Eliminate all use based taxes and fund all government spending via wealth based taxation. Scaled revenue taxation is better than use or sales based taxation but revenue generation benefits our economy. Wealth accumulation on the other hand is of no benefit to the economy.
Yikes! Wealth-based taxation is *incredibly* unfair and creates all sorts of unintended consequences. What would be the justification for it anyway? Simply saying it's not beneficial to the economy is hardly sufficient as there are gazillions of other things that aren't a benefit to the economy either.
"Also, it seems extremely rare to have a road lead just to one business, so the 70-90% number is probably on the high side."
I earn six figures so not low income, still my employer still bills 100% of my time out at 5 times what I make. That means 80% of the revenue I generate goes to my employer. That means anytime I travel to and from work or for anything that benefits my career my employer should be paying 80% of the cost of any wear and tear on the roads. Additionally, since I spend nearly 50% of my waking hours (aka life) producing revenue for them 80% of all government infrastructure (roads, replacement drivers licenses, medical infrastructure, police, housing, "my" share of government agency costs, defense, etc) costs that come from my life should be paid by them.
It's no different if you make $20,000-30,000/yr like most folks. Your employer still generally will be taking 70-90% of the value you generate. Therefore 70-90% of "your" share of public infrastructure and services use cost belongs to them.
I mean no offense, but to me this is full of unrelated and illogical conclusions.
- Why should your business be taxed differently based on whether you choose to walk or drive to work, or how far away you live, etc.? It seems preposterous that any of these are the business's concern, and yet that is a direct consequence of what you are proposing. - You seem to be overstating the value you provide to your company and/or understating all of the other things that go into running a business - their many other costs, the risks they are taking on that you get to avoid, etc. *If* your value to the company is as high as you say, then it is foolish for you to be working for them. Still, you're not being held hostage, so if the relationship really is as lopsided as you think, that's your problem and not theirs. - Regardless of all of that, the rate at which they bill out your work is so far removed from the use of the roads it's crazy. - The business pays property taxes; they are already paying a portion of the infrastructure costs relevant to them. Trying to say that the business is somehow on the hook for activities that *you* do doesn't make sense. Let me guess, the business should also pay for your food, clothing, and housing since you need food to stay alive to work for them, they won't let you come to work naked, and because you need a place where you can rest between shifts?
Even if you think the share of someone who earns six figures vs someone who earns $20,000yr should be equal based on millage (I don't, dollars represent goods and services and $1 buys roughly 100000x less of them than $100,000 and therefore requires about 1/100000th the public infrastructure to generate).
The most fair would be for each person to bear their portion of the cost that they create. Since that isn't practical, a rough approximation is the next best thing. How much of the maintenance costs do they cause? As a rough approximation, it's proportional to the amount they use the resource (the road, in this case).
The fact that one person, for whatever reason, has accumulated more dollars is not directly relevant at all. It's just like when you go to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread - the price is based on the cost of ingredients, the preparation costs, shipping, wages for workers, some portion of
Interesting. Is there a practical way to address this, though? i.e. talking about roads specifically, I just wonder if the complexity of figuring out each business's fair share of road costs would spiral out of control. Also, it seems extremely rare to have a road lead just to one business, so the 70-90% number is probably on the high side.
More generally, taxing infrastructure on revenue seems filled with its own set of problems. In the US at least, business expenses are tax deductible for a reason, so if you taxed on gross revenue it'd be an unusual (and arguably unfair) precedent. If you taxed on profits then you contribute to the existing problem of punishing businesses that maximize efficiency.
The business also pays a ton of other taxes - property taxes, payroll taxes, medicare/medicaid. If you add the numbers up, it's unlikely that the business is somehow mooching off of the poor travelers on that road in any way.
I kinda see your point, but wear and tear on the roads is probably more a function of amount of traffic on the roads (so to map it back to an individual car you'd need to base the tax on distance traveled).
To get more fine-grained maybe you could charge by axle weight or something along those lines but that's a refinement they could add later if needed.
Assuming there is some transparency to ensure accuracy of the calculations and there is some oversight to ensure the bulk of the money really does go to paying for roads, this seems like a great idea. As a taxpayer, anytime I can see a pretty direct link between my taxes and the taxes being used for something sensical, that's a good thing.
Ideally they'd eventually roll this out to everyone regardless of car type but/also/ leave in place some portion of the gas tax so there's some ongoing incentive towards efficient or alternate fuel vehicles.
I hate ads, I use an ad blocker, but I'm posting because so far all of the comments have chastised sites for using ads, without providing an alternative.
The summary has some truth when it says, "for all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web". It costs real money to host a website, it costs real money to run a website, it costs real money to produce the content for a website.
So my question to all of those infuriated by those content producers who would "dare" to try to protect their ads is this: what viable alternative do you suggest? Ads work because (a) they generate revenue to cover all of those costs and (b) they don't require any sort of opt-in, and (c) apart from a few places where they are overdone, they generally don't get in the way of the content you're seeking.
(a) is what helps the bulk of websites you frequent stay afloat, (b) is important because the websites don't have to spend considerable resources trying to get you to enter into some sort of financial arrangement with them, and (c) provides a bit of a standard so that a marketplace of ad buyers and sellers can exist.
So again, if we were to get rid of ads, what would we replace them with? Paywalled sites don't get much love on/. so if that's your answer, I'd love to hear how you'd make them tolerable and how you'd get people to sign up.
I hate ads, and I use an ad blocker, but I do so knowing full well I'm being somewhat of a hypocrite and that I'm also relying on the vast majority of people/not/ using an ad blocker, because if a lot more people starting using them then the economics for most websites would fall apart. I don't like ads, but I have to admit that in many ways they seem like the least bad option. It's seems that many people who scream about their "right" to not have ads are being disingenuous or ignorant or both.
Good point. Yet another example is in-flight wifi like Gogo - not only do those guys rely heavily on caching, they'll even do things like recompress jpegs on the fly to be smaller. I'll sidestep the debate around whether that is good or bad, but another consequence of HTTPS-only web is that stuff like that has the potential to get even slower.
I do worry about the downsides of this in terms of how it'll cause higher load on servers because of higher traffic. That said, all major CDNs support HTTPS on the edges and non-HTTPS between the origin and the CDN, so they'll be fine. Where this will probably hurt more is with forward proxies at universities and businesses and transparent intermediate caches at ISPs.
I've dabbled a bit in Kivy myself, but hadn't considered it for the kids - that's an interesting idea, and using the kivy launcher would let them get to see their program running on the device while avoiding the tedium/delay of building a full apk. I think it's a little beyond where they are at now but it could be the next-next stepping stone for them - thank you for the suggestion.
Haha, yeah - ironically it seems like it was far more accessible back then in a way. You could reasonably know a little bit (or even a lot) about nearly everything, and when you did use something higher level you knew pretty much everything about how it worked behind the scenes.
Speaking of BBSs, and an example of what was enough to catch my interest back then, I once wrote TDSANSI.SYS, a drop-in replacement for the standard ANSI.SYS. It extended the set of ANSI escape sequences so you could do higher level things like drawing text boxes or repeating characters, the net result being that a BBS could do their "fancy" UIs in far less characters sent across the wire. The funny thing was that people who used it loved the speed but couldn't stand the fact that it used like 40KB of their 640KB of RAM.;-)
I think I was in high school at the time and it was a ridiculously nerdy project, but that was something I really got into, and yet I can't imagine asking my high school son to think in those terms nowadays. I'm guessing that's part of what needs to change - just because I came up through learning a certain path, it doesn't mean that's a good or practical way to do it anymore. Basically nobody needs to work at that level these days, so it only makes sense that he'd focus on more of an application level.
I guess in some ways I got into programming because computers were a novelty and there wasn't an endless supply of free stuff, so in many ways programming was the entertainment. But now there is gobs of relatively high quality and free stuff to entertain that also/sort of/ scratches the builder itch (as I write this, my son is sitting nearby on the free-to-play Robocraft).
So the "problem" is that there is an endless stream of stuff competing for my kids' attention that (a) is of a quality leagues beyond anything they can hope to do anytime soon and (b) gives/some/ of the same "fix" I get from programming. Back in the olden days the gap between what you could do with e.g. BASIC and what you saw in commercial apps looked a lot smaller.
I'm always searching for something that does a good job of being an intermediate level - I can get my kids to do a lot of the intro / visual programming stuff and they like it, but then they run into this seemingly huge chasm when they try to go beyond that. It's like, "ok, so now you made a rudimentary game that runs inside this special environment on some website. You want to advance to something more flexible? Ok, um, now we need to talk about files and directories and a whole slew of tools and junk you never knew existed or were needed. Also, prepare to start typing a lot and using all those punctuation characters you rarely use in school assignments. And don't get me started if you want to get your little game onto a device so you can show your friends!"
On the one hand I think it's just part of getting into "real" programming and they just have to suck it up and deal with it. But I really think one or two of my kids could really get into programming and really like it, but I've yet to help them get over that hump from super basic stuff.
Yeah, this might be too broad of a generalization, but it seems common that when a person learns an additional language really well they tend to avoid at least some of the common grammar mistakes that native speakers make (which makes sense, because in learning the language they have to commit to memory actual rules of some sort, while a native speaker just sort of knows the language intuitively and often has trouble articulating the specifics of e.g. conjugation patterns).
IMO what's cool is that learning an additional language gives you insight into your native language's eccentricities and can help you improve your use of your native language.
Yeah, "broken English" is more of a tongue in cheek term, although what's interesting to me is that a non-native person is the one who referred to it that way to me (a tour guide in Hong Kong FWIW). His point - and I agree and I think you do too, to some extent - is that while the use of English-as-spoken-by-a-native-English-speaker is growing, it is still relatively small, but a form of simplified English as a kind of universal common tongue is pretty widespread.
And while I agree that English is taking over for historical/financial (and technical) reasons, IMO a lot of the drive *currently* is because English is whatever "everybody else" is learning too - it has momentum to become the go-to lingua franca all over the place.
Because English isn't/completely/ illogical nor/completely/ inconsistent (yes there are many exceptions and special cases you just have to memorize, but there is also a decent amount of regularity and predictability) and because the simplified version non-natives use cancels out a lot of that, it doesn't seem like the language's quirks will necessarily put any sort of limits on how widespread it will be used.
As others have noted, the number of native speakers of a language is different than the number of people that can speak a language, and that's where English pulls ahead.
The most widely known language in the world is "broken English" - there are a lot of native English speakers, a ton more who know it very well as a second language with a good degree of proficiency, and then a huge, huge, huge number more that can get by in English passably well.
By convincing yourself it's driven by hate, it allows you to brush aside the debate while feeling good about yourself because you've taken some moral high road.
How exactly did you come to this conclusion anyway? Why are you so convinced that this has to be hate-driven and that there can't be any possible explanation?
You have zeroed in on a particular motivation and have decided that it can be this and nothing else, and you somehow known even better than the people themselves what is driving them? You don't allow for the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there is an explanation beyond mass dishonesty and/or self-delusion?
To latch on to something so implausible seems silly. Is the alternative - that some people are being rational but genuinely feel differently than you - too terrifying a prospect to deal with? Why isn't it simply possible for you to accept that the "other side" is not driven by hate?
The scenario with a bag of bagels isn't one of the ones causing an issue, so as an example it doesn't apply. That type of transaction is fine - that the buyer is gay or whatever is irrelevant, it has no bearing on the transaction, it has no reason to come up. It'd be quite a stretch to say that by selling them some bagels you are endorsing them in any way.
The issue is with scenarios when the sexual orientation *is* relevant in the transaction and where participating in it can be interpreted as endorsement. Should someone be able to politely decline to participate in that transaction? It seems reasonable to allow it, that's all. What if it's a KKK rally? Or a Nazi rally? It could be any number of things that one person finds objectionable and another doesn't. Is the concept of civil liberties so completely eroded that we balk at people being free to choose whether or not they participate in such a thing?
So a more relevant example would be the wedding photographer. This isn't someone who is trying to shut down the gay wedding, they are not trying to make a spectacle of things. They would simply prefer to not participate and reserve the right to let someone else have that business.
It seems wildly unconstitutional and not a little ominous for the government to swoop in and *force* that photographer to be a part of it. If anyone's rights are being infringed in that situation, the photographer has at *least* as much claim on infringed rights as the people getting married.
Obviously, people can disagree with the photographer and boycott his services if they want and let market forces either keep him in or put him out of business. That's fine - he's not asking for any special treatment under the law, so if he goes out of business, so be it. That we're even talking about it being ok for the government to force him to enter into transactions seems ludicrous.
Yeah, I'm hoping this one was just an outlier and not a trend. I mean, people swap shifts all the time for various reasons, so it seems ominous that he should be suspended for asking around if someone would trade with him, especially since he express a willingness to work the event in some other capacity. The reaction just seems way too extreme.
No, what the law probably does is unfairly punish people who would otherwise let bygones be bygones to the point of them rising up and pushing back.
I just love how tolerance is all the rage and the freedom of choice is paramount - as long as it's tolerance in favor of LGBT and it's the freedom to choose to live an LGBT lifestyle. The moment someone just wants to be left alone and quietly and peacefully do their thing, they are labeled bigots and we call on the government to swoop in and stop them.
No, both (a) and (b) are incorrect and a mischaracterization of what I've said so far - you're not even arguing against what I said but have instead made up extreme positions and then dismissed them.
I'm the one talking about finding some middle ground where there is a compromise on both sides, while you are the one advocating an extremist view where one side has to completely lose so the other can win. Your way is the antithesis of what is required to make a functional society. The only peaceful outcome is going to come from both sides giving up some ground.
Thanks, that brings up some really interesting questions and points.
FWIW my whole point in jumping into the discussion was in reaction to someone's comment that this was driven by hate. I really don't think that's the case, for the most part. Also, a lot of people here are quick to paint the "other" side's arguments as outlandish, backward, and bigoted. Again, I don't think that's the case.
Anyone who is truly interested in coming up with a solution should be able to see at least some merit in the concerns of both sides. Even if we ultimately decide in favor of LGBT and against those with religious objections, we should be able to see that the religious viewpoint has some valid points. I can understand where both sides are coming from, at least to a degree, and that's why there's not a trivial, obvious, winner-takes-all solution.
The idea of not requiring someone to participate in the actual event is an intriguing possibility. That would still leave some cases that allow for apparent discrimination, but it also seems to address a lot of the "guilt by association" type of concerns - maybe it could work. It reminds me of a local story here - the police department was invited to participate in the Gay Pride parade. In addition to providing security for the event, they were also in the parade itself - you know, riding around on the motorcycles in some choreographed formation like they often do in parades.
One of the officers felt that being in the parade as a performer was taking it too far, so he asked around to see if someone would swap assignments with him. He was open to taking an assignment to provide security or in a traffic assignment or whatever (which he had also done at a prior year's Gay Pride parade), he just didn't feel right about being a performer in the parade. Anyway, just for asking to see if anyone would swap assignments with him, he was suspended and an Internal Affairs investigation was launched and the department issued a statement that an officer was put on leave for refusing his Gay Pride assignment. The officer ultimately resigned before the investigation completed, but it always rubbed me the wrong way that the reaction was so extreme. He wasn't trying to shut down the event, he offered to participate in a more typical police officer capacity, but because he didn't feel good about being an actual performer it basically derailed his career. There has to be a more balanced and tolerant want to deal with that type of scenario.
Ok, so go back to the KKK example: you act as caterer for their event and someone snaps a picture of you there and starts making a fuss because you're supporting their cause. Would you try to explain yourself, or distance yourself from their event? Hopefully, yes. If someone you respected saw those photos would you hasten to explain the situation? Probably. If you tried to run for political office, would your opponent be able to use those photos against you? Again, yes.
Pause and ask yourself why that is. It's because in all of those cases it's a reasonable assumption that your involvement in them denotes some degree of agreement if not outright endorsement of that cause. If you were to deny it, it would sound hollow and people would be skeptical.
Another reasonable assumption is that if you really, truly objected to those things you'd step aside and choose not to participate. You would still respect their rights and not try to shut them down, you might even go out of your way to help them find some other caterer to handle the job. But since you so deeply object to what that organization represents, you can't in good conscience aid in their event. You're not looking to make some big deal out of it, you just would like to quietly and discretely step away and let someone else cater for their event.
It seems reasonable that there should be some way to accommodate this type of gentle, conscientious objection. If market forces ultimately put this person out of business, so be it. It just doesn't strike me as completely wrong (or hate-driven as someone earlier asserted) for the caterer in this scenario to decline to participate. They aren't trying to shut the event down, they aren't trying to prevent other caterers from taking the business. Is it so wrong for them to have the freedom to choose to politely decline the job?
Sure you're celebrating it. You're making a cake to honor it, you're having your bed n' breakfast host it, you're taking pictures to commemorate it (to name a few of the most popular examples that have resulted in lawsuits).
For the sake of an explanation, assume the activity was something sinister, e.g. a KKK rally, and someone saw you baking cakes for it or acting as the official photographer. If you were to later say that you were just there on business and didn't actually support that stuff, a lot of people would find that pretty hard to believe. If you ever tried to run for a political office, your opponent would have a field day with this, don't you agree? Why, because it sure looks like you're acting for the benefit of that cause, that you support it. I hope it's obvious that I'm not at all trying to suggest these two are the same, btw, just illustrating the point that doing these types of things sure looks a lot like advocacy. And that's the rub for these people - there's no way to discretely bow out on the grounds that they feel wrong to be doing things that are akin to advocacy.
And you're not having to "determine" anything because the sexual orientation of the people involved is inherently obvious. It's not akin to e.g. not selling produce to someone because they are gay - the sexual orientation is not only front and center, it's part of the transaction details. As a cake shop owner you aren't the one bringing LGBT into the picture - you just happen to sell wedding cakes with a boy and a girl on them. If you refuse to create a cake w/ two boys, you can get sued and if recent court cases are any indication, there's a good chance you'll lose.
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Eliminate all use based taxes and fund all government spending via wealth based taxation. Scaled revenue taxation is better than use or sales based taxation but revenue generation benefits our economy. Wealth accumulation on the other hand is of no benefit to the economy.
Yikes! Wealth-based taxation is *incredibly* unfair and creates all sorts of unintended consequences. What would be the justification for it anyway? Simply saying it's not beneficial to the economy is hardly sufficient as there are gazillions of other things that aren't a benefit to the economy either.
"Also, it seems extremely rare to have a road lead just to one business, so the 70-90% number is probably on the high side."
I earn six figures so not low income, still my employer still bills 100% of my time out at 5 times what I make. That means 80% of the revenue I generate goes to my employer. That means anytime I travel to and from work or for anything that benefits my career my employer should be paying 80% of the cost of any wear and tear on the roads. Additionally, since I spend nearly 50% of my waking hours (aka life) producing revenue for them 80% of all government infrastructure (roads, replacement drivers licenses, medical infrastructure, police, housing, "my" share of government agency costs, defense, etc) costs that come from my life should be paid by them.
It's no different if you make $20,000-30,000/yr like most folks. Your employer still generally will be taking 70-90% of the value you generate. Therefore 70-90% of "your" share of public infrastructure and services use cost belongs to them.
I mean no offense, but to me this is full of unrelated and illogical conclusions.
- Why should your business be taxed differently based on whether you choose to walk or drive to work, or how far away you live, etc.? It seems preposterous that any of these are the business's concern, and yet that is a direct consequence of what you are proposing.
- You seem to be overstating the value you provide to your company and/or understating all of the other things that go into running a business - their many other costs, the risks they are taking on that you get to avoid, etc. *If* your value to the company is as high as you say, then it is foolish for you to be working for them. Still, you're not being held hostage, so if the relationship really is as lopsided as you think, that's your problem and not theirs.
- Regardless of all of that, the rate at which they bill out your work is so far removed from the use of the roads it's crazy.
- The business pays property taxes; they are already paying a portion of the infrastructure costs relevant to them. Trying to say that the business is somehow on the hook for activities that *you* do doesn't make sense. Let me guess, the business should also pay for your food, clothing, and housing since you need food to stay alive to work for them, they won't let you come to work naked, and because you need a place where you can rest between shifts?
Even if you think the share of someone who earns six figures vs someone who earns $20,000yr should be equal based on millage (I don't, dollars represent goods and services and $1 buys roughly 100000x less of them than $100,000 and therefore requires about 1/100000th the public infrastructure to generate).
The most fair would be for each person to bear their portion of the cost that they create. Since that isn't practical, a rough approximation is the next best thing. How much of the maintenance costs do they cause? As a rough approximation, it's proportional to the amount they use the resource (the road, in this case).
The fact that one person, for whatever reason, has accumulated more dollars is not directly relevant at all. It's just like when you go to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread - the price is based on the cost of ingredients, the preparation costs, shipping, wages for workers, some portion of
Interesting. Is there a practical way to address this, though? i.e. talking about roads specifically, I just wonder if the complexity of figuring out each business's fair share of road costs would spiral out of control. Also, it seems extremely rare to have a road lead just to one business, so the 70-90% number is probably on the high side.
More generally, taxing infrastructure on revenue seems filled with its own set of problems. In the US at least, business expenses are tax deductible for a reason, so if you taxed on gross revenue it'd be an unusual (and arguably unfair) precedent. If you taxed on profits then you contribute to the existing problem of punishing businesses that maximize efficiency.
The business also pays a ton of other taxes - property taxes, payroll taxes, medicare/medicaid. If you add the numbers up, it's unlikely that the business is somehow mooching off of the poor travelers on that road in any way.
The odometer can't tell when you've left Oregon.
I kinda see your point, but wear and tear on the roads is probably more a function of amount of traffic on the roads (so to map it back to an individual car you'd need to base the tax on distance traveled).
To get more fine-grained maybe you could charge by axle weight or something along those lines but that's a refinement they could add later if needed.
Assuming there is some transparency to ensure accuracy of the calculations and there is some oversight to ensure the bulk of the money really does go to paying for roads, this seems like a great idea. As a taxpayer, anytime I can see a pretty direct link between my taxes and the taxes being used for something sensical, that's a good thing.
Ideally they'd eventually roll this out to everyone regardless of car type but /also/ leave in place some portion of the gas tax so there's some ongoing incentive towards efficient or alternate fuel vehicles.
I hate ads, I use an ad blocker, but I'm posting because so far all of the comments have chastised sites for using ads, without providing an alternative.
The summary has some truth when it says, "for all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web". It costs real money to host a website, it costs real money to run a website, it costs real money to produce the content for a website.
So my question to all of those infuriated by those content producers who would "dare" to try to protect their ads is this: what viable alternative do you suggest? Ads work because (a) they generate revenue to cover all of those costs and (b) they don't require any sort of opt-in, and (c) apart from a few places where they are overdone, they generally don't get in the way of the content you're seeking.
(a) is what helps the bulk of websites you frequent stay afloat, (b) is important because the websites don't have to spend considerable resources trying to get you to enter into some sort of financial arrangement with them, and (c) provides a bit of a standard so that a marketplace of ad buyers and sellers can exist.
So again, if we were to get rid of ads, what would we replace them with? Paywalled sites don't get much love on /. so if that's your answer, I'd love to hear how you'd make them tolerable and how you'd get people to sign up.
I hate ads, and I use an ad blocker, but I do so knowing full well I'm being somewhat of a hypocrite and that I'm also relying on the vast majority of people /not/ using an ad blocker, because if a lot more people starting using them then the economics for most websites would fall apart. I don't like ads, but I have to admit that in many ways they seem like the least bad option. It's seems that many people who scream about their "right" to not have ads are being disingenuous or ignorant or both.
Good point. Yet another example is in-flight wifi like Gogo - not only do those guys rely heavily on caching, they'll even do things like recompress jpegs on the fly to be smaller. I'll sidestep the debate around whether that is good or bad, but another consequence of HTTPS-only web is that stuff like that has the potential to get even slower.
I do worry about the downsides of this in terms of how it'll cause higher load on servers because of higher traffic. That said, all major CDNs support HTTPS on the edges and non-HTTPS between the origin and the CDN, so they'll be fine. Where this will probably hurt more is with forward proxies at universities and businesses and transparent intermediate caches at ISPs.
I've dabbled a bit in Kivy myself, but hadn't considered it for the kids - that's an interesting idea, and using the kivy launcher would let them get to see their program running on the device while avoiding the tedium/delay of building a full apk. I think it's a little beyond where they are at now but it could be the next-next stepping stone for them - thank you for the suggestion.
Good call - that appears to be the sort of thing I'm looking for, I'll check it out. Thanks!
Thanks for the recommendation - much appreciated.
Haha, yeah - ironically it seems like it was far more accessible back then in a way. You could reasonably know a little bit (or even a lot) about nearly everything, and when you did use something higher level you knew pretty much everything about how it worked behind the scenes.
Speaking of BBSs, and an example of what was enough to catch my interest back then, I once wrote TDSANSI.SYS, a drop-in replacement for the standard ANSI.SYS. It extended the set of ANSI escape sequences so you could do higher level things like drawing text boxes or repeating characters, the net result being that a BBS could do their "fancy" UIs in far less characters sent across the wire. The funny thing was that people who used it loved the speed but couldn't stand the fact that it used like 40KB of their 640KB of RAM. ;-)
I think I was in high school at the time and it was a ridiculously nerdy project, but that was something I really got into, and yet I can't imagine asking my high school son to think in those terms nowadays. I'm guessing that's part of what needs to change - just because I came up through learning a certain path, it doesn't mean that's a good or practical way to do it anymore. Basically nobody needs to work at that level these days, so it only makes sense that he'd focus on more of an application level.
Hey, this looks very promising - thanks so much for the recommendation!
I guess in some ways I got into programming because computers were a novelty and there wasn't an endless supply of free stuff, so in many ways programming was the entertainment. But now there is gobs of relatively high quality and free stuff to entertain that also /sort of/ scratches the builder itch (as I write this, my son is sitting nearby on the free-to-play Robocraft).
So the "problem" is that there is an endless stream of stuff competing for my kids' attention that (a) is of a quality leagues beyond anything they can hope to do anytime soon and (b) gives /some/ of the same "fix" I get from programming. Back in the olden days the gap between what you could do with e.g. BASIC and what you saw in commercial apps looked a lot smaller.
I'm always searching for something that does a good job of being an intermediate level - I can get my kids to do a lot of the intro / visual programming stuff and they like it, but then they run into this seemingly huge chasm when they try to go beyond that. It's like, "ok, so now you made a rudimentary game that runs inside this special environment on some website. You want to advance to something more flexible? Ok, um, now we need to talk about files and directories and a whole slew of tools and junk you never knew existed or were needed. Also, prepare to start typing a lot and using all those punctuation characters you rarely use in school assignments. And don't get me started if you want to get your little game onto a device so you can show your friends!"
On the one hand I think it's just part of getting into "real" programming and they just have to suck it up and deal with it. But I really think one or two of my kids could really get into programming and really like it, but I've yet to help them get over that hump from super basic stuff.
Yeah, this might be too broad of a generalization, but it seems common that when a person learns an additional language really well they tend to avoid at least some of the common grammar mistakes that native speakers make (which makes sense, because in learning the language they have to commit to memory actual rules of some sort, while a native speaker just sort of knows the language intuitively and often has trouble articulating the specifics of e.g. conjugation patterns).
IMO what's cool is that learning an additional language gives you insight into your native language's eccentricities and can help you improve your use of your native language.
Yeah, "broken English" is more of a tongue in cheek term, although what's interesting to me is that a non-native person is the one who referred to it that way to me (a tour guide in Hong Kong FWIW). His point - and I agree and I think you do too, to some extent - is that while the use of English-as-spoken-by-a-native-English-speaker is growing, it is still relatively small, but a form of simplified English as a kind of universal common tongue is pretty widespread.
And while I agree that English is taking over for historical/financial (and technical) reasons, IMO a lot of the drive *currently* is because English is whatever "everybody else" is learning too - it has momentum to become the go-to lingua franca all over the place.
Because English isn't /completely/ illogical nor /completely/ inconsistent (yes there are many exceptions and special cases you just have to memorize, but there is also a decent amount of regularity and predictability) and because the simplified version non-natives use cancels out a lot of that, it doesn't seem like the language's quirks will necessarily put any sort of limits on how widespread it will be used.
As others have noted, the number of native speakers of a language is different than the number of people that can speak a language, and that's where English pulls ahead.
The most widely known language in the world is "broken English" - there are a lot of native English speakers, a ton more who know it very well as a second language with a good degree of proficiency, and then a huge, huge, huge number more that can get by in English passably well.
By convincing yourself it's driven by hate, it allows you to brush aside the debate while feeling good about yourself because you've taken some moral high road.
How exactly did you come to this conclusion anyway? Why are you so convinced that this has to be hate-driven and that there can't be any possible explanation?
You have zeroed in on a particular motivation and have decided that it can be this and nothing else, and you somehow known even better than the people themselves what is driving them? You don't allow for the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there is an explanation beyond mass dishonesty and/or self-delusion?
To latch on to something so implausible seems silly. Is the alternative - that some people are being rational but genuinely feel differently than you - too terrifying a prospect to deal with? Why isn't it simply possible for you to accept that the "other side" is not driven by hate?
The scenario with a bag of bagels isn't one of the ones causing an issue, so as an example it doesn't apply. That type of transaction is fine - that the buyer is gay or whatever is irrelevant, it has no bearing on the transaction, it has no reason to come up. It'd be quite a stretch to say that by selling them some bagels you are endorsing them in any way.
The issue is with scenarios when the sexual orientation *is* relevant in the transaction and where participating in it can be interpreted as endorsement. Should someone be able to politely decline to participate in that transaction? It seems reasonable to allow it, that's all. What if it's a KKK rally? Or a Nazi rally? It could be any number of things that one person finds objectionable and another doesn't. Is the concept of civil liberties so completely eroded that we balk at people being free to choose whether or not they participate in such a thing?
So a more relevant example would be the wedding photographer. This isn't someone who is trying to shut down the gay wedding, they are not trying to make a spectacle of things. They would simply prefer to not participate and reserve the right to let someone else have that business.
It seems wildly unconstitutional and not a little ominous for the government to swoop in and *force* that photographer to be a part of it. If anyone's rights are being infringed in that situation, the photographer has at *least* as much claim on infringed rights as the people getting married.
Obviously, people can disagree with the photographer and boycott his services if they want and let market forces either keep him in or put him out of business. That's fine - he's not asking for any special treatment under the law, so if he goes out of business, so be it. That we're even talking about it being ok for the government to force him to enter into transactions seems ludicrous.
Yeah, I'm hoping this one was just an outlier and not a trend. I mean, people swap shifts all the time for various reasons, so it seems ominous that he should be suspended for asking around if someone would trade with him, especially since he express a willingness to work the event in some other capacity. The reaction just seems way too extreme.
No, what the law probably does is unfairly punish people who would otherwise let bygones be bygones to the point of them rising up and pushing back.
I just love how tolerance is all the rage and the freedom of choice is paramount - as long as it's tolerance in favor of LGBT and it's the freedom to choose to live an LGBT lifestyle. The moment someone just wants to be left alone and quietly and peacefully do their thing, they are labeled bigots and we call on the government to swoop in and stop them.
No, both (a) and (b) are incorrect and a mischaracterization of what I've said so far - you're not even arguing against what I said but have instead made up extreme positions and then dismissed them.
I'm the one talking about finding some middle ground where there is a compromise on both sides, while you are the one advocating an extremist view where one side has to completely lose so the other can win. Your way is the antithesis of what is required to make a functional society. The only peaceful outcome is going to come from both sides giving up some ground.
Thanks, that brings up some really interesting questions and points.
FWIW my whole point in jumping into the discussion was in reaction to someone's comment that this was driven by hate. I really don't think that's the case, for the most part. Also, a lot of people here are quick to paint the "other" side's arguments as outlandish, backward, and bigoted. Again, I don't think that's the case.
Anyone who is truly interested in coming up with a solution should be able to see at least some merit in the concerns of both sides. Even if we ultimately decide in favor of LGBT and against those with religious objections, we should be able to see that the religious viewpoint has some valid points. I can understand where both sides are coming from, at least to a degree, and that's why there's not a trivial, obvious, winner-takes-all solution.
The idea of not requiring someone to participate in the actual event is an intriguing possibility. That would still leave some cases that allow for apparent discrimination, but it also seems to address a lot of the "guilt by association" type of concerns - maybe it could work. It reminds me of a local story here - the police department was invited to participate in the Gay Pride parade. In addition to providing security for the event, they were also in the parade itself - you know, riding around on the motorcycles in some choreographed formation like they often do in parades.
One of the officers felt that being in the parade as a performer was taking it too far, so he asked around to see if someone would swap assignments with him. He was open to taking an assignment to provide security or in a traffic assignment or whatever (which he had also done at a prior year's Gay Pride parade), he just didn't feel right about being a performer in the parade. Anyway, just for asking to see if anyone would swap assignments with him, he was suspended and an Internal Affairs investigation was launched and the department issued a statement that an officer was put on leave for refusing his Gay Pride assignment. The officer ultimately resigned before the investigation completed, but it always rubbed me the wrong way that the reaction was so extreme. He wasn't trying to shut down the event, he offered to participate in a more typical police officer capacity, but because he didn't feel good about being an actual performer it basically derailed his career. There has to be a more balanced and tolerant want to deal with that type of scenario.
Ok, so go back to the KKK example: you act as caterer for their event and someone snaps a picture of you there and starts making a fuss because you're supporting their cause. Would you try to explain yourself, or distance yourself from their event? Hopefully, yes. If someone you respected saw those photos would you hasten to explain the situation? Probably. If you tried to run for political office, would your opponent be able to use those photos against you? Again, yes.
Pause and ask yourself why that is. It's because in all of those cases it's a reasonable assumption that your involvement in them denotes some degree of agreement if not outright endorsement of that cause. If you were to deny it, it would sound hollow and people would be skeptical.
Another reasonable assumption is that if you really, truly objected to those things you'd step aside and choose not to participate. You would still respect their rights and not try to shut them down, you might even go out of your way to help them find some other caterer to handle the job. But since you so deeply object to what that organization represents, you can't in good conscience aid in their event. You're not looking to make some big deal out of it, you just would like to quietly and discretely step away and let someone else cater for their event.
It seems reasonable that there should be some way to accommodate this type of gentle, conscientious objection. If market forces ultimately put this person out of business, so be it. It just doesn't strike me as completely wrong (or hate-driven as someone earlier asserted) for the caterer in this scenario to decline to participate. They aren't trying to shut the event down, they aren't trying to prevent other caterers from taking the business. Is it so wrong for them to have the freedom to choose to politely decline the job?
Sure you're celebrating it. You're making a cake to honor it, you're having your bed n' breakfast host it, you're taking pictures to commemorate it (to name a few of the most popular examples that have resulted in lawsuits).
For the sake of an explanation, assume the activity was something sinister, e.g. a KKK rally, and someone saw you baking cakes for it or acting as the official photographer. If you were to later say that you were just there on business and didn't actually support that stuff, a lot of people would find that pretty hard to believe. If you ever tried to run for a political office, your opponent would have a field day with this, don't you agree? Why, because it sure looks like you're acting for the benefit of that cause, that you support it. I hope it's obvious that I'm not at all trying to suggest these two are the same, btw, just illustrating the point that doing these types of things sure looks a lot like advocacy. And that's the rub for these people - there's no way to discretely bow out on the grounds that they feel wrong to be doing things that are akin to advocacy.
And you're not having to "determine" anything because the sexual orientation of the people involved is inherently obvious. It's not akin to e.g. not selling produce to someone because they are gay - the sexual orientation is not only front and center, it's part of the transaction details. As a cake shop owner you aren't the one bringing LGBT into the picture - you just happen to sell wedding cakes with a boy and a girl on them. If you refuse to create a cake w/ two boys, you can get sued and if recent court cases are any indication, there's a good chance you'll lose.