Tax dollars started the ARPA net, provide education, and, if you live in a halfway civilized country, free health insurance.
s/civilized/socialist/
No joke! Christ, I can't believe those fucking socialists wasted our money on that damn ARPAnet.
We should have just waited for the benevolent and highly efficient AT&T (pre-socialist breakup) to develop an open communications network we could all tap into.
And to top it off, medicare goes around spending more per funding dollar on healthcare than any private health insurance company. How can they be so goddamn insensitive to the needs of insurers to make money by showing how efficient it could be if they stopped denying coverage? Don't they understand that the free market is perfect and their goddamn government efficiency is screwing up everyone's math?...
What will those paying the taxes get in return for paying them? Nothing
So where does the money go? Is someone just stuffing it in a mattress, never to be spent? if so, then the money you have will rise in value by exactly the same amount as what you lost (because there is less money to go around, but the value of the US economy is still the same, no?).
No, unfortunately the repeal of prohibition did nothing but say "the amendment is hereby repealed".
Believe me, I'd be in line to sign up for the guaranteed right to alchohol! Especially if we got some similar laws like germany regulating the purity and freshness. That's some legislating I can work up an appetite for (g)...
It "doesn't matter" only if we eliminate the programs that have been budgeted for the money that was borrowed.
Otherwise we've got a big problem when the day comes for baby boomers to start retiring and all the money we had saved up for social security isn't there any more (except on the books!)...
The difference is that purchasers are being taxed but not receiving any government services in return. All of the pro-taxation arguments which have been made so far are along the lines of "but everybody else is raking it in, why shouldn't we?" without any consideration of what those tax revenues will buy for the people who are being taxed.
But this assumes that there is a clear-cut division between rveenue/expense sources that doesn't exist. The state's (and country's) income just goes into the budget and is spent -- in many places the sales tax does pick up the cost of education or social services.
Saying that sales tax ONLY pays for the infrastructure to support the businesses ignores the equal reality that the infrastructure equally benefits the customer.
There are states without sales tax, where the income/property taxes pick up all expenses; there are other where there are no income taxzes, and thus sales tax picks up a larger burden for the local support of government...
So the taxes are the reason for unemployment and the bad exchange rate? What goods and services are produced in Jamaica? Obviously tourism is major, but with a bad exchange rate that isn't gonna bring you more money (although it will bring more people!).
I just question the cause/effect -- if the US economy is doing well and the Jamaican isn't, then the exchange rate will suffer.
High taxes are fairly common throughout the world, including many countries with currently booming economies...
Everytime somebody here talks about the internet, they make it seem like some sort of foreign entity that nobody here can be a part of. This state has that sort of attitude about a lot of topics so I was wondering whether this was just us or prevalent in other parts of the country/world.
-!Don't take this as an insult to New Mexico!-
This is a fairly common attitude in less-developed areas, in my experience. Very common in poorer states as well as poorer countries. What's frustrating in working with these folks is, as you point out, that they believe this is something foreign they can have no part in.
The single largest obstacle to lifting developing countries (and poor people on an individual level) is convincing them that there is nothing stopping them from getting out of the hole. This is not to say that shooting sunshine up someone's butt is going to make them a millionaire, because it's a long process that takes generations for the attitudes to change. I just get so frustrated with our third-world partners because everything is always "Oh, we're not as smart as you Americans, we can't do that sort of stuff." When of course they're just as smart, and frequently much harder workers -- they just don't accept that it's possible and thus they run in circles of poverty.
Consider a retailer who sells 1000 $0.50 items in a day, (20,000 tax calculations a month!), and then consider an income based tax which is calculated twice per month for each employee.
If someone is calculating the tax by hand 20,000 times a day, they should probably deserve to go out of business.
If, OTOH, they are simply printing out the reciepts at the end of the month and having the total sales/total taxes collected printed out with a check to the tax office, i don't see how it's any greater inconvenience than printing out the same salary/taxes paid summary to the tax office for every employee...
You should read a little more constitutional law before making such exaggerated claims.
In fact, the Supreme Court and the US Govt in general have always recognized that taxation is an inhibition. Maybe that's why churches don't have to pay taxes? You can't be taxed on speech, either.
taxing alchohol is fine -- there is no right to alcohol in the constitution...
Well in Texas, it's in our state constitution that there will be NO income tax. We could have an interesting state's rights battle if you propose every state simply abolish sales taxes wihtout providing an alternative income source.
As others have pointed out, while sales taxes are regressive, income taxes are viewed as punishing people for making money...
I think the democratic party should be named the AntiFreedom party. we must get back to the roots of this nation, not hand-holding and 'we know better' isms.
I agree -- and the sooner the Republican party stops trying to enforce the christian Bible on us as a legal document the sooner all the hand-holding 'we know better' isms will end...
You mean like the part of our law that provides that an accused party can face their accusor? Where is the anonymity there???
You have the right to face your accusers and see the evidence against you. How does this preclude anonymity? If I give the DA documents that prove you embezzeled funds from your company, I can do so anonymously. You'll still face the DA in court, and be able to see the evidence and offer evidence of your own. You just might not know that I'm the person who provided it.
The founding fathers bla bla bla"...sorry, this is the most tired drivel you could have drawn up. Let me guess - NRA member?
So I guess you concede that many of the founding fathers did in fact protest anonymously. While your invocation of the NRA may provide justification in your own mind that those who disagree with you are extremists, the case is equally likey that they are intelligent human beings who simply disagree with you on the importance of anonymity...
Mob informants testify as to things they saw and heard and participated in. If they did so anonymously, the jury would give their testimony less weight, and since it's generally the only evidence available the prosecutor generally requires the lack of anonymity in order to cut a deal.
In a whistleblowing case, it's acting as an informant, where you simply point the prosecutors to the REAL evidence (toxic waste, money laundering, dead bodies, etc). Who you are isn't as important as what you can tell.
The prosecutors are happy to let mob informants be anonymous so long as they can provide enough smoking-gun evidence that their testimony (and thus cross-examination) isn't required...
I would assume that means something like a "magnet school", where kids from all around the district go to a school with a unique program.
Places like the High School for the Arts (where everyone takes lots of painting and dancing and music classes) are examples of the magnet school concept that have been around for a while...
Maybe they're not trying to emphasize something, they just want it in italics?...
Re:Loosing the Iron Curtain
on
A New DeCSS
·
· Score: 2
The one significant error you make is assuming that physical pain will always be greater than emotional or psychological pain. people don't commit suicide -- inflict the ultimate physical pain upon themselves -- to avoid physical pain (frequently -- of course for some folks like cancer victims they do). they do it to avoid emotional or psycological anguish. Living with terrible cowardice or regret is a painful existence to go through every day of your life. For many it would be vastly preferable to simply die trying to extinguish the pain by fighting their oppresors than to live a "painless" life of physical comfort. Its the same reason that knowing the world is unfair is a relatively painless thing -- explaining to your child that it is unfair can be one of the most emotionally draining experiences of your life, becuase you see in their eyes the basic instinct (that you have avoided) that it shouldn't be...
Sorry -- I didn't mean that ALL firewire devices are scsi -- obviously a DV camera wouldn't be.
Initially i know a lot of the hard drives were SCSI, and I was confusing an earlier conversation I'd been having with someone at Adaptec talking about how Firewire could essentially be used to replace the current SCSI cabling (which is a mess) because the SCSI standard is separate from the physical interface.
The failure of 1394 will have nothing to do with the cos of the chipset or patent license, it will be because Apple is being moronic about their trademark on the word "FireWire".
How can you sell a technology to consumers if every company calls it something different? How is Joe Sixpack supposed to know that an i.Link camcorder can plug into a FireWire port? If you're not a geek, you'll have no clue that a 1394 device is compatible with an i.Link port and can be plugged into a FireWire hub.
Apple may as well write "don't buy me" on Firewire...
don't be silly, scsi devices can only be connected to a scsi bus.
SCSI is not a physical interface -- you can run a SCSI device over a parallel cable if you like, if you've got a device and a controller that know how to do it.
Firewire devices ARE all SCSI at the moment, which is part of why the hard drives are so damn expensive.
33 Hours a week? That's definitely a joke if you work with computers (or any kind of technology). Not even counting the beeper time that a lot of folks don't deal with, that's an unrealistically low figure.
I officially work 37.5 hours a week -- that's what I get paid for. In reality it's more like 50 or 60, what with never eating lunch and leavin an hour or two late every day ("just one more thing!").
I find it bizarre that the government would base statistics on what employers report their professional employees working -- this is a class that doesn't get overtime and thus is generally easy to add "just a little more" work to.
Not that I'm complaining, I enjoy my job and it pays better than most of my friends in college have (except those who are just now graduating law school! (g)). But we shouldn't officially pretend that everyone in America is getting home at 4 in the afternoon...
I read a very thought-provoking sci-fi short story on a similar idea.
Humanity builds a super-computer that can answer any question, and one of the engineers as a joke asks it to figure out how to reverse entropy.
Eons pass, humanity changes from physical beings to thought being, to pure energy, and entropy continues to take its toll, with the universe getting colder collapsing. The computer is still thinking -- "not enogh data, continuing observation" it would always say. in this time, the computer has changed to exist in an entirely different dimension than the universe we inhabit.
Our universe dies, and the computer watches, observing. An immesurable length of time passes, as the computer calculates.
Then, the computer discovers how to reverse entropy.
The computer says "Let there be light" and the universe is born again...
Slashdot Mirror
Tax dollars started the ARPA net, provide education, and, if you live in a halfway civilized country, free health insurance.
s/civilized/socialist/
No joke! Christ, I can't believe those fucking socialists wasted our money on that damn ARPAnet.
We should have just waited for the benevolent and highly efficient AT&T (pre-socialist breakup) to develop an open communications network we could all tap into.
And to top it off, medicare goes around spending more per funding dollar on healthcare than any private health insurance company. How can they be so goddamn insensitive to the needs of insurers to make money by showing how efficient it could be if they stopped denying coverage? Don't they understand that the free market is perfect and their goddamn government efficiency is screwing up everyone's math?...
What will those paying the taxes get in return for paying them? Nothing
So where does the money go? Is someone just stuffing it in a mattress, never to be spent? if so, then the money you have will rise in value by exactly the same amount as what you lost (because there is less money to go around, but the value of the US economy is still the same, no?).
So you haven't lost anything...
No, unfortunately the repeal of prohibition did nothing but say "the amendment is hereby repealed".
Believe me, I'd be in line to sign up for the guaranteed right to alchohol! Especially if we got some similar laws like germany regulating the purity and freshness. That's some legislating I can work up an appetite for (g)...
It "doesn't matter" only if we eliminate the programs that have been budgeted for the money that was borrowed.
Otherwise we've got a big problem when the day comes for baby boomers to start retiring and all the money we had saved up for social security isn't there any more (except on the books!)...
The difference is that purchasers are being taxed but not receiving any government services in return. All of the pro-taxation arguments which have been made so far are along the lines of "but everybody else is raking it in, why shouldn't we?" without any consideration of what those tax revenues will buy for the people who are being taxed.
But this assumes that there is a clear-cut division between rveenue/expense sources that doesn't exist. The state's (and country's) income just goes into the budget and is spent -- in many places the sales tax does pick up the cost of education or social services.
Saying that sales tax ONLY pays for the infrastructure to support the businesses ignores the equal reality that the infrastructure equally benefits the customer.
There are states without sales tax, where the income/property taxes pick up all expenses; there are other where there are no income taxzes, and thus sales tax picks up a larger burden for the local support of government...
So the taxes are the reason for unemployment and the bad exchange rate? What goods and services are produced in Jamaica? Obviously tourism is major, but with a bad exchange rate that isn't gonna bring you more money (although it will bring more people!).
I just question the cause/effect -- if the US economy is doing well and the Jamaican isn't, then the exchange rate will suffer.
High taxes are fairly common throughout the world, including many countries with currently booming economies...
Everytime somebody here talks about the internet, they make it seem like some sort of foreign entity that nobody here can be a part of. This state has that sort of attitude about a lot of topics so I was wondering whether this was just us or prevalent in other parts of the country/world.
...
-!Don't take this as an insult to New Mexico!-
This is a fairly common attitude in less-developed areas, in my experience. Very common in poorer states as well as poorer countries. What's frustrating in working with these folks is, as you point out, that they believe this is something foreign they can have no part in.
The single largest obstacle to lifting developing countries (and poor people on an individual level) is convincing them that there is nothing stopping them from getting out of the hole. This is not to say that shooting sunshine up someone's butt is going to make them a millionaire, because it's a long process that takes generations for the attitudes to change. I just get so frustrated with our third-world partners because everything is always "Oh, we're not as smart as you Americans, we can't do that sort of stuff." When of course they're just as smart, and frequently much harder workers -- they just don't accept that it's possible and thus they run in circles of poverty.
Ugh.
Consider a retailer who sells 1000 $0.50 items in a day, (20,000 tax calculations a month!), and then consider an income based tax which is calculated twice per month for each employee.
If someone is calculating the tax by hand 20,000 times a day, they should probably deserve to go out of business.
If, OTOH, they are simply printing out the reciepts at the end of the month and having the total sales/total taxes collected printed out with a check to the tax office, i don't see how it's any greater inconvenience than printing out the same salary/taxes paid summary to the tax office for every employee...
You should read a little more constitutional law before making such exaggerated claims.
In fact, the Supreme Court and the US Govt in general have always recognized that taxation is an inhibition. Maybe that's why churches don't have to pay taxes? You can't be taxed on speech, either.
taxing alchohol is fine -- there is no right to alcohol in the constitution...
Keep in mind that the huge "surplus" is still several orders of magnitude smaller than the debt we have -- we still owe several trillion dollars.
This is the same as wondering how to spend that $200 bonus from work when you owe $20,000 in credit card debt...
Well in Texas, it's in our state constitution that there will be NO income tax. We could have an interesting state's rights battle if you propose every state simply abolish sales taxes wihtout providing an alternative income source.
As others have pointed out, while sales taxes are regressive, income taxes are viewed as punishing people for making money...
I think the democratic party should be named the AntiFreedom party. we must get back to the roots of this nation, not hand-holding and 'we know better' isms.
I agree -- and the sooner the Republican party stops trying to enforce the christian Bible on us as a legal document the sooner all the hand-holding 'we know better' isms will end...
You mean like the part of our law that provides that an accused party can face their accusor? Where is the anonymity there???
You have the right to face your accusers and see the evidence against you. How does this preclude anonymity? If I give the DA documents that prove you embezzeled funds from your company, I can do so anonymously. You'll still face the DA in court, and be able to see the evidence and offer evidence of your own. You just might not know that I'm the person who provided it.
The founding fathers bla bla bla"...sorry, this is the most tired drivel you could have drawn up. Let me guess - NRA member?
So I guess you concede that many of the founding fathers did in fact protest anonymously. While your invocation of the NRA may provide justification in your own mind that those who disagree with you are extremists, the case is equally likey that they are intelligent human beings who simply disagree with you on the importance of anonymity...
Mob informants testify as to things they saw and heard and participated in. If they did so anonymously, the jury would give their testimony less weight, and since it's generally the only evidence available the prosecutor generally requires the lack of anonymity in order to cut a deal.
In a whistleblowing case, it's acting as an informant, where you simply point the prosecutors to the REAL evidence (toxic waste, money laundering, dead bodies, etc). Who you are isn't as important as what you can tell.
The prosecutors are happy to let mob informants be anonymous so long as they can provide enough smoking-gun evidence that their testimony (and thus cross-examination) isn't required...
I would assume that means something like a "magnet school", where kids from all around the district go to a school with a unique program.
Places like the High School for the Arts (where everyone takes lots of painting and dancing and music classes) are examples of the magnet school concept that have been around for a while...
FOr those of you that don't know, "Firewire" is the same as "Sony i.Link" and 1394 ports. Sony just calls it that
to prevent mindshare from Firewire.
No, sony calls it that because APPLE won't let people use the word "firewire" without paying a fee. That's why it goes by so many names.
Apple killed firewire -- nobody needed to help.
we've come to expect that our politicians will all be incompetent, so it's no surprise that they hire incompetent staff.
I'm sure they'd be happy to have you volunteer to fix all their problems. It's unlikely that anyone gets paid to work on these sites...
Maybe they're not trying to emphasize something, they just want it in italics?...
The one significant error you make is assuming that physical pain will always be greater than emotional or psychological pain. people don't commit suicide -- inflict the ultimate physical pain upon themselves -- to avoid physical pain (frequently -- of course for some folks like cancer victims they do). they do it to avoid emotional or psycological anguish. Living with terrible cowardice or regret is a painful existence to go through every day of your life. For many it would be vastly preferable to simply die trying to extinguish the pain by fighting their oppresors than to live a "painless" life of physical comfort. Its the same reason that knowing the world is unfair is a relatively painless thing -- explaining to your child that it is unfair can be one of the most emotionally draining experiences of your life, becuase you see in their eyes the basic instinct (that you have avoided) that it shouldn't be...
Sorry -- I didn't mean that ALL firewire devices are scsi -- obviously a DV camera wouldn't be.
Initially i know a lot of the hard drives were SCSI, and I was confusing an earlier conversation I'd been having with someone at Adaptec talking about how Firewire could essentially be used to replace the current SCSI cabling (which is a mess) because the SCSI standard is separate from the physical interface.
The failure of 1394 will have nothing to do with the cos of the chipset or patent license, it will be because Apple is being moronic about their trademark on the word "FireWire".
How can you sell a technology to consumers if every company calls it something different? How is Joe Sixpack supposed to know that an i.Link camcorder can plug into a FireWire port? If you're not a geek, you'll have no clue that a 1394 device is compatible with an i.Link port and can be plugged into a FireWire hub.
Apple may as well write "don't buy me" on Firewire...
don't be silly, scsi devices can only be connected to a scsi bus.
SCSI is not a physical interface -- you can run a SCSI device over a parallel cable if you like, if you've got a device and a controller that know how to do it.
Firewire devices ARE all SCSI at the moment, which is part of why the hard drives are so damn expensive.
Folks, I really don't think that time at work that you spend reading slashdot really counts as work.
Holy shit! In that case, I only work between 6pm and 9pm. But for some reason they keep insisting I show up at before noon...
33 Hours a week? That's definitely a joke if you work with computers (or any kind of technology). Not even counting the beeper time that a lot of folks don't deal with, that's an unrealistically low figure.
I officially work 37.5 hours a week -- that's what I get paid for. In reality it's more like 50 or 60, what with never eating lunch and leavin an hour or two late every day ("just one more thing!").
I find it bizarre that the government would base statistics on what employers report their professional employees working -- this is a class that doesn't get overtime and thus is generally easy to add "just a little more" work to.
Not that I'm complaining, I enjoy my job and it pays better than most of my friends in college have (except those who are just now graduating law school! (g)). But we shouldn't officially pretend that everyone in America is getting home at 4 in the afternoon...
I read a very thought-provoking sci-fi short story on a similar idea.
Humanity builds a super-computer that can answer any question, and one of the engineers as a joke asks it to figure out how to reverse entropy.
Eons pass, humanity changes from physical beings to thought being, to pure energy, and entropy continues to take its toll, with the universe getting colder collapsing. The computer is still thinking -- "not enogh data, continuing observation" it would always say. in this time, the computer has changed to exist in an entirely different dimension than the universe we inhabit.
Our universe dies, and the computer watches, observing. An immesurable length of time passes, as the computer calculates.
Then, the computer discovers how to reverse entropy.
The computer says "Let there be light" and the universe is born again...