core libertarians willing to do so. To my surprise, many responded that they would indeed rather kill than let their property walk away in a burglar's or looter's hands and it became a separate point of contention. In no way did I ever claim or in any way imply that someone had raised the idea of killing as property protection in the riots. If you can interpret a statement prefaced with "sound like" as conjuring a strawman and fiendishly conflating unlike issues rather than as making a comment on the side then you're just not reading very carefully.
Not one single other person has mentioned that there were multiple sources for so many of these pictures; they've all been too busy telling me to fuck myself. That makes a large difference for the correctness of a conviction based on this evidence. I'm still doubtful about how well this follows decent police procedure and whether the precedents are worth it, but at least the convictions couldn't be wrongful.
At least one guy trying to fend off protesters was a restaurant owner who had his family in the restaurant. If my family were threatened, I'd kill to protect them. Wouldn't you?
Killing to protect other human beings, whether or not my family, I would do, but that's not at all what was being talked about. I criticized killing purely for the sake of property, and I'm rather surprised to find that a controversial stance.
You have a "well ordered, and well behaved society" and your entry into an earnest debate begins with "fuck you. No seriously fuck you"? Perhaps your society is civilized, but you fall well short. Forgive me for valuing proper police procedure more than I value a dozen assault convictions and a slew of larceny and vandalism arrests. It's been accepted for a very, very long time now that sometimes a civilized society has to let the criminal go rather than compromise its principles. Rioting is a serious problem and a PITA to prosecute, but I still I don't think a video from one guy containing a person identified by another guy constitutes sufficient evidence for a conviction given the normal chain of custody rules for evidence and the "shadow of a doubt" criterion used for criminal convictions (at least in the US). I guess that makes me an anarchist or an ACLU boot-licker or whatever else you want to call me, but I'm not going to apologize and despite the concerted campaign to mod me down this is absolutely not flamebait. I'm trying to have a serious discussion; if all you people can respond with is curses and systematic attempts to bury my words under digital red ink you're not going to have any luck changing my mind. Enjoy your apoplexy; it was a complete waste of your time.
Who the fuck called it "harmless fun"? Jesus Christ....
As for your insistence that I would "run" from police asking me to provide testimony of a murder I witnessed, it's not the same thing and you god damn well know it. I don't know just how everyone decided I'm an anarchist or that I find prosecution of *anything* objectionable; I merely find prosecuting things based solely on crowd-sourced identifications of people in photos and videos with a convoluted chain of custody a worse precedent than letting people get away with looting and even some serious assaults.
I get that apparently everything I say is wanton flamebait, so feel free to ignore this and tell me to go fuck myself some more.
People willing to *kill* for the sake of their property are, in fact, much worse than people who would smash it for no reason. And thank you for being the 10th person in this discussion to tell me to fuck myself. That was the magic number; I now concede that all of you are completely reasonable people and I'm just a random asshole who values human life, and being careful about precedent and chain of custody, in law enforcement more than televisions, police cars and prosecuting mob violence.
Knock it off with the straw men and shelve the insults. Only willful misinterpretation could lead you to believe that I'm fine and dandy with vandalism and beating people on the street. I simply believe that this manner of searching for suspects could change the way we procure evidence and the way we determine guilt in ways that are more damaging to our society than a single riot, however major, ever could be.
I have read stories, and some of them were quite specific about the nature of the injuries suffered. According to what I've read exactly one person is in critical condition, there were three stabbings, and one officer received 14 stitches for a brick to the face.
Serious wounds and serious crimes, but hardly the utter chaos one is lead to believe by the phrase "150 injured". Forgive me if I don't think that theft, vandalism, and a half-dozen major injuries warrant an all-out digital dragnet. Frankly, I'd be more frightened of meeting any of the angry vigilante-sounding people who've responded to my post in a dark alley than of meeting the most dangerous of the rioters. At least rioters are just violent pricks and adrenaline-fueled idiots; you guys sound like the sort of vengeful, soulless libertarians who would shoot a man rather than let him walk away with your TV; the kind of people who want all crimes prosecuted to the 'fullest extent of the law', who cares the methods and damn the financial, social, or philosophical cost.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather not 'crowdsource' the manhunt for perpetrators of isolated property crimes. I'd bet the vast majority of these people have no criminal record and that almost nobody did anything violent during these riots. It's not worth setting a precedent that we'll all analyze video for the police merely to get justice for a few totaled cars.
It reminds me a little of the "lets all open our windows and see if we can spot the fleeing criminal" scene in Fahrenheit 451. I'm not helping the police find anyone short of a murderer or rapist through video coverage, if even then.
As for the idea that the congress can successfully work on both raising taxes and managing the budget, they certainly could, I'm simply arguing that the most efficient use of a legislator's time would be in finding ways to reduce or more efficiently use the $3.82 trillion the government plans to spend this year, with or without revenue increases, than to hound after a revenue increase that would raise just 0.7% of the needed funds per year (30 billion / 3.82 trillion).
The government is us. So when the say 'cheat the government' that are saying exactly what you said.
You know this, and I know this; my point was that a surprising number of congressmen and long-time federal bureaucrats don't seem to see it this way anymore. They discharge their jobs and run their mouths off in such a way that they appear to believe the government has life and priorities all its own, which it absolutely should not. It certainly should be pointless semantics to differentiate between cheating the government and cheating the citizenry, but unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case right now. Such theoretical non-distinctions do, in fact, need to be specifically stated when dealing with many government officials.
Uh...yeah. Just how you read "illegitimate government" into my statements I don't know. I'm saying the government works for us, and thus doesn't have any rights or need for income other than to serve us. I'm not even distantly implying any sort of strict Constitutionalist militia bullshit here. It's a perfectly nice and legitimate government, it just needs some god damn priorities.
Well, the article seems to say otherwise. It talks about tracking down not just businesses, but handymen, tutors, individual online buyers, and others via comparing their internet purchases and other financial information against their 'legitimate' income. I only addressed the sales tax part that the summary talked about, but in fact the system does specifically target individuals and it does so for even more than sales taxes.
the USA has had a deficit for almost every year of its existence
That's not only completely false, it would be misleading even if it were completely true. There have been several dozen years during which the debt was paid down at least slightly, and many others in which the increase in GDP far outweighed the increase in the debt. On that last point, I'm not saying anyone should ever count on growing their way out of debt (as a few of the more delusional Republican potential candidates, especially Pawlenty, seem to advocate today), but it's perfectly reasonable for a fiscally stable government to borrow some money in periods of preexisting economic growth, and of course there are times when you can cause economic growth by spending borrowed money in the right places.
So in a word, no. The US government has not spent substantially more than it took in throughout most of it's history, or when it did economic growth or fiscal responsibility closed the gap in following years. The only times we've had truly massive debt spikes were major wars, and the last thirty years of total irresponsibility. And that irresponsibility caught up with us about five years ago, truth be told. Most politicians are barely edging their way around to admitting the possible existence of a problem right now, but this crap reached crisis levels a while ago.
No government can spend more than it takes in for any impressively long time, and it certainly isn't the regular order of things.
This reminds me of the US Senator who declared the necessity of an Internet sales tax on the grounds that people were "cheating the government" by not remitting tax voluntarily on their online purchases. This program seems to come from the same sentiments, and thus I feel towards it as I did towards that Senator: first, the government is not a legitimate entity unto itself. I can't cheat the government, I can only cheat my fellow citizens and myself out of some worthy use of those potential tax dollars. Change your attitude before you start bitching about what people do and don't pay. Second, between better handling the multiple trillions of dollars you already manage in a year and hounding the public for yet another thirty billion you feel you're owed in internet sales taxes, you seriously choose the thirty billion? Third, collecting money at retail is already the most regressive and indirect way of taxing the economy to run the government. You should be abolishing the sales tax entirely and making a more sensible personal and corporate income tax structure, not worrying about the fraction of the sales tax people do not pay.
Bottom line, systems like this are missing the forest in favor of getting self righteous and nit picky about the trees.
I could swear I've read this story before...
I'm not an especially strong Apple hater, but haven't there been other stories on slashdot about Apple blatantly rolling over other companies copyrights or trademarks for names and concepts that sound similar to potential Apple products?
At least in this case they didn't arrest him on the sole charge of Resisting Arrest.
Yes, that actually happens.
Um, yeah, that's what I linked to in the first place.
Oh God dammit I'm an idiot. I did find the original source, it was right on that page. I'd now like to point out, however, that the "study" appears to be a bunch of market research tidbits, for which even the ESA's original presentation doesn't provide a concrete source other than crediting them all to the NPD group. At least, with a few dozen random facts on every page they stop every three pages or so to attribute a particular graph to NPD; other than that and about a million quotes, they don't source anything at all.
This so called study is nothing but the ESA trying to spin a bunch of market research babble into a factual narrative about gamers. They're trying to create the story and history of gaming as it's still developing rather than let it play out naturally.
So now we're posting submissions without sources that try to make an entire discussion out of a single alleged factoid? Seriously?
Most links I can find on this topic point to CNET, but this is the closest thing I can find to the original source. One website high in the google results links to pdf of this supposed study, but the link is dead.
Shoot...yeah, you're right. I had a weird feeling I was missing something.
Is it only masturbation or do sex and masturbation work equally well?
The way this is phrased looks like an incomplete story. Why wouldn't sex work just as well as masturbation? What plausible reason would there be that wanking your doodle by hand works better than wanking it in a soft, pleasant vagina?
Well, the abstract doesn't tell us what comparisons they made other than more coffee drunk vs less, but given that it's a Harvard study I'll extend the trust that they had decent control groups and biostatistics (and I'm not saying that just because I'm all doe-eyed about a big name school, I'm saying that because Harvard has probably the best public health program in the world).
Tea would be a pretty poor control, however; when testing a biochemical cocktail for health effects, when you want a control that measures hydration and fluid intake why on earth would you use a different biochemical cocktail rather than controlling statistically for overall hydration or having some sort of water-drinking control group? How do we know that tea doesn't have a whole host of different effects as opposed to coffee that could totally boink the study data? In fact, it probably does.
When you make $250k, it's a lot harder to decide whether you want the money or your weekend.
I'm completely lost. Shouldn't it make it easier for you, with an income of 250k+, to decide you'd like that weekend off rather than get $2000 when you don't need more money for your lifestyle and $2000 represents an increase of less than 1 percent for your gross income vs. someone else making the same decision who, at 50k, makes barely over the median wage and for whom $2000 is a 4% increase in income? Because it's tough to expand a business without increasing income? Why should we pity people already in the wealthiest 0.1% of the human race when they can't decide whether the take days off many people couldn't ever afford or spend those days chasing even more money?
after the high marginal tax rates of 1981 were cut, tax payments and the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent climbed sharply. For example, in 1981 the top 1 percent paid 17.6 percent of all personal income taxes, but by 1988 their share had jumped to 27.5 percent, a 10 percentage point increase.
The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.
Look, I'm simply fed up and exhausted with people such as yourself endlessly spouting these same statistics about the supposedly ever increasing relative tax burden on the rich and how this supposedly makes everyone with a 7 figure income some kind of martyr. Claiming or even unequivocally proving that the rich account for higher percentages of total tax paid today than yesterday does not amount to proving that the rich are getting screwed or that their taxes are rising at a faster relative rate than other people's.
What percentage of all personal income earned by US citizens do the top 10% make, today vs. yesterday? The top 1%? It's complete chicanery to bemoan the rich paying an ever increasing percentage of the tax pie without addressing whose income is rising and whose is falling. If the rich have been claiming an ever increasing percentage of total gross income earned by US citizens then no shit their taxes should be going up. That is, in fact, the claim of every liberal economist in the US: that the relative wealth of the top 1-5% continues to increase by a couple points per year while the middle and lower classes have experienced year-over-year losses in relative economic power for 39 years straight (I seem to recall claims that 1972 was the modern-era maximum for purchasing power and financial stability in the lower 90% of earners).
Convince me that the rich don't have all the money and then I'll agree that they shouldn't pay all the taxes.
The 1993 Clinton tax increase appears to [sic] having the opposite effect on the willingness of wealthy taxpayers to expose income to taxation. According to IRS data, the income generated by the top one percent of income earners actually declined in 1993.
There shouldn't be any fucking choice about whether you "expose" income to taxation! If it's income, it gets taxed. This quote in comparison with your other choices amounts to admitting flat-out that while claiming they're sad little martyrs who pay all the taxes for everyone the rich are simultaneously hiding money from taxation. I can see things like a slightly lower (and by "slightly" I mean "sure as fuck not 20%+ lower") capital gains rate or a respectable deduction for capital gains to create investment incentives, but there should be no category of income, no method of accounting, that makes millions of dollars totally tax free.