Actually the GP is right, nukes have stopped global wars. It is well established that more than once the USA and the USSR thought about starting WWIII and stopped in their tracks because with MAD (mutually assured destruction) no one wins.
While $65,000 to $75,000 seems like a lot for a car (I cringe at paying half that), there are just as many cars in that price range rolling in Palm Beach County that aren't nearly as exotic or as head-turning as the Tesla. I pass dozens of $65k+ cars on the way to work and it isn't unusual to see $100k+ cars either.
Not only that, the car looks like a $75K car which goes a long way towards making regular people fork that type of cash (e.g. Mercedes, Jaguar and Bentley customers).
"Overtaxed" means you feel that you are paying too much for what you get from the government.
Nope. Republicans have re-written the definition to mean that, but it is incorrect.
Going back to your restaurant analogy, it's like saying the food is overpriced.
Correct, there is a term for that which is "overpriced", yet republicans on purpose are using the term "overcharged" in an attempt to muddle the issue.
A place might charge you $2K for a burger which is waaay overpriced, but it you knowingly go in and order the two-grand burger you cannot complain about being overcharged.
Similarly with the government, every year we elect representatives who spend like drunken sailors, particularly republicans, who keep on increasing the spending tab while decreasing revenues. Keep in mind that the largest decrease in deficit took place during the Clinton administration, the largest increase took place during Bush Jr. with the book on Obama yet to be written.
It's just that when people say they're overtaxed, they are not talking about what you're talking about.
So it's they which are equivocating and selling a false bill of goods. This actually suggests that the arguments for tax cuts are not very good, and hence they have to rely on misstatements such as "we are overtaxed" to support them.
The political views expressed on slashdot are usually somewhat to the left of Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung and Ho Che Mihn.
Only in America could someone make such hyperbolic statements as the parent post and be modded "4: Informative".
It secretly appeals to Godwin's law by replacing you know who with a functional equivalent from the left, but I guess/. mods are too stupid to notice this.
The NSA is full of really smart people. There is not much we can come up with here they haven't thought of. The problem is that they are not being evaluated by how many attacks they stop (see the Boston bombings). They get measured by how active and busy they look.
Political ignoramuses consider a short, narrow targeted no-fly list a failure (picture Bush Jr in the oval office: "you've only found 100 people after I gave you 10Gigadollars???") while they are very impressed with a 100K long no-fly list ("you are catching so many of them! good job! here's another 3Gbucks").
If a positive result is obtained additional data is gathered using different tests aimed at eliminating the false positives.
If the additional test is too expensive, then at least for the case of illnesses you wait for the first indicator to be something else like "doc, I'm not feeling ok". By now if the test comes positive you have two indicators of a possible illness which now makes the expensive test worthwhile.
High taxes from the government can only be used to punish unwanted behavior not to increase revenue.
Not so. Higher taxes during the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations increased revenue. Look it up. In fact data suggests that revenue will continue increasing, albeit progressively more slowly, until somewhere around 60-70% of GDP. Of course at that level we are getting rather diminishing returns, so it is not worth chasing the last 10-15%. However from a purely revenue perspective collections would increase rather nicely until around a net tax rate of 50%.
As I said, there might be many other reasons why we wouldn't want that to happen (for example, personally I'm philosophically opposed to the government taking more than half your profits), but lower revenues is not a valid reason against that taxation level.
Yet it has been proven time and again that lowering high taxes increases revenue for the government due to increased economic activity
Actually not at all. FoxNews and the GOP repeat this all the time hoping that naive people will fall for it, but if you look at actual evidence there is no support for this claim.
All present evidence by economists from all sides of the political spectrum suggest that we are on the other side of the Laffer curve, the one where increased taxes means increased revenues. See for example the Bush Sr and Clinton tax increases.
Let me be clear, I agree very much that it is possible to tax so much that a reduction of taxes would mean an increase in revenues, i.e. the Laffer curve does exist. Having established its existence then we need to find on which side of the curve are we. The UK with its 100%+ tax rates in the 60s-70s was very clearly on the side of "lower tax rates and you will get more money". As I said, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that the US is not in that part of the curve.
I agree, that's exactly my point: We are not overtaxed.
Depending on your political preferences we are either overspending or undertaxed (or both). But we most definitely are not overtaxed. This is follows from basic accounting definitions. As simple as that.
I was talking about the military attacks as you might have clued on from the subtle hidden hint in "said military attacks".
You now bring up the terrorist attack and write it up in ALL CAPS as if that made it any more relevant to the explicit point I was making about "said military attacks".
Sorry, but its the blog author who fails the bias test:
Here, Gladwell completely neglects to mention that two of the crashes were caused by either military engagement or terrorism.
First of all he does acknowledge it was a military attack. Second it's the blog author the one who fails to acknowledge said military attacks caused by the plane wandering away from its route, which is very much pilot error.
In fact the write up in that blog is so biased and the overall tone so inflammatory that the original story should be modded -1 Flamebait.
We are undertaxed. How can we tell? because we are running a deficit. As simple as that.
Say if you go to a restaurant and start paying by installments. How do you go about finding out if you have over or underpaid? well you check to see if you still have a deficit on your tab, if there is still one you haven't paid enough. It is no different with the government,
What you are trying to say is that the government is overspending and I might or might not agree with you (in fact, I agree with you: it overspends by a mile particularly in defense matters and tax subsidies to the wealthy people/corporations), but saying we are overtaxed today is a factual falsehood propagated by the GOP. Given current levels of expenditures we are way under-taxed.
Back around the year 2000 people repeatedly asked you to make Java open source. Given what has happened since the Oracle acquisition do you regret not doing so back then?
If this were an android or iOS phone people would be drooling over the quantum leap in MPs. But since it is a windows phone (which I too despise) fanbois will come up with arguments why 41MP are actually bad.
Let's be honest people. 41MP is amazing. I still won't be getting one since it runs WiPh, but the camera is amazing. Period. End of Story.
Why stop at one? James, it's been nearly 20 years since Java was publicly released (I first heard about it at a conference in Dec 94). Can you tell us the top 5 to 10 things that you think could have been better done and wish future programming language designers will get right?
If he has any smarts, he'll rattle a long list: heck no language is perfect, and over the years one learns many things. If he doesn't he'll circle the wagons and answer "nothing".
Actually many of the activities of the government are wealth producing, including science, education and infrastructure.
The funny thing is that obviously false FoxNews talking point gets modded +5 Insightful because it appeals to people to be told that money was unjustly taken from them.
p.s. By the way people out there reading this with mod points, you are all extremely handsome and you pay too much taxes, and you deserve a raise.
Right, because making it easier to debug is not a real gain, but an imaginary one, and also bandwidth being so expensive one can barely afford the extra 1K of headers from HTML. I mean nowadays sending that can take as long as 1 millisecond over a slow connection. Who has that kind of time?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the GP is right, nukes have stopped global wars. It is well established that more than once the USA and the USSR thought about starting WWIII and stopped in their tracks because with MAD (mutually assured destruction) no one wins.
Google has 4x the market share, so a back of the envelope calculation suggests that Google has 4M servers.
While $65,000 to $75,000 seems like a lot for a car (I cringe at paying half that), there are just as many cars in that price range rolling in Palm Beach County that aren't nearly as exotic or as head-turning as the Tesla. I pass dozens of $65k+ cars on the way to work and it isn't unusual to see $100k+ cars either.
Not only that, the car looks like a $75K car which goes a long way towards making regular people fork that type of cash (e.g. Mercedes, Jaguar and Bentley customers).
"Overtaxed" means you feel that you are paying too much for what you get from the government.
Nope. Republicans have re-written the definition to mean that, but it is incorrect.
Going back to your restaurant analogy, it's like saying the food is overpriced.
Correct, there is a term for that which is "overpriced", yet republicans on purpose are using the term "overcharged" in an attempt to muddle the issue.
A place might charge you $2K for a burger which is waaay overpriced, but it you knowingly go in and order the two-grand burger you cannot complain about being overcharged.
Similarly with the government, every year we elect representatives who spend like drunken sailors, particularly republicans, who keep on increasing the spending tab while decreasing revenues. Keep in mind that the largest decrease in deficit took place during the Clinton administration, the largest increase took place during Bush Jr. with the book on Obama yet to be written.
The Nobel Peace Prize has always been political.
...and people often forget their truly worst gaffe: not giving it to Gandhi, after achieving India's independence through peaceful means.
It's just that when people say they're overtaxed, they are not talking about what you're talking about.
So it's they which are equivocating and selling a false bill of goods. This actually suggests that the arguments for tax cuts are not very good, and hence they have to rely on misstatements such as "we are overtaxed" to support them.
You gather less data as compared to the test everyone option.
The political views expressed on slashdot are usually somewhat to the left of Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung and Ho Che Mihn.
Only in America could someone make such hyperbolic statements as the parent post and be modded "4: Informative".
It secretly appeals to Godwin's law by replacing you know who with a functional equivalent from the left, but I guess /. mods are too stupid to notice this.
Yet it's not illegal.
Actually it can be. Is called stalking.
LMFTFY
He'll always be "that guy who was playing cowboy with a loaded gun without any proper training and ended up killing a teenage boy"
He deserves that and so does any other "quick to the trigger, no-retreat law supporters"
The NSA is full of really smart people. There is not much we can come up with here they haven't thought of. The problem is that they are not being evaluated by how many attacks they stop (see the Boston bombings). They get measured by how active and busy they look.
Political ignoramuses consider a short, narrow targeted no-fly list a failure (picture Bush Jr in the oval office: "you've only found 100 people after I gave you 10Gigadollars???") while they are very impressed with a 100K long no-fly list ("you are catching so many of them! good job! here's another 3Gbucks").
If a positive result is obtained additional data is gathered using different tests aimed at eliminating the false positives.
If the additional test is too expensive, then at least for the case of illnesses you wait for the first indicator to be something else like "doc, I'm not feeling ok". By now if the test comes positive you have two indicators of a possible illness which now makes the expensive test worthwhile.
High taxes from the government can only be used to punish unwanted behavior not to increase revenue.
Not so. Higher taxes during the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations increased revenue. Look it up. In fact data suggests that revenue will continue increasing, albeit progressively more slowly, until somewhere around 60-70% of GDP. Of course at that level we are getting rather diminishing returns, so it is not worth chasing the last 10-15%. However from a purely revenue perspective collections would increase rather nicely until around a net tax rate of 50%.
As I said, there might be many other reasons why we wouldn't want that to happen (for example, personally I'm philosophically opposed to the government taking more than half your profits), but lower revenues is not a valid reason against that taxation level.
You cannot look at isolated taxes, some go up, some go down. The tax take as percentage of GDP went up steadily for all of Clinton years in office.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205
So did revenues. That was the only time in recent memory that the USA posted a budget surplus.
Yet it has been proven time and again that lowering high taxes increases revenue for the government due to increased economic activity
Actually not at all. FoxNews and the GOP repeat this all the time hoping that naive people will fall for it, but if you look at actual evidence there is no support for this claim.
All present evidence by economists from all sides of the political spectrum suggest that we are on the other side of the Laffer curve, the one where increased taxes means increased revenues. See for example the Bush Sr and Clinton tax increases.
Let me be clear, I agree very much that it is possible to tax so much that a reduction of taxes would mean an increase in revenues, i.e. the Laffer curve does exist. Having established its existence then we need to find on which side of the curve are we. The UK with its 100%+ tax rates in the 60s-70s was very clearly on the side of "lower tax rates and you will get more money". As I said, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that the US is not in that part of the curve.
LMFTFY
Except that optical zoom means jack shit when there is a 41MP element
I agree, that's exactly my point: We are not overtaxed.
Depending on your political preferences we are either overspending or undertaxed (or both). But we most definitely are not overtaxed. This is follows from basic accounting definitions. As simple as that.
I was talking about the military attacks as you might have clued on from the subtle hidden hint in "said military attacks".
You now bring up the terrorist attack and write it up in ALL CAPS as if that made it any more relevant to the explicit point I was making about "said military attacks".
Sorry, but its the blog author who fails the bias test:
Here, Gladwell completely neglects to mention that two of the crashes were caused by either military engagement or terrorism.
First of all he does acknowledge it was a military attack. Second it's the blog author the one who fails to acknowledge said military attacks caused by the plane wandering away from its route, which is very much pilot error.
In fact the write up in that blog is so biased and the overall tone so inflammatory that the original story should be modded -1 Flamebait.
We are undertaxed. How can we tell? because we are running a deficit. As simple as that.
Say if you go to a restaurant and start paying by installments. How do you go about finding out if you have over or underpaid? well you check to see if you still have a deficit on your tab, if there is still one you haven't paid enough. It is no different with the government,
What you are trying to say is that the government is overspending and I might or might not agree with you (in fact, I agree with you: it overspends by a mile particularly in defense matters and tax subsidies to the wealthy people/corporations), but saying we are overtaxed today is a factual falsehood propagated by the GOP. Given current levels of expenditures we are way under-taxed.
Back around the year 2000 people repeatedly asked you to make Java open source. Given what has happened since the Oracle acquisition do you regret not doing so back then?
If this were an android or iOS phone people would be drooling over the quantum leap in MPs. But since it is a windows phone (which I too despise) fanbois will come up with arguments why 41MP are actually bad.
Let's be honest people. 41MP is amazing. I still won't be getting one since it runs WiPh, but the camera is amazing. Period. End of Story.
Why stop at one? James, it's been nearly 20 years since Java was publicly released (I first heard about it at a conference in Dec 94). Can you tell us the top 5 to 10 things that you think could have been better done and wish future programming language designers will get right?
If he has any smarts, he'll rattle a long list: heck no language is perfect, and over the years one learns many things. If he doesn't he'll circle the wagons and answer "nothing".
Actually many of the activities of the government are wealth producing, including science, education and infrastructure.
The funny thing is that obviously false FoxNews talking point gets modded +5 Insightful because it appeals to people to be told that money was unjustly taken from them.
p.s. By the way people out there reading this with mod points, you are all extremely handsome and you pay too much taxes, and you deserve a raise.
Human readable is a bug, not a feature.
[Citation needed]
for no real gain.
Right, because making it easier to debug is not a real gain, but an imaginary one, and also bandwidth being so expensive one can barely afford the extra 1K of headers from HTML. I mean nowadays sending that can take as long as 1 millisecond over a slow connection. Who has that kind of time?