I don't think you know how reCAPTCHA works. You are always presented with two different items to decode. One of them is always a known answer, and the other they are less sure about, but become more sure after they show it to enough people and get a crowd sourced answer. They don't give you two prompts just to be double sure you are human.
It appears the confusion all over the place here derives from the fact that there were two separate incidents. First, last year, he used school equipment to post a profane tweet and was suspended. Then, recently, he posted the above linked profane tweet, but it was from home, on his own computer, not on the school's network at all. They just saw it because they were examining his Twitter account because of the last incident.
Regarding the bracket, the four No 1 seeds march along, undefeated, until they meet in the final four. While this can happen, it seems like a trivial and unsophisticated result to me.
The problem with these predictions is, of course, that is the most likely scenario. There are enough other things that can happen that it is probably a worse than 50-50 shot, but there isn't another scenario that is more likely. Really, all any algorithm can do to beat picking the better seed every time is try to find spots where teams are seeded either higher or lower than they should be, and the very top and bottom of the list are probably not the most likely spots for this to happen.
Less than 1ms unless you are pushing around so much traffic that your router or switch is hosed. Even trashy consumer grade stuff should be able to do that.
Honestly, for a wired broadband provider I personally would be upset at more than about 30ms to anyplace in the same state I am in, and really expect lower than that. Propagation delay in that sort of geographic area is so negligible that the only cause at that point of higher latency is that something is wrong on their network, whether it is with my last mile or something farther down the line (oversaturation, bad config, faulty equipment).
There also is what happens when the market maker isn't there. Zero transactions. Fred doesn't buy from you because the market maker wasn't there to be the middle man. That's in a nutshell why this talk of "real" and "fake" liquidity is nonsense. "Real" liquidity doesn't happen without "fake" liquidity.
Buy orders can happen just fine without high frequency traders sitting in the middle. See: all of the history of stock market before the advent of computers.
But let's go on. How long does Fred have to hold on to a stock before it's considered "real" liquidity? Suppose ten minutes later, he finds out that he needed the money for something else and sells the stock. Did his "real" liquidity just turn into "fake" liquidity? Especially given that he might have held the stock for less time than the market maker did?
No, his liquidity is real liquidity because he decision to buy the stock was not predicated on selling it instantly to another buyer. He isn't waiting for some other investor to want the stock before he'll buy it.
And you can't tell the two apart anyway. Providing labels means something only if those labels have applicability (here, I mean that the labels are capable of being applied) and resolving power (that the labels actually distinguish some useful). To be blunt, you'd need pretty good insider knowledge of the relevant traders and their activities to be able to attach a "real" or "fake" label to the trades in question. Applicability fails hard.
There is plenty of applicability. You don't have to individually identify each trade as real or fake to make some observations about what market policies would affect which group of transactions. The whole concept of HFT involves buying and almost instantly reselling stock. Let's say that we make a policy decision that you now have to hold on to a stock for an hour between buying it and being able to resell it. This affects Fred very little, even if he does decide that he needs the money back ten minutes later. In fact, he probably already had to wait longer than that unless he's acting as a day trader, as most of us trying to make long term investments don't have market access to move stocks that quickly. Meanwhile, there's not real way to shoot the gap and leech money out of the system. The only question, then, ends up being whether HFT actually benefits us in some way such that we should keep it around, which is the discussion you and I are now having (and can continue to have without needing to identify which individual real-world transactions behave in which way).
Similarly, there's no actual point to doing so. We need the "fake" liquidity just as much as the "real" liquidity because the former closes trades of the latter. Thus, there's no point to distinguishing between fake and real trades (even if you could), especially with the connotation you use.
Sure there is, because it lets us make those useful policy decisions. If we just count up all of the transactions in the day, our numbers end up not reflecting any real ability to sell a stock on demand. It's like having a version of Walmart where all of the cashiers buy the products off the shelf from each other repeatedly, and when you count the number of sales to determine demand for items, you don't do it by determining the number of groceries that walk out of the door, you do it by determining the total number of transactions that occur in the building.
Again, there's no distinction between 'real' and 'fake'.
Maybe if you say it again, it will become true. There is a huge distinction. If Fred the Used Car Salesman wants to buy one of the stocks I own to build up a retirement fund, there are reasons he might change his mind before engaging in the transaction. Maybe the CEO resigned two hours ago. Maybe they just put out worse than projected profit figures. On the other hand, the "market maker" has no interest in any of that. He only cares if Fred the Used Car Salesman wants to buy my stock for $11 a share and I want to sell it for $10.93 a share. His whole goal is to buy my stock, sell it to Fred, and keep the $.07 a share difference. On paper, there were two transactions, and therefore twice as much liquidity, but as soon as Fred doesn't want to buy that stock anymore, Goldman Sachs doesn't, either. Only half of the liquidity is real because only half of it translates into the ability to find a buyer for your stock on demand, which is the whole reason you want liquidity in the first place.
The market is the "house" and its cut typically is very small.
It is a matter of perspective. As noted above, in a transaction not involving dividends, every cent that you make from a stock is coming directly out of the next investor's pocket. If they are not providing any useful properties to the market, then any cut is very large.
Sure there is, and you just described it. High frequency traders aren't going to be buying your shares unless they are sure there's somebody on the other end that's going to buy them right back. If the real liquidity goes away, the fake "liquidity" that "market makers" are providing dries up at the same time. You have the same amount of real ability to sell your stocks, it just looks like more on paper because the house uses similar transactions to take their cut.
Nope, they provide fake liquidity. There still has to be a fool on the other end, the "market makers" just take a cut between when I sell it and the other chump buys it.
Still doesn't make your position sane. Your argument is now that there are somewhat fewer dissenters than there otherwise would be because of peer pressures. This is possible (and even likely). The problem is, you still have to have a whole lot of consensus before strong arming dissenters even becomes a viable strategy. Depending on which survey you look at, somewhere between 96% and 99% of climatologists agree that man made global warming is a real thing. Even if you assume the lower end of that and make the case that 80% of the people who would normally be skeptics are hiding their opinions to avoid... whatever big, bad strongarm tactics you think a bunch of scientists can pull off (like linking them to oil companies, ooooooh scary), you still have 80% of climatologists that disagree with you.
And when we are talking about the mainstream conservative position, you have to remember that we're not talking about reasonable doubt when it comes to anthropogenic global warming, we're talking about almost all of the candidates in the Republican primary coming out and saying things indicating they are absolutely sure that man isn't causing global warming. In order to have that position, you have to believe in a vast global conspiracy so powerful that it can take a scientific consensus that our emissions aren't warming the earth and convince nearly all scientists that they should abandon their reasoned opinions and purposefully poison the world's collective knowledge base.
So no, linking to a stupid Wall Street Journal article about one scientist positing out loud how to discredit one other scientist doesn't even begin to make your opinion sane.
No, it's the part where I point out that hitting 90%+ among publishing scientists in a field is pretty good indicator of consensus and clinging to the last few percent as a reason to not take steps towards preventing potential global catastrophe is a completely insane position. It is sane to think that a huge number of the scientists working the field might, at a long shot, be wrong. It is not a sane position to firmly believe that they are all wrong based on... whatever you guys base it on. Rick Santorum and Mark Levin saying they wrong? I don't know. Whatever it is, it isn't your incredible respect for the scientific process.
Only in this particular debate, the actual scientists agree with Unnamed Democrat. That doesn't quite have the symmetry you were going for, though, right?
Just because using always-on DRM isn't so harmful that it automatically forces you out of business doesn't mean it is not harmful to sales. And you can pick whatever modern hosting company you want, you still not immune from eventually having an outage.
My guess is that's security through obscurity at work. That key hasn't been cracked because there hasn't been enough reason for anybody to bother cracking it. It's possible that $10k/copy software locked behind it would get people interested enough.
The problem is that you're running up against the software version of the analog hole. Before you feed it into the processor pipe, your application has to be in the standard machine code format that your processor is going to understand. You can dedicate some small portion of your codebase to refusing to work under certain circumstances, and you can make the binary inaccessible until right before it gets executed, but if the entire working application is on a cracker's computer, he's pretty well guaranteed a way to beat it. That leaves always-on style DRM schemes that constantly phone home to continue working, but if I buy $10,000 a seat software and I can't use it because one of your servers goes down, you can be pretty sure I'm not going to be very happy with you.
You also have to remember that hard to break DRM isn't a deterrent to your average pirate unless it is so hard that nobody does it. So what if it takes Sven The Reverse Engineering Scandinavian 30 hours of Monster and amphetamine-fueled thrashing about to circumvent your USB key DRM scheme? That will just make him even more of a hero when he posts the cracked copy of your software to The Pirate Bay for everybody to install. And at that point, the pirated version of your software is now easier to use as a consumer than the commercially released version; you are trying to sell an inferior product.
- so you say, so he says. He is a wannabe dictator, a king, he just found out that he can't rule like a king, but he still does everything to try (NDAA and all the wars he started, those are good examples).
I know I recently got told that I'm never getting a bunch of updates for my Xbox 360 version of Dungeon Defenders including new content that's been out for months of the PC specifically because of this cost.
Businesses already provide a W-2 for full time employees. In fact, if you are a single income earner household without any reductions, paying taxes already takes virtually no time. You don't have to spend time or money on an accountant.
I really love that you keep trying to compare a mythical consumption tax with an actual tax system, too. I've gotten to work with real world sales taxes before, and they aren't all that you guys crack them up to be. I've worked at a small rural ISP (10 or so employees), and our sales taxes were incredibly difficult even without a federal component. We had to calculate sales tax by customer location to determine whether there were any municipal taxes, which made base rates vary from 6.25% to 8.25% often for people a mile away from each other. The first $25 of a monthly internet bill was tax exempt. We offered web hosting, which gets a percentage-based discount on state sales tax. We also had to tax on product but not on service, so marking up the cost of items that a technician could sell on-site meant that the customer paid more taxes than if we didn't mark up the price but had a separate line-item installation fee.
Yes, we figured it out, but I am confident that a large portion of the businesses of our size in our industry weren't filing taxes incorrectly. Aren't people like you the ones always whining about excessive government regulation and how it kills small business?
Which do you do more times in a year: make a purchase or get a paycheck? Just because you've shifted the complexity to somebody else doesn't magically make it go away.
I didn't say our current tax system is as simple as the Fair Tax or any other specific consumption tax proposal. I said that consumption taxes aren't inherently simpler than income taxes. Even a progressive income tax isn't really more complicated. If, for instance, or tax system had the same progressive tax structure as it does now, only exactly 0 tax breaks or deductions were allowed, it would be more simple than even a completely flat tax in my eyes, because you could calculate your tax burden once per year by putting your total income for the year into a single, incredibly simple formula and get your tax burden. A flat consumption tax with no exceptions, by comparison, has to be calculated on each and every one of the hundreds or thousands of purchases I make in the next year. As somebody who has worked on software specifically to determine sales tax burdens for a business, I can assure you that the effort expended is non-trivial.
No, the real reason our tax system is complicated is because we put a bunch of exemptions and loopholes into it. Some portion of them are probably even ones that you would support if you thought about it and would want applied to your consumption tax. Do you want your church to pay sales tax on purchases? Right now in my state for state/municipal sales tax they are exempt, so I am sure that it would be at least a somewhat popular idea. Extrapolate that out to every other exemption that some politician will eventually put in someplace, and we'll be right back where we are, only instead of having a wildly unpredictable tax rate curve because of all the exemptions out there, we'll have one because of all that piled on to the fact that even your base tax burden will be wildly unpredictable because it is based on money outflow rather than income.
I stand by my initial assertion. There is nothing magical about a consumption tax. It doesn't make things better, and it doesn't do anything to reduce complexity that a simplified progressive income tax couldn't. The only particular property that it is has that gets it such praise from anybody is that it taxes poor people higher as a percentage of their overall income than it does rich people. Everything else is just a shell game that the rich proponents of the system are playing so that they can get richer.
Consumption taxes are not inherently simpler than income taxes. The core reason behind conservatives arguing constantly for a flat consumption tax is that they are tired of progressive taxes and really would prefer taxes to be regressive. It has very little to do with the IRS or your plight.
Biological viruses are a different scenario. They are not hard to make, and while the chance of an accidental escape is low, if one WERE to happen and to reach a major hub, control would be impossible. Nature will not evolve organisms in the directions of deadly pandemics because evolutionary forces act against this sort of thing. However, doing it on purpose is straightforward and quite easy (the tough part is actually making the genetic changes actually stick in the real lab, but the code changes are not very complex at all)
Nature is less likely to evolve in the direction of deadly pandemics, but that does not make it impossible. We've already seen a flu virus evolve in such a way that it spread orthogonally to normal evolutionary pressures to deadly effect in the influenza plague of 1918. You just need a microcosm to generate abnormal pressures for a while before spreading it to the population at large to cause significant devastation. Also, don't forget that while evolution takes place somewhat predictable on middle-range time scales, it is ultimately derived from random variation, so a disease-causing micro-organism doesn't have to spontaneously develop traits of actual ideal magnitude for transmission. It can "accidentally" go too far and kill a significant number of those infected while still being a viable evolutionary adaptation. It would likely hit an equilibrium that is less deadly over time, but that doesn't stop it from generating a pandemic in the short term. Or you could have an already deadly disease get better at transmission, and again it would probably eventually get less deadly, but you might not be happy with the wait.
All that said, I do agree that the possibility of an engineered virus is more terrifying, because it mostly seems like a question of a dollar amount if somebody wanted their very own personal pandemic. It might be a really big number, but the eventual existence of a psychopath with a big enough wallet seems more likely to occur in my lifetime than a natural pandemic.
What you say is true, but there is always an unfair implication that the two invasions via Belgium happened the same way implicit in the summarized version of the story. War was a much slower moving affair in World War 1. The entire design of the Maginot Line was supposed to take into account invasion from Belgium or Switzerland. Yes, it was supposed to make invasion direct from Germany very difficult, but it was also supposed to make it much easier to hold the line on the German border with less manpower specifically to free up mobilized forces to respond to the presumably slower offensives that could take place from other borders.
Yes, obviously there was a large miscalculation on how quickly the Germans could advance through Belgium (and in hoping that they would respect Belgium's neutral status), but France's was not the only fighting force to be outmaneuvered by the German Blitzkrieg, and France was highly outnumbered to boot. The whole meme of France learning nothing from World War 1 is way overblown. If the Germans had moved the same way that they had in World War 1, France would have been in great shape. The real problem is that they spent too much effort responding to what they learned from World War 1, and war had changed (despite what Ron Perlman would have you believe).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you know how reCAPTCHA works. You are always presented with two different items to decode. One of them is always a known answer, and the other they are less sure about, but become more sure after they show it to enough people and get a crowd sourced answer. They don't give you two prompts just to be double sure you are human.
Here's the original local story:
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20120325/LOCAL0201/303259931
It appears the confusion all over the place here derives from the fact that there were two separate incidents. First, last year, he used school equipment to post a profane tweet and was suspended. Then, recently, he posted the above linked profane tweet, but it was from home, on his own computer, not on the school's network at all. They just saw it because they were examining his Twitter account because of the last incident.
Hopefully that clears up some of the confusion.
Regarding the bracket, the four No 1 seeds march along, undefeated, until they meet in the final four. While this can happen, it seems like a trivial and unsophisticated result to me.
The problem with these predictions is, of course, that is the most likely scenario. There are enough other things that can happen that it is probably a worse than 50-50 shot, but there isn't another scenario that is more likely. Really, all any algorithm can do to beat picking the better seed every time is try to find spots where teams are seeded either higher or lower than they should be, and the very top and bottom of the list are probably not the most likely spots for this to happen.
Less than 1ms unless you are pushing around so much traffic that your router or switch is hosed. Even trashy consumer grade stuff should be able to do that. Honestly, for a wired broadband provider I personally would be upset at more than about 30ms to anyplace in the same state I am in, and really expect lower than that. Propagation delay in that sort of geographic area is so negligible that the only cause at that point of higher latency is that something is wrong on their network, whether it is with my last mile or something farther down the line (oversaturation, bad config, faulty equipment).
There also is what happens when the market maker isn't there. Zero transactions. Fred doesn't buy from you because the market maker wasn't there to be the middle man. That's in a nutshell why this talk of "real" and "fake" liquidity is nonsense. "Real" liquidity doesn't happen without "fake" liquidity.
Buy orders can happen just fine without high frequency traders sitting in the middle. See: all of the history of stock market before the advent of computers.
But let's go on. How long does Fred have to hold on to a stock before it's considered "real" liquidity? Suppose ten minutes later, he finds out that he needed the money for something else and sells the stock. Did his "real" liquidity just turn into "fake" liquidity? Especially given that he might have held the stock for less time than the market maker did?
No, his liquidity is real liquidity because he decision to buy the stock was not predicated on selling it instantly to another buyer. He isn't waiting for some other investor to want the stock before he'll buy it.
And you can't tell the two apart anyway. Providing labels means something only if those labels have applicability (here, I mean that the labels are capable of being applied) and resolving power (that the labels actually distinguish some useful). To be blunt, you'd need pretty good insider knowledge of the relevant traders and their activities to be able to attach a "real" or "fake" label to the trades in question. Applicability fails hard.
There is plenty of applicability. You don't have to individually identify each trade as real or fake to make some observations about what market policies would affect which group of transactions. The whole concept of HFT involves buying and almost instantly reselling stock. Let's say that we make a policy decision that you now have to hold on to a stock for an hour between buying it and being able to resell it. This affects Fred very little, even if he does decide that he needs the money back ten minutes later. In fact, he probably already had to wait longer than that unless he's acting as a day trader, as most of us trying to make long term investments don't have market access to move stocks that quickly. Meanwhile, there's not real way to shoot the gap and leech money out of the system. The only question, then, ends up being whether HFT actually benefits us in some way such that we should keep it around, which is the discussion you and I are now having (and can continue to have without needing to identify which individual real-world transactions behave in which way).
Similarly, there's no actual point to doing so. We need the "fake" liquidity just as much as the "real" liquidity because the former closes trades of the latter. Thus, there's no point to distinguishing between fake and real trades (even if you could), especially with the connotation you use.
Sure there is, because it lets us make those useful policy decisions. If we just count up all of the transactions in the day, our numbers end up not reflecting any real ability to sell a stock on demand. It's like having a version of Walmart where all of the cashiers buy the products off the shelf from each other repeatedly, and when you count the number of sales to determine demand for items, you don't do it by determining the number of groceries that walk out of the door, you do it by determining the total number of transactions that occur in the building.
Again, there's no distinction between 'real' and 'fake'.
Maybe if you say it again, it will become true. There is a huge distinction. If Fred the Used Car Salesman wants to buy one of the stocks I own to build up a retirement fund, there are reasons he might change his mind before engaging in the transaction. Maybe the CEO resigned two hours ago. Maybe they just put out worse than projected profit figures. On the other hand, the "market maker" has no interest in any of that. He only cares if Fred the Used Car Salesman wants to buy my stock for $11 a share and I want to sell it for $10.93 a share. His whole goal is to buy my stock, sell it to Fred, and keep the $.07 a share difference. On paper, there were two transactions, and therefore twice as much liquidity, but as soon as Fred doesn't want to buy that stock anymore, Goldman Sachs doesn't, either. Only half of the liquidity is real because only half of it translates into the ability to find a buyer for your stock on demand, which is the whole reason you want liquidity in the first place.
The market is the "house" and its cut typically is very small.
It is a matter of perspective. As noted above, in a transaction not involving dividends, every cent that you make from a stock is coming directly out of the next investor's pocket. If they are not providing any useful properties to the market, then any cut is very large.
Sure there is, and you just described it. High frequency traders aren't going to be buying your shares unless they are sure there's somebody on the other end that's going to buy them right back. If the real liquidity goes away, the fake "liquidity" that "market makers" are providing dries up at the same time. You have the same amount of real ability to sell your stocks, it just looks like more on paper because the house uses similar transactions to take their cut.
Nope, they provide fake liquidity. There still has to be a fool on the other end, the "market makers" just take a cut between when I sell it and the other chump buys it.
Still doesn't make your position sane. Your argument is now that there are somewhat fewer dissenters than there otherwise would be because of peer pressures. This is possible (and even likely). The problem is, you still have to have a whole lot of consensus before strong arming dissenters even becomes a viable strategy. Depending on which survey you look at, somewhere between 96% and 99% of climatologists agree that man made global warming is a real thing. Even if you assume the lower end of that and make the case that 80% of the people who would normally be skeptics are hiding their opinions to avoid... whatever big, bad strongarm tactics you think a bunch of scientists can pull off (like linking them to oil companies, ooooooh scary), you still have 80% of climatologists that disagree with you.
And when we are talking about the mainstream conservative position, you have to remember that we're not talking about reasonable doubt when it comes to anthropogenic global warming, we're talking about almost all of the candidates in the Republican primary coming out and saying things indicating they are absolutely sure that man isn't causing global warming. In order to have that position, you have to believe in a vast global conspiracy so powerful that it can take a scientific consensus that our emissions aren't warming the earth and convince nearly all scientists that they should abandon their reasoned opinions and purposefully poison the world's collective knowledge base.
So no, linking to a stupid Wall Street Journal article about one scientist positing out loud how to discredit one other scientist doesn't even begin to make your opinion sane.
No, it's the part where I point out that hitting 90%+ among publishing scientists in a field is pretty good indicator of consensus and clinging to the last few percent as a reason to not take steps towards preventing potential global catastrophe is a completely insane position. It is sane to think that a huge number of the scientists working the field might, at a long shot, be wrong. It is not a sane position to firmly believe that they are all wrong based on... whatever you guys base it on. Rick Santorum and Mark Levin saying they wrong? I don't know. Whatever it is, it isn't your incredible respect for the scientific process.
Only in this particular debate, the actual scientists agree with Unnamed Democrat. That doesn't quite have the symmetry you were going for, though, right?
Just because using always-on DRM isn't so harmful that it automatically forces you out of business doesn't mean it is not harmful to sales. And you can pick whatever modern hosting company you want, you still not immune from eventually having an outage.
And then his servers go down. And then anybody who bought his $10,000 is now on the phone screaming at him. Sounds like a winning business model.
My guess is that's security through obscurity at work. That key hasn't been cracked because there hasn't been enough reason for anybody to bother cracking it. It's possible that $10k/copy software locked behind it would get people interested enough.
The problem is that you're running up against the software version of the analog hole. Before you feed it into the processor pipe, your application has to be in the standard machine code format that your processor is going to understand. You can dedicate some small portion of your codebase to refusing to work under certain circumstances, and you can make the binary inaccessible until right before it gets executed, but if the entire working application is on a cracker's computer, he's pretty well guaranteed a way to beat it. That leaves always-on style DRM schemes that constantly phone home to continue working, but if I buy $10,000 a seat software and I can't use it because one of your servers goes down, you can be pretty sure I'm not going to be very happy with you.
You also have to remember that hard to break DRM isn't a deterrent to your average pirate unless it is so hard that nobody does it. So what if it takes Sven The Reverse Engineering Scandinavian 30 hours of Monster and amphetamine-fueled thrashing about to circumvent your USB key DRM scheme? That will just make him even more of a hero when he posts the cracked copy of your software to The Pirate Bay for everybody to install. And at that point, the pirated version of your software is now easier to use as a consumer than the commercially released version; you are trying to sell an inferior product.
We can finally get an official count on the number of times somebody tugs on a braid or smooths a skirt in the series.
- so you say, so he says. He is a wannabe dictator, a king, he just found out that he can't rule like a king, but he still does everything to try (NDAA and all the wars he started, those are good examples).
... What?
Clearly a canned response that the CSR forgot to switch out Apple for RIM in it. Nothing to see here.
RIM, then?
I know I recently got told that I'm never getting a bunch of updates for my Xbox 360 version of Dungeon Defenders including new content that's been out for months of the PC specifically because of this cost.
Businesses already provide a W-2 for full time employees. In fact, if you are a single income earner household without any reductions, paying taxes already takes virtually no time. You don't have to spend time or money on an accountant.
I really love that you keep trying to compare a mythical consumption tax with an actual tax system, too. I've gotten to work with real world sales taxes before, and they aren't all that you guys crack them up to be. I've worked at a small rural ISP (10 or so employees), and our sales taxes were incredibly difficult even without a federal component. We had to calculate sales tax by customer location to determine whether there were any municipal taxes, which made base rates vary from 6.25% to 8.25% often for people a mile away from each other. The first $25 of a monthly internet bill was tax exempt. We offered web hosting, which gets a percentage-based discount on state sales tax. We also had to tax on product but not on service, so marking up the cost of items that a technician could sell on-site meant that the customer paid more taxes than if we didn't mark up the price but had a separate line-item installation fee.
Yes, we figured it out, but I am confident that a large portion of the businesses of our size in our industry weren't filing taxes incorrectly. Aren't people like you the ones always whining about excessive government regulation and how it kills small business?
Which do you do more times in a year: make a purchase or get a paycheck? Just because you've shifted the complexity to somebody else doesn't magically make it go away.
I didn't say our current tax system is as simple as the Fair Tax or any other specific consumption tax proposal. I said that consumption taxes aren't inherently simpler than income taxes. Even a progressive income tax isn't really more complicated. If, for instance, or tax system had the same progressive tax structure as it does now, only exactly 0 tax breaks or deductions were allowed, it would be more simple than even a completely flat tax in my eyes, because you could calculate your tax burden once per year by putting your total income for the year into a single, incredibly simple formula and get your tax burden. A flat consumption tax with no exceptions, by comparison, has to be calculated on each and every one of the hundreds or thousands of purchases I make in the next year. As somebody who has worked on software specifically to determine sales tax burdens for a business, I can assure you that the effort expended is non-trivial.
No, the real reason our tax system is complicated is because we put a bunch of exemptions and loopholes into it. Some portion of them are probably even ones that you would support if you thought about it and would want applied to your consumption tax. Do you want your church to pay sales tax on purchases? Right now in my state for state/municipal sales tax they are exempt, so I am sure that it would be at least a somewhat popular idea. Extrapolate that out to every other exemption that some politician will eventually put in someplace, and we'll be right back where we are, only instead of having a wildly unpredictable tax rate curve because of all the exemptions out there, we'll have one because of all that piled on to the fact that even your base tax burden will be wildly unpredictable because it is based on money outflow rather than income.
I stand by my initial assertion. There is nothing magical about a consumption tax. It doesn't make things better, and it doesn't do anything to reduce complexity that a simplified progressive income tax couldn't. The only particular property that it is has that gets it such praise from anybody is that it taxes poor people higher as a percentage of their overall income than it does rich people. Everything else is just a shell game that the rich proponents of the system are playing so that they can get richer.
Consumption taxes are not inherently simpler than income taxes. The core reason behind conservatives arguing constantly for a flat consumption tax is that they are tired of progressive taxes and really would prefer taxes to be regressive. It has very little to do with the IRS or your plight.
Biological viruses are a different scenario. They are not hard to make, and while the chance of an accidental escape is low, if one WERE to happen and to reach a major hub, control would be impossible. Nature will not evolve organisms in the directions of deadly pandemics because evolutionary forces act against this sort of thing. However, doing it on purpose is straightforward and quite easy (the tough part is actually making the genetic changes actually stick in the real lab, but the code changes are not very complex at all)
Nature is less likely to evolve in the direction of deadly pandemics, but that does not make it impossible. We've already seen a flu virus evolve in such a way that it spread orthogonally to normal evolutionary pressures to deadly effect in the influenza plague of 1918. You just need a microcosm to generate abnormal pressures for a while before spreading it to the population at large to cause significant devastation. Also, don't forget that while evolution takes place somewhat predictable on middle-range time scales, it is ultimately derived from random variation, so a disease-causing micro-organism doesn't have to spontaneously develop traits of actual ideal magnitude for transmission. It can "accidentally" go too far and kill a significant number of those infected while still being a viable evolutionary adaptation. It would likely hit an equilibrium that is less deadly over time, but that doesn't stop it from generating a pandemic in the short term. Or you could have an already deadly disease get better at transmission, and again it would probably eventually get less deadly, but you might not be happy with the wait.
All that said, I do agree that the possibility of an engineered virus is more terrifying, because it mostly seems like a question of a dollar amount if somebody wanted their very own personal pandemic. It might be a really big number, but the eventual existence of a psychopath with a big enough wallet seems more likely to occur in my lifetime than a natural pandemic.
What you say is true, but there is always an unfair implication that the two invasions via Belgium happened the same way implicit in the summarized version of the story. War was a much slower moving affair in World War 1. The entire design of the Maginot Line was supposed to take into account invasion from Belgium or Switzerland. Yes, it was supposed to make invasion direct from Germany very difficult, but it was also supposed to make it much easier to hold the line on the German border with less manpower specifically to free up mobilized forces to respond to the presumably slower offensives that could take place from other borders.
Yes, obviously there was a large miscalculation on how quickly the Germans could advance through Belgium (and in hoping that they would respect Belgium's neutral status), but France's was not the only fighting force to be outmaneuvered by the German Blitzkrieg, and France was highly outnumbered to boot. The whole meme of France learning nothing from World War 1 is way overblown. If the Germans had moved the same way that they had in World War 1, France would have been in great shape. The real problem is that they spent too much effort responding to what they learned from World War 1, and war had changed (despite what Ron Perlman would have you believe).