Probably because that is preferable to standing by idly watching children die needlessly at the hands of parents who don't achieve your magical level of perfection -- which is to say, all parents. That's what I think. Why do you think it is?
You're not a libertarian if you think the government should build roads.
Hence the reason I'm not a libertarian. Libertarians have a childishly simplistic ideology based on an incomplete understanding of a tiny fraction of human psychology. You sound too smart for that.
Yeah but the industry is video games not things like economy (AIG, Countrywide) or environment (BP) or human life (Halliburton). Even Comcast and RIAA represent threats a thousand times worse than EA. This particular Consumerist contest was taken over last year by a bunch of whiny gamers. Promptly thereafter The Consumerist got hacked a bunch of times, lost comments and community, and the articles declined. This year they decided to include EA again, a preposterous decision, giving the same whiners a chance to do a password lookup on their 12-month-old accounts, log in one more time, and vote for EA. They'll be back 12 months from now, but the Consumerist is past because they've sort of given up their credibility. I took them out of my Reader which was sad because I always liked the site a lot.
Yeah maybe that might be rich but at that level we get hit a lot less. It sounds like I'm about where you are. Keep in mind that you are working; even if you have a couple years' salary saved up, most of your income comes from working. My household income is something like 3x the median, but when I did my taxes I noticed that I was 50% under the mean. Did you notice that? Wow, three times the median is 50% less than the mean. That's because of a few non-working inherited-wealth economic sycophantic do-nothing families full of billionaires who pay large but relatively low taxes. They are people who don't work but who are rich and they are the ones who would lose out the most. But you know what? Don't worry about them, trust me they'll be fine, they'll still be in charge of everything and still the richest people around.
By "greedy rich people" did you refer to people who save instead? That's a strange way to phrase it but yeah I guess so. People who "saved" $35,000,000,000.
And "poor people" do you mean those who are completely leveraged in consumer and mortgage debt? Again that's a strange way to phrase it, but yeah I guess so. People sold into financial slavery for making too little to pay for the bare necessities.
Inflating our way out of debt will be a huge problem, smaller than the huge problem it replaces. Wait for it, I give it eight or ten more years. It'll be during Jeb's second term.
Of course they are tax supported. Everything is tax supported. How is that controversial? What part of that do you have a problem with?
Does Google use roads? Do they benefit from a healthy population? Is their business made easier by widespread peace and prosperity? All of those things are paid for by taxes. If you live or do business in America, you are tax supported, and it is legitimate to criticize you if you don't pay your fair share into that wonderful tax-supported society.
You should imagine it, or maybe three meals a day even. Googlers get up early, catch a bus with wifi on which they start working, arrive at work early, eat for free, work long hours, eat for free again, work into the nite, eat for free again, then catch the same bus home and work on the way. (Well, many of them do anyway.) Googlers work hard and earn their pay, but in my opinion people should be taxes on all benefits -- from health care to company cars to meals. If you get it and it has value, then it's income and you should pay taxes on it. Otherwise you're just shucking your tax burden onto people whose companies don't give them free shit and hide the costs behind the immoral Business Expense Deduction.
You make a great argument for doing away with the immoral and destructive Business Expense Deduction. Tax businesses the way we tax individuals: on income, not savings; on gross, not net. We would be able to drastically lower the overal rate on everyone and conservatives should love it because it would essentially be a sales tax (which fucks the poor, conservatives love to fuck the poor) as those costs were passed on as higher prices. I support this because even though it fucks the poor, it REALLY fucks the rich, who do not pay taxes on most of their lifestyle because they hide most of their lifestyle behind "business expenses".
You can't possibly think that deductions are calculated as you say. There is no way, NO WAY you actually believe that. Stop trying to win an argument and start over again with two feet in reality.
Correct. 90% of GDP is the number most economists agree is the threshold, and the USA is just about at it, depending on how you count the debt. (Most of our "debt" is dollars we owe ourselves. Is it really debt if you owe yourself a dollar? Maybe, but it's sort of complicated.) There are a zillion citations the GP can look up but here is one.
Luckily for our economy we can "simply" inflate our way out of debt, and I think we should. Rich people don't like this solution because inflation hits rich people while helping poor people. That's because rich people don't work, they coast on their savings and their savings loses value during inflation. Meanwhile, poor people work and wages rise with inflation, so the poor certainly don't get ahead but they mostly don't fall farther behind either. Because rich people run the world, economic policy is to hold inflation to nearly zero.
Some nasty rich people even want to return to the gold standard which would cause massive deflation, making the savings of rich people worth *more*. It's a brilliant feint on their part to fool "libertarians" into supporting their greedy bullshit.
Yeah all of those things are true. Lobbying for, receiving, and taking advantage of tax breaks is malefaction. And to not do so is a dereliction of duty to shareholders. True and true. And the problem is the American law of corporation which demands that corporations be malefactors. We should rewrite that law (laws in each state, plus I believe at the federal level). Here's how one particularly liberal commentator describes it.
We don't allow individuals to "do whatever the fuck it takes to get money, ethics morals and society be damned. Get yours and fuck the other guy." No state encourages or even allows individuals to do that, so it is preposterous to insist that corporations to do so. Just like individuals, corporate responsibility should be first as a citizen of society. This isn't hippie nonsense, it's common sense.
Relativity is not (quite) correct, hence relativity is (a little bit) wrong. What part of that do you have a problem with? I think I made my good point well.
We all know that general relativity is wrong -- or, not perfectly right. We know that we live in a quantum universe and relativity is not a quantum theory, therefore it is "wrong" in the same way that Newtonian laws of motion are "wrong". It's an unbelievably difficult problem which science is working on. Next question.
I don't follow your point. A broom is not a vacuum. Brooms are not subsets of vacuums. Brooms don't do what vacuums do. What are you trying to get at?
He said "people who worry about intermittent internet connectivity being an issue as the same as someone not buying a vacuum cleaner because the electricity sometimes goes out." But that's a bad analogy. A good analogy is that I don't want to buy a vacuum that doesn't work when I cancel my subscription to Newsweek magazine. That is a great analogy because Newsweek isn't available any longer, just like the DRM servers eventually won't be, and Newsweek has nothing to do with vacuums.
I'm not a gamer -- I play very few games and own no console. This issue doesn't directly affect me but it's interesting to sit on the sidelines and watch gamers both (1) complain about DRM and (2) repeatedly buy DRM games in large numbers. You gamers should look at what music fans did: we used market pressure to remove DRM from the commercial landscape. Get with the program, gamers, you guys are like those self-flagellating Christians.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully nobody, but probably whoever wants to reach its audience. Was that a trick question?
Probably because that is preferable to standing by idly watching children die needlessly at the hands of parents who don't achieve your magical level of perfection -- which is to say, all parents. That's what I think. Why do you think it is?
A drone society is a polite society.
Pry my drone from my cold dead hands.
This house protected by Drone & Wesson.
Holy fuck. That war was is almost as stupid and baseless as the Iraq war.
You're not a libertarian if you think the government should build roads.
Hence the reason I'm not a libertarian. Libertarians have a childishly simplistic ideology based on an incomplete understanding of a tiny fraction of human psychology. You sound too smart for that.
"Customers are laying out enough money is being laid out to justify some re-investment now and then."
I don't think you understand capitalism. What part of "fuck you, pay me" didn't they teach you in school?
You're mistaken. I'm glad to have cleared that up for you.
Demonstrated successfully.
The Consumerist sold out their credibility. It's time for a new consumer-news blog. Who has one to recommend?
Halliburton's customers are satisfied with their performance, too, yet somehow voters chose them as worst company.
Yeah but the industry is video games not things like economy (AIG, Countrywide) or environment (BP) or human life (Halliburton). Even Comcast and RIAA represent threats a thousand times worse than EA. This particular Consumerist contest was taken over last year by a bunch of whiny gamers. Promptly thereafter The Consumerist got hacked a bunch of times, lost comments and community, and the articles declined. This year they decided to include EA again, a preposterous decision, giving the same whiners a chance to do a password lookup on their 12-month-old accounts, log in one more time, and vote for EA. They'll be back 12 months from now, but the Consumerist is past because they've sort of given up their credibility. I took them out of my Reader which was sad because I always liked the site a lot.
Halliburton? But yeah Monsanto might still be even worse than Halliburton.
Yeah maybe that might be rich but at that level we get hit a lot less. It sounds like I'm about where you are. Keep in mind that you are working; even if you have a couple years' salary saved up, most of your income comes from working. My household income is something like 3x the median, but when I did my taxes I noticed that I was 50% under the mean. Did you notice that? Wow, three times the median is 50% less than the mean. That's because of a few non-working inherited-wealth economic sycophantic do-nothing families full of billionaires who pay large but relatively low taxes. They are people who don't work but who are rich and they are the ones who would lose out the most. But you know what? Don't worry about them, trust me they'll be fine, they'll still be in charge of everything and still the richest people around.
By "greedy rich people" did you refer to people who save instead? That's a strange way to phrase it but yeah I guess so. People who "saved" $35,000,000,000.
And "poor people" do you mean those who are completely leveraged in consumer and mortgage debt? Again that's a strange way to phrase it, but yeah I guess so. People sold into financial slavery for making too little to pay for the bare necessities.
Inflating our way out of debt will be a huge problem, smaller than the huge problem it replaces. Wait for it, I give it eight or ten more years. It'll be during Jeb's second term.
Of course they are tax supported. Everything is tax supported. How is that controversial? What part of that do you have a problem with?
Does Google use roads? Do they benefit from a healthy population? Is their business made easier by widespread peace and prosperity? All of those things are paid for by taxes. If you live or do business in America, you are tax supported, and it is legitimate to criticize you if you don't pay your fair share into that wonderful tax-supported society.
You should imagine it, or maybe three meals a day even. Googlers get up early, catch a bus with wifi on which they start working, arrive at work early, eat for free, work long hours, eat for free again, work into the nite, eat for free again, then catch the same bus home and work on the way. (Well, many of them do anyway.) Googlers work hard and earn their pay, but in my opinion people should be taxes on all benefits -- from health care to company cars to meals. If you get it and it has value, then it's income and you should pay taxes on it. Otherwise you're just shucking your tax burden onto people whose companies don't give them free shit and hide the costs behind the immoral Business Expense Deduction.
You make a great argument for doing away with the immoral and destructive Business Expense Deduction. Tax businesses the way we tax individuals: on income, not savings; on gross, not net. We would be able to drastically lower the overal rate on everyone and conservatives should love it because it would essentially be a sales tax (which fucks the poor, conservatives love to fuck the poor) as those costs were passed on as higher prices. I support this because even though it fucks the poor, it REALLY fucks the rich, who do not pay taxes on most of their lifestyle because they hide most of their lifestyle behind "business expenses".
You can't possibly think that deductions are calculated as you say. There is no way, NO WAY you actually believe that. Stop trying to win an argument and start over again with two feet in reality.
You should think a little harder about what he was saying. You didn't 'get it'.
Correct. 90% of GDP is the number most economists agree is the threshold, and the USA is just about at it, depending on how you count the debt. (Most of our "debt" is dollars we owe ourselves. Is it really debt if you owe yourself a dollar? Maybe, but it's sort of complicated.) There are a zillion citations the GP can look up but here is one.
Luckily for our economy we can "simply" inflate our way out of debt, and I think we should. Rich people don't like this solution because inflation hits rich people while helping poor people. That's because rich people don't work, they coast on their savings and their savings loses value during inflation. Meanwhile, poor people work and wages rise with inflation, so the poor certainly don't get ahead but they mostly don't fall farther behind either. Because rich people run the world, economic policy is to hold inflation to nearly zero.
Some nasty rich people even want to return to the gold standard which would cause massive deflation, making the savings of rich people worth *more*. It's a brilliant feint on their part to fool "libertarians" into supporting their greedy bullshit.
Yeah all of those things are true. Lobbying for, receiving, and taking advantage of tax breaks is malefaction. And to not do so is a dereliction of duty to shareholders. True and true. And the problem is the American law of corporation which demands that corporations be malefactors. We should rewrite that law (laws in each state, plus I believe at the federal level). Here's how one particularly liberal commentator describes it.
We don't allow individuals to "do whatever the fuck it takes to get money, ethics morals and society be damned. Get yours and fuck the other guy." No state encourages or even allows individuals to do that, so it is preposterous to insist that corporations to do so. Just like individuals, corporate responsibility should be first as a citizen of society. This isn't hippie nonsense, it's common sense.
You clicked the link? That's weird.
"wrong, adj (1) not correct or true"
Relativity is not (quite) correct, hence relativity is (a little bit) wrong. What part of that do you have a problem with? I think I made my good point well.
Done. Question is answered. Shut down the thread; next article please.
We all know that general relativity is wrong -- or, not perfectly right. We know that we live in a quantum universe and relativity is not a quantum theory, therefore it is "wrong" in the same way that Newtonian laws of motion are "wrong". It's an unbelievably difficult problem which science is working on. Next question.
Agreed. And been elected Senator.
I don't follow your point. A broom is not a vacuum. Brooms are not subsets of vacuums. Brooms don't do what vacuums do. What are you trying to get at?
He said "people who worry about intermittent internet connectivity being an issue as the same as someone not buying a vacuum cleaner because the electricity sometimes goes out." But that's a bad analogy. A good analogy is that I don't want to buy a vacuum that doesn't work when I cancel my subscription to Newsweek magazine. That is a great analogy because Newsweek isn't available any longer, just like the DRM servers eventually won't be, and Newsweek has nothing to do with vacuums.
I'm not a gamer -- I play very few games and own no console. This issue doesn't directly affect me but it's interesting to sit on the sidelines and watch gamers both (1) complain about DRM and (2) repeatedly buy DRM games in large numbers. You gamers should look at what music fans did: we used market pressure to remove DRM from the commercial landscape. Get with the program, gamers, you guys are like those self-flagellating Christians.