Re:"Software engineers" don't do web programming
on
Hard Truths About HTML5
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
that looks almost like coldfusion.
<cffunction name="add">
<cfargument name = "x" type = "integer">
<cfargument name= "y" type = "integer>
<cfset var result = x + y>
<cfreturn result </cffunction>
I wish I was kidding. And yeah, I -do- know about cfscript.
It just annoys the hell out of me with the people who are like "anyone who's conserned about the environment wants to send us back to the stone-age". I suppose luddites exist, but they sure as hell aren't the norm.
And with all due respect, turning into Sweden (with respect to GDP/CO2) is a far cry from going stoneage. It *is* possible, or indeed easy, to substantially reduce pollution, while having only a small, or in some cases even no, impact on living-standard.
Renewable energy, except hydropower, isn't currently competitive with burning oil or coal or gas to create electricity -- but that's mostly cos energy is dirt-cheap. You can buy a *lot* of energy for your salary today, it depends on where you live, but for example here in Norway a single hour of work at average salary, earns you about 300 Kwh.
Yeah, if you bought windpower, the same salary would earn you only about half that. But 150Kwh for an hour of work, is *still* very cheap - not anywhere near "stone-age".
Furthermore better efficiency means we get more and more comfort, more and more goods, more and more value out of each Kwh. For example a modern but standard norwegian house, needs only a third of the energy to stay warm and comfy in winter, compared to houses 30-40 year old. And a modern car uses only half the petrol of a 25 year old one -- while having *better* comfort and performance.
There's a finite amount of resources - but the ones we have stay around. There's no simple way, for example of using up iron. (though you may offcourse end up making the iron more or less accessible)
Nevertheless, you're both sorta right. There's no physical reason that all of humanity can't have the material standard of the west. But there's societal and technological reasons - we can't do that *today* with todays technology and todays education and so on, without laying waste to a huge fraction of the ecosystems.
Energy ? Current human consumption is equal to the power shining freely on 5% of Sahara. (no it's not *currently* possible to harvest that power and sell it at market-prices. But have you looked at price/performance charts over the last couple of decades?)
In the meantime, it's a good time to pick the low-hanging fruit, that is, do those things that significantly decrease our impact, without hurting our living-standard much. Keep in mind, for example, that if USA became Sweden, then CO2-emissions would drop 40%, and the living-standard would stay about the same, for example.
Offcourse it doesn't work on all graphs. I never claimed it would. I said I consider it likely that it'll work on interesting datasets, and gave one example of a interesting dataset - the social graph of Facebook.
It'll work on most random graphs too, but not, offcourse, graphs that are regular, such as the one you describe where every node is connected in an identical way. (another trivial example is that it won't work on the fully connected graph)
Even on a graph like facebooks, it'll not work on all nodes.
Imagine there's 2 facebook-users who have only one friend: me.
There'll be no way to tell them apart only by looking at the graph. Similar situations can arise for anyone with few friends, but it gets progressively less likely the larger your network is.
Nevertheless, if the encryption isn't one-to-one, then by nessecity, encrypting the input must expand it. For example, if you want to encode 256 possible integers in a single byte, then your encoding MUST be one-to-one.
And the higher the possible count, the larger the expansion. If you want each of your integers to map to one of 256 possible encrypted values, you've now doubled the size of your cleartext to get your ciphertext.
Not that that's nessecarily a deal-killer, but it doesn't sound like something conductive to good performance.
Implies that x is 2 and y is 4. It doesn't matter how the numbers are encrypted, if those are the inputs and those are the outputs, then that's what they by mathemathical nessecity -must- mean.
Do more math, and every one gives you a new equation, pretty soon you can solve for any unknown.
What am I missing ?
Does homomorphic computation make special assumption such as the operations must all be mod N or something of that nature ?
Trivial example ? The xor-function. If you encrypt two different numbers with certain (weak, but this is a trivial example!) cryptosystems, then run xor on the encrypted numbers, you get the same answer as you would've if you'd run xor on the original number.
Yeah, that example is indeed *trivial*, but the real examples are math-heavy.
I'm not convinced that practical applications exist though. Most heavy lifting on numbers involve large sets of numbers that are connected somehow. Encrypting those numbers is insufficient to anonymize the data, because the connections themselves give away information.
For example, given a network-graph of Facebook with every single column encrypted, but the connections still visible, and you'd be able to find out which record corresponds to which person.
How many users on facebook have precisely 19871 friends ? How many of those 19871 friends have *precisely* 561 friends ? Basically, even the connections themselves, contain enough information to recognize someone.
It's most trivial for those with many friends, but even for those with a handful, it should be very well doable.
How large a fraction of Facebooks users have *precisely* 7 friends, and those friends again have *precisely* 173, 40, 3, 19, 21 and 4563 friends ? And if that's not enough to nail someone, you can go one step further. Pretty soon it's obvious that the anonymous graph can be mapped onto the non-anonymous one in only precisely *one* way.
I think the same problem is likely for any actually interesting dataset.
"most of the world" is not a reasonable comparison. Most of the world is dirt-poor relative to the US, so it follows that those living there are poorer too.
Being poor in USA, is substantially more likely, and substantially worse, than being poor in any other country I can think of with comparable wealth. That is, if you compare to other countries where GDP/capita is in the same ballpark as USA, then you'll find USA has a higher fraction of poor, and lower material standard of living for the poor.
You'll also find more super-rich. This is the explanation offcourse: distribution in usa is out of whack, a smaller and smaller fraction of the population gets a larger and larger slice of the pie, to the detriment of everyone outside the top-10%.
Those Americans who look at our average tax-rate and conclude we've got high taxes (we = scandinavians) mostly fail to grasp one or both of the following points:
Our tax-system is progressive, there's low or zero taxes on low to medium incomes, but substantially higher taxes on high incomes.
Second, there's no deductions whatsoever. Gross minus taxes is what you're paid. I don't know details about USA, but compared to for example Germany, this is a *huge* difference.
In Germany it's more like:
Gross - taxes - healthcare - unemployment_insurance - care_insurance - pension_prepay - social_adjustments = net. The non-tax-deductions are in the ~25%+ range for someone with low to average pay, and are actually -REVERSE- progressive, that is, you pay a *lower* percentage the higher your income is.
Meanwhile, I live in the tax-hell-hole that is called Norway, where I earn a gross of somewhat over $8500/month and get to take home aproximately $6500/month of that. (and my tax-rate would be even lower if I was the only working adult in my family, but my wife works as a CFO and so actually earns somewhat more than me)
But yes, our VAT is 25% on non-essentials. (lower on essentials like food). And yes, there's a 1.1% wealth-tax on any wealth beyond $150K. And yes I pay a -marginal- tax-rate of something like 43%. (that is, I pay 43% of the *last* dollar I earn in taxes)
I think it's damn well fair that those who can better afford it, contribute more to society. With a household-income near $20K/month, we can well afford to pay 25% in taxes. And yes, as our wealth grows, so will our taxes. So what ? I'm not complaining.
Feels really dumb to me for someone to complain that "he's so wealthy that he must pay taxes" -- it's still a hell of a lot nicer than being poor.
Agreed. And the mistake, offcourse, is in thinking that she's experienced "the" alternative -- as if there's only one. As if the only alternative to the extremism that Rand preaches, is extremism of the opposite kind.
In the real world, it's wiser to stick to a middle road on most things. And doing anything to an extreme, tends to be disastrous.
Communism in the soviet-union or north-korea sense, is disastrous. It's almost a pity that we've not had high-profile experiments with Rands brand of extremism, but I'm convinced that if we did, they'd have been equally disastrous, certainly we have plenty experience to indicate that unfettered "free markets" are capable of making substantial havoc.
Meanwhile, there's a lot that's useful and good in free markets. They are the most efficient way of allocating resources, and they are also good at creating wealth. And there's a lot that's useful and good in socialism, there's a lot of benefit in providing free schooling (atleast at basic levels) to every child for example, even if the parents can't or won't pay for it, and there's substantial evidence that the benefits of universal healthcare outweigh the drawbacks.
I wonder what Rand would've written if she'd grown up in Sweden. Would she still be as convinced of the evils of government and taxation ? I kinda doubt it. Sweden, Denmark and Norway have among the largest government-sectors and highest tax-rates, but nevertheless they *also* include much of what's good in capitalism, and as such utterly fail to be hell-holes.
You are right. Offcourse it's true that poverty is *also* influenced (to a significant degree!) by actions (or lack of action) on the part of the poor.
But this actually fails to explain anything at all when you do cross-country comparisons. If one country has a substantial persistent underclass of poor, and another country does not - it's not reasonable to assume that the reason is, to any significant degree, that the poor in one country are dumber or lazier or in any other way inferior to the poor of the other country.
If one country *produces* a helpless, resourceless, stupid, poor underclass, while other countries succeed better at avoiding this, then this is a pretty strong indication that circumstances are a major factor in making people poor.
USA has a large fraction of poor. Much larger fraction than most countries that are on a similar developmental level. USA *also* has a larger-than-normal population of insanely rich, and low taxation. It's not unreasonable to see a connection.
For example, in 2009, total tax revenue in USA was 24% In Canada 31%, Spain 30%, Germany 35%, Norway 37%, France 38% all the way up to Denmark at the top with 48%
I'm not suggesting the highest possible tax is a good idea.
But if you've got a super-upper-class that has seen double-percentage growth in their income over several decades, while the average worker in the same period has seen *no* real growth. If you're spending a lot more than you take in. If the poor is *already* so poor that many of them need food-stamps and shit like that to make ends meet.
Then it would seem reasonable to say that the hurt that is now coming, should hit both the poor AND the rich. (and not only the poor)
To a first aproximation, taxes hit the rich, while spending-cuts hurt the poor. Thus by suggesting that *only* the latter half occur, as the Tea-idiots do, they're in essence saying, the solution is a society where there's a even larger difference between the haves and the have-nots. USA *already* has a stratospheric GINI-index, on par with the worse feudal systems on the planet. Are you really sure you wanna get even worse ?
It depends on the price-differential. If power is sufficiently much cheaper at night, and power-consumption is sufficiently high, it'd be profitable to, for example, run a heat-pump to freeze water in the basement at night, and use the ice for cooling intake-air during the day.
As an added bonus, the outside-air is typically colder at night, so you get higher efficiency. (physics say that you spend more energy dumping heat to a warmer environment)
That sounds very pessimistic. I guess it may be different by region, I know there's significant differences even just between Germany and Norway (my wife is German, and we lived there for half a decade)
In Germany, most resourceful and educated couples don't have kids, or at maximum perhaps one kid. Meanwhile the uneducated welfare-recipients have substantially more kids. Kids in Germany on the average grow up in below-average-education and below-average-resources families.
Especially pronounced in former east-germany: the resourceful young ones move to the west and get better jobs, while the losers get pregnant at 17 and end up getting nowhere.
In contrast, here in Norway, something like 80% of university-educated couples have kids, and the count is split pretty evenly between 1, 2, and 3-or-more. So we're only slightly above average with our 3. (I'm a bachelor of computer-science, and my wife holds a german 4.5 year degree in finance and administration and is a CFO)
It shows. Families with children are *courted* by bussiness here, quite simply because there's many families with children and money. (something that to a first aproximation don't exist in eastern germany)
And I'm sure that this makes me sound like an elitist asshole, but thing is, more resourceful parents are on the average also better at parenting (in addition to the other things they're better at that -makes- them more resourceful)
I do think the crazyness is generally less pronounced here (Norway) though. I'm a leader for the cub-scouts here, and most of the parents are sane. There's a *few* who are, in my opinion, too nervous about things like letting their kids (6-7 years) do things like use an axe under adult supervision, or light a fire, but most are in the ballpark.
The thing that mystifies me the most, is the reluctance some parents show of letting kids make mistakes that *aren't* dangerous. For example, we explicitly ask parents to let the kids pack themselves. We have extra of all the essentials for any trip anyway.
It's not *dangerous* to be hungry for a few hours, or cold, or wet, or all of the above simultaneously - and in my experience, it's a *huge* learning-experience, kids NEVER forget to pack food more than once. What' so bad about allowing them the chance to learn this lesson ?
All true. The most important part of anonymity (or pseudonymity) on the internet though, is that it gives voice to those who'd otherwise be silenced.
That includes a *lot* of people living in all sorts of opressive circumstances, ranging from intolerant conservative christian parents of a gay teenager, up to governments who say straight out that they'll kill anyone who believe in the wrong thing (say atheists in Iran)
Giving those people a voice, has a *lot* of value to me.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
The basic simple-minded view is true, but oversimplifies things. There are issues in state-finance that simply don't arise for a family or average-sized company. Below is a partial list of such issues:
If you cut costs by firing workers, those people will then apply for unemployment-benefits or welfare (some of them anyway) thus your savings are less than their salary.
If you cut costs by firing workers, then those people who end up earning less pays less taxes than they used to do, thus decreasing the governments income. Again, this means you save less than their salary was.
If you decrease spendings, your valuta may rise in value. This again means that all american products exported becomes more expensive for the foreigners -- possibly leading to decreased exports. Simultaneously all foreign-made products become cheaper, possibly leading to increased imports. Your trade-balance thus gets worse.
Rising dollar-value is functionally equivalent to an increase in effective interest, that is, getting money becomes more expensive. This is potentially problematic to companies, i.e. it can put a damper on the economy.
A significant fraction of the money you spend, returns to you immediately in the forms of different taxes. This again, means the savings are less than they would appear to be. For example, if the government buys products or services to which VAT applies, this money merely circles back.
This isn't a complete list, nor even a fraction of one.
My point is, you're right, the only way to get things under control is to ensure that over time, the debt grows more slowly than GDP does. (If GDP grows 30% over a decade, and debt grows 15%, then you're winning this battle, despite growing debt)
Nevertheless, things *are* more complicated for a government.
No. Computer-experts aren't as a group smarter than say law-experts, biology-experts, math-experts, or other experts.
But anyone who can be said to be an expert in *anything* is likely smarter than the national average, most of which don't really know much about anything.
It's just that there's so many good reasons to want to use a name other than your "real" name.
For example, I'm supporting and helping an online forum that's trying to help young people whose beliefs crash with those of their parents. The two largest groups there at the moment, is young non-believing people with muslim parents, and those who are lesbian or gay with conservative parents.
Frankly, I don't think that forum could work, if it was a requirement to publish all posts under "real names" -- hell some of the participants live in regimes where there's a *death-penalty* for what they're doing. (we've got Iranian atheists, for example)
An important distinction is that Google+ does not require you to use your real name. There is, no requirement to at any point provide any kind of ID to Google. The practical consequence is that the pseudonym "Leif Ytrestad" (or any other invented name that *sounds* like a real name) is fine whereas obvious pseudonyms such as "Skud" or "Opnionated NewYorker" are NOT okay.
This is substantially worse than useless. There are advantages and disadvantages to a requirement for real names (I think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages) but this isn't even that.
If you're dealing with a individual using a pseudonym, wouldn't it be better to be *aware* that this is a pseudonym ?
I'd *much* prefer a policy where you could choose: use a real name - but then provide ID and have it be a *verified* real name. Or else, use a pseudonym at will, but in that case the name is somehow labeled as a pseudonym so that people will know that that's what it is.
In the real world they do. In *principle* they don't.
Sure, atheists will (mostly) say that they'd change their opinion if actual evidence showed up.
But since it won't, that's *functionally* identical to saying that they won't change their opinion.
I'd change my opinion that rocks tend to fall to the ground because of gravity if I encountered a lot of rocks that did not do that, so in principle my belief in gravity is not "unshakeable". But in *practice* that's pretty darn unshakable.
We might indeed, reach a level where nobody needs to perform any work in order to have all material needs of all of humanity covered very well.
That would leave research as the only remaining job. And if anyone could have "anything", it might be hard at first glance to see what would motivate anyone to do it.
But material rewards aren't the only things that motivate people. Indeed, one of the primary things we comepete for is social status, influence, popularity etc. Inventing new nifty stuff, or creating new nifty art, is likely to be rewarded with all of these things. (besides, it appears to me that some of the best artists and scientists are those who're in it primarily because to them it *is* recreation, i.e. fun and fulfilling to do science or create art)
Your math comes out wrong because you assume that those who don't work, should get the same rewards as those who work. That would indeed lead to no incentive. (except for social insentives like those I mention above)
But if we could produce todays output while using only 1% of todays workers, you could give those who work 10 times as much as those who don't work, and the non-workers would still enjoy 0.9 times the average standard of living they'd have if everything was shared equally.
Yes, this means there's a 90% tax. But does a 90% tax dissuade you from working if working still makes you 10 times wealthier than not-working ? Indeed that'd mean the benefits are LARGER than today. (today, in Norway, the average fullt-time-worker takes home about 3 times the amount that is handed to the average welfare-recipient)
All the cinemas here are digital. Making an additional copy, which is shipped around on a good-old pair of HDDs thus cost a whopping total of $100, aproximately.
Furthermore, dubbing into other languages means that you cannot use the same physical analogue film in France or Germany or Spain or wherever anyway.
My 6-year old will stay at home alone while I go to the store, assuming it's just a short visit (30 minutes max) Yes there's issues that could arise, that he'd be unable to handle himself. But he does know how to call me, and he does know how to ring the doorbell at the neighbours. (I guess fire would be the big one, but even then, 'get out and alert adults' is *likely* a sufficient response to ensure his safety)
As he grows and becomes more capable, he'll get more freedoms. It's not only a question of age, but also of maturity and behaviour. We observe him, and do our best to estimate what he can handle. So for example we are pretty confident that he behaves well in traffic -- simply because that's what we've consistently observed over the last several years, even on those occasions when he's not aware that we see him, while we're -not- confident that he respects the dangers that deep water represents to a poor swimmer.
"No you can't go there without us accompanying you, not before you can swim better." "But I wanna !" "Then you'll better start practicing your swimming, do you want me to enlist you for a course ?" "Yeah!"
When given a chance, I much prefer teaching him how to handle potentially dangerous things, instead of simply shielding him from them. I'd rather he swim well, instead of being protected from water. I'd rather he knows how to cross a street, rather than being protected from traffic. I'd rather he knows how to use an axe or a knife, rather than having to hide sharp object from him.
Sure, you can construct outliers, particular rare and/or concorted situations where it'd hypothethically make sense.
That does not at all change the fact that 95%+ of the computers which are rented, are rented in situations where doing so does not make sense.
Yes, if my laptop unexpectedly breaks AND I cannot borrow one, AND the laptop is under warranty, AND there's convenient rental around *then* it might make sense. I estimate this situation explains 0.001% of the rentals in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
that looks almost like coldfusion.
<cffunction name="add">
<cfargument name = "x" type = "integer">
<cfargument name= "y" type = "integer>
<cfset var result = x + y>
<cfreturn result
</cffunction>
I wish I was kidding. And yeah, I -do- know about cfscript.
It just annoys the hell out of me with the people who are like "anyone who's conserned about the environment wants to send us back to the stone-age". I suppose luddites exist, but they sure as hell aren't the norm.
And with all due respect, turning into Sweden (with respect to GDP/CO2) is a far cry from going stoneage. It *is* possible, or indeed easy, to substantially reduce pollution, while having only a small, or in some cases even no, impact on living-standard.
Renewable energy, except hydropower, isn't currently competitive with burning oil or coal or gas to create electricity -- but that's mostly cos energy is dirt-cheap. You can buy a *lot* of energy for your salary today, it depends on where you live, but for example here in Norway a single hour of work at average salary, earns you about 300 Kwh.
Yeah, if you bought windpower, the same salary would earn you only about half that. But 150Kwh for an hour of work, is *still* very cheap - not anywhere near "stone-age".
Furthermore better efficiency means we get more and more comfort, more and more goods, more and more value out of each Kwh. For example a modern but standard norwegian house, needs only a third of the energy to stay warm and comfy in winter, compared to houses 30-40 year old. And a modern car uses only half the petrol of a 25 year old one -- while having *better* comfort and performance.
There's a finite amount of resources - but the ones we have stay around. There's no simple way, for example of using up iron. (though you may offcourse end up making the iron more or less accessible)
Nevertheless, you're both sorta right. There's no physical reason that all of humanity can't have the material standard of the west. But there's societal and technological reasons - we can't do that *today* with todays technology and todays education and so on, without laying waste to a huge fraction of the ecosystems.
Energy ? Current human consumption is equal to the power shining freely on 5% of Sahara. (no it's not *currently* possible to harvest that power and sell it at market-prices. But have you looked at price/performance charts over the last couple of decades?)
In the meantime, it's a good time to pick the low-hanging fruit, that is, do those things that significantly decrease our impact, without hurting our living-standard much. Keep in mind, for example, that if USA became Sweden, then CO2-emissions would drop 40%, and the living-standard would stay about the same, for example.
Offcourse it doesn't work on all graphs. I never claimed it would. I said I consider it likely that it'll work on interesting datasets, and gave one example of a interesting dataset - the social graph of Facebook.
It'll work on most random graphs too, but not, offcourse, graphs that are regular, such as the one you describe where every node is connected in an identical way. (another trivial example is that it won't work on the fully connected graph)
Even on a graph like facebooks, it'll not work on all nodes.
Imagine there's 2 facebook-users who have only one friend: me.
There'll be no way to tell them apart only by looking at the graph. Similar situations can arise for anyone with few friends, but it gets progressively less likely the larger your network is.
Guilty as charged !
Nevertheless, if the encryption isn't one-to-one, then by nessecity, encrypting the input must expand it. For example, if you want to encode 256 possible integers in a single byte, then your encoding MUST be one-to-one.
And the higher the possible count, the larger the expansion. If you want each of your integers to map to one of 256 possible encrypted values, you've now doubled the size of your cleartext to get your ciphertext.
Not that that's nessecarily a deal-killer, but it doesn't sound like something conductive to good performance.
Indeed. I never quite got that part either.
x + x = y
x * x = y
Implies that x is 2 and y is 4. It doesn't matter how the numbers are encrypted, if those are the inputs and those are the outputs, then that's what they by mathemathical nessecity -must- mean.
Do more math, and every one gives you a new equation, pretty soon you can solve for any unknown.
What am I missing ?
Does homomorphic computation make special assumption such as the operations must all be mod N or something of that nature ?
It's not voodoo, but math.
Trivial example ? The xor-function. If you encrypt two different numbers with certain (weak, but this is a trivial example!) cryptosystems, then run xor on the encrypted numbers, you get the same answer as you would've if you'd run xor on the original number.
Yeah, that example is indeed *trivial*, but the real examples are math-heavy.
I'm not convinced that practical applications exist though. Most heavy lifting on numbers involve large sets of numbers that are connected somehow. Encrypting those numbers is insufficient to anonymize the data, because the connections themselves give away information.
For example, given a network-graph of Facebook with every single column encrypted, but the connections still visible, and you'd be able to find out which record corresponds to which person.
How many users on facebook have precisely 19871 friends ? How many of those 19871 friends have *precisely* 561 friends ? Basically, even the connections themselves, contain enough information to recognize someone.
It's most trivial for those with many friends, but even for those with a handful, it should be very well doable.
How large a fraction of Facebooks users have *precisely* 7 friends, and those friends again have *precisely* 173, 40, 3, 19, 21 and 4563 friends ? And if that's not enough to nail someone, you can go one step further. Pretty soon it's obvious that the anonymous graph can be mapped onto the non-anonymous one in only precisely *one* way.
I think the same problem is likely for any actually interesting dataset.
"most of the world" is not a reasonable comparison. Most of the world is dirt-poor relative to the US, so it follows that those living there are poorer too.
Being poor in USA, is substantially more likely, and substantially worse, than being poor in any other country I can think of with comparable wealth. That is, if you compare to other countries where GDP/capita is in the same ballpark as USA, then you'll find USA has a higher fraction of poor, and lower material standard of living for the poor.
You'll also find more super-rich. This is the explanation offcourse: distribution in usa is out of whack, a smaller and smaller fraction of the population gets a larger and larger slice of the pie, to the detriment of everyone outside the top-10%.
Those Americans who look at our average tax-rate and conclude we've got high taxes (we = scandinavians) mostly fail to grasp one or both of the following points:
Our tax-system is progressive, there's low or zero taxes on low to medium incomes, but substantially higher taxes on high incomes.
Second, there's no deductions whatsoever. Gross minus taxes is what you're paid. I don't know details about USA, but compared to for example Germany, this is a *huge* difference.
In Germany it's more like:
Gross - taxes - healthcare - unemployment_insurance - care_insurance - pension_prepay - social_adjustments = net. The non-tax-deductions are in the ~25%+ range for someone with low to average pay, and are actually -REVERSE- progressive, that is, you pay a *lower* percentage the higher your income is.
Meanwhile, I live in the tax-hell-hole that is called Norway, where I earn a gross of somewhat over $8500/month and get to take home aproximately $6500/month of that. (and my tax-rate would be even lower if I was the only working adult in my family, but my wife works as a CFO and so actually earns somewhat more than me)
But yes, our VAT is 25% on non-essentials. (lower on essentials like food). And yes, there's a 1.1% wealth-tax on any wealth beyond $150K. And yes I pay a -marginal- tax-rate of something like 43%. (that is, I pay 43% of the *last* dollar I earn in taxes)
I think it's damn well fair that those who can better afford it, contribute more to society. With a household-income near $20K/month, we can well afford to pay 25% in taxes. And yes, as our wealth grows, so will our taxes. So what ? I'm not complaining.
Feels really dumb to me for someone to complain that "he's so wealthy that he must pay taxes" -- it's still a hell of a lot nicer than being poor.
Agreed. And the mistake, offcourse, is in thinking that she's experienced "the" alternative -- as if there's only one. As if the only alternative to the extremism that Rand preaches, is extremism of the opposite kind.
In the real world, it's wiser to stick to a middle road on most things. And doing anything to an extreme, tends to be disastrous.
Communism in the soviet-union or north-korea sense, is disastrous. It's almost a pity that we've not had high-profile experiments with Rands brand of extremism, but I'm convinced that if we did, they'd have been equally disastrous, certainly we have plenty experience to indicate that unfettered "free markets" are capable of making substantial havoc.
Meanwhile, there's a lot that's useful and good in free markets. They are the most efficient way of allocating resources, and they are also good at creating wealth. And there's a lot that's useful and good in socialism, there's a lot of benefit in providing free schooling (atleast at basic levels) to every child for example, even if the parents can't or won't pay for it, and there's substantial evidence that the benefits of universal healthcare outweigh the drawbacks.
I wonder what Rand would've written if she'd grown up in Sweden. Would she still be as convinced of the evils of government and taxation ? I kinda doubt it. Sweden, Denmark and Norway have among the largest government-sectors and highest tax-rates, but nevertheless they *also* include much of what's good in capitalism, and as such utterly fail to be hell-holes.
You are right. Offcourse it's true that poverty is *also* influenced (to a significant degree!) by actions (or lack of action) on the part of the poor.
But this actually fails to explain anything at all when you do cross-country comparisons. If one country has a substantial persistent underclass of poor, and another country does not - it's not reasonable to assume that the reason is, to any significant degree, that the poor in one country are dumber or lazier or in any other way inferior to the poor of the other country.
If one country *produces* a helpless, resourceless, stupid, poor underclass, while other countries succeed better at avoiding this, then this is a pretty strong indication that circumstances are a major factor in making people poor.
USA has a large fraction of poor. Much larger fraction than most countries that are on a similar developmental level. USA *also* has a larger-than-normal population of insanely rich, and low taxation. It's not unreasonable to see a connection.
For example, in 2009, total tax revenue in USA was 24% In Canada 31%, Spain 30%, Germany 35%, Norway 37%, France 38% all the way up to Denmark at the top with 48%
I'm not suggesting the highest possible tax is a good idea.
But if you've got a super-upper-class that has seen double-percentage growth in their income over several decades, while the average worker in the same period has seen *no* real growth. If you're spending a lot more than you take in. If the poor is *already* so poor that many of them need food-stamps and shit like that to make ends meet.
Then it would seem reasonable to say that the hurt that is now coming, should hit both the poor AND the rich. (and not only the poor)
To a first aproximation, taxes hit the rich, while spending-cuts hurt the poor. Thus by suggesting that *only* the latter half occur, as the Tea-idiots do, they're in essence saying, the solution is a society where there's a even larger difference between the haves and the have-nots. USA *already* has a stratospheric GINI-index, on par with the worse feudal systems on the planet. Are you really sure you wanna get even worse ?
It depends on the price-differential. If power is sufficiently much cheaper at night, and power-consumption is sufficiently high, it'd be profitable to, for example, run a heat-pump to freeze water in the basement at night, and use the ice for cooling intake-air during the day.
As an added bonus, the outside-air is typically colder at night, so you get higher efficiency. (physics say that you spend more energy dumping heat to a warmer environment)
That sounds very pessimistic. I guess it may be different by region, I know there's significant differences even just between Germany and Norway (my wife is German, and we lived there for half a decade)
In Germany, most resourceful and educated couples don't have kids, or at maximum perhaps one kid. Meanwhile the uneducated welfare-recipients have substantially more kids. Kids in Germany on the average grow up in below-average-education and below-average-resources families.
Especially pronounced in former east-germany: the resourceful young ones move to the west and get better jobs, while the losers get pregnant at 17 and end up getting nowhere.
In contrast, here in Norway, something like 80% of university-educated couples have kids, and the count is split pretty evenly between 1, 2, and 3-or-more. So we're only slightly above average with our 3. (I'm a bachelor of computer-science, and my wife holds a german 4.5 year degree in finance and administration and is a CFO)
It shows. Families with children are *courted* by bussiness here, quite simply because there's many families with children and money. (something that to a first aproximation don't exist in eastern germany)
And I'm sure that this makes me sound like an elitist asshole, but thing is, more resourceful parents are on the average also better at parenting (in addition to the other things they're better at that -makes- them more resourceful)
Ain't met any of those yet, but I'll keep it in mind.
Thanks !
I do think the crazyness is generally less pronounced here (Norway) though. I'm a leader for the cub-scouts here, and most of the parents are sane. There's a *few* who are, in my opinion, too nervous about things like letting their kids (6-7 years) do things like use an axe under adult supervision, or light a fire, but most are in the ballpark.
The thing that mystifies me the most, is the reluctance some parents show of letting kids make mistakes that *aren't* dangerous. For example, we explicitly ask parents to let the kids pack themselves. We have extra of all the essentials for any trip anyway.
It's not *dangerous* to be hungry for a few hours, or cold, or wet, or all of the above simultaneously - and in my experience, it's a *huge* learning-experience, kids NEVER forget to pack food more than once. What' so bad about allowing them the chance to learn this lesson ?
All true. The most important part of anonymity (or pseudonymity) on the internet though, is that it gives voice to those who'd otherwise be silenced.
That includes a *lot* of people living in all sorts of opressive circumstances, ranging from intolerant conservative christian parents of a gay teenager, up to governments who say straight out that they'll kill anyone who believe in the wrong thing (say atheists in Iran)
Giving those people a voice, has a *lot* of value to me.
The basic simple-minded view is true, but oversimplifies things. There are issues in state-finance that simply don't arise for a family or average-sized company. Below is a partial list of such issues:
If you cut costs by firing workers, those people will then apply for unemployment-benefits or welfare (some of them anyway) thus your savings are less than their salary.
If you cut costs by firing workers, then those people who end up earning less pays less taxes than they used to do, thus decreasing the governments income. Again, this means you save less than their salary was.
If you decrease spendings, your valuta may rise in value. This again means that all american products exported becomes more expensive for the foreigners -- possibly leading to decreased exports. Simultaneously all foreign-made products become cheaper, possibly leading to increased imports. Your trade-balance thus gets worse.
Rising dollar-value is functionally equivalent to an increase in effective interest, that is, getting money becomes more expensive. This is potentially problematic to companies, i.e. it can put a damper on the economy.
A significant fraction of the money you spend, returns to you immediately in the forms of different taxes. This again, means the savings are less than they would appear to be. For example, if the government buys products or services to which VAT applies, this money merely circles back.
This isn't a complete list, nor even a fraction of one.
My point is, you're right, the only way to get things under control is to ensure that over time, the debt grows more slowly than GDP does. (If GDP grows 30% over a decade, and debt grows 15%, then you're winning this battle, despite growing debt)
Nevertheless, things *are* more complicated for a government.
No. Computer-experts aren't as a group smarter than say law-experts, biology-experts, math-experts, or other experts.
But anyone who can be said to be an expert in *anything* is likely smarter than the national average, most of which don't really know much about anything.
It's just that there's so many good reasons to want to use a name other than your "real" name.
For example, I'm supporting and helping an online forum that's trying to help young people whose beliefs crash with those of their parents. The two largest groups there at the moment, is young non-believing people with muslim parents, and those who are lesbian or gay with conservative parents.
Frankly, I don't think that forum could work, if it was a requirement to publish all posts under "real names" -- hell some of the participants live in regimes where there's a *death-penalty* for what they're doing. (we've got Iranian atheists, for example)
An important distinction is that Google+ does not require you to use your real name. There is, no requirement to at any point provide any kind of ID to Google. The practical consequence is that the pseudonym "Leif Ytrestad" (or any other invented name that *sounds* like a real name) is fine whereas obvious pseudonyms such as "Skud" or "Opnionated NewYorker" are NOT okay.
This is substantially worse than useless. There are advantages and disadvantages to a requirement for real names (I think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages) but this isn't even that.
If you're dealing with a individual using a pseudonym, wouldn't it be better to be *aware* that this is a pseudonym ?
I'd *much* prefer a policy where you could choose: use a real name - but then provide ID and have it be a *verified* real name. Or else, use a pseudonym at will, but in that case the name is somehow labeled as a pseudonym so that people will know that that's what it is.
In the real world they do. In *principle* they don't.
Sure, atheists will (mostly) say that they'd change their opinion if actual evidence showed up.
But since it won't, that's *functionally* identical to saying that they won't change their opinion.
I'd change my opinion that rocks tend to fall to the ground because of gravity if I encountered a lot of rocks that did not do that, so in principle my belief in gravity is not "unshakeable". But in *practice* that's pretty darn unshakable.
We might indeed, reach a level where nobody needs to perform any work in order to have all material needs of all of humanity covered very well.
That would leave research as the only remaining job. And if anyone could have "anything", it might be hard at first glance to see what would motivate anyone to do it.
But material rewards aren't the only things that motivate people. Indeed, one of the primary things we comepete for is social status, influence, popularity etc. Inventing new nifty stuff, or creating new nifty art, is likely to be rewarded with all of these things. (besides, it appears to me that some of the best artists and scientists are those who're in it primarily because to them it *is* recreation, i.e. fun and fulfilling to do science or create art)
Your math comes out wrong because you assume that those who don't work, should get the same rewards as those who work. That would indeed lead to no incentive. (except for social insentives like those I mention above)
But if we could produce todays output while using only 1% of todays workers, you could give those who work 10 times as much as those who don't work, and the non-workers would still enjoy 0.9 times the average standard of living they'd have if everything was shared equally.
Yes, this means there's a 90% tax. But does a 90% tax dissuade you from working if working still makes you 10 times wealthier than not-working ? Indeed that'd mean the benefits are LARGER than today. (today, in Norway, the average fullt-time-worker takes home about 3 times the amount that is handed to the average welfare-recipient)
Uhm, pull the other one !
All the cinemas here are digital. Making an additional copy, which is shipped around on a good-old pair of HDDs thus cost a whopping total of $100, aproximately.
Furthermore, dubbing into other languages means that you cannot use the same physical analogue film in France or Germany or Spain or wherever anyway.
Fear in general, is a awfully poor guidance.
My 6-year old will stay at home alone while I go to the store, assuming it's just a short visit (30 minutes max) Yes there's issues that could arise, that he'd be unable to handle himself. But he does know how to call me, and he does know how to ring the doorbell at the neighbours. (I guess fire would be the big one, but even then, 'get out and alert adults' is *likely* a sufficient response to ensure his safety)
As he grows and becomes more capable, he'll get more freedoms. It's not only a question of age, but also of maturity and behaviour. We observe him, and do our best to estimate what he can handle. So for example we are pretty confident that he behaves well in traffic -- simply because that's what we've consistently observed over the last several years, even on those occasions when he's not aware that we see him, while we're -not- confident that he respects the dangers that deep water represents to a poor swimmer.
"No you can't go there without us accompanying you, not before you can swim better." "But I wanna !" "Then you'll better start practicing your swimming, do you want me to enlist you for a course ?" "Yeah!"
When given a chance, I much prefer teaching him how to handle potentially dangerous things, instead of simply shielding him from them. I'd rather he swim well, instead of being protected from water. I'd rather he knows how to cross a street, rather than being protected from traffic. I'd rather he knows how to use an axe or a knife, rather than having to hide sharp object from him.
Sure, you can construct outliers, particular rare and/or concorted situations where it'd hypothethically make sense.
That does not at all change the fact that 95%+ of the computers which are rented, are rented in situations where doing so does not make sense.
Yes, if my laptop unexpectedly breaks AND I cannot borrow one, AND the laptop is under warranty, AND there's convenient rental around *then* it might make sense. I estimate this situation explains 0.001% of the rentals in the world.
Yeah it happens. No it's not the norm.