Sometimes people say, of Snowden, "He should have gone through official channels."
In 2001, William Binney did exactly that. Ever since then, Binney had been harrassed and prosecuted by the government, and marginalized and ignored by the media -- until Snowden embarrassed the major media with the help of Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian. Binney (and Drake before him) is why Snowden was right not to go through official channels; that method had been tested and found to fail.
That's a big part of the reason I went with Binney instead of Doctorow (my original choice); to make you, and others like you, wonder, "Who is Binney?" Hopefully most of the rest will realize they can type "binney" into a search engine.:)
That image is my original artwork (with friendly tips from Slashdot user Indigo), copyright 2014 Robert Bushman, licensed under CC by-nc-sa. It is properly sized for a 2.75" by 5" sticker with.125" bleed at 300 dpi. I'm getting them printed at psprint.com (I recommend doing a search for "vinyl bumper stickers", since they often have a coupon running on Duck Duck Go). I haven't seen my physical proofs yet, but the on-screen color conversion looked good to me. Please feel free to print a stack and spread them far and wide.
I appreciate you taking the time to comment and give suggestions. I think I am going to go with Snowden/Binney, and that I will stop fiddling with the design. Thank you!
Far to many Americans these days don't care how much it hurts government funding as long as it hurts people better off than them.
And far too many remain emotionally attached to laissez-faire despite extensive empirical evidence that in the real world it does not match the theoretical ideal free market.
Naturally, GDP growth is all that matters long term. Heck, even in just 20 years, the difference between 2% and 4% growth makes more difference in our day-to-day lives than anything else the government can do. But so few people seem to care.
The hardest thing for me to do when I did a deep dive on the data was to give up the preconception that I was hoping to prove. I went into it believing that the shift in the level of the top tax bracket had caused the reduction in long-run GDP growth by increasing friction on the entrepreneurial class (roughly P90 - P99 income range). While the data did not support my belief, it gave me an extraordinarily detailed picture of what did happen. I am an economist and an empiricist; my only rational choice was to abandon my belief in favor of the truth.
who really get screwed by attempts at social justice through the tax code.
Don't pull that "social justice" crap on me. I have made it exceedingly clear that my only concern is long-run GDP growth. I believe that the only possible "social justice" coincides with maximizing the income of the highest earners -- which happens to be achieved by the exact same path as maximizing the income of the lowest earners. The only path to that end is maximizing long-run GDP growth -- it's a math thing, you can't maximize anyone's income without maximizing long-run GDP growth. And maximizing long-run GDP growth necessarily maximizes everyone's income in the long run.
While too much income concentration can certainly be a problem, it's not what the tax code is for.
It is exactly what the tax structure is for. The idea is to gradually increase the friction as compensation packages increase in size, so that the government cannot specify who gets paid how much, but can have an influence on the broad distribution of income (in my opinion, which power should only be used to maximize long-run GDP growth rates).
Taxes are for funding the government
That's what the overall tax rate is for, not the tax structure.
(And those with very high income have great flexibility as to when, where, and how they receive compensation - it's those in the "Second 1%," small business owners, doctors, lawyers, and top-tier salaried workers, who really get screwed by attempts at social justice through the tax code. The executive making $500k has other options to dodge taxes, such as getting paid in Ireland, or get pay spread over 5 years, or whatever.)
That is an extremely good point. It is a critical flaw in our tax structure that is actually a direct cause of the reduction in tax progressivity that started before Reganomics. I'm not sandbagging or trying to trick you; you really have hit on one of the most important problems with our tax structure.
Prior to 1993, our marginal tax rate thresholds were not adjusted for inflation. In 1934, the top tax bracket started at $1m nominal, $13.9m real (2014) using the GDP deflator (feel free to use a different deflator for your own calculations, as suits your context, of course). In 1936 it was upped to $5m nominal, $67.1m real. In 1942, it was cut to $200k nominal, $2.3m real. In 1954, there was a major update but the top marginal level remained at $200k nominal, which inflation had dropped to $1.4m real. In 1986, it was still at $200k nominal, which had fallen to $430k real. And in 1993, it was finally set to track inflation, and was set to $250k nominal, $407k real.
So, from 1934 to 1954, the top marginal bracket moved from the truly extraordinarily high earners to the merely exceptional. From 1954 to 1986 (particularly during the massive inflation in the wake of OPEC driving up the price of oil in the early 1970s) it dropped from the exceptionally high earners to hit a really wide range of C-execs, VPs, and even officers in small to medium enterprises. This is when the high top marginal rate, which had been a healthy moderating influence (according to the empirical data) on a tiny fraction of society, started to really pinch the broad "got there on hard work and talent alone" class, including entrepreneurs and people who worked their way up from the blue collar families. That provided the pressure that galvanized Reagan to lower the top marginal rate, but we had already put in a major reduction in 1963.
Which all is to say, the top marginal bracket is much too low. In fact, I believe that if we increased the top marginal rate without moving the top marginal bracket right now, it could very well harm the economy. But the data still says that a higher top marginal rate is better for long-run GDP growth. If my belief that keeping the top marginal bracket at this level while raising the top rate the same would be harmful is correct, then the policy we should be testing -- if our objective is to maximize long-run GDP growth -- is to increase both the top marginal rate and the level at which it kicks in.
That is what the empirical data says is best for everyone, rich, poor, and middle class alike; regardless of what our hearts might believe.
Changing the name from Ask Slashdot to Slashdot Asks seems a rather telling display of your character. You see yourselves as Slashdot, and the commenters as... what, customers? the audience?
The next Beta Sucks is coming, it is only a matter of time. Until you realize that we, the commenters, are the site -- that we create the value you sell to the readers -- you will never be out from under that hanging sword.
Do me a favor; go to YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Ars, and half a dozen other sites, and read some comment streams. Do you see how vacuous they are? Do you see how much chaff you must wade through to find one or two poignant insights?
The moderation and metamoderation systems here have generated a unique community (well, not entirely unique, with SoylentNews cruising along in the wings). It is the community of commenters that you have the privilege of monetizing. But only so long as you don't piss it away with your narcissism.
Here's Snowden/Binney. I'm a little frustrated with the extra negative space below the "den" in Snowden, because Binney's name is too short, and the tall "i" and hanging "y" are messing with me, and I'm not a graphic designer. I've moved and resized everything but I keep coming back to the original layout. I'm tempted to change their roles on the ticket because Binney/Snowden fits great. grumble grumble
I guess I just have to remember that I'm making a statement, not an actual political campaign -- it need not be perfect to achieve its goal.
But top-tier incomes are really unstable, they go down fast in a downturn and up fast in an upturn, so federal revenue takes it on the chin from that group during times like 2008-2011.
Is that a bad thing or a good thing? If the ideal case is for taxation to decrease during lean times, and to increase during times of plenty, that might make a rather nice automatic adjustment.
That's probably the dominant factor in changes federal revenue as a percentage of GOP these days, now that 1% of tax payers pay about 1/3 of all income taxes, and that noise drowns out any signal we might get from changes in top marginal rate.
I don't care about equality for its own sake, I'm a heartless economist: Whatever maximizes long run GDP is the best answer; it makes the rich richest, and it makes the poor richest, and it makes everyone in between richest, in the long run. That is the only objective definition of "good" in my world. There's a lot of unfounded beliefs on both sides of the argument, but the data, if you look at it without presuming to know the answer, points pretty hard in one direction.
Thank you! Just yesterday, in fact, I submitted this one for an initial 25 prints as proofs, and if they come out right I'll be printing 2,000 to hand out at Burning Man. What do you think of Snowden Doctorow versus Snowden Binney? The upside to Doctorow is name recognition and the approachability of his writing, particularly Little Brother and Homeland. The upside of using Binney, of course, is that more people should know what he has done for his country.
Your thoughts? (and if you ping me off list at bob at thrhahxhehl.com remove all the h's, I'll mail you a few)
Do you want to increase tax revenue, or tax rates? The two are not necessarily the same, depending on which side of the Laffer Curve we currently occupy.
Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is now, and has been for a decade, lower than it was in the 50's and 60's. Since the 50's and 60's were the two decades when we rose to superpower -- with the highest sustained GDP growth in our history -- empirical data says we are safe to at least go up to that level.
I would posit that we are almost certainly in the big hairy middle section of the Neo-Laffer Curve. That is, even without the evidence we gathered during our golden era, I would still suspect we are far from the point where excessive taxation becomes a primary cause of reduced GDP growth.
a revenue reduction concurrent with an even larger spending reduction.
Yes, as soon as we get that big spending reduction (which I favor), we can take revenue increases off the table. Meanwhile, I remain a fiscal conservative; our deficit is excessive, and we must do all of: cut defense, cut health spending, cut social security, and increase revenue until we bring the deficit under control. We cannot tolerate saying, "But not the one I don't like." Bullshit. Cut them all, and increase revenue, until we get the deficit under control. Then we can have our pudding, but we can't have any pudding if we don't eat our meat.
Realistically, I'm not sure things would be much better if we had a different president. Even Ron Paul, who would assuredly do his damnedest to actually set things right, would be one man against an army of criminal, power-hungry scum. Still, I'd rather take a man that tries over a man that supports this evil.
the Constitution is a blacklist of things government is not allowed to do, not a whitelist of things Citizens ARE allowed to do.
I get your sentiment, and support it, but I must quibble on a minor point: The main body of the Constitution is a whitelist of duties the government is charged with, and the means for doing so. The first ten amendments, The Bill of Rights, is a blacklist of things the government is forbidden from doing without a constitutional amendment. The 9th and 10th amendments specify that the Bill of Rights, being a blacklist, is not to be interpreted as a whitelist of citizen rights.
The only defense is to give them just barely enough resources to do their job,... It's all about taxes... there are but a handful of congresscritters who actually are for less government spending,
Are you unhappy with taxes or with budget allocation? The first and third part above are about budget allocation, which, unfortunately, has very little to do with taxation. The middle part is about taxes, which, unfortunately, have very little to do with budget allocation.
I favor reducing spending and increasing taxes. That is because I am a fiscal conservative and we are currently running a wildly excessive deficit. I believe in running a balanced budget except during exceptional economic downturns, in which a short-term deficit is fiscally prudent for the long-term outcome, and in times of plenty, when a short term surplus prepares our larder for the next downturn.
Conflating reductions in spending with reductions in taxation is a premeditated psychological manipulation tactic. There are bad people out there who want to maximize their personal short-term outcome by cranking up the deficit and damn the consequences to the economy. Those people are not helpful to America. Do not fall victim to the false equivalence of taxation and spending.
Programming is not something that requires grueling training or rare talents. Algebraic topology, cardiothoracic surgery, and competitive chess require those. If you're writing code that requires elite skills, you're doing it wrong - no one is going to be able to understand it, and you will never be able to troubleshoot it. Someone with an IQ of 100 can become a perfectly competent Java or C++ programmer with two years of intensive training.
You said "competitive chess" which implies a high skill level and "cardiothoracic surgery" which implies doing it well enough to have zero fatal errors most of the time. Those don't correlate to "competent programmer", nor to a programmer who can perform well in a job that requires code that works, has a long service life, and can be maintained. Writing a PGP key manager that can traverse the web of trust without granting privs to an attacker, for example, really does require elite skills -- just like your elite electrician and elite body mechanic.
Anyone can write Hello World, many can write an address book. It takes a lot of study to be able to write a cluster management system.
The tools, well I know people who swear vim is easier to use than the latest IDE that has full intellisense and refactoring builtin, and they are probably right - in that they have learned their craft using that tool and actually are more productive than the bloated and slow IDE could make them.
I would add that very little of my programming time is spent writing code, which is what an IDE is most helpful with; refactoring, code skeletons, reminding you of the order of args, etc. Most of the time I spend programming -- at least on anything that I expect will have a long service life -- is spent thinking through the right way for the code to work so it will be clear, fast, easy on memory, and work in a way that makes sense when we apply it in a different context. There is no IDE or language that can help with that part of the problem.
While your comment sounds like over-the-top sarcasm, keep in mind the time when you go to the dentist and your dental insurance company refuses to pay their portion of the bill because you have not been brushing your teeth properly....
It's good, and coming soon.
Not too much further down the road: When your average time spent brushing suddenly falls and the 7:00 PM brushings stop altogether, the analytic engine interprets this as having broken up; so it starts sending you ads for Haagen Dazs and cookies, because it knows you are vulnerable. You succumb to temptation, which creates a credit record, and your health insurance company ups your rates for the diabetes risk.
It's not just about responding to weaknesses, it is also about preying on them.
I'm wondering about the idea of having a group of friends who swap their cell devices. You'd have to change a lot of your comm, but if you use the cellular system just for bandwidth, you don't really care about your cellular identity except for you phone number. If you can migrate your friends to contacting you via internet comm, you don't need to have the same cellular identity from one day to the next.
Toss in dynamic proxying through SSH, and you aren't exposing your comm fingerprint to your cell provider. Use OwnCloud to swap in your files and contacts (a bit of data overhead there, maybe keep most of your heavy content data on a separate device that tethers to whatever cell phone you happen to be carrying).
They'd still be able to analyze your tracking footprint to figure out who held which phone at which time, but it would make surveillance more expensive.
I'm not saying I think they know it now, or are intentionally moving in this direction, but consider the market forces involved: Is this, Netflix's similar effort, and ISP throttling, ultimately just foreplay to getting in bed together? They have the potential to really harm each other, and that has to get through to them eventually.
Seems to me, barring common carrier or another path to true net neutrality, both sides have more to gain by colluding than by fighting. If big content and big ISPs work together, they could create a barrier to independent ISPs and content.
This is a problem with the law, not with... Qualcomm. Fix the damned law.
I agree we should fix the law, but it absolutely is a problem with Qualcomm also, and we (especially the many network admins here who specify network hardware purchases) should hold their feet to the fire over this.
I own a software engineering consultancy. The business tax code is sufficiently vague that I could slip in all kinds of things that are not really business expenses. I do not, because I will not cheat my nation. Good people do not abuse bad laws. Those who do cheat their society are defectors and society's interests are best served when they are punished by the people for their behavior.
As it says at the linked explanation, 2600 is not a charity, and they're not seeking donations -- but they would like you to buy the magazine (in print or Kindle form),
If you feel like buying the current issue isn't enough, and/or can't make it to NYC for the conference, they have bulk prices on back issues ($5/issue or less). I don't regularly read 2600, but I think they are an important resource for the security community.
Slashdot Mirror
who is binney
But, maybe my previous response was too snarky...
Sometimes people say, of Snowden, "He should have gone through official channels."
In 2001, William Binney did exactly that. Ever since then, Binney had been harrassed and prosecuted by the government, and marginalized and ignored by the media -- until Snowden embarrassed the major media with the help of Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian. Binney (and Drake before him) is why Snowden was right not to go through official channels; that method had been tested and found to fail.
who is binney
That's a big part of the reason I went with Binney instead of Doctorow (my original choice); to make you, and others like you, wonder, "Who is Binney?" Hopefully most of the rest will realize they can type "binney" into a search engine. :)
Looks like ".Snowden" at first glance. Reduce the space between the i and the dot.
Thanks for the tip. Done. Same url.
Snowden / Binney 2016!
That image is my original artwork (with friendly tips from Slashdot user Indigo), copyright 2014 Robert Bushman, licensed under CC by-nc-sa. It is properly sized for a 2.75" by 5" sticker with .125" bleed at 300 dpi. I'm getting them printed at psprint.com (I recommend doing a search for "vinyl bumper stickers", since they often have a coupon running on Duck Duck Go). I haven't seen my physical proofs yet, but the on-screen color conversion looked good to me. Please feel free to print a stack and spread them far and wide.
I appreciate you taking the time to comment and give suggestions. I think I am going to go with Snowden/Binney, and that I will stop fiddling with the design. Thank you!
Far to many Americans these days don't care how much it hurts government funding as long as it hurts people better off than them.
And far too many remain emotionally attached to laissez-faire despite extensive empirical evidence that in the real world it does not match the theoretical ideal free market.
Naturally, GDP growth is all that matters long term. Heck, even in just 20 years, the difference between 2% and 4% growth makes more difference in our day-to-day lives than anything else the government can do. But so few people seem to care.
The hardest thing for me to do when I did a deep dive on the data was to give up the preconception that I was hoping to prove. I went into it believing that the shift in the level of the top tax bracket had caused the reduction in long-run GDP growth by increasing friction on the entrepreneurial class (roughly P90 - P99 income range). While the data did not support my belief, it gave me an extraordinarily detailed picture of what did happen. I am an economist and an empiricist; my only rational choice was to abandon my belief in favor of the truth.
Oh, and one more thing:
who really get screwed by attempts at social justice through the tax code.
Don't pull that "social justice" crap on me. I have made it exceedingly clear that my only concern is long-run GDP growth. I believe that the only possible "social justice" coincides with maximizing the income of the highest earners -- which happens to be achieved by the exact same path as maximizing the income of the lowest earners. The only path to that end is maximizing long-run GDP growth -- it's a math thing, you can't maximize anyone's income without maximizing long-run GDP growth. And maximizing long-run GDP growth necessarily maximizes everyone's income in the long run.
While too much income concentration can certainly be a problem, it's not what the tax code is for.
It is exactly what the tax structure is for. The idea is to gradually increase the friction as compensation packages increase in size, so that the government cannot specify who gets paid how much, but can have an influence on the broad distribution of income (in my opinion, which power should only be used to maximize long-run GDP growth rates).
Taxes are for funding the government
That's what the overall tax rate is for, not the tax structure.
(And those with very high income have great flexibility as to when, where, and how they receive compensation - it's those in the "Second 1%," small business owners, doctors, lawyers, and top-tier salaried workers, who really get screwed by attempts at social justice through the tax code. The executive making $500k has other options to dodge taxes, such as getting paid in Ireland, or get pay spread over 5 years, or whatever.)
That is an extremely good point. It is a critical flaw in our tax structure that is actually a direct cause of the reduction in tax progressivity that started before Reganomics. I'm not sandbagging or trying to trick you; you really have hit on one of the most important problems with our tax structure.
Prior to 1993, our marginal tax rate thresholds were not adjusted for inflation. In 1934, the top tax bracket started at $1m nominal, $13.9m real (2014) using the GDP deflator (feel free to use a different deflator for your own calculations, as suits your context, of course). In 1936 it was upped to $5m nominal, $67.1m real. In 1942, it was cut to $200k nominal, $2.3m real. In 1954, there was a major update but the top marginal level remained at $200k nominal, which inflation had dropped to $1.4m real. In 1986, it was still at $200k nominal, which had fallen to $430k real. And in 1993, it was finally set to track inflation, and was set to $250k nominal, $407k real.
So, from 1934 to 1954, the top marginal bracket moved from the truly extraordinarily high earners to the merely exceptional. From 1954 to 1986 (particularly during the massive inflation in the wake of OPEC driving up the price of oil in the early 1970s) it dropped from the exceptionally high earners to hit a really wide range of C-execs, VPs, and even officers in small to medium enterprises. This is when the high top marginal rate, which had been a healthy moderating influence (according to the empirical data) on a tiny fraction of society, started to really pinch the broad "got there on hard work and talent alone" class, including entrepreneurs and people who worked their way up from the blue collar families. That provided the pressure that galvanized Reagan to lower the top marginal rate, but we had already put in a major reduction in 1963.
Which all is to say, the top marginal bracket is much too low. In fact, I believe that if we increased the top marginal rate without moving the top marginal bracket right now, it could very well harm the economy. But the data still says that a higher top marginal rate is better for long-run GDP growth. If my belief that keeping the top marginal bracket at this level while raising the top rate the same would be harmful is correct, then the policy we should be testing -- if our objective is to maximize long-run GDP growth -- is to increase both the top marginal rate and the level at which it kicks in.
That is what the empirical data says is best for everyone, rich, poor, and middle class alike; regardless of what our hearts might believe.
Changing the name from Ask Slashdot to Slashdot Asks seems a rather telling display of your character. You see yourselves as Slashdot, and the commenters as ... what, customers? the audience?
The next Beta Sucks is coming, it is only a matter of time. Until you realize that we, the commenters, are the site -- that we create the value you sell to the readers -- you will never be out from under that hanging sword.
Do me a favor; go to YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Ars, and half a dozen other sites, and read some comment streams. Do you see how vacuous they are? Do you see how much chaff you must wade through to find one or two poignant insights?
The moderation and metamoderation systems here have generated a unique community (well, not entirely unique, with SoylentNews cruising along in the wings). It is the community of commenters that you have the privilege of monetizing. But only so long as you don't piss it away with your narcissism.
Here's Snowden/Binney. I'm a little frustrated with the extra negative space below the "den" in Snowden, because Binney's name is too short, and the tall "i" and hanging "y" are messing with me, and I'm not a graphic designer. I've moved and resized everything but I keep coming back to the original layout. I'm tempted to change their roles on the ticket because Binney/Snowden fits great. grumble grumble
I guess I just have to remember that I'm making a statement, not an actual political campaign -- it need not be perfect to achieve its goal.
But top-tier incomes are really unstable, they go down fast in a downturn and up fast in an upturn, so federal revenue takes it on the chin from that group during times like 2008-2011.
Is that a bad thing or a good thing? If the ideal case is for taxation to decrease during lean times, and to increase during times of plenty, that might make a rather nice automatic adjustment.
That's probably the dominant factor in changes federal revenue as a percentage of GOP these days, now that 1% of tax payers pay about 1/3 of all income taxes, and that noise drowns out any signal we might get from changes in top marginal rate.
Also worth noting that in the 1950s and 1960s, the period of greatest economic growth in our history, we had a much higher top marginal rate. As corollary evidence, consider that a lower Gini index (less income concentration) correlates to a higher GDP per capita (PPP, product per person) all over the world.
I don't care about equality for its own sake, I'm a heartless economist: Whatever maximizes long run GDP is the best answer; it makes the rich richest, and it makes the poor richest, and it makes everyone in between richest, in the long run. That is the only objective definition of "good" in my world. There's a lot of unfounded beliefs on both sides of the argument, but the data, if you look at it without presuming to know the answer, points pretty hard in one direction.
Thank you! Just yesterday, in fact, I submitted this one for an initial 25 prints as proofs, and if they come out right I'll be printing 2,000 to hand out at Burning Man. What do you think of Snowden Doctorow versus Snowden Binney? The upside to Doctorow is name recognition and the approachability of his writing, particularly Little Brother and Homeland. The upside of using Binney, of course, is that more people should know what he has done for his country.
Your thoughts? (and if you ping me off list at bob at thrhahxhehl.com remove all the h's, I'll mail you a few)
Do you want to increase tax revenue, or tax rates? The two are not necessarily the same, depending on which side of the Laffer Curve we currently occupy.
Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is now, and has been for a decade, lower than it was in the 50's and 60's. Since the 50's and 60's were the two decades when we rose to superpower -- with the highest sustained GDP growth in our history -- empirical data says we are safe to at least go up to that level.
I would posit that we are almost certainly in the big hairy middle section of the Neo-Laffer Curve. That is, even without the evidence we gathered during our golden era, I would still suspect we are far from the point where excessive taxation becomes a primary cause of reduced GDP growth.
a revenue reduction concurrent with an even larger spending reduction.
Yes, as soon as we get that big spending reduction (which I favor), we can take revenue increases off the table. Meanwhile, I remain a fiscal conservative; our deficit is excessive, and we must do all of: cut defense, cut health spending, cut social security, and increase revenue until we bring the deficit under control. We cannot tolerate saying, "But not the one I don't like." Bullshit. Cut them all, and increase revenue, until we get the deficit under control. Then we can have our pudding, but we can't have any pudding if we don't eat our meat.
Realistically, I'm not sure things would be much better if we had a different president. Even Ron Paul, who would assuredly do his damnedest to actually set things right, would be one man against an army of criminal, power-hungry scum. Still, I'd rather take a man that tries over a man that supports this evil.
Vote Snowden/Binney 2016.
the Constitution is a blacklist of things government is not allowed to do, not a whitelist of things Citizens ARE allowed to do.
I get your sentiment, and support it, but I must quibble on a minor point: The main body of the Constitution is a whitelist of duties the government is charged with, and the means for doing so. The first ten amendments, The Bill of Rights, is a blacklist of things the government is forbidden from doing without a constitutional amendment. The 9th and 10th amendments specify that the Bill of Rights, being a blacklist, is not to be interpreted as a whitelist of citizen rights.
The only defense is to give them just barely enough resources to do their job, ... It's all about taxes ... there are but a handful of congresscritters who actually are for less government spending,
Are you unhappy with taxes or with budget allocation? The first and third part above are about budget allocation, which, unfortunately, has very little to do with taxation. The middle part is about taxes, which, unfortunately, have very little to do with budget allocation.
I favor reducing spending and increasing taxes. That is because I am a fiscal conservative and we are currently running a wildly excessive deficit. I believe in running a balanced budget except during exceptional economic downturns, in which a short-term deficit is fiscally prudent for the long-term outcome, and in times of plenty, when a short term surplus prepares our larder for the next downturn.
Conflating reductions in spending with reductions in taxation is a premeditated psychological manipulation tactic. There are bad people out there who want to maximize their personal short-term outcome by cranking up the deficit and damn the consequences to the economy. Those people are not helpful to America. Do not fall victim to the false equivalence of taxation and spending.
Programming is not something that requires grueling training or rare talents. Algebraic topology, cardiothoracic surgery, and competitive chess require those. If you're writing code that requires elite skills, you're doing it wrong - no one is going to be able to understand it, and you will never be able to troubleshoot it. Someone with an IQ of 100 can become a perfectly competent Java or C++ programmer with two years of intensive training.
You said "competitive chess" which implies a high skill level and "cardiothoracic surgery" which implies doing it well enough to have zero fatal errors most of the time. Those don't correlate to "competent programmer", nor to a programmer who can perform well in a job that requires code that works, has a long service life, and can be maintained. Writing a PGP key manager that can traverse the web of trust without granting privs to an attacker, for example, really does require elite skills -- just like your elite electrician and elite body mechanic.
Anyone can write Hello World, many can write an address book. It takes a lot of study to be able to write a cluster management system.
First off, love your post. Well said.
The tools, well I know people who swear vim is easier to use than the latest IDE that has full intellisense and refactoring builtin, and they are probably right - in that they have learned their craft using that tool and actually are more productive than the bloated and slow IDE could make them.
I would add that very little of my programming time is spent writing code, which is what an IDE is most helpful with; refactoring, code skeletons, reminding you of the order of args, etc. Most of the time I spend programming -- at least on anything that I expect will have a long service life -- is spent thinking through the right way for the code to work so it will be clear, fast, easy on memory, and work in a way that makes sense when we apply it in a different context. There is no IDE or language that can help with that part of the problem.
It's good, and coming soon.
By that, I meant your example is good, not the emerging reality it presents.
While your comment sounds like over-the-top sarcasm, keep in mind the time when you go to the dentist and your dental insurance company refuses to pay their portion of the bill because you have not been brushing your teeth properly....
It's good, and coming soon.
Not too much further down the road: When your average time spent brushing suddenly falls and the 7:00 PM brushings stop altogether, the analytic engine interprets this as having broken up; so it starts sending you ads for Haagen Dazs and cookies, because it knows you are vulnerable. You succumb to temptation, which creates a credit record, and your health insurance company ups your rates for the diabetes risk.
It's not just about responding to weaknesses, it is also about preying on them.
I'm wondering about the idea of having a group of friends who swap their cell devices. You'd have to change a lot of your comm, but if you use the cellular system just for bandwidth, you don't really care about your cellular identity except for you phone number. If you can migrate your friends to contacting you via internet comm, you don't need to have the same cellular identity from one day to the next.
Toss in dynamic proxying through SSH, and you aren't exposing your comm fingerprint to your cell provider. Use OwnCloud to swap in your files and contacts (a bit of data overhead there, maybe keep most of your heavy content data on a separate device that tethers to whatever cell phone you happen to be carrying).
They'd still be able to analyze your tracking footprint to figure out who held which phone at which time, but it would make surveillance more expensive.
I'm not saying I think they know it now, or are intentionally moving in this direction, but consider the market forces involved: Is this, Netflix's similar effort, and ISP throttling, ultimately just foreplay to getting in bed together? They have the potential to really harm each other, and that has to get through to them eventually.
Seems to me, barring common carrier or another path to true net neutrality, both sides have more to gain by colluding than by fighting. If big content and big ISPs work together, they could create a barrier to independent ISPs and content.
This is a problem with the law, not with ... Qualcomm. Fix the damned law.
I agree we should fix the law, but it absolutely is a problem with Qualcomm also, and we (especially the many network admins here who specify network hardware purchases) should hold their feet to the fire over this.
I own a software engineering consultancy. The business tax code is sufficiently vague that I could slip in all kinds of things that are not really business expenses. I do not, because I will not cheat my nation. Good people do not abuse bad laws. Those who do cheat their society are defectors and society's interests are best served when they are punished by the people for their behavior.
No quarter for legalism.
Nice post. Thank you!
As it says at the linked explanation, 2600 is not a charity, and they're not seeking donations -- but they would like you to buy the magazine (in print or Kindle form),
If you feel like buying the current issue isn't enough, and/or can't make it to NYC for the conference, they have bulk prices on back issues ($5/issue or less). I don't regularly read 2600, but I think they are an important resource for the security community.