>>In fact, it shows the opposite, demolishing the most important "conservative" talking point of all: that we are "over-taxed" and that such "over-taxing" hurts the economy or stifles growth.
It doesn't show anything of the sort. Nominal tax rates and effective tax rates are two very different things. If the nominal tax rate is 91%, but there's enough loopholes and tax shelters that a rich guy pays 20% anyway, then unless you think the tax shelters themselves stimulate the economy (which you could make a case for), it's really no different than our current system with a 35% top marginal tax rate and less loopholes with the effective rate being 20%.
You also have to realize that it doesn't make much of a difference when there is only one person in America in the top tax rate (HuffPo, another liberal source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/top-marginal-tax-rates-chart_n_849596.html). Looking at the tax brackets by quintile is a more informative than just focusing on the highest marginal tax rate (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/business/31leonhardt.html?ex=1351569600&en=b1065bf4721795fa&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink)
>>It's too bad that would have to happen with this president and not the previous one, who happened to be Houdini of inventing BS from thin air. Free-speech zones. WMD. Blocking Scientific Papers.
The free speech zones really came to pre-eminence at the 1999 WTO talks, not the 2004 Democratic convention. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone) I know that "blaming Clinton" isn't nearly as popular as trying to pin everything on GWB, but it's not good to live in fact-free zone, either.
He didn't invent the idea that WMDs would be found in Iraq (again, Clinton - http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp). Also, minor stockpiles of WMDs were found in Iraq (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/).
While I agree with you on the anti-scientific behavior relating to the AGW paper squelching, you should be careful yourself to make sure you've got your fact right.
>>However the federal government has taken in only 14.9% of GDP in 2009 and 2010 >>So if we want to get serious about the budget we must start by repealing the disastrous Bush tax cuts
Logic fail. The Bush tax cuts were in 2001 and 2003, but we had growing income tax revenues after 2003. You're blaming the Bush tax cuts on the drop in tax revenues in 2009-2010 on something that happened 7-9 years before? When in the meantime tax revenues both individual (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Federal_individual_income_tax_receipts_2000-2009.png) and total revenue as percentage of GDP *rose* during that time period? The data doesn't support your hypothesis.
>>not by enacting recession-prolonging austerity measures borne entirely by the lower and middle classes.
Whereas the drunken-sailor stimulus spending has resulted in... what?
Did our tax rates suddenly change from 2008 to 2011, or did our economy collapse?
In fact, you see a high point in our tax rate by GDP in the mid 2000s, which took place after GWB's tax cuts to the rich - wait, what, tax revenues went up?
>>The chart that you have provided us shows that the federal government is NOT taking in enough money.
Right (if you put in terms of how much they want to spend), but neither are corporations or people. That's why it's called a depr^h^h^h^hrecession.
The point you're missing is that the tax revenues per GDP stay amazingly stable no matter what the tax rate is.
>>If you go back to WWII, you'll find that whenever the tax rate on the top income groups goes above 50%, we have dropping unemployment, greater growth of GDP
There again doesn't seem to be any correlation between the highest marginal tax rate and GDP growth. And if you're suggesting returning to the 91% marginal tax rate, you have to remember to reintroduce all the loopholes that made people pay roughly the same taxes as they do today.
>>Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years.
Wrong. Don't confuse the maximum marginal tax rate (which used to go up to 91%) with the actual amount of taxes paid per dollar of GDP. Hauser found (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_Law) that no matter what the tax rates are set to, we pay around 20% of our GDP in taxes. If you're talking about the recent dip due to the recession, you might be able to make an argument there, but the long term trend is actually pretty clear: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/U.S._Federal_Tax_Receipts_as_a_Percentage_of_GDP_1945%E2%80%932015.jpg
The federal government takes in plenty of money from taxes. The problem is that they spend too much. I suggest even, across the board, cuts to balance the budget. No partisanship, just chop the budget by whatever percentage excess they had the year before.
>>Everyone loves wind power, as long as the mills aren't located anywhere near themselves
Yep. Eco-friendly Ted Kennedy sued to block windmills going up near his estate.
Hell, the DC lawyers that worked against NIMBY lawsuits on windmills filed a NIMBY lawsuit when they found out that windmills were going to go up near their farm in backwater Virginia.
The hypocrites come out of the woodwork. It's always "we like wind power, just not here". We seriously need to restructure how these sorts of lawsuits can proceed in our country.
>>it is newsworthy because this kid did this all on his own while he was in High School. With no training. What were you doing in High School?
I did a summer internship between my junior and senior years with Dr. Clark Guest (an amazing EE Professor) at UCSD to work on a fuzzy logic AI system that ultimately got me a job at a defense contractor before I graduated. But nice try with your tu quoque attempt.
>>So now you're talking about 100k? Which is it? 200k or 100k?
There are people making 200k, that get to retire at 50 with 90% pay. This is too high. 50% of the lifeguards make over 100k, that also get to retire at 50 with 90% pay. This is also too high.
>>The article also mentions that it's a competitive salary for the job they do
Yeah, no shit.
>>So really your argument isn't about public sector workers, it's that you think professional life guards are paid too much.
No, my argument is about all public sector workers. The average salary for parole officers and corrections officers exceeds 100k as well. In Texas, which is only about 15% lower than us in terms of cost of living, these jobs average 40k-50k in salary. The difference? They have public unions for them here in CA, but TX bans public unions, as they should.
Building a functioning 8-bit CPU and writing apps for it was required for graduating from our CS program at UC San Diego... not seeing why this is newsworthy.
>>Just so. How do we know that any set of conditions in the climate is optimal?
We can look back at the medieval warm period, which was a very productive time in our history. Our current global temps are comparable.
So the apocalypse now people are a bit premature.
Not to say that ocean acidification and continued warming won't be bad, but the notion that we're facing the end of the world right this second is just fearmongering.
>>The fact you were waiting around and checking back on me for a snarky reply proves my point that you're trolling.
In other words: "How dare these people use citations and facts to destroy my carefully arranged prejudices??" -jo_ham
Heh, no, I was just amused by how deafening silence always greets those that win an argument on here. I was doubly amused by you calling the truth a troll.
When I worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, I was hired to write a server, essentially, that would provide a web interface to some of the big iron projects in biology.
Was a two year project. I got it finished over a summer, as it turned out to be easier than I thought to do the coding that piped information to and from the biology modeling programs to a web browser.
The only roadblock was the SDSC IT and web services guys that said they wouldn't allow... well, everything. So, long story short, we just had to bypass them entirely, host it on our own machines, and just use the SDSC site as a redirect. The moral of the story was that IT policy trumps million dollar research projects.
VPSs: yes, which makes a lot more sense than running our own physical server, for a lot of reasons.
SaaS: yes, we've moved to google docs in our corporation, since we're mostly in different physical locations, and document version tracking over email is a mess when you have multiple authors and editors.
IaaS: since our products as such run on a LAMP stack, we can spin up more capacity by adding to the VPS. It's highly unlikely that we'll get the exponential growth requiring more heroic measures. (We have a limited customer base.)
We also use other technologies, like VNC, which lets me (the IT guy slash CEO) connect to the other people in the corporation working remotely, when they ask for help.
I run automatic remote backups on all of our work machines, and have been looking to move to a virtualized environment (that will also be automatically backed up) so the inevitable hardware failures can be mitigated somewhat.
It works pretty well, honestly. Now that everything is set up, my only IT related tasks just involves reminding people to use google docs instead of Word.
I moved my small corporation to "the cloud" because even though there have been outages (thoug not for us) in the cloud, it's still far more reliable than running a linux box in a neighborhood where PG&E apparently trips over their own power cords every month, and a UPS only buys the incompetents a short window to get it back up.
And it's cheaper and more reliable than colocing.
Has nothing to do with "hating IT" in our case. Hell, I am the IT guy in addition to all my other hats. Small businesses are like that.
America is self-sufficient when it comes to food production. We import food when it's cheaper, not because we can't feed our own people.
A massive return to agriculture, as you suggest, would make as much sense as Mao's desire to build a blast furnace in every podunk village in China. And with the same disasterous consequences.
The easiest measure of the success of a civilization is to measure the ratio of farmers to the rest of the population.
Indeed. Corn ethanol is one of the worst ideas ever implemented in our country, and this is the first positive news I've heard about it in a long time.
It's nothing more than a bribe to Iowa farmers to get that key early presidential nomination.
>>I don't know how it's in Canada, but here in Germany, recording someone without previously having his agreement, is still illegal, even when in public.
In sane countries, there's no presumption of privacy in public spaces, and you can be recorded without your permission.
Does Germany really have no CCTVs facing the streets? (If so, that'd be kind of nice, actually.)
So your article says that in anonymous crowds, people can act like idiots? And get away with it? Astonishing research. Anyone who has ever participated in an online community knows that's how it works.
I should clarify; around slashdot, we're awfully big on civil liberties, personal privacy and libertarianism (Hey, government, stay out of my business!). That said, we don't spend nearly enough time on civic duty. Civic duty and civil liberties are inextricably linked: a society will remain well ordered if either, there are no civil liberties and no civic duty, or there are lots of civil liberties, but they come at a price: that of civic duty.
Exactly. And for all the retards advocating anarchism on here (which is amazingly common for such a stupid idea), imagine Vancouver but with no police. Or no, Vancouver is still too polite. Imagine Detroit.
It's amazing how many people on here are anti-police (they're all fascists!), anti-military (imperialist dogs!) and anti-government (they're all fascists -- wait... did we use that one already?) There's serious problems with the police, and military, and government at times, especially when their power grows beyond the ability of the populace to limit it, but they're still good things to have in general.
The worst trend are the pacifists that are willing to reap the benefits of a peaceful society, but are unwilling to pick up arms in a time of crisis to defend it. I'm not saying you have to join the military - you could make a valid argument against the four wars we're fighting right now - but the philosophy of pacifism is nothing more than parasitism dressed up in pretty words.
>>While I read this I really wonder what the old imperial metric for power is;D After all the US seems very attached to theri miles and feet and yards;D (Just kidding, ofc)
Well, our power systems are all standardized on watts for instantaneous consumption, and kilowatt-hours instead of joules for energy.
This replaced the imperial system in use up through 1995, which was library-of-congress-feet.
>>Try that without the subsidies the state and federal governments are already providing.
Wait, aren't we talking about a giant federal government loan guarantee? Ok, fine. It's about $2/watt to buy PV panels wholesale, before subsidies. So a 5.5kW system (what I have) would be about $11k, plus the inverter ($2k) plus installation and wiring. So call it $20k at cost.
>>it wouldn't provide for 100% of the power they need, so it's not a remotely fair comparison
My 5.5kW system is producing more power than I consume (about 30 kWh / day), though that'll change if I start running the AC 24/7. But I've got a fairly large store of credits built up.
>>And did I mention life-time? Operating costs on a solar thermal plant are infinitesimal, indefinitely. PV panels need to be thrown away and replaced after a few years.
You have it completely backwards.
Solar thermal systems have pipes (that can leak) and high temperatures (that can cause wear), with operations and maintenance working out to about 1c/kWh.
Solar PV has no moving parts, and the panels retain 80-90% efficiency across 20 years. (This is the guaranteed wear rate, in fact.) PV panels have no maintenance at all, unless you're getting leaves or mud blown on them.
Slashdot Mirror
>>The data points are decades, for god's sake.
The data points are years.
>>In fact, it shows the opposite, demolishing the most important "conservative" talking point of all: that we are "over-taxed" and that such "over-taxing" hurts the economy or stifles growth.
It doesn't show anything of the sort. Nominal tax rates and effective tax rates are two very different things. If the nominal tax rate is 91%, but there's enough loopholes and tax shelters that a rich guy pays 20% anyway, then unless you think the tax shelters themselves stimulate the economy (which you could make a case for), it's really no different than our current system with a 35% top marginal tax rate and less loopholes with the effective rate being 20%.
You also have to realize that it doesn't make much of a difference when there is only one person in America in the top tax rate (HuffPo, another liberal source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/top-marginal-tax-rates-chart_n_849596.html). Looking at the tax brackets by quintile is a more informative than just focusing on the highest marginal tax rate (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/business/31leonhardt.html?ex=1351569600&en=b1065bf4721795fa&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink)
I know. I read my own reference I posted.
But the notion came to national attention with the 1999 WTO riots. Something not in the reference, but something I remember.
>>It's too bad that would have to happen with this president and not the previous one, who happened to be Houdini of inventing BS from thin air. Free-speech zones. WMD. Blocking Scientific Papers.
The free speech zones really came to pre-eminence at the 1999 WTO talks, not the 2004 Democratic convention. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone) I know that "blaming Clinton" isn't nearly as popular as trying to pin everything on GWB, but it's not good to live in fact-free zone, either.
He didn't invent the idea that WMDs would be found in Iraq (again, Clinton - http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp). Also, minor stockpiles of WMDs were found in Iraq (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/).
While I agree with you on the anti-scientific behavior relating to the AGW paper squelching, you should be careful yourself to make sure you've got your fact right.
>>However the federal government has taken in only 14.9% of GDP in 2009 and 2010
>>So if we want to get serious about the budget we must start by repealing the disastrous Bush tax cuts
Logic fail. The Bush tax cuts were in 2001 and 2003, but we had growing income tax revenues after 2003. You're blaming the Bush tax cuts on the drop in tax revenues in 2009-2010 on something that happened 7-9 years before? When in the meantime tax revenues both individual (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Federal_individual_income_tax_receipts_2000-2009.png) and total revenue as percentage of GDP *rose* during that time period? The data doesn't support your hypothesis.
>>not by enacting recession-prolonging austerity measures borne entirely by the lower and middle classes.
Whereas the drunken-sailor stimulus spending has resulted in... what?
>>Notice the data nodes at the year "2011"?
Did our tax rates suddenly change from 2008 to 2011, or did our economy collapse?
In fact, you see a high point in our tax rate by GDP in the mid 2000s, which took place after GWB's tax cuts to the rich - wait, what, tax revenues went up?
>>The chart that you have provided us shows that the federal government is NOT taking in enough money.
Right (if you put in terms of how much they want to spend), but neither are corporations or people. That's why it's called a depr^h^h^h^hrecession.
The point you're missing is that the tax revenues per GDP stay amazingly stable no matter what the tax rate is.
>>If you go back to WWII, you'll find that whenever the tax rate on the top income groups goes above 50%, we have dropping unemployment, greater growth of GDP
Let's test your theory.
From a liberal source: http://img.slate.com/media/86/marginalGrowth.jpg
There again doesn't seem to be any correlation between the highest marginal tax rate and GDP growth. And if you're suggesting returning to the 91% marginal tax rate, you have to remember to reintroduce all the loopholes that made people pay roughly the same taxes as they do today.
>>Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years.
Wrong. Don't confuse the maximum marginal tax rate (which used to go up to 91%) with the actual amount of taxes paid per dollar of GDP. Hauser found (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_Law) that no matter what the tax rates are set to, we pay around 20% of our GDP in taxes. If you're talking about the recent dip due to the recession, you might be able to make an argument there, but the long term trend is actually pretty clear:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/U.S._Federal_Tax_Receipts_as_a_Percentage_of_GDP_1945%E2%80%932015.jpg
The federal government takes in plenty of money from taxes. The problem is that they spend too much. I suggest even, across the board, cuts to balance the budget. No partisanship, just chop the budget by whatever percentage excess they had the year before.
>>Everyone loves wind power, as long as the mills aren't located anywhere near themselves
Yep. Eco-friendly Ted Kennedy sued to block windmills going up near his estate.
Hell, the DC lawyers that worked against NIMBY lawsuits on windmills filed a NIMBY lawsuit when they found out that windmills were going to go up near their farm in backwater Virginia.
The hypocrites come out of the woodwork. It's always "we like wind power, just not here". We seriously need to restructure how these sorts of lawsuits can proceed in our country.
>>it is newsworthy because this kid did this all on his own while he was in High School. With no training. What were you doing in High School?
I did a summer internship between my junior and senior years with Dr. Clark Guest (an amazing EE Professor) at UCSD to work on a fuzzy logic AI system that ultimately got me a job at a defense contractor before I graduated. But nice try with your tu quoque attempt.
>>So now you're talking about 100k? Which is it? 200k or 100k?
There are people making 200k, that get to retire at 50 with 90% pay. This is too high.
50% of the lifeguards make over 100k, that also get to retire at 50 with 90% pay. This is also too high.
>>The article also mentions that it's a competitive salary for the job they do
Yeah, no shit.
>>So really your argument isn't about public sector workers, it's that you think professional life guards are paid too much.
No, my argument is about all public sector workers. The average salary for parole officers and corrections officers exceeds 100k as well. In Texas, which is only about 15% lower than us in terms of cost of living, these jobs average 40k-50k in salary. The difference? They have public unions for them here in CA, but TX bans public unions, as they should.
The article talks about half of them earning more than 100k a year. Try to tell me that is a reasonable salary for a lifeguard, with a straight face.
Also, tell me that retiring at 90% pay with 30 years of service is also perfectly reasonable.
Building a functioning 8-bit CPU and writing apps for it was required for graduating from our CS program at UC San Diego... not seeing why this is newsworthy.
>>Just so. How do we know that any set of conditions in the climate is optimal?
We can look back at the medieval warm period, which was a very productive time in our history. Our current global temps are comparable.
So the apocalypse now people are a bit premature.
Not to say that ocean acidification and continued warming won't be bad, but the notion that we're facing the end of the world right this second is just fearmongering.
>>The fact you were waiting around and checking back on me for a snarky reply proves my point that you're trolling.
In other words:
"How dare these people use citations and facts to destroy my carefully arranged prejudices??"
-jo_ham
Heh, no, I was just amused by how deafening silence always greets those that win an argument on here. I was doubly amused by you calling the truth a troll.
If you're having trouble understanding what I wrote, there is a snark translator available on the internet.
When I worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, I was hired to write a server, essentially, that would provide a web interface to some of the big iron projects in biology.
Was a two year project. I got it finished over a summer, as it turned out to be easier than I thought to do the coding that piped information to and from the biology modeling programs to a web browser.
The only roadblock was the SDSC IT and web services guys that said they wouldn't allow... well, everything. So, long story short, we just had to bypass them entirely, host it on our own machines, and just use the SDSC site as a redirect. The moral of the story was that IT policy trumps million dollar research projects.
What have we moved to?
VPSs: yes, which makes a lot more sense than running our own physical server, for a lot of reasons.
SaaS: yes, we've moved to google docs in our corporation, since we're mostly in different physical locations, and document version tracking over email is a mess when you have multiple authors and editors.
IaaS: since our products as such run on a LAMP stack, we can spin up more capacity by adding to the VPS. It's highly unlikely that we'll get the exponential growth requiring more heroic measures. (We have a limited customer base.)
We also use other technologies, like VNC, which lets me (the IT guy slash CEO) connect to the other people in the corporation working remotely, when they ask for help.
I run automatic remote backups on all of our work machines, and have been looking to move to a virtualized environment (that will also be automatically backed up) so the inevitable hardware failures can be mitigated somewhat.
It works pretty well, honestly. Now that everything is set up, my only IT related tasks just involves reminding people to use google docs instead of Word.
Different reasons for different sized businesses.
I moved my small corporation to "the cloud" because even though there have been outages (thoug not for us) in the cloud, it's still far more reliable than running a linux box in a neighborhood where PG&E apparently trips over their own power cords every month, and a UPS only buys the incompetents a short window to get it back up.
And it's cheaper and more reliable than colocing.
Has nothing to do with "hating IT" in our case. Hell, I am the IT guy in addition to all my other hats. Small businesses are like that.
America is self-sufficient when it comes to food production. We import food when it's cheaper, not because we can't feed our own people.
A massive return to agriculture, as you suggest, would make as much sense as Mao's desire to build a blast furnace in every podunk village in China. And with the same disasterous consequences.
The easiest measure of the success of a civilization is to measure the ratio of farmers to the rest of the population.
Indeed. Corn ethanol is one of the worst ideas ever implemented in our country, and this is the first positive news I've heard about it in a long time.
It's nothing more than a bribe to Iowa farmers to get that key early presidential nomination.
>>I don't know how it's in Canada, but here in Germany, recording someone without previously having his agreement, is still illegal, even when in public.
In sane countries, there's no presumption of privacy in public spaces, and you can be recorded without your permission.
Does Germany really have no CCTVs facing the streets? (If so, that'd be kind of nice, actually.)
>>I suggest http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/02/10/deindividuation/ for further reading.
So your article says that in anonymous crowds, people can act like idiots? And get away with it? Astonishing research. Anyone who has ever participated in an online community knows that's how it works.
It's still absolutely no excuse to riot.
Exactly. And for all the retards advocating anarchism on here (which is amazingly common for such a stupid idea), imagine Vancouver but with no police. Or no, Vancouver is still too polite. Imagine Detroit.
It's amazing how many people on here are anti-police (they're all fascists!), anti-military (imperialist dogs!) and anti-government (they're all fascists -- wait... did we use that one already?) There's serious problems with the police, and military, and government at times, especially when their power grows beyond the ability of the populace to limit it, but they're still good things to have in general.
The worst trend are the pacifists that are willing to reap the benefits of a peaceful society, but are unwilling to pick up arms in a time of crisis to defend it. I'm not saying you have to join the military - you could make a valid argument against the four wars we're fighting right now - but the philosophy of pacifism is nothing more than parasitism dressed up in pretty words.
What? No snarky reply?
It sucks, doesn't it, when you call someone a troll but it turns out they're right?
>>While I read this I really wonder what the old imperial metric for power is ;D After all the US seems very attached to theri miles and feet and yards ;D (Just kidding, ofc)
Well, our power systems are all standardized on watts for instantaneous consumption, and kilowatt-hours instead of joules for energy.
This replaced the imperial system in use up through 1995, which was library-of-congress-feet.
>>Try that without the subsidies the state and federal governments are already providing.
Wait, aren't we talking about a giant federal government loan guarantee? Ok, fine. It's about $2/watt to buy PV panels wholesale, before subsidies. So a 5.5kW system (what I have) would be about $11k, plus the inverter ($2k) plus installation and wiring. So call it $20k at cost.
>>it wouldn't provide for 100% of the power they need, so it's not a remotely fair comparison
My 5.5kW system is producing more power than I consume (about 30 kWh / day), though that'll change if I start running the AC 24/7. But I've got a fairly large store of credits built up.
>>And did I mention life-time? Operating costs on a solar thermal plant are infinitesimal, indefinitely. PV panels need to be thrown away and replaced after a few years.
You have it completely backwards.
Solar thermal systems have pipes (that can leak) and high temperatures (that can cause wear), with operations and maintenance working out to about 1c/kWh.
Solar PV has no moving parts, and the panels retain 80-90% efficiency across 20 years. (This is the guaranteed wear rate, in fact.) PV panels have no maintenance at all, unless you're getting leaves or mud blown on them.