musk says a lot of things.. how about 9 out of 10 successfull landings first.
Yes he says a lot of things and he backs a huge number of them up. His company managed to launch and land a booster twice and they did it successfully on their first try at landing a used booster. Gives pretty good confidence that SpaceX can replicate the results. More work to do of course but unlike snarky slashdot posters, he's actually doing the work. What have you done to advance human kind today?
This is a huge stepping stone. Your cynicism is misplaced.
Oh please, you're ridiculous. Theaters offer many valuable features you simply cannot easily get at home. Here's a few: * teenagers using cellphones * screaming kids (esp. in R-rated movies) * people talking about the movie * people talking *to* the movie * arguments between patrons * patrons shooting each other
Don't know where you live but I've been in plenty of homes with ALL of those amenities available.
That's what's so special about going to a theater, and why you can't replicate it at home. At home, it's just a dry, inhuman experience with only you there alone, or maybe 1 or 2 other people.
It's only a "dry, inhuman experience" if you make it one. That is 100% within your control.
At a theater, you have a whole room full of wonderful people to share that experience with, along with all the other great things that come with being around other humans, including the talking, screaming kids, use of cellphones with bright screens, and shootings.
There is this thing called being social. Try it sometime. Did you know you are actually allowed to invite people over to your home? I know, crazy, right?
Christopher Nolan and Sofia Coppola have urged audiences to see their films in the cinema at a time when the movie industry is reckoning with the growing popularity of video on demand and streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.
Translation: We're in charge of the current situation and if it changes we'll have less control.
Boo-hoo. Not my problem.
"This is a story that needs to carry you through the suspenseful situation, and make you feel like you are there, and the only way to do that is through theatrical distribution"
Bullshit. Maybe that's the only way it works for him but I can decide for myself what the best way for me to view a particular movie is. Sometimes that's the theater but I have a large 4K screen at home with a good sound system too. For me I enjoy going to the theater but more as a social outing than for any practical movie going reason. It's certainly not convenient to go. The best theaters offer amenities I cannot get at home and that might be more than just the movie. If I can replicate the experience to a good approximation in my house why would I bother going to a theater and paying a lot of money? Big screen? Got it. Popcorn? Check. Dark room? No problem. Good sound? Probably better than most theaters. What is he really offering me that I don't already have? Give me something more if you want me to make the extra effort to go to a theater.
"I am depending and relying on all of you to try to present this film in the best way possible."
Whose definition of best? The only one I care about is mine. If our opinions of "best" happen to match then fine but I'm not worried about what the director wants. I'll enjoy art on my terms, not someone elses.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( X) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( X) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( X) Extreme profitability of spam ( X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( X) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Still, despite all signs to the contrary -- and many predictions -- email is not dead.
Anybody predicting email is or will be dead is either an imbecile or has something to sell you. Practically everybody has email and except for specific purposes nothing has come along that will substantially replace it any time soon.
And took the blame for the increased deficit, even though it wasn't their expense. The next time you hear some idiot hyperventilating over Obama's increase of the deficit, remember that.
Correct. We went to war and unlike every other time we've done that we did not raise taxes or take other extraordinary measures to fund our little wars of adventure because modern republican politicians break out in hives if you even mention the words "tax increase". In fact congress (republicans) lowered taxes because doing that is always politically popular even though only the wealthy saw meaningful benefit. In doing so our congress gave the bill for the pointless and expensive war to our children and grand children instead of behaving like responsible adults. Most of the money the US government borrows every year comes from the American people in one form or another. We are literally letting the government write IOUs to us while we have the delusion that the bill will never come due.
A lot of things in the defense budget are things that people rely on.
None that are things that have to be covered under the defense budget. Most of the defense budget is for personnel and for war fighting machines (purchase and operation).
Food subsidies at one point were covered through the defense budget for example
I'm not aware of this being true in my lifetime if ever. Citation please.
The GPS cluster maintenance and upgrades are paid out of the defense budget.
Doesn't mean it has to remain that way. Wouldn't be hard to put that into the budget for NOAA or NASA or NTSB or the Commerce Dept.
Originally the US interstate system was a defense project, though it's now funded through gasoline taxes.
The money for it never came out of the defense budget. The project did have defense implications but it ultimately was a civilian project that has been used almost entirely for civilian uses and funded by non-military dollars.
The defense budget covers a lot more than just war machines.
Let's not pretend that war machines and the people that operate them don't account for the vast majority of military spending.
After all, the Internet got its start as a DARPA project.
Which has fuck-all to do with the fact that our current military budget is bloated far beyond any reasonable defense needs.
I would like to remind you that about a trillion dollars a year go toward "defense".
The actual number last year was around $600 billion but your point still stands. Coincidentally our federal deficit in 2016 was also right around $600 billion so we basically borrowed every penny we spent on the military last year. So thank your grandchildren for the debt they'll be paying off because we think it necessary to support a military that is grossly oversized but are unwilling to tax enough to pay for it.
If you want to talk about pork, you aren't talking about spending money on science, you're talking about defense spending.
Truer words have never been spoken. NASA is a rounding error compared to the wasteful spending in the defense department.
This is the sort of idiotic criticism made by people with no understanding of accounting. Part of "overhead" is engineering and the engineering costs for designing a system like SLS are substantial. Since NASA is doing the engineering for SLS in house of course the overhead costs are going to be a higher percentage of their total. If they outsourced it, the overhead for engineering won't disappear - it will just go on the P&L for a different company. You could argue that a private sector company might be more efficient (not clear in this case) but they also would charge a mark up because they have to make a profit so you give some of that back. You can't just blindly compare overhead percentages without understanding what they are comprised of. Lower overhead does not necessarily equal a more efficient program, especially when it is in design phases. Just because the money didn't go to a private company doesn't necessarily mean it was money wasted.
You can argue whether SLS is pork or not and that's a separate issue. There is plenty to criticize about the program. But this argument about overhead is just someone who doesn't understand accounting naively comparing percentages they don't fully understand.
I'd say the usefulness of aggregators lies in the extremes - if the aggregate score is 80-90%, that's a remarkably wide range of people saying it was good, so clearly it has a broad based appeal and you'll likely enjoy it too.
True though there are some genres of movies on Rotten Tomatoes that get consistently over-rated compared with their relative merits. Pixar movies and disney-esque animation in general tend to get higher reviews than they probably deserve in many cases. For example Wall-E was a very solid movie and I enjoyed it but it got a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. You'll never convince me that it was THAT good of a movie. I would have put it somewhere in the high 70s or low 80s. Maybe high 80s at best which is where the audience score was at 89% and even that is a bit high. Totally worth a theater ticket but not exactly best picture material. There are some that deserve ratings in the 90s but those should be much more rare than they are.
Fortunately I'm aware of this fact about RT so I can mentally adjust but it's kind of annoying and makes it harder to separate the good from the great and sometimes results in movies that should be skipped getting decent recommendations.
Similarly, if something is ranked at 10-20%, that's a remarkable consensus that it's bad.
Agreed. I've never seen a movie rated that low on Rotten Tomatoes that wasn't indeed a hot mess.
But, if you force them to pay higher taxes, they'll move, and take the jobs/money with them.
Exactly how is Amazon going to move outside the US? Their business model is dependent on being able to deliver stuff quickly which means they aren't going anywhere and are going to be subject to US taxes whether they like it or not.
So they should pay higher taxes, but if we charge higher taxes, were screwed anyway.
They don't need to pay higher taxes, they just need to be prohibited from weaseling out of paying taxes they rightfully should have to pay. And no, just because they found some clever loophole doesn't make it ok.
President Obama spent $85 million of taxpayer money on vacations in 8 years. A tidy sum but Trump is on pace to eclipse that total in less than a year. Trump has racked up north of $15 million in travel costs in two MONTHS. Spare me the bogus false equivalence.
I'm not sure leaving wealth in corporations is necessarily bad. That means the owners of the company, not the employees (including the executives) have it.
It's bad because if you don't tax it it becomes a vehicle for avoiding or deferring taxes. If I'm a wealthy guy and we don't tax the profits (or revenues) of my company then I have every incentive to use that company as a savings account for money I don't immediately need. Avoiding taxes without taxing corporations becomes trivial. If we don't tax those profits at either the individual level (like in S-Corps) or at the corporate level (like in C-Corps) then you will see a stampede of people using corporations to dodge taxes altogether to the detriment of us all. No wealthy person would ever have to pay a dime of tax if we didn't tax corporations and that's not a good thing at all.
And who owns the corporation? The investors. Who are they? Well, they could be anyone with a 401k or a pension. Or an employee. Or an executive. Or a C-level officer. Or a venture capitalist.
There is a huge difference between being a passive shareholder through a 401K and having enough of a stake in the company to actually influence company decisions. Technically both are "owners" of the company but their level of influence and control is far difference.
And while the 1% can try to get laws passed, we've seen money doesn't necessarily equal electoral victory.
No but a lack of money almost always ensures an electoral loss. Money doesn't cause a victory but it correlates heavily with one.
The problem with the 'buyer is always 200% correct' mentality at ebay can screw small sellers. Or if you only sell something once or twice a year. You're better off using craigslist.
Speaking from personal experience I would agree. Selling on eBay can be a risky pain in the butt. Never sell anything you can't afford to lose. You might have to take it back even if you do nothing wrong and the item is perfect so take that into account too.
I was a pretty big seller at one point and I can assure you that eBay isn't friendly with big sellers either. But being a small seller is definitely risky. One or two bad bits of feedback can really screw you hard.
I disagree. I sold something. The recipient said there was nothing in the box when he received it. Payment is taken back and I no longer have the item.
That happens sometimes but I'm talking about how buyers protect themselves, not sellers. You are basically backing up what I'm saying that there are more buyers who are crooks than sellers.
Best advice I can give for a seller is to document, document, document. Take pictures of the product going into the box and have witnesses. Make sure you have evidence of the weight of the package and the item. Only ship via traceable services. Use an escrow service if you are really worried or if the item is especially valuable (eBay offers one). Don't sell anything on eBay you cannot afford to lose. There is no way to perfectly keep all crooks from trying to scam you but I've sold probably 15000 items on eBay over the years and over 99% of the buyers are perfectly fine. We had trouble with about 1% of buyers (mostly hard to please people) and about 0.1% were people actually trying to rip us off.
... but I have a difficult time trusting many of the vendors on EBay.
If you pay PayPal and follow eBay's rules and it's largely a non-issue. (yes I know how people feel about PayPal) It's not always convenient but you can almost always get your money back if the deal goes south. I buy stuff like surplus tooling with some regularity on eBay and I rarely have a problem. By and large if you look at things with a skeptical eye and read all the fine print you should have too much trouble.
I used to make my living selling stuff on eBay and I assure you that there are WAY more problem buyers than sellers. I've had people send me countless fake money orders, refuse to pay, complain about every aspect of the auction despite it being clearly stated (they couldn't be bothered to read), and try every scam in the book. I've even had people buy something and "return" it when in fact what they put in the box were literally rocks.
Amazon's same day and even 2 day shipping is rarely on time.
I place about 150 orders per year through Amazon Prime and the number that have arrived late I can count on my fingers. Maybe it's different where you live but Amazon is extremely reliable about shipping times to where I live in Michigan. The only times I've had trouble have been when UPS or USPS have dropped the ball.
Why hasn't Trump apologized to Obama? It would seem to be the decent thing to do.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.... Cough, snort... Trump apologize? Are you serious? That asshat never apologizes for anything no matter how slanderous. Why would he start now?
Now, now... He spends way more time (and taxpayer funds) flying back and forth to Mar-a-Lago in Florida *every* weekend, and I'm sure he gets some work done on those flights -- or, at least, catches up on nap-time.
Don't forget that he flies to his resort at a cost of $3 million in tax money per trip just days after he proposes a budget to cut health insurance and benefits for millions of poor and middle class people. The arrogance is breathtaking. I'd say hypocrisy if it were anyone else but he's never been "one of the people" to anyone actually paying attention.
The US pays 22% of the NATO budget so the EU countries pick up over 75% of the cost. NATO benefits the US as it serves primarily as a deterrent to Russia. The fact that the US elects to spend WAY more money on its military than any other country in the world is not the fault of the other NATO member states.
the % does not matter, only total dollar amount. and frankly, other countries need to step up
Bullshit. Percentage matters a great deal. I'm much more impressed by someone who donates 2% of their income to help those in need than someone who donates 0.19% (the actual number for the US) The US is the one that needs to step up. Buy fewer tanks that the military doesn't want and do something actually helpful with the money. And yes, foreign aid does help the US. It's a form of soft power.
Actually real ideology cannot be situational. Real positions are not changing regardless of the circumstances, otherwise it's expedience and not a position or ideology in the first place.
Utilitarianism
is very much situational and is very much an ideology that it is only the outcomes that matter. You are talking about deontology which is that it is only the rules that matter, not the outcome. Real ideologies can be situational or they can explicitly ignore situations but both are ideologies all the same. Your assertion that "real ideology cannot be situational" is quite simply not true.
It can be. Whether it is an ethical action or not is situation dependent within the context of the society where it occurs.
Governments are necessary evils to maintain social contracts and civilization.
Agreed. One could say the same thing about corporations to a large degree. They are useful tools that allow individuals to collaborate for a greater good than they could achieve themselves.
Overreaching government is unethical.
Agreed with the caveat that your definition of overreach and my definition may be substantially different. The conservative US view of what constitutes overreach is not the only or even necessarily the correct one. And in reality you can get good results from two different governments with very different outlooks on how much government involvement is beneficial. You can have a very involved socialist oriented government or a much more constrained capitalist government and get good results both ways. Neither is inherently better or worse.
Government double-taxing is unethical.
Poppycock. Multiple forms of taxation are used on almost everything we do and for very good reasons. From a cash flow point of view there really is no such thing as double taxation. The tax laws might tax you more than once but at the end of the day you'll pay a certain net amount. Whether you pay $20 or $10 twice the result is the same either way. It is possible for the net tax rate to be too high but the whole "double tax on corporations" argument is a bogus one.
And...corporate income tax is a dumb idea in the first place, when those funds have already been taxes through both income and sales.
Corporate income tax exists so that non-active shareholders who bought shares through a secondary market don't have to pay taxes on their personal income taxes for activities they have effectively no control over. What good is buying a stock that goes up 5% if I pay all that back because Apple had a good year and made a big profit? Yes in a sense it can be "double" taxation but in reality it really isn't aside from the fact that money is paid on two occasions instead of one larger tax bill. And just because you pay (for example) a sales tax doesn't mean all other forms of taxation should be off the table. Good tax policy actually requires a variety of types of taxes to keep funding streams predictable. Depend too heavily on one tax stream (like housing values) and governments can find their budgets under water very quickly in the event of a downturn in that market.
Slashdot Mirror
musk says a lot of things.. how about 9 out of 10 successfull landings first.
Yes he says a lot of things and he backs a huge number of them up. His company managed to launch and land a booster twice and they did it successfully on their first try at landing a used booster. Gives pretty good confidence that SpaceX can replicate the results. More work to do of course but unlike snarky slashdot posters, he's actually doing the work. What have you done to advance human kind today?
This is a huge stepping stone. Your cynicism is misplaced.
Oh please, you're ridiculous. Theaters offer many valuable features you simply cannot easily get at home. Here's a few:
* teenagers using cellphones
* screaming kids (esp. in R-rated movies)
* people talking about the movie
* people talking *to* the movie
* arguments between patrons
* patrons shooting each other
Don't know where you live but I've been in plenty of homes with ALL of those amenities available.
That's what's so special about going to a theater, and why you can't replicate it at home. At home, it's just a dry, inhuman experience with only you there alone, or maybe 1 or 2 other people.
It's only a "dry, inhuman experience" if you make it one. That is 100% within your control.
At a theater, you have a whole room full of wonderful people to share that experience with, along with all the other great things that come with being around other humans, including the talking, screaming kids, use of cellphones with bright screens, and shootings.
There is this thing called being social. Try it sometime. Did you know you are actually allowed to invite people over to your home? I know, crazy, right?
I'm fairly sure the National Association of Theatre Owners have not been putting 2% of their budget towards defense spending.
That would make them smart.
Christopher Nolan and Sofia Coppola have urged audiences to see their films in the cinema at a time when the movie industry is reckoning with the growing popularity of video on demand and streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.
Translation: We're in charge of the current situation and if it changes we'll have less control.
Boo-hoo. Not my problem.
"This is a story that needs to carry you through the suspenseful situation, and make you feel like you are there, and the only way to do that is through theatrical distribution"
Bullshit. Maybe that's the only way it works for him but I can decide for myself what the best way for me to view a particular movie is. Sometimes that's the theater but I have a large 4K screen at home with a good sound system too. For me I enjoy going to the theater but more as a social outing than for any practical movie going reason. It's certainly not convenient to go. The best theaters offer amenities I cannot get at home and that might be more than just the movie. If I can replicate the experience to a good approximation in my house why would I bother going to a theater and paying a lot of money? Big screen? Got it. Popcorn? Check. Dark room? No problem. Good sound? Probably better than most theaters. What is he really offering me that I don't already have? Give me something more if you want me to make the extra effort to go to a theater.
"I am depending and relying on all of you to try to present this film in the best way possible."
Whose definition of best? The only one I care about is mine. If our opinions of "best" happen to match then fine but I'm not worried about what the director wants. I'll enjoy art on my terms, not someone elses.
Your post advocates a
( X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( X) Extreme profitability of spam
( X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( X) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Still, despite all signs to the contrary -- and many predictions -- email is not dead.
Anybody predicting email is or will be dead is either an imbecile or has something to sell you. Practically everybody has email and except for specific purposes nothing has come along that will substantially replace it any time soon.
And took the blame for the increased deficit, even though it wasn't their expense. The next time you hear some idiot hyperventilating over Obama's increase of the deficit, remember that.
Correct. We went to war and unlike every other time we've done that we did not raise taxes or take other extraordinary measures to fund our little wars of adventure because modern republican politicians break out in hives if you even mention the words "tax increase". In fact congress (republicans) lowered taxes because doing that is always politically popular even though only the wealthy saw meaningful benefit. In doing so our congress gave the bill for the pointless and expensive war to our children and grand children instead of behaving like responsible adults. Most of the money the US government borrows every year comes from the American people in one form or another. We are literally letting the government write IOUs to us while we have the delusion that the bill will never come due.
A lot of things in the defense budget are things that people rely on.
None that are things that have to be covered under the defense budget. Most of the defense budget is for personnel and for war fighting machines (purchase and operation).
Food subsidies at one point were covered through the defense budget for example
I'm not aware of this being true in my lifetime if ever. Citation please.
The GPS cluster maintenance and upgrades are paid out of the defense budget.
Doesn't mean it has to remain that way. Wouldn't be hard to put that into the budget for NOAA or NASA or NTSB or the Commerce Dept.
Originally the US interstate system was a defense project, though it's now funded through gasoline taxes.
The money for it never came out of the defense budget. The project did have defense implications but it ultimately was a civilian project that has been used almost entirely for civilian uses and funded by non-military dollars.
The defense budget covers a lot more than just war machines.
Let's not pretend that war machines and the people that operate them don't account for the vast majority of military spending.
After all, the Internet got its start as a DARPA project.
Which has fuck-all to do with the fact that our current military budget is bloated far beyond any reasonable defense needs.
I would like to remind you that about a trillion dollars a year go toward "defense".
The actual number last year was around $600 billion but your point still stands. Coincidentally our federal deficit in 2016 was also right around $600 billion so we basically borrowed every penny we spent on the military last year. So thank your grandchildren for the debt they'll be paying off because we think it necessary to support a military that is grossly oversized but are unwilling to tax enough to pay for it.
If you want to talk about pork, you aren't talking about spending money on science, you're talking about defense spending.
Truer words have never been spoken. NASA is a rounding error compared to the wasteful spending in the defense department.
This is the sort of idiotic criticism made by people with no understanding of accounting. Part of "overhead" is engineering and the engineering costs for designing a system like SLS are substantial. Since NASA is doing the engineering for SLS in house of course the overhead costs are going to be a higher percentage of their total. If they outsourced it, the overhead for engineering won't disappear - it will just go on the P&L for a different company. You could argue that a private sector company might be more efficient (not clear in this case) but they also would charge a mark up because they have to make a profit so you give some of that back. You can't just blindly compare overhead percentages without understanding what they are comprised of. Lower overhead does not necessarily equal a more efficient program, especially when it is in design phases. Just because the money didn't go to a private company doesn't necessarily mean it was money wasted.
You can argue whether SLS is pork or not and that's a separate issue. There is plenty to criticize about the program. But this argument about overhead is just someone who doesn't understand accounting naively comparing percentages they don't fully understand.
I'd say the usefulness of aggregators lies in the extremes - if the aggregate score is 80-90%, that's a remarkably wide range of people saying it was good, so clearly it has a broad based appeal and you'll likely enjoy it too.
True though there are some genres of movies on Rotten Tomatoes that get consistently over-rated compared with their relative merits. Pixar movies and disney-esque animation in general tend to get higher reviews than they probably deserve in many cases. For example Wall-E was a very solid movie and I enjoyed it but it got a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. You'll never convince me that it was THAT good of a movie. I would have put it somewhere in the high 70s or low 80s. Maybe high 80s at best which is where the audience score was at 89% and even that is a bit high. Totally worth a theater ticket but not exactly best picture material. There are some that deserve ratings in the 90s but those should be much more rare than they are.
Fortunately I'm aware of this fact about RT so I can mentally adjust but it's kind of annoying and makes it harder to separate the good from the great and sometimes results in movies that should be skipped getting decent recommendations.
Similarly, if something is ranked at 10-20%, that's a remarkable consensus that it's bad.
Agreed. I've never seen a movie rated that low on Rotten Tomatoes that wasn't indeed a hot mess.
But, if you force them to pay higher taxes, they'll move, and take the jobs/money with them.
Exactly how is Amazon going to move outside the US? Their business model is dependent on being able to deliver stuff quickly which means they aren't going anywhere and are going to be subject to US taxes whether they like it or not.
So they should pay higher taxes, but if we charge higher taxes, were screwed anyway.
They don't need to pay higher taxes, they just need to be prohibited from weaseling out of paying taxes they rightfully should have to pay. And no, just because they found some clever loophole doesn't make it ok.
Amazon made just $2.37 billion of profit in 2016...
Such a small profit. How ever will they manage to feed their families...
And the outrage you had when the Obamas...
President Obama spent $85 million of taxpayer money on vacations in 8 years. A tidy sum but Trump is on pace to eclipse that total in less than a year. Trump has racked up north of $15 million in travel costs in two MONTHS. Spare me the bogus false equivalence.
I'm not sure leaving wealth in corporations is necessarily bad. That means the owners of the company, not the employees (including the executives) have it.
It's bad because if you don't tax it it becomes a vehicle for avoiding or deferring taxes. If I'm a wealthy guy and we don't tax the profits (or revenues) of my company then I have every incentive to use that company as a savings account for money I don't immediately need. Avoiding taxes without taxing corporations becomes trivial. If we don't tax those profits at either the individual level (like in S-Corps) or at the corporate level (like in C-Corps) then you will see a stampede of people using corporations to dodge taxes altogether to the detriment of us all. No wealthy person would ever have to pay a dime of tax if we didn't tax corporations and that's not a good thing at all.
And who owns the corporation? The investors. Who are they? Well, they could be anyone with a 401k or a pension. Or an employee. Or an executive. Or a C-level officer. Or a venture capitalist.
There is a huge difference between being a passive shareholder through a 401K and having enough of a stake in the company to actually influence company decisions. Technically both are "owners" of the company but their level of influence and control is far difference.
And while the 1% can try to get laws passed, we've seen money doesn't necessarily equal electoral victory.
No but a lack of money almost always ensures an electoral loss. Money doesn't cause a victory but it correlates heavily with one.
The problem with the 'buyer is always 200% correct' mentality at ebay can screw small sellers. Or if you only sell something once or twice a year. You're better off using craigslist.
Speaking from personal experience I would agree. Selling on eBay can be a risky pain in the butt. Never sell anything you can't afford to lose. You might have to take it back even if you do nothing wrong and the item is perfect so take that into account too.
I was a pretty big seller at one point and I can assure you that eBay isn't friendly with big sellers either. But being a small seller is definitely risky. One or two bad bits of feedback can really screw you hard.
I disagree. I sold something. The recipient said there was nothing in the box when he received it. Payment is taken back and I no longer have the item.
That happens sometimes but I'm talking about how buyers protect themselves, not sellers. You are basically backing up what I'm saying that there are more buyers who are crooks than sellers.
Best advice I can give for a seller is to document, document, document. Take pictures of the product going into the box and have witnesses. Make sure you have evidence of the weight of the package and the item. Only ship via traceable services. Use an escrow service if you are really worried or if the item is especially valuable (eBay offers one). Don't sell anything on eBay you cannot afford to lose. There is no way to perfectly keep all crooks from trying to scam you but I've sold probably 15000 items on eBay over the years and over 99% of the buyers are perfectly fine. We had trouble with about 1% of buyers (mostly hard to please people) and about 0.1% were people actually trying to rip us off.
... but I have a difficult time trusting many of the vendors on EBay.
If you pay PayPal and follow eBay's rules and it's largely a non-issue. (yes I know how people feel about PayPal) It's not always convenient but you can almost always get your money back if the deal goes south. I buy stuff like surplus tooling with some regularity on eBay and I rarely have a problem. By and large if you look at things with a skeptical eye and read all the fine print you should have too much trouble.
I used to make my living selling stuff on eBay and I assure you that there are WAY more problem buyers than sellers. I've had people send me countless fake money orders, refuse to pay, complain about every aspect of the auction despite it being clearly stated (they couldn't be bothered to read), and try every scam in the book. I've even had people buy something and "return" it when in fact what they put in the box were literally rocks.
Amazon's same day and even 2 day shipping is rarely on time.
I place about 150 orders per year through Amazon Prime and the number that have arrived late I can count on my fingers. Maybe it's different where you live but Amazon is extremely reliable about shipping times to where I live in Michigan. The only times I've had trouble have been when UPS or USPS have dropped the ball.
Why hasn't Trump apologized to Obama? It would seem to be the decent thing to do.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.... Cough, snort... Trump apologize? Are you serious? That asshat never apologizes for anything no matter how slanderous. Why would he start now?
Now, now... He spends way more time (and taxpayer funds) flying back and forth to Mar-a-Lago in Florida *every* weekend, and I'm sure he gets some work done on those flights -- or, at least, catches up on nap-time.
Don't forget that he flies to his resort at a cost of $3 million in tax money per trip just days after he proposes a budget to cut health insurance and benefits for millions of poor and middle class people. The arrogance is breathtaking. I'd say hypocrisy if it were anyone else but he's never been "one of the people" to anyone actually paying attention.
The US pays 22% of the NATO budget so the EU countries pick up over 75% of the cost. NATO benefits the US as it serves primarily as a deterrent to Russia. The fact that the US elects to spend WAY more money on its military than any other country in the world is not the fault of the other NATO member states.
the % does not matter, only total dollar amount. and frankly, other countries need to step up
Bullshit. Percentage matters a great deal. I'm much more impressed by someone who donates 2% of their income to help those in need than someone who donates 0.19% (the actual number for the US) The US is the one that needs to step up. Buy fewer tanks that the military doesn't want and do something actually helpful with the money. And yes, foreign aid does help the US. It's a form of soft power.
Actually real ideology cannot be situational. Real positions are not changing regardless of the circumstances, otherwise it's expedience and not a position or ideology in the first place.
Utilitarianism
is very much situational and is very much an ideology that it is only the outcomes that matter. You are talking about deontology which is that it is only the rules that matter, not the outcome. Real ideologies can be situational or they can explicitly ignore situations but both are ideologies all the same. Your assertion that "real ideology cannot be situational" is quite simply not true.
Paying more taxes is not ethical.
It can be. Whether it is an ethical action or not is situation dependent within the context of the society where it occurs.
Governments are necessary evils to maintain social contracts and civilization.
Agreed. One could say the same thing about corporations to a large degree. They are useful tools that allow individuals to collaborate for a greater good than they could achieve themselves.
Overreaching government is unethical.
Agreed with the caveat that your definition of overreach and my definition may be substantially different. The conservative US view of what constitutes overreach is not the only or even necessarily the correct one. And in reality you can get good results from two different governments with very different outlooks on how much government involvement is beneficial. You can have a very involved socialist oriented government or a much more constrained capitalist government and get good results both ways. Neither is inherently better or worse.
Government double-taxing is unethical.
Poppycock. Multiple forms of taxation are used on almost everything we do and for very good reasons. From a cash flow point of view there really is no such thing as double taxation. The tax laws might tax you more than once but at the end of the day you'll pay a certain net amount. Whether you pay $20 or $10 twice the result is the same either way. It is possible for the net tax rate to be too high but the whole "double tax on corporations" argument is a bogus one.
And...corporate income tax is a dumb idea in the first place, when those funds have already been taxes through both income and sales.
Corporate income tax exists so that non-active shareholders who bought shares through a secondary market don't have to pay taxes on their personal income taxes for activities they have effectively no control over. What good is buying a stock that goes up 5% if I pay all that back because Apple had a good year and made a big profit? Yes in a sense it can be "double" taxation but in reality it really isn't aside from the fact that money is paid on two occasions instead of one larger tax bill. And just because you pay (for example) a sales tax doesn't mean all other forms of taxation should be off the table. Good tax policy actually requires a variety of types of taxes to keep funding streams predictable. Depend too heavily on one tax stream (like housing values) and governments can find their budgets under water very quickly in the event of a downturn in that market.