've heard that drug/alcohol abusers are all 'self-medicating' themselves, unknowingly trying to do what proper medication can achieve.
Some, not all, I think. And 'proper medication' can't address everyone's problems yet(perhaps never).
But yes, the general answer is an individualized course of medical treatment is the most effective solution to these sorts of things. Surgery very rarely required.
The story sucks, but I have to wonder. We do some radical brain surgeries at times just to fix problems with seizures. At least in the long term addiction carries a higher incidental rate of death, lowered quality of life, and such than seizures.
So I guess I'd have to say 'it depends'. I'd view it a bit the same as stomach stapling for weight loss -
I'd need to know a heck of a lot more about the details of the surgery - primary effects, dangers, side effects, success rates, etc... Does it result in an unmotivated zombie, because there's no longer any reward for doing so much as life maintenance tasks? Can they still feel pleasure? Is it only being used on the most serious 'mental' addiction cases? I added mental because this wouldn't solve physical addictions to things like heroin, I think, but might help solve addictions to gambling, stealing, etc...
Going by the article, it seems to only stop addictions 10% better than traditional methods, and is still well under half. 60% have serious side effects, so I'm going to go with 'nope, not worth it, keep looking'.
As for 'losing who you are', well, even just day to day life you change. I'm not the same person I was a decade ago. Technically I'm not the person I was yesterday. If somebody wants to change, it might be worth it.
For how many years during the last century, did such a "counterpoint" policy actually result in a surplus?
Politicians suck at implementing the surplus part. That, I'll fully admit. Which is why I said it should be 'mostly automatic'.
What government spending cuts would you agitate for over the next 10-20 years, to get a surplus budget, in non-recession times?
Why does it need to solely be spending cuts? We should have never done the Bush tax cuts, for example, though at this point I'd have been working to suck money out of the housing boom - I saw that one coming a mile away. I was a bit young for the dotcom boom, but even there I saw that investors were throwing a lot of money at companies with no real business plan(sign of a boom). So you raise taxes a bit(preferably targeting the overheating* market), and build up some reserves for when the crash/downturn comes.
Anyways, if you read into the post a bit you'd see that the 'spending cuts' I'd make during a boom time is that federal type construction and maintenance of infrastructure would slow down. I'd also slow down military R&D and acquisitions.
*Though it's a fine line between a market that's simply 'hot' and 'overheating'. Hot is good. Overheating = greatly increased waste with no real extra production, and even higher expenses when it finally breaks.
Do you believe we are currently in a recession? (Are you a Keynesian only during recessions?)
No, I'm not a Keynesian only during recessions. See the Bush tax cuts. I believe that we're currently in a small one, though there are signs we're leaving it.
Here's a question: Why does even the UK still give people making their money via investment preferential treatment over those that 'earn a living'? An extra £2k isn't an insubstantial amount. A top rate of 28% for capital gains is still a heck of a lot lower than 40%. Etc...
Obviously, if the corporation tax is abolished somebody is going to have to make up that tax revenue, which ends up being the tax-paying citizens, so the tax rate for us is only going to go up.
I think the critical difference in thought is that I see it as you're already paying that tax. It's just hidden, out of obvious sight. Like gas taxes - you see the final price on the pump, but in many/most areas over half that price is actually taxes.
And bear in mind that similarly to large corporations, many high net worth individuals take advantage of loopholes in the tax code to minimize their tax bill. It's not a sense of injustice that makes people go into the 'shady' areas of the law to avoid tax, it's greed.
I know that; it's just that the options for high-income individuals to avoid taxes is still more difficult than it is for a huge multinational corporation. I'd try to avoid raising the rate too much.
Most of the actual loopholes Romney exploited have been closed, and closed for a while. The biggest one remaining is our entirely too low capital gains tax rate. I'd argue raising it to the 35% over $400k we currently have for ordinary income, but put some rules in place to allow you to average your capital gains over a number off years, so selling off a property doesn't hit you too hard for a one time affair.
Corporation also cost society money. SO they shoudl also pay. 20% on the net no deduction except RnD, 30% on any money leaving the US.
1. PEOPLE cost society money(resources). The concept of a corporation also enables more efficient generation of resources. Just like people, some are better at it than others. Just like people, we pass laws and regulations to seek to limit the damage the 'bad eggs' cause. 2. You do realize that 20% of net basically equals a 20% sales tax, right? Though it would end up being a pretty hefty subsidy for sole proprietorships. 3. You specified a deduction for R&D, but not for hiring people, then mentioned 'hire more people' as a tax break, which is it? 4. Not all money moving has value, besides corporations are moving money all the time. Remember, when you own shares of a company, you own a portion of it's assets, not a particular number of dollars. Corps generally try to make the most use out of their assets as they can. 5. How do you define 'money leaving the US'? Is it leaving the USA when a company buys Italian champagne to stock in it's stores? When it imports aluminum bars(production in the USA being practically nil due to low amounts of Bauxite deposits) to fabricate stuff? When a dividend goes to a foreign stock owner?
Most rich/corporations don't actually hoard money. They hoard assets, which they rent out or allow others to use productively in exchange for a portion of the profits. Often expressed as 'interest'.
Sure, I think the idea that a corporation is a person needs to be killed, along with some other adjustments, but the idea of a corporation itself isn't a bad one.
There's a difference between supporting the troops and supporting the military complex. You have to be careful about the lines drawn.
Getting our troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan can be supporting the troops while not supporting military industry/spending. Lowering overall military numbers gradually while increasing pay can be supporting, etc...
I'm a mix of Bin B and C. I go downright socialist in the sense that because I believe in Keynesian economic theory, I think that the government should shift between deficit spending and a surplus in counterpoint to the private economy. Ideally this should be set up to be as automatic as possible.
Combined with our not being willing to let people starve in the streets, not wanting people in prison to have better lifestyles than those out of prison, etc... I think that we should have a sort of universal employment option instead of most forms of welfare. Call it the 'Federal Jobs Program'. It'd be a typical government job: Low on pay; high on benefits. I'd try to keep it paying slightly less overall than private jobs in the same category. Meanwhile it provides medical*, training(technical, OJT, and college), perhaps even food and housing. I'm picturing how we used to treat junior enlisted in the military - eat at a dining facility(where junior enlisted to most of the work), live in the dorms/barracks, family housing for the married. Anyways, haven't even addressed what I'd have them do - which is mostly 'build infrastructure', which to me is anything that should still be in operation and providing benefits 20 years later. Roads, bridges, schools, parks, government buildings, etc... Heck, maybe even put them to work putting solar panels on people's houses in areas where it makes sense. Running fiber. Helping to set up a community cooperative internet provider. To try to keep private businesses from using it to get their projects done cheaper, I'd require all infrastructure to pass in to the hands of a cooperate(IE customer owned)/not for profit, not a for profit business. The details would fill a book, of course.
The trick is that when deciding whether a project would be profitable, you deduct the welfare we'd be paying the worker otherwise if they weren't working. So with laber discounted something like 50%, you can now, on paper at least, have a lot of projects be profitable/worth it if it wasn't for the otherwise high cost of labor.
*Until we get some sort of universal system set up; as a libertarian I find the idea of your job providing your healthcare abhorrent. You should be getting your own healthcare insurance INDEPENDENT of your job, outside of military/professional sports and such.
The REAL question is why hasn't this enormous loophole been closed yet?
Because the companies are willing to spend millions lobbying politicians to make sure it isn't closed, and as most politicians own substantial amounts of stock in the companies doing this, closing the loopholes will cost THEM money.
Unfortunately - here in the UK we have the same problem... the people pay more while the corporations pay next-to-nothing
This is a complicated issue in my mind, I'm conflicted. One the one hand, my thought is that as long as we're going to tax corporations, we should do so effectively, limiting/eliminating the tricks that international companies use to avoid taxes like this. Note: To me tax avoidance is using legal means to lower your tax burden. Tax evasion is using illegal means. Using the former is shady, but not illegal, and we should expect companies to be immoral when it comes to saving millions of dollars.
But I also have the thought of 'why bother taxing corporations'? We suck at it, and ultimately companies are owned by individuals, everybody from fat cat industrialists to the retired grandmother who bought $100 of IBM stock 50 years ago. That makes taxing corporations both regressive and ineffective - it's regressive in that it hits those who have low incomes and low amounts of stock(mostly in retirement accounts) as much as it hits the rich. Ineffective in that the big companies have all figured out how to shelter the vast majority of their profits legally. It's the small to mid sized companies that are handicapped by actually having to pay the high US taxes.
Maybe make the corporations collect sales tax instead? What about VAT? Maybe put proper tiers on non-earned income(IE capital gains)?
My idea is to split personal income taxes into two categories - earned and unearned. Earned is salaries, piece work, etc... IE you 'did' something to earn that money. Unearned is capital gains, interest, dividends, and such, money earned from the simple fact that you 'owned' something. Your first ~$10k of income in either category is taxed at 0%, after that it's tiered in parallel like the current system. Assuming an average return rate of 5%, that's $200k in investments before you start having to pay taxes on the return, which is a good amount for emergencies, college, early retirement, and what not.
If you make as much as Romney though, you're going to be paying near the top rate, no matter how you structure your income.
I'm surprised nobody has gone after the protocols to see how many low tire pressure warnings they can set off at once...
Probably because: 1. It takes something like 15-30 minutes without signal to set one off. So you jam the signal for a couple minutes before they're outside the jamming range and the light never turns on. 2. Most people would still ignore the light even if your jam range is high enough to set it off. 3. Even if they pay attention to the light, the odds of getting satisfyingly outrageous behavior out of them is unlikely. All but the most paranoid would simply drive to a gas station and check their tire pressure there, assuming they know what the light is for. I'd simply drive home and use my compressor there.
Of course, going by the AC stalking you, you're apparently an epic troll; with one post you managed to get dozens of replies over multiple threads!;)
I find it interesting that the nut seems to be keeping a log of everyone's posts in order to keep digging up the past. Not that I've seen you post anything really controversial.
Maybe you should stop blaming people for things when you don't know what's going on?
One could think that it was a hypothesis; 'Cops installed a new radio/antenna that's interfering with our system'. It's reasonable, logical, and testable. The problem is only if they don't test it. Given that they seem to have relatively quickly figured it out, it's likely they contacted the cops about it, the cops said 'we didn't do anything' and contacted the FCC, the FCC sent somebody out with a frequency analyzer that found the interference and triangulated it's source as the pirate station on the bank roof.
I saw that in one of my friends cars it seems ridiculous to me considering that any one with the right equipment could listen in on the key exchange.
That's the thing, they use rolling codes, much like what garage door openers have used for decades, same with key fobs. You can't determine the next key sequence simply by recording the signal.
While there are weaknesses, you have to remember that door locks aren't exactly without their own weaknesses. In reality, key fobs are, at least on average, more secure than physical locks, requiring both more time and additional equipment at substantial cost over a lockpick set.
Ultimately though, I've heard that most really high end cars are stolen the same way a relative of mine once stole a cop car with. Pull up with a tow truck and cart it away. Of course, my relative did it decades and decades ago as a joke* - he parked it on the far end of the police parking lot. Nobody batted an eye, and it took weeks for them to figure out where it went to. Cop cars break down as well, nobody sees anything wrong with a marked tow truck neatly dropping a car into the lot.
*A rather mean one on a cop he had a serious dislike for. I wonder how successful 'theft' charges would be given that it was parked, out in the open, right in the appropriate department's lot?
doing no work would very quickly lead to a hazardous dilapidated shell.
This is in line with my original thought on why such an upscale building would be empty - it's possible that it's already a hazardous shell, except for the bits necessary to keep the billboard up, and for whatever reason(incredible amount of asbestos?), it'd cost more than what he could rent it out for to fix.
Well most people own at least something, so the threshold for 'profitable' is about the same as 'is alive'.
Yes, but as long as the person is productive in the community they should be safe - Killing the tailor might get you a bunch of shirts NOW, but in the future? Galileo was productive, so he was useful.
Heathens are something of a different story - the value of their land/goods minus the cost of killing them exceeded the value of trading with them.
I guess the trick is to be seen as part of the group - it raises the costs of seriously screwing you over, because if you're useful to lots of people, they won't get an appreciable amount of stuff divvying it up, and the rest will object if only one tries it.
This sort of stuff is why I'm inclined to believe Marvell's claims that the earlier Seagate patents cover their devices, rendering the University's claims void.
Beside that, I'd tend to assign the value for the 'innovations' at around a dime to penny per device, making the 'value' of the infringement more in the low to mid millions.
Consider that a lot of HD's go for ~$40, and that the controller chip is only part of that system. Say $10. Given that the patents are for incremental improvements, that's like $.10 or less per chip.
Especially if they licensed the seagate patents, that would remove the 'willful' claim.
Any bible translation you own would also be enough to send you to the gallows.
Only if you made it profitable or politically convenient to do so. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, more often found FOR the accused, IE 'They're NOT a witch', than for the accussers, who often did it against socially and politically vulnerable people in order to seize their assets.
Look at history. Galileo might of had trouble with the Church, investigated by the Roman Inquisition too boot, and he didn't end up burned. Heck, he wrote a piece that attacked the pope and was only forced to recant and stuck in house arrest. There's a lot of this through history. Kind of like today you could be pretty much anything you wanted as long as you were quiet about it. Don't attack the church or leadership. Go to church(don't have to agree, just shut up and go), pay the tithe, and most importantly, don't make waves. Galileo got into the trouble he did(but was somewhat protected) because he was a known respected auther.
I remember hearing a news article about a prescription pill crackdown, specifically oxycontin, leading to a flourishing heroin market. It was a radio program in the car, I don't remember where.
But in your case, it's a very interesting trend. Drug users DO drugs. They'll 'generally' go after the safest high that meets their needs that they can afford. The largest proportion is satisfied by the legal drugs - caffeine, alcohol, tobacco. Even more if you add marijuana. I personally think that if you added cocaine, opium/heroin, LSD, and a few others to the list, and don't put too many controls or taxes on them that it's still easier to make meth, that meth and bath salts and such will become very unusual stories, not everywhere.
A drug user who has their condition treated as a medical/psychological issue is more likely* to be able to keep a job, home, etc... A steady supply of cheaper, purer, safer drugs will help keep the addicts from messing themselves up more. It's all a play for time, as it's my belief that you can't really 'fix' an addict until they want to be fixed. Until then, it's keeping them being a contributing member of society, or at least not a drain.
*though their chances are still lower than clean individuals, on average.
Meth production is way down in Illinois because of making it hard to get cold medicine, and the cops said on the news this morning that the methheads are switching to heroin, which is almost the exact opposite of meth in its effects, yet heroin ODs can kill you.
I think you're misremembering that news article. They were finding that the addicts were replacing Oxycontin, not meth, with heroin.
Legalize cocaine and only those who are already crazy (like McAffee) will do bath salts.
That's the general idea. Heck, if cocaine and such had never been made illegal, odds are 'bath salts' would have never been developed in the first place.
I align myself with the libertarian party because they're 'closest' to my views. I've been described as a 'practical minarchist', by which I mean that while I give any spending the stink eye, I'll support programs like free birth control because numerous studies show that it saves the government money in the long run.
My first reaction: WTF is a multimillionaire in Belize doing bath salts for? Why can't he stick to snorting cocaine off of hookers like the other rich dudes? And yes, I'm also a proponent of 'legalize just about everything', INCLUDING cocaine and heroin*, and 'bath salts' manages to make my short list of stuff to make/keep illegal.
Bath salts tend to burn the brain even quicker than badly cooked meth.
*It's a harm mitigation strategy to defund organized crime; it needs to be a medical, not a criminal, issue. In my experience any 'successes' in the 'war on drugs' tend to simply have the users switch to something worse. For example, Australia/Papua New Guinea(not sure which) managed, through a combination of being an Island and the people just being that poor, to eliminate nearly all illegal drug use in the local Aborigine population(like many native populations, they have a horrible drug addiction rate). What happened? They switched to huffing gasoline, which killed brains quicker than the other drugs.
Am I wrong in believing that we've got poorly defended waste pools all over the country, any of which could catch fire and spew radioactive waste over thousands of square miles if for some reason the pumps failed and we could not respond quickly enough to provide cooling?
You're pretty much wrong. One of the things found during Fukushima is that US plants are much more up to date/paranoid about their backup plans.
My waste plan, at the moment, is more like 'cool in the waste pool for ~5 years, in a cask for 20, then reprocess as it's now cool enough to not need the really crazy safety measures, bury the remaining nasty stuff(that cools down quick) in a place like Yucca'.
Are we prepared for a terrorist attack during a hurricane? What if a terrorist crashes a 767 jet into the waste pools at Sharon Harris, or any of the other waste pools? I'm sure that after 9/11 and Japan's crisis, these are things that are being considered, but are we ready? Thanks in advance.
1. The hurricane will probably cause more damage than the terrorists. Either they operate far enough outside the hurricane that LE can handle them, or they operate far enough in that most people are shuttered in or evacuated, meaning the terrorists have no good targets, plus they're having to deal with the storm. 2. 767 into waste pools? A: Can you ID the pool's location on the map? B: Can you successfully pilot a plane into it? It's not a massive elevated target like the towers were. Experienced professional pilots have been shown to have a hard time hitting the hoover dam in a simulator (not that jetliner would do much to it). C: Terrorists have overwhelmingly shown a preference for primary casualties, not secondary. IE they want people to die in the blast, not from cancer 20 years down the road.
It's more like the costs for shipping and china/Indian wages have increased to the point, combined with shipping delays, increased stock expense(you have to keep an extra month or two of stock around between shipping and staging from China to the USA) that making the stuff in the USA using sufficient automation to compensate for the increased wage cost.
China: High shipping, low labor, low automation. USA Lower shipping, high labor, high automation to compensate for the high labor.
A US robotic plant can literally produce hundreds of times as much per man hour as a Chinese sweat shop manufactury. Now, it's likely to cost 5-10X as much to build the factory, but it's still possible.
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've heard that drug/alcohol abusers are all 'self-medicating' themselves, unknowingly trying to do what proper medication can achieve.
Some, not all, I think. And 'proper medication' can't address everyone's problems yet(perhaps never).
But yes, the general answer is an individualized course of medical treatment is the most effective solution to these sorts of things. Surgery very rarely required.
Maybe Velex is a female and got to undergo the female circumcision? I'm also circumcised and I have plenty of fun with my equipment.
The possibility that the surgery was messed up is still possible, of course.
The story sucks, but I have to wonder. We do some radical brain surgeries at times just to fix problems with seizures. At least in the long term addiction carries a higher incidental rate of death, lowered quality of life, and such than seizures.
So I guess I'd have to say 'it depends'. I'd view it a bit the same as stomach stapling for weight loss -
I'd need to know a heck of a lot more about the details of the surgery - primary effects, dangers, side effects, success rates, etc...
Does it result in an unmotivated zombie, because there's no longer any reward for doing so much as life maintenance tasks? Can they still feel pleasure? Is it only being used on the most serious 'mental' addiction cases? I added mental because this wouldn't solve physical addictions to things like heroin, I think, but might help solve addictions to gambling, stealing, etc...
Going by the article, it seems to only stop addictions 10% better than traditional methods, and is still well under half. 60% have serious side effects, so I'm going to go with 'nope, not worth it, keep looking'.
As for 'losing who you are', well, even just day to day life you change. I'm not the same person I was a decade ago. Technically I'm not the person I was yesterday. If somebody wants to change, it might be worth it.
For how many years during the last century, did such a "counterpoint" policy actually result in a surplus?
Politicians suck at implementing the surplus part. That, I'll fully admit. Which is why I said it should be 'mostly automatic'.
What government spending cuts would you agitate for over the next 10-20 years, to get a surplus budget, in non-recession times?
Why does it need to solely be spending cuts? We should have never done the Bush tax cuts, for example, though at this point I'd have been working to suck money out of the housing boom - I saw that one coming a mile away. I was a bit young for the dotcom boom, but even there I saw that investors were throwing a lot of money at companies with no real business plan(sign of a boom). So you raise taxes a bit(preferably targeting the overheating* market), and build up some reserves for when the crash/downturn comes.
Anyways, if you read into the post a bit you'd see that the 'spending cuts' I'd make during a boom time is that federal type construction and maintenance of infrastructure would slow down. I'd also slow down military R&D and acquisitions.
*Though it's a fine line between a market that's simply 'hot' and 'overheating'. Hot is good. Overheating = greatly increased waste with no real extra production, and even higher expenses when it finally breaks.
Do you believe we are currently in a recession? (Are you a Keynesian only during recessions?)
No, I'm not a Keynesian only during recessions. See the Bush tax cuts. I believe that we're currently in a small one, though there are signs we're leaving it.
Here's a question: Why does even the UK still give people making their money via investment preferential treatment over those that 'earn a living'? An extra £2k isn't an insubstantial amount. A top rate of 28% for capital gains is still a heck of a lot lower than 40%. Etc...
Obviously, if the corporation tax is abolished somebody is going to have to make up that tax revenue, which ends up being the tax-paying citizens, so the tax rate for us is only going to go up.
I think the critical difference in thought is that I see it as you're already paying that tax. It's just hidden, out of obvious sight. Like gas taxes - you see the final price on the pump, but in many/most areas over half that price is actually taxes.
And bear in mind that similarly to large corporations, many high net worth individuals take advantage of loopholes in the tax code to minimize their tax bill. It's not a sense of injustice that makes people go into the 'shady' areas of the law to avoid tax, it's greed.
I know that; it's just that the options for high-income individuals to avoid taxes is still more difficult than it is for a huge multinational corporation. I'd try to avoid raising the rate too much.
Most of the actual loopholes Romney exploited have been closed, and closed for a while. The biggest one remaining is our entirely too low capital gains tax rate. I'd argue raising it to the 35% over $400k we currently have for ordinary income, but put some rules in place to allow you to average your capital gains over a number off years, so selling off a property doesn't hit you too hard for a one time affair.
Corporation also cost society money. SO they shoudl also pay. 20% on the net no deduction except RnD, 30% on any money leaving the US.
1. PEOPLE cost society money(resources). The concept of a corporation also enables more efficient generation of resources. Just like people, some are better at it than others. Just like people, we pass laws and regulations to seek to limit the damage the 'bad eggs' cause.
2. You do realize that 20% of net basically equals a 20% sales tax, right? Though it would end up being a pretty hefty subsidy for sole proprietorships.
3. You specified a deduction for R&D, but not for hiring people, then mentioned 'hire more people' as a tax break, which is it?
4. Not all money moving has value, besides corporations are moving money all the time. Remember, when you own shares of a company, you own a portion of it's assets, not a particular number of dollars. Corps generally try to make the most use out of their assets as they can.
5. How do you define 'money leaving the US'? Is it leaving the USA when a company buys Italian champagne to stock in it's stores? When it imports aluminum bars(production in the USA being practically nil due to low amounts of Bauxite deposits) to fabricate stuff? When a dividend goes to a foreign stock owner?
Most rich/corporations don't actually hoard money. They hoard assets, which they rent out or allow others to use productively in exchange for a portion of the profits. Often expressed as 'interest'.
Sure, I think the idea that a corporation is a person needs to be killed, along with some other adjustments, but the idea of a corporation itself isn't a bad one.
There's a difference between supporting the troops and supporting the military complex. You have to be careful about the lines drawn.
Getting our troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan can be supporting the troops while not supporting military industry/spending. Lowering overall military numbers gradually while increasing pay can be supporting, etc...
I'm a mix of Bin B and C. I go downright socialist in the sense that because I believe in Keynesian economic theory, I think that the government should shift between deficit spending and a surplus in counterpoint to the private economy. Ideally this should be set up to be as automatic as possible.
Combined with our not being willing to let people starve in the streets, not wanting people in prison to have better lifestyles than those out of prison, etc... I think that we should have a sort of universal employment option instead of most forms of welfare. Call it the 'Federal Jobs Program'. It'd be a typical government job: Low on pay; high on benefits. I'd try to keep it paying slightly less overall than private jobs in the same category. Meanwhile it provides medical*, training(technical, OJT, and college), perhaps even food and housing. I'm picturing how we used to treat junior enlisted in the military - eat at a dining facility(where junior enlisted to most of the work), live in the dorms/barracks, family housing for the married. Anyways, haven't even addressed what I'd have them do - which is mostly 'build infrastructure', which to me is anything that should still be in operation and providing benefits 20 years later. Roads, bridges, schools, parks, government buildings, etc... Heck, maybe even put them to work putting solar panels on people's houses in areas where it makes sense. Running fiber. Helping to set up a community cooperative internet provider. To try to keep private businesses from using it to get their projects done cheaper, I'd require all infrastructure to pass in to the hands of a cooperate(IE customer owned)/not for profit, not a for profit business. The details would fill a book, of course.
The trick is that when deciding whether a project would be profitable, you deduct the welfare we'd be paying the worker otherwise if they weren't working. So with laber discounted something like 50%, you can now, on paper at least, have a lot of projects be profitable/worth it if it wasn't for the otherwise high cost of labor.
*Until we get some sort of universal system set up; as a libertarian I find the idea of your job providing your healthcare abhorrent. You should be getting your own healthcare insurance INDEPENDENT of your job, outside of military/professional sports and such.
He might be including medicare expenses in there, even then it'd only be the most expensive retirees getting $300k worth of medical benefits a year.
The REAL question is why hasn't this enormous loophole been closed yet?
Because the companies are willing to spend millions lobbying politicians to make sure it isn't closed, and as most politicians own substantial amounts of stock in the companies doing this, closing the loopholes will cost THEM money.
Unfortunately - here in the UK we have the same problem... the people pay more while the corporations pay next-to-nothing
This is a complicated issue in my mind, I'm conflicted. One the one hand, my thought is that as long as we're going to tax corporations, we should do so effectively, limiting/eliminating the tricks that international companies use to avoid taxes like this. Note: To me tax avoidance is using legal means to lower your tax burden. Tax evasion is using illegal means. Using the former is shady, but not illegal, and we should expect companies to be immoral when it comes to saving millions of dollars.
But I also have the thought of 'why bother taxing corporations'? We suck at it, and ultimately companies are owned by individuals, everybody from fat cat industrialists to the retired grandmother who bought $100 of IBM stock 50 years ago. That makes taxing corporations both regressive and ineffective - it's regressive in that it hits those who have low incomes and low amounts of stock(mostly in retirement accounts) as much as it hits the rich. Ineffective in that the big companies have all figured out how to shelter the vast majority of their profits legally. It's the small to mid sized companies that are handicapped by actually having to pay the high US taxes.
Maybe make the corporations collect sales tax instead? What about VAT? Maybe put proper tiers on non-earned income(IE capital gains)?
My idea is to split personal income taxes into two categories - earned and unearned. Earned is salaries, piece work, etc... IE you 'did' something to earn that money. Unearned is capital gains, interest, dividends, and such, money earned from the simple fact that you 'owned' something. Your first ~$10k of income in either category is taxed at 0%, after that it's tiered in parallel like the current system. Assuming an average return rate of 5%, that's $200k in investments before you start having to pay taxes on the return, which is a good amount for emergencies, college, early retirement, and what not.
If you make as much as Romney though, you're going to be paying near the top rate, no matter how you structure your income.
I'm surprised nobody has gone after the protocols to see how many low tire pressure warnings they can set off at once...
Probably because:
1. It takes something like 15-30 minutes without signal to set one off. So you jam the signal for a couple minutes before they're outside the jamming range and the light never turns on.
2. Most people would still ignore the light even if your jam range is high enough to set it off.
3. Even if they pay attention to the light, the odds of getting satisfyingly outrageous behavior out of them is unlikely. All but the most paranoid would simply drive to a gas station and check their tire pressure there, assuming they know what the light is for. I'd simply drive home and use my compressor there.
I'll admit that I snickered.
Of course, going by the AC stalking you, you're apparently an epic troll; with one post you managed to get dozens of replies over multiple threads! ;)
I find it interesting that the nut seems to be keeping a log of everyone's posts in order to keep digging up the past. Not that I've seen you post anything really controversial.
Maybe you should stop blaming people for things when you don't know what's going on?
One could think that it was a hypothesis; 'Cops installed a new radio/antenna that's interfering with our system'. It's reasonable, logical, and testable. The problem is only if they don't test it. Given that they seem to have relatively quickly figured it out, it's likely they contacted the cops about it, the cops said 'we didn't do anything' and contacted the FCC, the FCC sent somebody out with a frequency analyzer that found the interference and triangulated it's source as the pirate station on the bank roof.
I saw that in one of my friends cars it seems ridiculous to me considering that any one with the right equipment could listen in on the key exchange.
That's the thing, they use rolling codes, much like what garage door openers have used for decades, same with key fobs. You can't determine the next key sequence simply by recording the signal.
While there are weaknesses, you have to remember that door locks aren't exactly without their own weaknesses. In reality, key fobs are, at least on average, more secure than physical locks, requiring both more time and additional equipment at substantial cost over a lockpick set.
Ultimately though, I've heard that most really high end cars are stolen the same way a relative of mine once stole a cop car with. Pull up with a tow truck and cart it away. Of course, my relative did it decades and decades ago as a joke* - he parked it on the far end of the police parking lot. Nobody batted an eye, and it took weeks for them to figure out where it went to. Cop cars break down as well, nobody sees anything wrong with a marked tow truck neatly dropping a car into the lot.
*A rather mean one on a cop he had a serious dislike for. I wonder how successful 'theft' charges would be given that it was parked, out in the open, right in the appropriate department's lot?
doing no work would very quickly lead to a hazardous dilapidated shell.
This is in line with my original thought on why such an upscale building would be empty - it's possible that it's already a hazardous shell, except for the bits necessary to keep the billboard up, and for whatever reason(incredible amount of asbestos?), it'd cost more than what he could rent it out for to fix.
Well most people own at least something, so the threshold for 'profitable' is about the same as 'is alive'.
Yes, but as long as the person is productive in the community they should be safe - Killing the tailor might get you a bunch of shirts NOW, but in the future? Galileo was productive, so he was useful.
Heathens are something of a different story - the value of their land/goods minus the cost of killing them exceeded the value of trading with them.
I guess the trick is to be seen as part of the group - it raises the costs of seriously screwing you over, because if you're useful to lots of people, they won't get an appreciable amount of stuff divvying it up, and the rest will object if only one tries it.
This sort of stuff is why I'm inclined to believe Marvell's claims that the earlier Seagate patents cover their devices, rendering the University's claims void.
Beside that, I'd tend to assign the value for the 'innovations' at around a dime to penny per device, making the 'value' of the infringement more in the low to mid millions.
Consider that a lot of HD's go for ~$40, and that the controller chip is only part of that system. Say $10. Given that the patents are for incremental improvements, that's like $.10 or less per chip.
Especially if they licensed the seagate patents, that would remove the 'willful' claim.
Any bible translation you own would also be enough to send you to the gallows.
Only if you made it profitable or politically convenient to do so. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, more often found FOR the accused, IE 'They're NOT a witch', than for the accussers, who often did it against socially and politically vulnerable people in order to seize their assets.
Look at history. Galileo might of had trouble with the Church, investigated by the Roman Inquisition too boot, and he didn't end up burned. Heck, he wrote a piece that attacked the pope and was only forced to recant and stuck in house arrest. There's a lot of this through history. Kind of like today you could be pretty much anything you wanted as long as you were quiet about it. Don't attack the church or leadership. Go to church(don't have to agree, just shut up and go), pay the tithe, and most importantly, don't make waves. Galileo got into the trouble he did(but was somewhat protected) because he was a known respected auther.
*Shrug*
I remember hearing a news article about a prescription pill crackdown, specifically oxycontin, leading to a flourishing heroin market. It was a radio program in the car, I don't remember where.
But in your case, it's a very interesting trend. Drug users DO drugs. They'll 'generally' go after the safest high that meets their needs that they can afford. The largest proportion is satisfied by the legal drugs - caffeine, alcohol, tobacco. Even more if you add marijuana. I personally think that if you added cocaine, opium/heroin, LSD, and a few others to the list, and don't put too many controls or taxes on them that it's still easier to make meth, that meth and bath salts and such will become very unusual stories, not everywhere.
A drug user who has their condition treated as a medical/psychological issue is more likely* to be able to keep a job, home, etc... A steady supply of cheaper, purer, safer drugs will help keep the addicts from messing themselves up more. It's all a play for time, as it's my belief that you can't really 'fix' an addict until they want to be fixed. Until then, it's keeping them being a contributing member of society, or at least not a drain.
*though their chances are still lower than clean individuals, on average.
Meth production is way down in Illinois because of making it hard to get cold medicine, and the cops said on the news this morning that the methheads are switching to heroin, which is almost the exact opposite of meth in its effects, yet heroin ODs can kill you.
I think you're misremembering that news article. They were finding that the addicts were replacing Oxycontin, not meth, with heroin.
Legalize cocaine and only those who are already crazy (like McAffee) will do bath salts.
That's the general idea. Heck, if cocaine and such had never been made illegal, odds are 'bath salts' would have never been developed in the first place.
I align myself with the libertarian party because they're 'closest' to my views. I've been described as a 'practical minarchist', by which I mean that while I give any spending the stink eye, I'll support programs like free birth control because numerous studies show that it saves the government money in the long run.
My first reaction: WTF is a multimillionaire in Belize doing bath salts for? Why can't he stick to snorting cocaine off of hookers like the other rich dudes? And yes, I'm also a proponent of 'legalize just about everything', INCLUDING cocaine and heroin*, and 'bath salts' manages to make my short list of stuff to make/keep illegal.
Bath salts tend to burn the brain even quicker than badly cooked meth.
*It's a harm mitigation strategy to defund organized crime; it needs to be a medical, not a criminal, issue. In my experience any 'successes' in the 'war on drugs' tend to simply have the users switch to something worse. For example, Australia/Papua New Guinea(not sure which) managed, through a combination of being an Island and the people just being that poor, to eliminate nearly all illegal drug use in the local Aborigine population(like many native populations, they have a horrible drug addiction rate). What happened? They switched to huffing gasoline, which killed brains quicker than the other drugs.
Yeah, watching the video the bird wasn't really using it for transport, it was playing with it more.
Am I wrong in believing that we've got poorly defended waste pools all over the country, any of which could catch fire and spew radioactive waste over thousands of square miles if for some reason the pumps failed and we could not respond quickly enough to provide cooling?
You're pretty much wrong. One of the things found during Fukushima is that US plants are much more up to date/paranoid about their backup plans.
My waste plan, at the moment, is more like 'cool in the waste pool for ~5 years, in a cask for 20, then reprocess as it's now cool enough to not need the really crazy safety measures, bury the remaining nasty stuff(that cools down quick) in a place like Yucca'.
Are we prepared for a terrorist attack during a hurricane? What if a terrorist crashes a 767 jet into the waste pools at Sharon Harris, or any of the other waste pools? I'm sure that after 9/11 and Japan's crisis, these are things that are being considered, but are we ready? Thanks in advance.
1. The hurricane will probably cause more damage than the terrorists. Either they operate far enough outside the hurricane that LE can handle them, or they operate far enough in that most people are shuttered in or evacuated, meaning the terrorists have no good targets, plus they're having to deal with the storm.
2. 767 into waste pools? A: Can you ID the pool's location on the map? B: Can you successfully pilot a plane into it? It's not a massive elevated target like the towers were. Experienced professional pilots have been shown to have a hard time hitting the hoover dam in a simulator (not that jetliner would do much to it). C: Terrorists have overwhelmingly shown a preference for primary casualties, not secondary. IE they want people to die in the blast, not from cancer 20 years down the road.
It's more like the costs for shipping and china/Indian wages have increased to the point, combined with shipping delays, increased stock expense(you have to keep an extra month or two of stock around between shipping and staging from China to the USA) that making the stuff in the USA using sufficient automation to compensate for the increased wage cost.
China:
High shipping, low labor, low automation.
USA
Lower shipping, high labor, high automation to compensate for the high labor.
A US robotic plant can literally produce hundreds of times as much per man hour as a Chinese sweat shop manufactury. Now, it's likely to cost 5-10X as much to build the factory, but it's still possible.