I've wondered the same thing. What's more, if you intentionally play for the tie with another player, and they succeed, they may very well reciprocate the favor if they're in the lead on the next show. Won't last forever without some sort of collusion, but it's another marginal increase of your odds of sticking around and winning more money, at little cost to you (just the EV of your additional bet).
I think the stake holders need to think about that simple question. The last thing we need is some sentient silicon running around like a pestilent child lobbing nukes between hemispheres for fun.
Pestilent children are the worst, with all their plagues and their boils and their oozing pustules.
This is an especially naive post, not in its contents but in its conclusions. Yes, computers reduce the need for laborers in the workforce by taking over some jobs outright and making other workers more productive. And it's only going to continue, and we have already started to see that the demand for labor is dropping well beneath the actual supply.
But taking the leap from there to the conclusion that we should remove the incentive for people to educate themselves is sophistry. How do you think we got to the point of having these computers and all this other modern technology? We haven't reached the level where computers are going to be able to make the next breakthroughs themselves, and even once we do, we'll need people who can work with the computers and support them. An entire society cannot support itself on blissful ignorance.
If you don't promote education and make it worthwhile economically, then people won't pursue it on their own. If you give a person the choice of getting an education to develop a valuable skill and then working that skill for the rest of their life, or skipping an education to develop no valuable skills and then leading a life of free time and pleasure-seeking, and the standard of living is the same for either choice, which one do you think they'll go for?
This. Streaming services make it a lot easier to hear the music you want whenever you want without having to download OR pay for it. I'm partial to Grooveshark myself, but Pandora's pretty good too.
Yes, but the existing employee is probably already performing some important job. If you train him to take on these new duties, you have to scale back his original duties, or you have to hire someone new anyway to take over those original duties. So unless you can magically get by on less work, or somehow convince your existing employees to take on more work during the same hours, you're going to have to hire someone new and train them on the business side of things anyway. If you consider that to be a sunk cost, then of course it makes more sense for the new hire to be trained on the new technology, because of the overhead involved in switching the existing person from where they are to their new role.
It's amusing to listen to people complain about the fact that after your crew gets captured, running around doing other side missions will cause some of them to die waiting for your rescue.
NO SHIT.
Your crew just got captured by evil aliens! What did you think they would do, keep them in luxury penthouses until you decided it was finally worth your time to come rescue them? I thought that even having one important side mission to undertake before you went after them was a little too much. In theory, you should have to go after them immediately or face the consequences.
This is really more a commentary on how previous games have forced people to think. RPGs are set up nowadays so that few, if any, of the quests have a sense of urgency to them. If a farmer comes up to you and complains about bandits attacking his farm, you can say "Sure, I'll help you out", get an entry in your quest book, then go do the entire rest of the game and come back to the farmer weeks and weeks of game time later. And yet the moment you finally arrive, THAT is when the bandits strike and you can run them off. It's a bit insane that you can go around collecting quests and putting them off until you're ready, even if the quest's storyline is something that has immediate consequences if left unsolved. Even ME2, a tremendous game, suffers from this most of the way through... some loyalty quests (Miranda and Thane come to mind) should be things you have to handle immediately, but instead you can put them off until you feel like dealing with them. You're gaining flexibility but trading away believability.
Again, we're talking about different things. You're talking about relative wealth, I'm talking about actual wealth. You only want to view the condition of the middle class relative to the condition of the ultra-wealthy. I'm saying that technology has improved the lives of the middle class and continues to do so as advancements are made. Today we have devices that have more intrinsic value than those we had 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago: today's cars are better, today's computers are better, today's phones are better, and so on. Take the middle class family from 50 years ago that you're citing, transport it with its salary and all its possessions to today, and they'd be poor. You're not denying my point or opposing it in any way.
The technology of smart meters, if implemented properly, will continue to improve the lives of the middle class (and pretty much everyone who uses electricity). Banning them for the reasons listed in the article is foolish, and banning them to protect the jobs of meter readers would be extra-foolish. Opposing them on the grounds that they might, MIGHT, disproportionately provide more gains to the wealthy than to the middle class (an assertion you have not backed up with data), would STILL be foolish.
If you had the opportunity to buy a device for $50 that would save/earn you $100 over the next year, guaranteed, would you do it? Of course you would. What if you knew that the device only cost $10 to manufacture, and so the creator of the device was making millions of dollars off of it? Would you boycott the device because you think you should be spending less for it? You could, but it would be stupid. All you're doing is costing yourself $50 by not buying the device.
If increased efficiency meant that regular people had more, or paid less, then I wouldn't have a problem. As it is, I say they are screwing us, so we should take any opportunity to screw them.
You made this statement, and clearly it's a lie. You don't care that smart meters, if implemented properly and used properly, will save money for the middle class. You only care that "they" (the ultra-wealthy) might gain more from the invention than the middle class would.
How can you say that technological progress has not resulted in a wealthier middle class? The middle class owns cars, computers, home appliances and electronics at affordable prices for the majority of Americans. All these things started out as playthings of the rich. The middle class is significantly better off today than it has been at basically any point in human history.
I'm not discussing income inequality. I'm discussing whether technological progress for household gadgets, be it computers or smart meters or the like, is of benefit to the occupants of those households.
Say your home gets a smart meter and as a result, it helps you use 10% less energy and you correspondingly pay 10% less on your monthly bill.
As a consequence of your savings (and those of the other customers with this technology), the power company no longer needs to purchase so much electricity from neighboring states, or avoids building a new power plant to handle increased demand, and it saves MILLIONS.
Are you saying that because the power company benefits so greatly, you would sacrifice your own gain just to spite them? Because that's what your argument amounts to.
All the gains in productivity in the past 30-40 years have gone to the top one percent.
You can't seriously believe this in an era where the widespread availability of computers and other consumer electronics has lead to the majority of people in developed countries being able to work more efficiently and perform routine tasks much faster than they were before.
If increased efficiency meant that regular people had more, or paid less, then I wouldn't have a problem. As it is, I say they are screwing us, so we should take any opportunity to screw them.
But it WILL result in regular people using less and paying less. Who exactly do you think you're screwing over by advocating for using outdated technology?
Using new technology to reduce electricity consumption and lower the amount of power we need to generate to satisfy our populace shouldn't be the subject of class warfare. It's something everyone should be able to support.
Having a particular job is not a right. Having the opportunity to secure a job may be a right, but just because someone has training as, say, a switchboard operator doesn't mean that the person has a right to the continued existence of switchboards.
Unions have several important duties, like standing up for workplace safety standards and combating discrimination. But impeding technological progress in order to protect jobs is a net loss for society. The desire of a company to use a machine instead of a person to perform a job in order to save money shouldn't be viewed as unbridled greed, it should be viewed as smart business sense. Reducing costs should lead to reducing the amount charged for the service in question and, in a case like this one, provides significant efficiency benefits that could lead to reduced electricity consumption and ultimately less destruction of the environment. While there may be legitimate concerns associated with moving to smart meters, the fact that meter readers could lose their jobs shouldn't be among them.
You seem to think that the luck of being born into wealth is orthogonal with working hard. Far from it. BOTH are necessary for the vast majority of cases.
You deliberately conflate being born to the mega-wealthy to being born to the merely wealthy so you can dismiss that headstart they get over the other 80% as non-existent.
I can't tell whether you're being deliberately ignorant or just confused. I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT A HEAD START.
You made this statement:
For most, the only thing they are better at is being born into the modern aristocracy.
I am supporting THIS statement:
in the vast majority of cases, those who are pulling in significant salaries and paying into the highest tax brackets are doing so because they nourished some trade or talent that allows them to command a high price for their time and efforts.
Does my statement say anything about whether someone was born into a poor family or a rich one? No, it does not. But it DOES rebut your statement, which claims that most of the wealthy are wealthy only because they are born wealthy. This is NOT TRUE. It takes a large amount of residual wealth being handed down from your parents for someone to lead a rich lifestyle without having to work to maintain it. The pool of these people is small, compared to the number of well-off people (who are still being taxed at the highest rates) who have their money because they go out and earn it on a daily basis.
You are the one who is deliberately conflating the mega-wealthy with the merely comfortable. And I'm still waiting for your citation.
And if someone close to you actually WAS killed in your home by someone else, you would refuse the police the ability to search for evidence that could implicate that person?
I understand your position and it's generally good policy, but there are exceptions.
You fail to convey the relevance of this claim to the conversation.
You fail to convey the relevance of your own claims to the conversation, and when called out on it you just blindly repeat them, like a good little sheep. I made a statement saying that the majority of people in the top tax brackets don't come from megarich families like the ones you initially described (kids of rock stars and franchise owners and so on). You asked for evidence and then I gave it to you in the form of income tax figures (from taxfoundation.org if you care, not that you've gone and provided citations for any of your claims). Meanwhile all you want to talk about is intergenerational mobility, which is NOT what the original statement is about. You want to pretend that people who have money have it because of an accident of birth rather than the hard work it requires to sustain a career capable of commanding a high income. And in the majority of cases, you are very wrong.
There are about seven million people making $150k or better, most of them in the top two tax brackets (and the rest in the high end of the 28% bracket). Only about 1.5 million of them are making the sort of money that would let you go without a job or retire after only a few years and still live comfortably for the rest of your life (~$400k or better). The rest of those people are well-off, certainly, but they still have to keep getting up and going to work every day to support themselves; even if you saved diligently on $150k a year, it takes a long time and wise financial decisions to reach the point where they could give up that annual income. So your ultra-wealthy make up less than 25% of the top tax brackets.
There are just as many dumbasses and leachers among them as there are among any other broad group of society. For most, the only thing they are better at is being born into the modern aristocracy.
Most of those who have "nourished some trade or talent" were only able to do so because they were rich enough and connected enough in the first place.
Now why don't you go back and document your own claims, before calling out someone else. Your statement comparing the chances of reaching the top 5% from low income roots is not sufficient. Yes, it's easier for a person who grows up with moderate means to reach the top 5% than it is for someone who grows up in poverty. But EASIER is not the same as EASY. Kids in middle class homes who slack off through high school and college and don't learn to do anything useful might have more to fall back on when they fail, but bumming around unemployed all day long isn't going to be enough for them to live anything more than a meager existence, certainly not to become one of the wealthy "modern aristocracy" you're opposing.
You're arguing against a completely different problem. Yeah, publicly available education in the US sucks (relative to other first-world countries, at least). There are a whole host of reasons for this. And low-income families don't usually place enough importance on education, so children grow up unmotivated and miss any opportunity they had to break into a well-paying career. But that's not what I'm talking about.
There's a huge difference between the children of the mega-rich (who can lead a life of luxury purely on money handed down by their parents) and the children of middle-class families (who may have an easier path to a college degree, but are still going to have to work for a living). I'm talking about the latter. That's who makes up the majority of the higher tax brackets.
"Which is more likely to work, all workers and no capitalists or all capitalists and no workers?"
What a dumb argument you two are having. The question is meaningless. Both arrangements will work equally well, which is to say, not at all. It's impossible to produce goods without both capital and workers. If you had all workers, they would by default be the capitalists, as they would have to own their own capital (or sit idle, unable to produce). If you had all capitalists, they would also sit idle, unable to produce, until one or more of them started to do work. It's a false choice.
The fallacy in the mind of the asker of that question is believing that the workers are somehow more important than the capitalists because one capitalist can support many workers, while situations where many capitalists support a single worker are much rarer and harder to define. The system still falls apart with the absence of either side.
Why is it that when people want to disparage the upper class, they always go after people who have their fortunes handed down through generations, and ignore the large percentage of people who became doctors, lawyers, business leaders, or athletes/entertainers through their own hard efforts? Of course there are people who have plenty of money that they did nothing to earn, on account of their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. But they're only a small part of the total picture, and if you had that sort of money you'd want to be able to secure your family's future too.
I'm not going to side with the poster claiming that the rich are somehow "better" than the rest of the country, but in the vast majority of cases, those who are pulling in significant salaries and paying into the highest tax brackets are doing so because they nourished some trade or talent that allows them to command a high price for their time and efforts. To pretend that all people with money have it because of an accident of birth is pure sophistry.
Oh. Well then by all means, tell us what percentage of all the taxes you paid last year went towards your public utility company.
Just because you know how much tax money in total is going towards a utility doesn't mean you know how much of your own tax money is going towards it, to be able to perform the appropriate comparison. And it wouldn't be as simple as looking at your state income tax bill and then discovering the total amount your state collected in taxes; you'd have to keep track of how much you've paid in sales tax and other taxes to get an appropriate picture of just how much you've paid in to the system. Even if doing that math were possible, it would be too time-consuming for any sane person to do.
Except that you don't necessarily pay more, you just see a higher cost on your monthly bills. The amount you pay towards the public utility is obscured from you, because you will never know how much of your taxes are going towards supporting that utility. Government can use this convenient sleight of hand to make it appear that government control of industry is a good thing to the uninformed consumer.
It's not that each copy has a near-zero cost, it's that producing each additional copy has a near-zero cost. All of the things you mentioned are important, but their costs don't scale significantly as more people acquire the game.
I don't think "pay what you want", in most cases, will be sufficient to recoup the initial costs of a game's development. But I do believe that after a game has been out for several months, and initially excited buyers have already dropped their money on the game, moving to a pay-what-you-want model at that point to squeeze out cash from any who remain interested but didn't believe the game was worth the initial price might be viable.
First off, the right to refuse service to someone in your place of business extends far further than "blacks". Don't make this an issue of racism; at its core, it isn't. Just because some idiots use this to justify some form of their own bigotry doesn't change the fundamental principle at work.
Second, the two scenarios are mutually exclusive; there's nothing about "prioritizing" here. I'm not asking you to be the cop trying to decide which situation to respond to. I am saying that you're using fallacious logic (enacting a law >> more law enforcement required to enforce it == bigger government, so opposers of bigger government should oppose all laws) to try to support your argument.
Your original assertion is also wrong. The "amount" of government IS a quantity. It can be quantified in the number of laws that need to be enforced, in the number of people it employs, in the amount of money it demands from its citizens, and probably by several other metrics as well. Most people, whether libertarian, commie, fascist, or other, believe that SOME amount of government is necessary; they just disagree on how much, and which specific parts of the government are required. But it can definitely be quantified.
I agree that the other poster's statement of "the larger the government is, the fewer choices people have" is incorrect, but mostly on the grounds of being incomplete, not for being fundamentally misguided. A better way to phrase it would be this: each person begins with total freedom, and every law the government enacts restricts that freedom in some way. Some of these laws are clearly beneficial (e.g. a law against killing another person, properly enforced, ensures a level of safety and trust that is critical for advanced society to exist at all). But at some point, government can enact too many laws and infringe upon too many freedoms (e.g. Prohibition). And it's much harder to get a law repealed than it is to get one enacted, unfortunately. That's really the point of the Constitution: a safeguard against laws being passed that infringe upon our most sacred freedoms. Unfortunately, that safeguard is only as strong as the people enforcing it (the judiciary, in this case). And letting the judiciary be chosen by one of the two branches in charge of making the laws (don't act like the executive branch hasn't swerved into law-making territory), the whole system threatens to fall apart.
That's a pretty ridiculous argument to use. You can apply the exact same logic to the following statements:
1. Person X walks into my house and takes all my possessions. 2. To prevent this from happening, I'm relying on the government to enforce my property rights. 3. If enough people act like Person X, my house would require a constant police presence to protect it. 4. Therefore, people who oppose big government should support a system in which anyone can walk into any house and take all its possessions, because it would require less government to enforce.
Slashdot Mirror
I've wondered the same thing. What's more, if you intentionally play for the tie with another player, and they succeed, they may very well reciprocate the favor if they're in the lead on the next show. Won't last forever without some sort of collusion, but it's another marginal increase of your odds of sticking around and winning more money, at little cost to you (just the EV of your additional bet).
I think the stake holders need to think about that simple question. The last thing we need is some sentient silicon running around like a pestilent child lobbing nukes between hemispheres for fun.
Pestilent children are the worst, with all their plagues and their boils and their oozing pustules.
Thanks /. Made my day complete.
How anyone over at Hulu could think that this will work out for them is beyond me.
This is an especially naive post, not in its contents but in its conclusions. Yes, computers reduce the need for laborers in the workforce by taking over some jobs outright and making other workers more productive. And it's only going to continue, and we have already started to see that the demand for labor is dropping well beneath the actual supply.
But taking the leap from there to the conclusion that we should remove the incentive for people to educate themselves is sophistry. How do you think we got to the point of having these computers and all this other modern technology? We haven't reached the level where computers are going to be able to make the next breakthroughs themselves, and even once we do, we'll need people who can work with the computers and support them. An entire society cannot support itself on blissful ignorance.
If you don't promote education and make it worthwhile economically, then people won't pursue it on their own. If you give a person the choice of getting an education to develop a valuable skill and then working that skill for the rest of their life, or skipping an education to develop no valuable skills and then leading a life of free time and pleasure-seeking, and the standard of living is the same for either choice, which one do you think they'll go for?
This. Streaming services make it a lot easier to hear the music you want whenever you want without having to download OR pay for it. I'm partial to Grooveshark myself, but Pandora's pretty good too.
Yes, but the existing employee is probably already performing some important job. If you train him to take on these new duties, you have to scale back his original duties, or you have to hire someone new anyway to take over those original duties. So unless you can magically get by on less work, or somehow convince your existing employees to take on more work during the same hours, you're going to have to hire someone new and train them on the business side of things anyway. If you consider that to be a sunk cost, then of course it makes more sense for the new hire to be trained on the new technology, because of the overhead involved in switching the existing person from where they are to their new role.
Doesn't make it right, but it does make sense.
It's amusing to listen to people complain about the fact that after your crew gets captured, running around doing other side missions will cause some of them to die waiting for your rescue.
NO SHIT.
Your crew just got captured by evil aliens! What did you think they would do, keep them in luxury penthouses until you decided it was finally worth your time to come rescue them? I thought that even having one important side mission to undertake before you went after them was a little too much. In theory, you should have to go after them immediately or face the consequences.
This is really more a commentary on how previous games have forced people to think. RPGs are set up nowadays so that few, if any, of the quests have a sense of urgency to them. If a farmer comes up to you and complains about bandits attacking his farm, you can say "Sure, I'll help you out", get an entry in your quest book, then go do the entire rest of the game and come back to the farmer weeks and weeks of game time later. And yet the moment you finally arrive, THAT is when the bandits strike and you can run them off. It's a bit insane that you can go around collecting quests and putting them off until you're ready, even if the quest's storyline is something that has immediate consequences if left unsolved. Even ME2, a tremendous game, suffers from this most of the way through... some loyalty quests (Miranda and Thane come to mind) should be things you have to handle immediately, but instead you can put them off until you feel like dealing with them. You're gaining flexibility but trading away believability.
Again, we're talking about different things. You're talking about relative wealth, I'm talking about actual wealth. You only want to view the condition of the middle class relative to the condition of the ultra-wealthy. I'm saying that technology has improved the lives of the middle class and continues to do so as advancements are made. Today we have devices that have more intrinsic value than those we had 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago: today's cars are better, today's computers are better, today's phones are better, and so on. Take the middle class family from 50 years ago that you're citing, transport it with its salary and all its possessions to today, and they'd be poor. You're not denying my point or opposing it in any way.
The technology of smart meters, if implemented properly, will continue to improve the lives of the middle class (and pretty much everyone who uses electricity). Banning them for the reasons listed in the article is foolish, and banning them to protect the jobs of meter readers would be extra-foolish. Opposing them on the grounds that they might, MIGHT, disproportionately provide more gains to the wealthy than to the middle class (an assertion you have not backed up with data), would STILL be foolish.
If you had the opportunity to buy a device for $50 that would save/earn you $100 over the next year, guaranteed, would you do it? Of course you would. What if you knew that the device only cost $10 to manufacture, and so the creator of the device was making millions of dollars off of it? Would you boycott the device because you think you should be spending less for it? You could, but it would be stupid. All you're doing is costing yourself $50 by not buying the device.
If increased efficiency meant that regular people had more, or paid less, then I wouldn't have a problem. As it is, I say they are screwing us, so we should take any opportunity to screw them.
You made this statement, and clearly it's a lie. You don't care that smart meters, if implemented properly and used properly, will save money for the middle class. You only care that "they" (the ultra-wealthy) might gain more from the invention than the middle class would.
How can you say that technological progress has not resulted in a wealthier middle class? The middle class owns cars, computers, home appliances and electronics at affordable prices for the majority of Americans. All these things started out as playthings of the rich. The middle class is significantly better off today than it has been at basically any point in human history.
I'm not discussing income inequality. I'm discussing whether technological progress for household gadgets, be it computers or smart meters or the like, is of benefit to the occupants of those households.
Say your home gets a smart meter and as a result, it helps you use 10% less energy and you correspondingly pay 10% less on your monthly bill.
As a consequence of your savings (and those of the other customers with this technology), the power company no longer needs to purchase so much electricity from neighboring states, or avoids building a new power plant to handle increased demand, and it saves MILLIONS.
Are you saying that because the power company benefits so greatly, you would sacrifice your own gain just to spite them? Because that's what your argument amounts to.
All the gains in productivity in the past 30-40 years have gone to the top one percent.
You can't seriously believe this in an era where the widespread availability of computers and other consumer electronics has lead to the majority of people in developed countries being able to work more efficiently and perform routine tasks much faster than they were before.
If increased efficiency meant that regular people had more, or paid less, then I wouldn't have a problem. As it is, I say they are screwing us, so we should take any opportunity to screw them.
But it WILL result in regular people using less and paying less. Who exactly do you think you're screwing over by advocating for using outdated technology?
Using new technology to reduce electricity consumption and lower the amount of power we need to generate to satisfy our populace shouldn't be the subject of class warfare. It's something everyone should be able to support.
Having a particular job is not a right. Having the opportunity to secure a job may be a right, but just because someone has training as, say, a switchboard operator doesn't mean that the person has a right to the continued existence of switchboards.
Unions have several important duties, like standing up for workplace safety standards and combating discrimination. But impeding technological progress in order to protect jobs is a net loss for society. The desire of a company to use a machine instead of a person to perform a job in order to save money shouldn't be viewed as unbridled greed, it should be viewed as smart business sense. Reducing costs should lead to reducing the amount charged for the service in question and, in a case like this one, provides significant efficiency benefits that could lead to reduced electricity consumption and ultimately less destruction of the environment. While there may be legitimate concerns associated with moving to smart meters, the fact that meter readers could lose their jobs shouldn't be among them.
You seem to think that the luck of being born into wealth is orthogonal with working hard. Far from it. BOTH are necessary for the vast majority of cases.
I accept your concession, sir. Good day.
You deliberately conflate being born to the mega-wealthy to being born to the merely wealthy so you can dismiss that headstart they get over the other 80% as non-existent.
I can't tell whether you're being deliberately ignorant or just confused. I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT A HEAD START.
You made this statement:
For most, the only thing they are better at is being born into the modern aristocracy.
I am supporting THIS statement:
in the vast majority of cases, those who are pulling in significant salaries and paying into the highest tax brackets are doing so because they nourished some trade or talent that allows them to command a high price for their time and efforts.
Does my statement say anything about whether someone was born into a poor family or a rich one? No, it does not. But it DOES rebut your statement, which claims that most of the wealthy are wealthy only because they are born wealthy. This is NOT TRUE. It takes a large amount of residual wealth being handed down from your parents for someone to lead a rich lifestyle without having to work to maintain it. The pool of these people is small, compared to the number of well-off people (who are still being taxed at the highest rates) who have their money because they go out and earn it on a daily basis.
You are the one who is deliberately conflating the mega-wealthy with the merely comfortable. And I'm still waiting for your citation.
And if someone close to you actually WAS killed in your home by someone else, you would refuse the police the ability to search for evidence that could implicate that person?
I understand your position and it's generally good policy, but there are exceptions.
You fail to convey the relevance of this claim to the conversation.
You fail to convey the relevance of your own claims to the conversation, and when called out on it you just blindly repeat them, like a good little sheep. I made a statement saying that the majority of people in the top tax brackets don't come from megarich families like the ones you initially described (kids of rock stars and franchise owners and so on). You asked for evidence and then I gave it to you in the form of income tax figures (from taxfoundation.org if you care, not that you've gone and provided citations for any of your claims). Meanwhile all you want to talk about is intergenerational mobility, which is NOT what the original statement is about. You want to pretend that people who have money have it because of an accident of birth rather than the hard work it requires to sustain a career capable of commanding a high income. And in the majority of cases, you are very wrong.
There are about seven million people making $150k or better, most of them in the top two tax brackets (and the rest in the high end of the 28% bracket). Only about 1.5 million of them are making the sort of money that would let you go without a job or retire after only a few years and still live comfortably for the rest of your life (~$400k or better). The rest of those people are well-off, certainly, but they still have to keep getting up and going to work every day to support themselves; even if you saved diligently on $150k a year, it takes a long time and wise financial decisions to reach the point where they could give up that annual income. So your ultra-wealthy make up less than 25% of the top tax brackets.
There are just as many dumbasses and leachers among them as there are among any other broad group of society. For most, the only thing they are better at is being born into the modern aristocracy.
Most of those who have "nourished some trade or talent" were only able to do so because they were rich enough and connected enough in the first place.
Now why don't you go back and document your own claims, before calling out someone else. Your statement comparing the chances of reaching the top 5% from low income roots is not sufficient. Yes, it's easier for a person who grows up with moderate means to reach the top 5% than it is for someone who grows up in poverty. But EASIER is not the same as EASY. Kids in middle class homes who slack off through high school and college and don't learn to do anything useful might have more to fall back on when they fail, but bumming around unemployed all day long isn't going to be enough for them to live anything more than a meager existence, certainly not to become one of the wealthy "modern aristocracy" you're opposing.
You're arguing against a completely different problem. Yeah, publicly available education in the US sucks (relative to other first-world countries, at least). There are a whole host of reasons for this. And low-income families don't usually place enough importance on education, so children grow up unmotivated and miss any opportunity they had to break into a well-paying career. But that's not what I'm talking about.
There's a huge difference between the children of the mega-rich (who can lead a life of luxury purely on money handed down by their parents) and the children of middle-class families (who may have an easier path to a college degree, but are still going to have to work for a living). I'm talking about the latter. That's who makes up the majority of the higher tax brackets.
"Which is more likely to work, all workers and no capitalists or all capitalists and no workers?"
What a dumb argument you two are having. The question is meaningless. Both arrangements will work equally well, which is to say, not at all. It's impossible to produce goods without both capital and workers. If you had all workers, they would by default be the capitalists, as they would have to own their own capital (or sit idle, unable to produce). If you had all capitalists, they would also sit idle, unable to produce, until one or more of them started to do work. It's a false choice.
The fallacy in the mind of the asker of that question is believing that the workers are somehow more important than the capitalists because one capitalist can support many workers, while situations where many capitalists support a single worker are much rarer and harder to define. The system still falls apart with the absence of either side.
Why is it that when people want to disparage the upper class, they always go after people who have their fortunes handed down through generations, and ignore the large percentage of people who became doctors, lawyers, business leaders, or athletes/entertainers through their own hard efforts? Of course there are people who have plenty of money that they did nothing to earn, on account of their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. But they're only a small part of the total picture, and if you had that sort of money you'd want to be able to secure your family's future too.
I'm not going to side with the poster claiming that the rich are somehow "better" than the rest of the country, but in the vast majority of cases, those who are pulling in significant salaries and paying into the highest tax brackets are doing so because they nourished some trade or talent that allows them to command a high price for their time and efforts. To pretend that all people with money have it because of an accident of birth is pure sophistry.
Oh. Well then by all means, tell us what percentage of all the taxes you paid last year went towards your public utility company.
Just because you know how much tax money in total is going towards a utility doesn't mean you know how much of your own tax money is going towards it, to be able to perform the appropriate comparison. And it wouldn't be as simple as looking at your state income tax bill and then discovering the total amount your state collected in taxes; you'd have to keep track of how much you've paid in sales tax and other taxes to get an appropriate picture of just how much you've paid in to the system. Even if doing that math were possible, it would be too time-consuming for any sane person to do.
Except that you don't necessarily pay more, you just see a higher cost on your monthly bills. The amount you pay towards the public utility is obscured from you, because you will never know how much of your taxes are going towards supporting that utility. Government can use this convenient sleight of hand to make it appear that government control of industry is a good thing to the uninformed consumer.
It's not that each copy has a near-zero cost, it's that producing each additional copy has a near-zero cost. All of the things you mentioned are important, but their costs don't scale significantly as more people acquire the game.
I don't think "pay what you want", in most cases, will be sufficient to recoup the initial costs of a game's development. But I do believe that after a game has been out for several months, and initially excited buyers have already dropped their money on the game, moving to a pay-what-you-want model at that point to squeeze out cash from any who remain interested but didn't believe the game was worth the initial price might be viable.
First off, the right to refuse service to someone in your place of business extends far further than "blacks". Don't make this an issue of racism; at its core, it isn't. Just because some idiots use this to justify some form of their own bigotry doesn't change the fundamental principle at work.
Second, the two scenarios are mutually exclusive; there's nothing about "prioritizing" here. I'm not asking you to be the cop trying to decide which situation to respond to. I am saying that you're using fallacious logic (enacting a law >> more law enforcement required to enforce it == bigger government, so opposers of bigger government should oppose all laws) to try to support your argument.
Your original assertion is also wrong. The "amount" of government IS a quantity. It can be quantified in the number of laws that need to be enforced, in the number of people it employs, in the amount of money it demands from its citizens, and probably by several other metrics as well. Most people, whether libertarian, commie, fascist, or other, believe that SOME amount of government is necessary; they just disagree on how much, and which specific parts of the government are required. But it can definitely be quantified.
I agree that the other poster's statement of "the larger the government is, the fewer choices people have" is incorrect, but mostly on the grounds of being incomplete, not for being fundamentally misguided. A better way to phrase it would be this: each person begins with total freedom, and every law the government enacts restricts that freedom in some way. Some of these laws are clearly beneficial (e.g. a law against killing another person, properly enforced, ensures a level of safety and trust that is critical for advanced society to exist at all). But at some point, government can enact too many laws and infringe upon too many freedoms (e.g. Prohibition). And it's much harder to get a law repealed than it is to get one enacted, unfortunately. That's really the point of the Constitution: a safeguard against laws being passed that infringe upon our most sacred freedoms. Unfortunately, that safeguard is only as strong as the people enforcing it (the judiciary, in this case). And letting the judiciary be chosen by one of the two branches in charge of making the laws (don't act like the executive branch hasn't swerved into law-making territory), the whole system threatens to fall apart.
That's a pretty ridiculous argument to use. You can apply the exact same logic to the following statements:
1. Person X walks into my house and takes all my possessions.
2. To prevent this from happening, I'm relying on the government to enforce my property rights.
3. If enough people act like Person X, my house would require a constant police presence to protect it.
4. Therefore, people who oppose big government should support a system in which anyone can walk into any house and take all its possessions, because it would require less government to enforce.
Lunacy.