I'm betting it's an AC who made up numbers he thinks proves his point. I'm not an AC. With income at $100,000 in a year, I was at 10% federal income tax, and about 20% for the sum of all taxes I paid (SS, Medicare, sales, state, local, property - multiple properties, and all that). It would be hard to reach 40% in the US. Though some people manage it, like those hit with AMT and other such weirdness. Or those who pay both halves of SS themselves (contractors) but he specifically said "salary" so that doesn't count.
At $100,000 a year, you will lose 35% of your paycheck before deductions and writeoffs. Throw in the 10% state sales tax in California, and there you go.
>>I understand it's SOP, but I do think it is motherfucking bullshit that I pay a higher percentage of my income in taxes than these companies
You know what's bullshit? San Francisco's tax laws. Combined with California's tax laws. That's why there's this controversy in the first place. They have one of the most business-unfriendly environments in the US.
My company pays 1.5% of its profits to the state of California. You know what's bullshit about it? It's an S-Corp, so there are no profits, technically - all money passes through to the shareholders, who pay personal income tax on the money. But you get the privilege of paying 1.5% anyway, on top of the taxes you get to pay for personal income, simply because you have a corporation. If your profits are not that high, you get to pay a minimum tax of $800 anyway. Which can work out to a lot more than 1.5% of your income, if you're a small operation. Hey, that's fair, right? Mom and Pop start a $20,000/year candle business, and so California taxes them a bonus 4% for the privilege. (And people wonder why corporations are leaving the state.)
C-Corps (that retain earnings) get to pay corporate taxes (unless you're rich enough to buy a loophole) on top of the taxes that the owners pay when they eventually draw money out of the corporation. That's double-bonus awesome, right?
Twitter was going to be charged a bonus 1.5% taxes on all money it spent on payroll (i.e. personnel expenses), on top of all the other bullshit. That's the San Francisco Treat right there, and why they were going to move to San Jose. Twitter is big enough and famous enough to get an exemption from the SF government though. Smaller corporations just have to take it or leave. (Guess which companies are hard to relocate? That's right, small businesses.)
Even more fun: if you're a corporation grossing over $100,000 a year, you get to pay California sales tax on all purchases of durable goods bought outside of California. (http://www.boe.ca.gov/taxprograms/usetax/index.html) How's that for being fair? And if you don't keep records for your "exemptions" (i.e. purchases from companies like Newegg that charge CA sales tax already), you get to pay sales tax twice. Lucky you, eh? Oh, and after they enroll your corporation for Use Tax, it's retroactive for the past four years, taxes and penalties due immediately.
You're right about the corporate tax code being bullshit, but the reality isn't exactly what you think it is for anyone not rich enough to buy off the legislature.
>>But remember it wasn't the FDA that banned Vioxx - Merck pulled it from the market.
Right, that's what I said. And I'm hardly defending Merck here. They behaved irresponsibly, but pulling Vioxx from the market when they could have black-labelled their drug (as everyone else did) was also irresponsible.
My wife was in pharmacy school while all that was going down. It was an interesting issue to study.
Really needs to DIAF. I mean sure, if the drug company lies? Bust their asses, shut them down. but too many drugs, drugs that can save lives and make folks lives better, are being taken off the market not by lies but by douches that don't follow directions and that is total bullshit! If my doc explains the pros and cons of a drug and I agree to take it it should be between my doc and myself not some ambulance chasing scumbag!
Your story is an excellent case for the policy of informed consent. As long as everyone knows what the risks are, people should be free to take the drugs.
Who cares if Vioxx increased your chance of a heart attack by a small amount? ("Doubling" the risk is much scarier than saying it raises your risk by 1% or whatever.) If the patient UNDERSTANDS the risk, and no better drugs exist, he should be able to take his Vioxx or whatever. It's called a black-label warning, and the FDA does it all the time. But nothing helps if the drug gets pulled off the market.
I know about this, because my landlord at the time (an old Korean war vet) suffered excruciating pain from arthritis in his spine. He started on Vioxx and became a functional individual again. When they pulled it from the market, it was like literally chopping his legs off. Not one other painkiller really worked for him, except morphine. So he was put on morphine, and spent 17 hours a day sleeping. I asked him if he'd trade a 1% chance of a heart attack in exchange for getting his life back, and his response was something along the lines of "Yes, in a second. I spend all day sleeping now - I'd like to have my life back, even if it means a slight risk."
Naderites love to claim that their lawsuits keep the evil big corporations in line, not thinking about the harm they cause to the little guys.
Of course, after the whole Vioxx debacle played out, they found that all COX-blockers increase the risk of heart problems (due to shared receptors, IIRC, on the heart). But other companies just slapped a black-label warning on their Celebrex or whatever, and kept selling it.
>>so that each falling object approaches the event horizon asymptotically BUT NEVER ACTUALLY REACHES IT.
To be fair, there's a certain amount of "open question" about what actually would happen if you threw a baseball into a black hole, as we don't actually have one on hand to play with. There's something of a paradox involved as well, since the baseball (from its perspective) would pass through the event horizon just fine, but observers would watch it stop, or perhaps get smeared across the surface of the black hole.
>>A sign of success would be that the poor and middle class were growing more, and the richer are staying where they are or having their incomes reduced slightly for a time.
Again, you're not understanding why this is an apples to oranges comparison. Rich people get to pull percentage profits from corporations. As Bobco, Inc. moves into the global marketplace and doubles its profits, Founder Bob is going to go from making $100M a year to $200M. Since he's grateful to all his peons, and is a generous guy, he doubles all their wages, and drops down to making only $150M a year.
So the middle class schlubs that are working for him are making an extra $40,000 a year, but he's still pulling in an extra $50M. People like you would claim he's being "unjust" and "unfair" to his employees, even though he just gave them a 100% raise, and gave away half his extra money to his peons. Naive economic calculations would show that "inequality is at an all time high". The news media would trumpet that "the rich got richer but the poor got poorer", even though everyone is doing much better.
You've got to realize that corporate/shareholder income cannot be fairly compared against W-2/personal income. And if you take corporate income out of the equation, you'll see that "inequality" in our society hasn't risen at all in the last 50 years.
So you can either nationalize all corporations and destroy our economy, or stop using brain-dead economic measures. Better measures for the success of the middle class are already out there - I listed them in the previous post - and all of them show the poor and middle class alike are doing much better than they were 50 years ago.
Percentages mean everything. That's the problem you people have - failure to understand basic maths.
>>Meanwhile, the costs of basic necessities (food, energy to heat/cool a home, housing, transportation to get to a job) have gone through the roof
Remember, we're using constant 2007 dollars for those figures. So you have to use constant dollars for the costs, too. In fact, you have to look at what percentage people are spending on the necessities. These calculations are done in the "disposable personal income" category, and disposable income has risen dramatically as well, for the rich and poor alike.
While it's trendy and everything to say how horrible things are now, we really are better off than we were in the past. (Well, maybe not as good as in 2007, but still.)
>>I haven't seen the principle applied to faking an HDD before; but the same phenomenon crops up fairly frequently with USB flash drives and flash memory cards sourced from suspiciously cheap ebay sellers and similar places.
I just bought a Hitachi 2TB hard drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145473) which is supposed to have a 64MB cache (http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/desktop/deskstar/deskstar-7k3000), which is why it's about $20 more expensive than their one with a 32MB cache.
So I buy it, plug it in, and then start doing various tests on it to make sure it's working fine before cloning my primary drive over to it, and notice that it is reporting only a 32MB cache. So I download a couple other tools that pull info from the HD, and they all report a 32MB cache. The reported ID for the drive is correct, and all the other items match up, but it's not reporting the right cache size.
So either it's: 1) A problem with all the tools not reading the cache size correctly 2) A problem with the drive not reporting the cache size correctly 3) Hitachi not actually providing a 64MB cache (which seems unlikely) 4) Something is shady going on
But at the same time, the drive is fast and cheap, so I just eventually shrugged my shoulders and went ahead with using it anyway.
>>Obama is NOT a socialist, and that's a shame, because that's what the US needed. It is what we still need. >>[Bush] increased inequality to points nearly as high as our nation has ever seen in its history
If you're talking about income inequality, it doesn't actually matter. In fact, using the term is generally a clear sign the person doesn't know anything about anything, and is just parroting some rant he read online.
Why doesn't it matter? Think about a country in which everyone makes 20% more (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than the year before. This is A Good Thing. Everyone's doing better off.
But socialists like yourself would whine and complain that the guy making a million dollars is now making $1.2M, whereas the poor $10,000/year worker has been exploited by *only* getting a $2,000 raise. People like you repeat the tired line "The rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer." But it's not true, dude. The gap is larger, yes, but *everyone* has gotten richer.
What you want to look at instead is called "median income" (either for personal income or household income). This eliminates the effect that is the basis for all the "inequality" - people that start successful businesses get to pull in corporate-level income, instead of personal-level income. That's the key point all you idiots miss. It's like comparing marshmallows with the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. Even though all you socialists claim that it is "unfair" (whatever the hell that means) that Sergey Brin is making more than his housekeeper, the only thing unfair about the whole deal is trying to compare corporate income with personal. In fact, if you eliminate corporate income from the equations, there's much much less "income inequality" in our society.
There's nothing dastardly about people making a percentage of their corporate profits - it is the incentive that makes it worth all the time and headache to start your own business (which it is, trust me). If you ban private percentage ownership of companies (which you do, as you're a Socialist), you'll actually destroy the economy, and actually screw the working class over. But by that point, you'll probably be painting the kulaks as class traitors, so their mass starvation and cannibalism probably won't bother you at all. Maybe after you die, your successors will slowly reintroduce private ownership of capital as it is the only way they find to promote the generation of wealth.
The real question you should be asking is: "Have the rich have been getting richer by actually making the poor poorer (instead of growing faster than the poor)?"
And the answer is no. If you look at the following measures: Median Household Income Median Personal Income Household Income by Quintile Per capita GDP in PPP Personal disposable Income
All of these measures have risen by at least 20% from the 1960s to the current day. For the rich and poor alike. Some (such as Personal Disposable Income) have risen dramatically.
In constant dollars, the poor (20th percentile) are making 225% more now than in 1947, and the rich (95th percentile) are making about 300% more. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg) By contrast, when your favorite country, a certain union of socialist republics destroyed private ownership of capital, the economy collapsed and the only thing that saved them from total ruin was allowing a bit of private ownership under the NEP and similar policies later in its history.
>>Also, the assumption people make regarding Libya is that the choice we faced was either spend zero money dealign with the Libyan situation or spend a lot of money.
You can actually pull the data from the OMB on how much extra the various wars (or police actions, or whatever they call it these days) are costing.
It's not free to have your military sitting at home and not shooting cruise missiles at people, but it is cheaper.
A quick look says the number you're looking for is $162.2B/year to pay for these operations.
Honestly, both the left wing and right wing are being stupid about the budget crisis. Amdahl's Law says they should hit the big things first (SSN, Medicare/Medicaid, Military), but all three are sacred cows to their various wings, and so they're fighting over the scraps left over.
>>GRE may be somewhat challenging because you may not have enough time to solve all the problems.
The GRE may be somewhat challenging because the test-takers might get bored doing basic maths for an hour, but that's about it. You don't need to put your brain into "think like an 8th grader" mode to solve "x+y = 6. x = 5. What is Y?"
It honestly felt much easier than the SAT math section. The GRE verbal section seemed harder, though.
Quoting Al Jazeera isn't really doing much to establish your bona fides.
>>That shit has a halflife of 20,000 years. So it wont be completely nonreactive for approximately 250,000 years
Uh, no. Think about what "half life" means.
It will never be "completely nonreactive". After 250,000 years it will have decayed in half 12.5 times, so.5^12.5 = 1.7% remaining.
Also things with long half lives, by definition, decay less often, so they're less radioactive. I'd much rather spend a minute next to a gram of a radioactive product with a half life of 100,000 years than half a gram of something with a half life of one minute.
Kids these days (/cough) don't know what it's like to turn a computer on and be immediately given a programming prompt. Even if it as just a BASIC interpreter, the barrier to entry was a lot lower then than it is now.
>>supporting some company because you want competition is a pretty bad was to have competition.
If you have two equally good products (say the AMD64 vs. whatever Intel had at the time), it doesn't matter particularly which one you buy, so I always chose to support AMD. As I said, if we were down only to Intel, it would be a bad thing in general.
>>Buy the bast bang for your buck
Didn't I say I just bought Sandy Bridge? It's head-and-shoulders above anything AMD has right now.
Yeah, Sandy Bridge has slaughtered AMD for the current generation.
I've been a long time AMD supporter, just because I don't want there to be only one kid on the block (competition is good and all that), but about three hours ago I just bought a 2600K and matching mobo and ram on Newegg. First Intel CPU I've bought since the old $90 Celeron 300A that was 50% overclockable out of the box.
>>Study advanced math. Take the time to focus on doing well on the GRE.
These two things don't really go well together.
The GRE goes up to, what, algebra?
I didn't even bother looking at the GRE before I took it and got a perfect score on the math section. Literally, the first question was: "x + 7 = 13. Solve for x."...and it didn't get any harder after that. A perfect score was only something like 95th percentile for computer science majors. That's how ridiculously easy it is - 5% of people get perfect scores on it.
The logic problem section was also pretty easy. I missed one question from misclicking an answer, but the stupid computerized test systems won't let you go back to change an answer.
>>Computers have become the universal tool, but no one is able to explore their capabilities, recent graduates are like illiterate peasants in a library.
To be fair, betting on ignorance is always a safe bet, no matter what subject or area of our society you're talking about. Nobody** knows history, math, computer programming, religion, physics, etc. at a very good level these days.
That said, there's a lot of smart people in every field. Some of the best math people I met were bioengineering professors at UCSD, at least or especially in their areas of expertise. I was fortunate enough to be partnered on my master's thesis project with an AMES guy who was a pretty decent programmer and had a good knowledge of math, but unfortunately the AMES program at the time (early 2000s) was still using FORTRAN. So we had fun getting our code to interoperate, but at least he was competent enough that if I told him how I was formatting my output, he'd have it all read in and analyzed by the next day.
By contrast, two of the stupidest people I've ever had to work with were at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. It was at the time of the internet boom, so they were having trouble finding competent programmers, so they hired these biology PhDs instead. Their sum output of work in the two years I spent there was half-constructing a web page (that didn't work) and a lot of snarky emails to my professor about how I should be using whatever trendy thing they'd read about somewhere. Because I wasn't using XML or whatever internally in our project, you know, that was the only reason they couldn't get any work done.
>>Either the tobacco tax is a premier example of taxation without representation
Eh, in my mostly-Libertarian opinion, usage taxes are one of the most fair ways of raising revenue to pay for things. While Amtrack apologists like to talk about how we subsidize roads much more than trains, they fail to consider the fact that gas taxes pay for roads entirely (and then some).
Smokers help pay into medical care through their taxes.
So why not a sugar tax? If fructose is the cause of the modern obesity and metabolic syndrome epidemic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM), then why not put a 1c per gram of fructose tax on all food and drinks (including juices)? That would work out to about 25c per can of Coke, or 15c per Twinkie.
Play a fun game the next time you go to a gas station and try to find something healthy and tasty to eat or drink.
It is. Nobody takes it seriously. The insurance industry loves it, though, since it overclassifies people as overweight.
There *is* a correlation between BMI and body fat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Correlation_between_BMI_and_Percent_Body_Fat_for_Men_in_NCHS%27_NHANES_1994_Data.PNG), but it's not a very good one.
I work out about 4 to 6 times per week, and check my body fat pretty regularly with my personal trainer. My BMI is 34.7 (obese), my body fat is 18%. Which isn't great compared to where I used to be, but certainly not anywhere near the obese level.
That said, I recently watched this lecture from UCSF, and it really changed my thinking on obesity and diet. It's well worth the 90 minutes of your life, and the guy is a good speaker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
(A speaker on nutrition using actual biochemistry? How very unlike most things you see on television.)
You forget that all electromagnetic radiation cause airplanes to fall out of the sky. That's why it's so important to shut down your Kindle back in row 79.
It's a wonder that airplanes survive in sunlight, at all.
>>They don't SAY it ran out, but they do IMPLY it ran out
Huh? I just watched the video and the car came to a halt in the middle of the track twice. Once apparently completely, the other it slowed down when the engine overheated.
Whether or not it actually happened is another issue, but Top Gear certainly did make it look like it was an unreliable POS.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.paycheckcity.com/NetPayCalc/netpayCalcResult.asp
At $100,000 a year, you will lose 35% of your paycheck before deductions and writeoffs. Throw in the 10% state sales tax in California, and there you go.
>>I understand it's SOP, but I do think it is motherfucking bullshit that I pay a higher percentage of my income in taxes than these companies
You know what's bullshit? San Francisco's tax laws. Combined with California's tax laws. That's why there's this controversy in the first place. They have one of the most business-unfriendly environments in the US.
My company pays 1.5% of its profits to the state of California. You know what's bullshit about it? It's an S-Corp, so there are no profits, technically - all money passes through to the shareholders, who pay personal income tax on the money. But you get the privilege of paying 1.5% anyway, on top of the taxes you get to pay for personal income, simply because you have a corporation. If your profits are not that high, you get to pay a minimum tax of $800 anyway. Which can work out to a lot more than 1.5% of your income, if you're a small operation. Hey, that's fair, right? Mom and Pop start a $20,000/year candle business, and so California taxes them a bonus 4% for the privilege. (And people wonder why corporations are leaving the state.)
C-Corps (that retain earnings) get to pay corporate taxes (unless you're rich enough to buy a loophole) on top of the taxes that the owners pay when they eventually draw money out of the corporation. That's double-bonus awesome, right?
Twitter was going to be charged a bonus 1.5% taxes on all money it spent on payroll (i.e. personnel expenses), on top of all the other bullshit. That's the San Francisco Treat right there, and why they were going to move to San Jose. Twitter is big enough and famous enough to get an exemption from the SF government though. Smaller corporations just have to take it or leave. (Guess which companies are hard to relocate? That's right, small businesses.)
Even more fun: if you're a corporation grossing over $100,000 a year, you get to pay California sales tax on all purchases of durable goods bought outside of California. (http://www.boe.ca.gov/taxprograms/usetax/index.html) How's that for being fair? And if you don't keep records for your "exemptions" (i.e. purchases from companies like Newegg that charge CA sales tax already), you get to pay sales tax twice. Lucky you, eh? Oh, and after they enroll your corporation for Use Tax, it's retroactive for the past four years, taxes and penalties due immediately.
You're right about the corporate tax code being bullshit, but the reality isn't exactly what you think it is for anyone not rich enough to buy off the legislature.
>>Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd say that guy got COX-blocked pretty hard.
I'm rather proud of myself that I got all the UCSF pharmacy students I know to start calling them that.
Everyone needs to do their part for academia.
>>But remember it wasn't the FDA that banned Vioxx - Merck pulled it from the market.
Right, that's what I said. And I'm hardly defending Merck here. They behaved irresponsibly, but pulling Vioxx from the market when they could have black-labelled their drug (as everyone else did) was also irresponsible.
My wife was in pharmacy school while all that was going down. It was an interesting issue to study.
Your story is an excellent case for the policy of informed consent. As long as everyone knows what the risks are, people should be free to take the drugs.
Who cares if Vioxx increased your chance of a heart attack by a small amount? ("Doubling" the risk is much scarier than saying it raises your risk by 1% or whatever.) If the patient UNDERSTANDS the risk, and no better drugs exist, he should be able to take his Vioxx or whatever. It's called a black-label warning, and the FDA does it all the time. But nothing helps if the drug gets pulled off the market.
I know about this, because my landlord at the time (an old Korean war vet) suffered excruciating pain from arthritis in his spine. He started on Vioxx and became a functional individual again. When they pulled it from the market, it was like literally chopping his legs off. Not one other painkiller really worked for him, except morphine. So he was put on morphine, and spent 17 hours a day sleeping. I asked him if he'd trade a 1% chance of a heart attack in exchange for getting his life back, and his response was something along the lines of "Yes, in a second. I spend all day sleeping now - I'd like to have my life back, even if it means a slight risk."
Naderites love to claim that their lawsuits keep the evil big corporations in line, not thinking about the harm they cause to the little guys.
Of course, after the whole Vioxx debacle played out, they found that all COX-blockers increase the risk of heart problems (due to shared receptors, IIRC, on the heart). But other companies just slapped a black-label warning on their Celebrex or whatever, and kept selling it.
>>so that each falling object approaches the event horizon asymptotically BUT NEVER ACTUALLY REACHES IT.
To be fair, there's a certain amount of "open question" about what actually would happen if you threw a baseball into a black hole, as we don't actually have one on hand to play with. There's something of a paradox involved as well, since the baseball (from its perspective) would pass through the event horizon just fine, but observers would watch it stop, or perhaps get smeared across the surface of the black hole.
>>A sign of success would be that the poor and middle class were growing more, and the richer are staying where they are or having their incomes reduced slightly for a time.
Again, you're not understanding why this is an apples to oranges comparison. Rich people get to pull percentage profits from corporations. As Bobco, Inc. moves into the global marketplace and doubles its profits, Founder Bob is going to go from making $100M a year to $200M. Since he's grateful to all his peons, and is a generous guy, he doubles all their wages, and drops down to making only $150M a year.
So the middle class schlubs that are working for him are making an extra $40,000 a year, but he's still pulling in an extra $50M. People like you would claim he's being "unjust" and "unfair" to his employees, even though he just gave them a 100% raise, and gave away half his extra money to his peons. Naive economic calculations would show that "inequality is at an all time high". The news media would trumpet that "the rich got richer but the poor got poorer", even though everyone is doing much better.
You've got to realize that corporate/shareholder income cannot be fairly compared against W-2/personal income. And if you take corporate income out of the equation, you'll see that "inequality" in our society hasn't risen at all in the last 50 years.
So you can either nationalize all corporations and destroy our economy, or stop using brain-dead economic measures. Better measures for the success of the middle class are already out there - I listed them in the previous post - and all of them show the poor and middle class alike are doing much better than they were 50 years ago.
>>Percentages mean nothing.
Percentages mean everything. That's the problem you people have - failure to understand basic maths.
>>Meanwhile, the costs of basic necessities (food, energy to heat/cool a home, housing, transportation to get to a job) have gone through the roof
Remember, we're using constant 2007 dollars for those figures. So you have to use constant dollars for the costs, too. In fact, you have to look at what percentage people are spending on the necessities. These calculations are done in the "disposable personal income" category, and disposable income has risen dramatically as well, for the rich and poor alike.
While it's trendy and everything to say how horrible things are now, we really are better off than we were in the past. (Well, maybe not as good as in 2007, but still.)
>>I haven't seen the principle applied to faking an HDD before; but the same phenomenon crops up fairly frequently with USB flash drives and flash memory cards sourced from suspiciously cheap ebay sellers and similar places.
I just bought a Hitachi 2TB hard drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145473) which is supposed to have a 64MB cache (http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/desktop/deskstar/deskstar-7k3000), which is why it's about $20 more expensive than their one with a 32MB cache.
So I buy it, plug it in, and then start doing various tests on it to make sure it's working fine before cloning my primary drive over to it, and notice that it is reporting only a 32MB cache. So I download a couple other tools that pull info from the HD, and they all report a 32MB cache. The reported ID for the drive is correct, and all the other items match up, but it's not reporting the right cache size.
So either it's:
1) A problem with all the tools not reading the cache size correctly
2) A problem with the drive not reporting the cache size correctly
3) Hitachi not actually providing a 64MB cache (which seems unlikely)
4) Something is shady going on
But at the same time, the drive is fast and cheap, so I just eventually shrugged my shoulders and went ahead with using it anyway.
>>I feel as if a movie star I hadn't watched in forever has just passed away. "I didn't know he was still alive?"
Yeah, seriously.
Did people even use Kermit after Zmodem was available?
>>Obama is NOT a socialist, and that's a shame, because that's what the US needed. It is what we still need.
>>[Bush] increased inequality to points nearly as high as our nation has ever seen in its history
If you're talking about income inequality, it doesn't actually matter. In fact, using the term is generally a clear sign the person doesn't know anything about anything, and is just parroting some rant he read online.
Why doesn't it matter? Think about a country in which everyone makes 20% more (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than the year before. This is A Good Thing. Everyone's doing better off.
But socialists like yourself would whine and complain that the guy making a million dollars is now making $1.2M, whereas the poor $10,000/year worker has been exploited by *only* getting a $2,000 raise. People like you repeat the tired line "The rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer." But it's not true, dude. The gap is larger, yes, but *everyone* has gotten richer.
What you want to look at instead is called "median income" (either for personal income or household income). This eliminates the effect that is the basis for all the "inequality" - people that start successful businesses get to pull in corporate-level income, instead of personal-level income. That's the key point all you idiots miss. It's like comparing marshmallows with the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. Even though all you socialists claim that it is "unfair" (whatever the hell that means) that Sergey Brin is making more than his housekeeper, the only thing unfair about the whole deal is trying to compare corporate income with personal. In fact, if you eliminate corporate income from the equations, there's much much less "income inequality" in our society.
There's nothing dastardly about people making a percentage of their corporate profits - it is the incentive that makes it worth all the time and headache to start your own business (which it is, trust me). If you ban private percentage ownership of companies (which you do, as you're a Socialist), you'll actually destroy the economy, and actually screw the working class over. But by that point, you'll probably be painting the kulaks as class traitors, so their mass starvation and cannibalism probably won't bother you at all. Maybe after you die, your successors will slowly reintroduce private ownership of capital as it is the only way they find to promote the generation of wealth.
The real question you should be asking is: "Have the rich have been getting richer by actually making the poor poorer (instead of growing faster than the poor)?"
And the answer is no. If you look at the following measures:
Median Household Income
Median Personal Income
Household Income by Quintile
Per capita GDP in PPP
Personal disposable Income
All of these measures have risen by at least 20% from the 1960s to the current day. For the rich and poor alike. Some (such as Personal Disposable Income) have risen dramatically.
In constant dollars, the poor (20th percentile) are making 225% more now than in 1947, and the rich (95th percentile) are making about 300% more. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg) By contrast, when your favorite country, a certain union of socialist republics destroyed private ownership of capital, the economy collapsed and the only thing that saved them from total ruin was allowing a bit of private ownership under the NEP and similar policies later in its history.
>>Also, the assumption people make regarding Libya is that the choice we faced was either spend zero money dealign with the Libyan situation or spend a lot of money.
You can actually pull the data from the OMB on how much extra the various wars (or police actions, or whatever they call it these days) are costing.
It's not free to have your military sitting at home and not shooting cruise missiles at people, but it is cheaper.
A quick look says the number you're looking for is $162.2B/year to pay for these operations.
Honestly, both the left wing and right wing are being stupid about the budget crisis. Amdahl's Law says they should hit the big things first (SSN, Medicare/Medicaid, Military), but all three are sacred cows to their various wings, and so they're fighting over the scraps left over.
>>"exhaust data", "quantitatively asses"... I think these guys need smarter spell checkers.
These guys are dealing with the ass end of customer service. For free.
I think they're allowed to make fart jokes all they want.
But then again, they steadfastly refuse to give users the option to disable tabs (AFAICT). At least there's still a status bar, mostly.
>>Nov 11 is a holiday in most of the western world, as it is based on the ending of WWI in 11/11/1918.
But more importantly, it's the release date of Skyrim.
Let's just hope they've finally fixed the bugs from Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, Fallout New Vegas...
>>GRE may be somewhat challenging because you may not have enough time to solve all the problems.
The GRE may be somewhat challenging because the test-takers might get bored doing basic maths for an hour, but that's about it. You don't need to put your brain into "think like an 8th grader" mode to solve "x+y = 6. x = 5. What is Y?"
It honestly felt much easier than the SAT math section. The GRE verbal section seemed harder, though.
Quoting Al Jazeera isn't really doing much to establish your bona fides.
>>That shit has a halflife of 20,000 years. So it wont be completely nonreactive for approximately 250,000 years
Uh, no. Think about what "half life" means.
It will never be "completely nonreactive". After 250,000 years it will have decayed in half 12.5 times, so .5^12.5 = 1.7% remaining.
Also things with long half lives, by definition, decay less often, so they're less radioactive. I'd much rather spend a minute next to a gram of a radioactive product with a half life of 100,000 years than half a gram of something with a half life of one minute.
That's exactly right.
Kids these days (/cough) don't know what it's like to turn a computer on and be immediately given a programming prompt. Even if it as just a BASIC interpreter, the barrier to entry was a lot lower then than it is now.
>>supporting some company because you want competition is a pretty bad was to have competition.
If you have two equally good products (say the AMD64 vs. whatever Intel had at the time), it doesn't matter particularly which one you buy, so I always chose to support AMD. As I said, if we were down only to Intel, it would be a bad thing in general.
>>Buy the bast bang for your buck
Didn't I say I just bought Sandy Bridge? It's head-and-shoulders above anything AMD has right now.
Yeah, Sandy Bridge has slaughtered AMD for the current generation.
I've been a long time AMD supporter, just because I don't want there to be only one kid on the block (competition is good and all that), but about three hours ago I just bought a 2600K and matching mobo and ram on Newegg. First Intel CPU I've bought since the old $90 Celeron 300A that was 50% overclockable out of the box.
>>Study advanced math. Take the time to focus on doing well on the GRE.
These two things don't really go well together.
The GRE goes up to, what, algebra?
I didn't even bother looking at the GRE before I took it and got a perfect score on the math section. Literally, the first question was: "x + 7 = 13. Solve for x." ...and it didn't get any harder after that. A perfect score was only something like 95th percentile for computer science majors. That's how ridiculously easy it is - 5% of people get perfect scores on it.
The logic problem section was also pretty easy. I missed one question from misclicking an answer, but the stupid computerized test systems won't let you go back to change an answer.
>>Computers have become the universal tool, but no one is able to explore their capabilities, recent graduates are like illiterate peasants in a library.
To be fair, betting on ignorance is always a safe bet, no matter what subject or area of our society you're talking about. Nobody** knows history, math, computer programming, religion, physics, etc. at a very good level these days.
That said, there's a lot of smart people in every field. Some of the best math people I met were bioengineering professors at UCSD, at least or especially in their areas of expertise. I was fortunate enough to be partnered on my master's thesis project with an AMES guy who was a pretty decent programmer and had a good knowledge of math, but unfortunately the AMES program at the time (early 2000s) was still using FORTRAN. So we had fun getting our code to interoperate, but at least he was competent enough that if I told him how I was formatting my output, he'd have it all read in and analyzed by the next day.
By contrast, two of the stupidest people I've ever had to work with were at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. It was at the time of the internet boom, so they were having trouble finding competent programmers, so they hired these biology PhDs instead. Their sum output of work in the two years I spent there was half-constructing a web page (that didn't work) and a lot of snarky emails to my professor about how I should be using whatever trendy thing they'd read about somewhere. Because I wasn't using XML or whatever internally in our project, you know, that was the only reason they couldn't get any work done.
(**Approximately.)
>>Either the tobacco tax is a premier example of taxation without representation
Eh, in my mostly-Libertarian opinion, usage taxes are one of the most fair ways of raising revenue to pay for things. While Amtrack apologists like to talk about how we subsidize roads much more than trains, they fail to consider the fact that gas taxes pay for roads entirely (and then some).
Smokers help pay into medical care through their taxes.
So why not a sugar tax? If fructose is the cause of the modern obesity and metabolic syndrome epidemic (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM), then why not put a 1c per gram of fructose tax on all food and drinks (including juices)? That would work out to about 25c per can of Coke, or 15c per Twinkie.
Play a fun game the next time you go to a gas station and try to find something healthy and tasty to eat or drink.
>>BMI is extremely stupid
It is. Nobody takes it seriously. The insurance industry loves it, though, since it overclassifies people as overweight.
There *is* a correlation between BMI and body fat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Correlation_between_BMI_and_Percent_Body_Fat_for_Men_in_NCHS%27_NHANES_1994_Data.PNG), but it's not a very good one.
I work out about 4 to 6 times per week, and check my body fat pretty regularly with my personal trainer. My BMI is 34.7 (obese), my body fat is 18%. Which isn't great compared to where I used to be, but certainly not anywhere near the obese level.
That said, I recently watched this lecture from UCSF, and it really changed my thinking on obesity and diet. It's well worth the 90 minutes of your life, and the guy is a good speaker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
(A speaker on nutrition using actual biochemistry? How very unlike most things you see on television.)
You forget that all electromagnetic radiation cause airplanes to fall out of the sky. That's why it's so important to shut down your Kindle back in row 79.
It's a wonder that airplanes survive in sunlight, at all.
>>They don't SAY it ran out, but they do IMPLY it ran out
Huh? I just watched the video and the car came to a halt in the middle of the track twice. Once apparently completely, the other it slowed down when the engine overheated.
Whether or not it actually happened is another issue, but Top Gear certainly did make it look like it was an unreliable POS.