GP is implying that he pays rent instead, which most people do if they do not pay a mortgage. Often monthly rent payments are similar/higher than monthly mortgage payments, but without the tax breaks. So yes, indirectly you are taxed for not having a mortgage.
I might be misunderstanding what you are saying here, but I have to assume by 'federal plan' you are referring to some sort of publicly-funded option? This option does not exist, at all.
Washington and Jefferson would weep. We've become a nation of lickspittle slaves. Perhaps we deserve our fate.
The founding fathers have been turning over in their graves for the past 200-odd years. They would have stroked if they could have seen the progress that we have made on universal civil rights and suffrage. Each generation in America has lived in an increasingly better world than the one where white male landowners ruled everyone else. In 1776 fully 90% of the population was disenfranchised.
"Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level."
-John Adams, 1776
You should be free to live and behave as you wish...that is a part of freedom and the govt should play no part in trying to coerce you in any way...
Unless you are doing something harmful/destructive to other people specifically or society in general. The government imposes many punishments for things of this nature, in an attempt to levy justice but also to discourage people from doing 'bad things'.
Running around without health insurance is now considered a 'bad enough thing' to punish. It was determined that it would be more productive to tax people who refuse to comply than to throw them into jail or whatever.
Will everyone be required to have Auto Insurance regardless if they want it?
Auto insurance is already mandatory in many(most?) states. There are not as many complaints about this because it is mandated by the states, not the federal government.
It should be decided by Hawaiians what happens to Hawaii - and I assure you they wouldn't want some megalomaniacal (sp?) asshat with all that power over their lives.
The island just passed from one megalomaniac billionaire to another. It was previously owned by David Murdock (via his real estate holdings company, Castle & Cooke).
I hope we aren't arguing that "living wage" includes the right to live in your own home by yourself and not have to live frugally.
Correct. I have never lived alone, though finding roommates can sometimes be very difficult. I have known people that found it impossible and were in bad situations because of it. In my observation, minimum wage is currently livable only at the very bottom of the cost-of-living curve. Remember, I didn't include car repair/maintenance, medical costs, or anything else that often crops up.
Oh, and $ 350 for an apartment is crazy cheap. My family left Huntsville when I was pretty young, but I lived in Birmingham for grad school and was only able to come up with a place for $450/month - 25 years ago. And I considered that to be awfully cheap.
Yes. A $350/mo place here would likely be in a "questionable" location. You can sometimes find a less-questionable place that low through a promotional deal - "move-in special" or something. You can get much better deals in 2 and 3 bdrm places, including rental houses. (I lived in a 2bdrm/2bth for $600/mo for a couple of years with a roommate, and my sister once scored a 3bdrm place with 2 roommates for around $750.)
Yeah, it's my observation that even in the lowest cost of living scenario, a minimum wage job is just barely feasible unless outside assistance is present (living with parents, multiple roommates, living in a dorm and supplementing with school loans, holding multiple jobs and working 60-80 hours etc.).
First, universities, unlike the taxpayers, suffer no financial consequences when the underqualified students they have lured into their academic programs ultimately default on their loans.
"lured"? Kind of showing their bias, aren't they?
Well, I will definitely attest to the fact that private, for-profit "colleges" have extremely shady recruitment practices. They also, incidentally, have the highest student-loan default rates.
Fourth, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, associated with these programs, aside from being unbearably complex, gives colleges private information about family finances that allows them to gouge students more.
Stick to a single point in each point, okay? Either they're "unbearably complex" or they give too much information about family finances.
Not sure what the author is referring to in the first case...the FAFSA is not complex at all. It requires at least marginal literacy. If you can't fill out a FAFSA, you definitely should not be going to college.
I live in Huntsville, Alabama which is a smallish city (~180k pop) surrounded by a couple of semi-affluent suburbs. Surrounding the suburbs are a very poor rural area dotted with small towns. The area (as well as most of the state, and most of the region) has an extremely low cost of living. Minimum wage is at the Federal minimum of 7.25.
I have two brothers and a sister who all live here and make at or near minimum wage at various jobs. They have occasional raises that seem to add up to around $1.00 per hour each year or so.
Working full-time at minimum wage you end up with a take-home of less than $1000 per month. The cheapest 1bdrm apt you can really hope for is around $350/mo. (You can potentially save some money here by playing the roommate lottery.) Utilities will bottom out at around $50/mo on average if you are careful. The area is very spread out and not pedestrian friendly, and we have very poor public transportation here. Gas is around $3.10/gallon right now (it recently dropped from around $3.70 or so, where it had been holding for a couple of months) so depending on the commute you'll be spending somewhere in the ballpark of $100/mo or so on gas.
So, after gas and housing you're looking at $500 to live off of each month. This is just barely manageable from my experience. Frugality is a must in this situation, and medical bills are basically un-payable. Since most retail and other min-wage jobs are only part-time, lots of people end up working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Luckily this area was not hit as hard by the recent economic unpleasantness, so there are still lots of low-end jobs to go around. Anyone who has student loans, car payments, or any other significant bills is pretty much on rice-and-beans-with-the-lights-out at this income level.
Not to detract from the good explanation of the situation in your post, but some corrections, and additional explanation:
Coyotes are in the wolf genus (though currently still considered a different species) - Canis latrans. Coyotes and wolves can actually interbreed and produce viable offspring, and have been shown to do so in the wild. Domestic dogs are considered a subspecies of wolf.
"Jackal" is, as you say, a colloquialism, and includes the species Canis mesomelas, Canis adustus, and Canis aureus. The two former seem unable to produce viable offspring with any of the other members of the genus Canis. Canis aureus is actually more closely genetically related to wolves and coyotes than it is to the other two "Jackals". They can breed with wolves though it is unknown if they have done so in the wild.
There are 7 genus of foxes (vulpes designating the "true foxes"). There have been no confirmed instances of foxes interbreeding with members of Canis.
There are also a number of other members of the "dog family" (canids) that have varying genetic differences.
As the canids illustrate, species and other taxonomic divisions are artificial constructs that scientists find useful. There is no hard-line method of determining what is classified as a distinct species. See: the species problem.
This would decrease the cost for family-plan users who use less than 1gb of data (admittedly that is a somewhat low quantity).
Currently, with a family-plan you are required to pay $30/mo for 2gb of data for each smartphone. For example, I have two smartphones on my plan, they each cost $30/mo (in addition to all other plan costs). So, I'm getting a total of 4gb/mo of data for $60/mo total. With the new plan, I could get a 1gb/mo 'bucket' for the family to share and pay $10/mo less. The gb/mo quantity actually does vary depending on which smartphone you have, so ymmv as far as that goes.
Now, this would only be beneficial in circumstances where users are currently using less than 1gb/mo. I feel that it is very likely that users in higher data usage brackets will be paying much more than they currently are, which is the point of the change. Verizon is trying to discourage users from using more data so they do not have to upgrade their infrastructure.
It does not matter how they intended the game to be played.
While I understand your point, it definitely does matter in the context of design decisions that affect the way certain players wish to play. In this case, they allow you to play alone but they have designed the game in a way that makes it sometimes inconvenient to do so. This is because they decided that optimizing the game for solo play was not a priority. They wanted it to be a primarily multiplayer game and have made decisions based on that. They allow players to play alone if they like, but that does not mean the game is "single-player".
As many people in this thread have mentioned, Diablo 3 is not a single-player game. Yes, you can choose to play alone (as in WoW and most other MMO's) but the game is designed and balanced with multiplayer interaction in mind. The game has some features (e.g. you can play and complete the game alone and never come into contact with another player) that keep it from being a full-fledged MMO in my mind, but it is very, very close.
Due to the auction house and the social system (which includes allowing players to seamlessly join friends' games) and the sheer number of players Blizzard has the same technical hurdles to overcome as they would with a more robust MMO.
Some people don't like multiplayer games, and I get that, but it does frustrate me when people rage about features that are peripheral to the game-as-designed.
Ah but those people are not politically relevant or culturally influential, other than being laughed at.
The 40% of the population of the USA who believe in literal creationism are not politically relevant?
I was pretty sure that 40% was a bit high so I started poking around for numbers. According to Wikipedia (original source here), Evangelicals only make up around 26% of the population. This is the only large group I was aware of that would adhere to literal creationism as a rule, though they do not hold the belief universally. From my understanding a small percentage of Catholics adhere to literal creationsim also.
I then checked out the Gallup Poll that states the 40% number. I found this difficult to believe, but the wording of the question may influence the answer. I think that perhaps many Americans across all religions (including those who vaguely 'believe in god') don't really understand the difference between 10,000 years and 10,000,000 years. Maybe a lot of (even reasonably intelligent) people just don't care that much, and file it all away as "stuff that happened a long time ago".
This is common in the corporate world as well. CIO's and heads of IT security are often just managers with little-to-no actual IT experience/knowledge.
I'm not familiar with all the details of this particular case, but there is a difference between paying as little tax as possible (everyone should be attempting to do this...) and committing tax fraud.
I definitely agree our tax system is junk and should not have so many loopholes that are exploitable by huge corporations and the wealthy but I really can't fault anyone for doing whatever they can as long as they are acting within the rules.
I haven't read all the details of Boch's testimony, but if I had to guess I would surmise that the range check function is something the poor guy keeps in a TXT file with a bunch of other routine things that he has to copy and paste a lot while doing work. He was probably working on Java and was like 'oh, need a rangecheck function AGAIN, let me paste in the one I always use!' and then did the same for Dalvik.
I would argue this is a legitimate practice, as the code for that particular function should not be copyrightable in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't figure out if this is a cleverly disguised Bitcoin advertisement or not....
They don't have to, but they will happily do so! Failure to pay taxes is generally considered srs bizness. Ask Al Capone.
GP is implying that he pays rent instead, which most people do if they do not pay a mortgage. Often monthly rent payments are similar/higher than monthly mortgage payments, but without the tax breaks. So yes, indirectly you are taxed for not having a mortgage.
I might be misunderstanding what you are saying here, but I have to assume by 'federal plan' you are referring to some sort of publicly-funded option? This option does not exist, at all.
Washington and Jefferson would weep. We've become a nation of lickspittle slaves. Perhaps we deserve our fate.
The founding fathers have been turning over in their graves for the past 200-odd years. They would have stroked if they could have seen the progress that we have made on universal civil rights and suffrage. Each generation in America has lived in an increasingly better world than the one where white male landowners ruled everyone else. In 1776 fully 90% of the population was disenfranchised.
"Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level."
-John Adams, 1776
You should be free to live and behave as you wish...that is a part of freedom and the govt should play no part in trying to coerce you in any way...
Unless you are doing something harmful/destructive to other people specifically or society in general. The government imposes many punishments for things of this nature, in an attempt to levy justice but also to discourage people from doing 'bad things'.
Running around without health insurance is now considered a 'bad enough thing' to punish. It was determined that it would be more productive to tax people who refuse to comply than to throw them into jail or whatever.
Will everyone be required to have Auto Insurance regardless if they want it?
Auto insurance is already mandatory in many(most?) states. There are not as many complaints about this because it is mandated by the states, not the federal government.
...prevent stuff like this.
It should be decided by Hawaiians what happens to Hawaii - and I assure you they wouldn't want some megalomaniacal (sp?) asshat with all that power over their lives.
The island just passed from one megalomaniac billionaire to another. It was previously owned by David Murdock (via his real estate holdings company, Castle & Cooke).
The particular island in question seems to have been almost-wholly owned by super-rich landholders for ~150 years.
I hope we aren't arguing that "living wage" includes the right to live in your own home by yourself and not have to live frugally.
Correct. I have never lived alone, though finding roommates can sometimes be very difficult. I have known people that found it impossible and were in bad situations because of it. In my observation, minimum wage is currently livable only at the very bottom of the cost-of-living curve. Remember, I didn't include car repair/maintenance, medical costs, or anything else that often crops up.
Oh, and $ 350 for an apartment is crazy cheap. My family left Huntsville when I was pretty young, but I lived in Birmingham for grad school and was only able to come up with a place for $450/month - 25 years ago. And I considered that to be awfully cheap.
Yes. A $350/mo place here would likely be in a "questionable" location. You can sometimes find a less-questionable place that low through a promotional deal - "move-in special" or something. You can get much better deals in 2 and 3 bdrm places, including rental houses. (I lived in a 2bdrm/2bth for $600/mo for a couple of years with a roommate, and my sister once scored a 3bdrm place with 2 roommates for around $750.)
Yeah, it's my observation that even in the lowest cost of living scenario, a minimum wage job is just barely feasible unless outside assistance is present (living with parents, multiple roommates, living in a dorm and supplementing with school loans, holding multiple jobs and working 60-80 hours etc.).
From TFA:
"lured"? Kind of showing their bias, aren't they?
Well, I will definitely attest to the fact that private, for-profit "colleges" have extremely shady recruitment practices. They also, incidentally, have the highest student-loan default rates.
Stick to a single point in each point, okay? Either they're "unbearably complex" or they give too much information about family finances.
Not sure what the author is referring to in the first case...the FAFSA is not complex at all. It requires at least marginal literacy. If you can't fill out a FAFSA, you definitely should not be going to college.
I'll help!
I live in Huntsville, Alabama which is a smallish city (~180k pop) surrounded by a couple of semi-affluent suburbs. Surrounding the suburbs are a very poor rural area dotted with small towns. The area (as well as most of the state, and most of the region) has an extremely low cost of living. Minimum wage is at the Federal minimum of 7.25.
I have two brothers and a sister who all live here and make at or near minimum wage at various jobs. They have occasional raises that seem to add up to around $1.00 per hour each year or so.
Working full-time at minimum wage you end up with a take-home of less than $1000 per month. The cheapest 1bdrm apt you can really hope for is around $350/mo. (You can potentially save some money here by playing the roommate lottery.) Utilities will bottom out at around $50/mo on average if you are careful. The area is very spread out and not pedestrian friendly, and we have very poor public transportation here. Gas is around $3.10/gallon right now (it recently dropped from around $3.70 or so, where it had been holding for a couple of months) so depending on the commute you'll be spending somewhere in the ballpark of $100/mo or so on gas.
So, after gas and housing you're looking at $500 to live off of each month. This is just barely manageable from my experience. Frugality is a must in this situation, and medical bills are basically un-payable. Since most retail and other min-wage jobs are only part-time, lots of people end up working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Luckily this area was not hit as hard by the recent economic unpleasantness, so there are still lots of low-end jobs to go around. Anyone who has student loans, car payments, or any other significant bills is pretty much on rice-and-beans-with-the-lights-out at this income level.
Not to detract from the good explanation of the situation in your post, but some corrections, and additional explanation:
Coyotes are in the wolf genus (though currently still considered a different species) - Canis latrans. Coyotes and wolves can actually interbreed and produce viable offspring, and have been shown to do so in the wild. Domestic dogs are considered a subspecies of wolf.
"Jackal" is, as you say, a colloquialism, and includes the species Canis mesomelas, Canis adustus, and Canis aureus. The two former seem unable to produce viable offspring with any of the other members of the genus Canis. Canis aureus is actually more closely genetically related to wolves and coyotes than it is to the other two "Jackals". They can breed with wolves though it is unknown if they have done so in the wild.
There are 7 genus of foxes (vulpes designating the "true foxes"). There have been no confirmed instances of foxes interbreeding with members of Canis.
There are also a number of other members of the "dog family" (canids) that have varying genetic differences.
As the canids illustrate, species and other taxonomic divisions are artificial constructs that scientists find useful. There is no hard-line method of determining what is classified as a distinct species. See: the species problem.
This would decrease the cost for family-plan users who use less than 1gb of data (admittedly that is a somewhat low quantity).
Currently, with a family-plan you are required to pay $30/mo for 2gb of data for each smartphone. For example, I have two smartphones on my plan, they each cost $30/mo (in addition to all other plan costs). So, I'm getting a total of 4gb/mo of data for $60/mo total. With the new plan, I could get a 1gb/mo 'bucket' for the family to share and pay $10/mo less. The gb/mo quantity actually does vary depending on which smartphone you have, so ymmv as far as that goes.
Now, this would only be beneficial in circumstances where users are currently using less than 1gb/mo. I feel that it is very likely that users in higher data usage brackets will be paying much more than they currently are, which is the point of the change. Verizon is trying to discourage users from using more data so they do not have to upgrade their infrastructure.
It does not matter how they intended the game to be played.
While I understand your point, it definitely does matter in the context of design decisions that affect the way certain players wish to play. In this case, they allow you to play alone but they have designed the game in a way that makes it sometimes inconvenient to do so. This is because they decided that optimizing the game for solo play was not a priority. They wanted it to be a primarily multiplayer game and have made decisions based on that. They allow players to play alone if they like, but that does not mean the game is "single-player".
As many people in this thread have mentioned, Diablo 3 is not a single-player game. Yes, you can choose to play alone (as in WoW and most other MMO's) but the game is designed and balanced with multiplayer interaction in mind. The game has some features (e.g. you can play and complete the game alone and never come into contact with another player) that keep it from being a full-fledged MMO in my mind, but it is very, very close.
Due to the auction house and the social system (which includes allowing players to seamlessly join friends' games) and the sheer number of players Blizzard has the same technical hurdles to overcome as they would with a more robust MMO.
Some people don't like multiplayer games, and I get that, but it does frustrate me when people rage about features that are peripheral to the game-as-designed.
SIGH :(
Ah but those people are not politically relevant or culturally influential, other than being laughed at.
The 40% of the population of the USA who believe in literal creationism are not politically relevant?
I was pretty sure that 40% was a bit high so I started poking around for numbers. According to Wikipedia (original source here), Evangelicals only make up around 26% of the population. This is the only large group I was aware of that would adhere to literal creationism as a rule, though they do not hold the belief universally. From my understanding a small percentage of Catholics adhere to literal creationsim also.
I then checked out the Gallup Poll that states the 40% number. I found this difficult to believe, but the wording of the question may influence the answer. I think that perhaps many Americans across all religions (including those who vaguely 'believe in god') don't really understand the difference between 10,000 years and 10,000,000 years. Maybe a lot of (even reasonably intelligent) people just don't care that much, and file it all away as "stuff that happened a long time ago".
whoosh..?
This is common in the corporate world as well. CIO's and heads of IT security are often just managers with little-to-no actual IT experience/knowledge.
I completely agree.
I'm not familiar with all the details of this particular case, but there is a difference between paying as little tax as possible (everyone should be attempting to do this...) and committing tax fraud.
I definitely agree our tax system is junk and should not have so many loopholes that are exploitable by huge corporations and the wealthy but I really can't fault anyone for doing whatever they can as long as they are acting within the rules.
By that logic over half our presidents in the 20th century probably should have been thrown out of office.
I haven't read all the details of Boch's testimony, but if I had to guess I would surmise that the range check function is something the poor guy keeps in a TXT file with a bunch of other routine things that he has to copy and paste a lot while doing work. He was probably working on Java and was like 'oh, need a rangecheck function AGAIN, let me paste in the one I always use!' and then did the same for Dalvik.
I would argue this is a legitimate practice, as the code for that particular function should not be copyrightable in the first place.
Indeed. I do not think there is much of a correlation, since Alabama has a very strong teachers union and placed almost last on that list.