What you are saying, I think, is that the very rich are so few in number (on the very far end of the tail of the distribution curve), that their actual contribution to the coffers is a drop in the ocean compared to the bulk of taxpayers. You are sort of right, but you are also off by an order or two of magnitude. (All numbers rounded, taken from the 2009 tax year). There are 138 million taxpayers in the US, and they all earn approx 7.825 trillion taxable dollars, and pay $866b in income taxes. (So, an average tax burden of $6275 per taxpayer.)
The top 1% of taxpayers is about 1.38 million people. Those one percent of people earn about $1 million a piece, and pay about $320,000 a piece in income taxes. The top one percent of taxpayers earn 16.9% of all the taxable income in the US, and their share of all income tax revenue is 36.7%. (In other words, the whole other 99% only earn 83.1% of the total income and contribute 63.3% of the income tax revenue.)
OK, let's look at the top 0.1%. 138,000 taxpayers. They collectively earn $610,000,000,000 or 7.8% of the income, with an average income of about $4.4 million. They pay in total $148 billion in income taxes, or a 17% share of the total income tax burden. Which is $866 billion.
What I think that means is that if we taxed them at 100%, our taxes would go down 70% (roughly, since of the $866b in tax burden, $610b of it would already be taken care of. And if we taxed then at 0%, our taxes would go up 20% (again, roughly, because we would have another $148 billion to come up with on top of the $718 billion we already pay.
I agree with you 100%, but in the current system, from a macro standpoint, I pay a certain % more in taxes to "subsidize" the businesses (and consumers of that product) that don't pay their fair share. Under your system, or the parent's system, the money would get captured one way or the other in order to pay the bills. Instead, they funnel money out of the tax base.
I'm not sure about the prices two years later, but four years later, my Dell is still going for a quarter of what I paid for it.
And half of a lot of money is still a lot of money. You could have just spent the half in the first place on a decent Dell that's spec'ed better. (If you ignore Velben-good, fake features like the wrought from a block of pure virgin aluminum, and polished by the tears of a unicorn.)
All that said, you are right, the tight control over the models does help the secondary market.
I agree. Defined benefit programs ought to be illegal. I mean, it's nice for the employees who manage to collect, but it ends us screwing up businesses and future employees. I'm not sure if the statistic is correct, but it has to be close to the truth: more of the price of a GM car goes to pay retiree benefits than it does to pay the people who actually built the thing.
When you are too lazy to do the hard work of maintaining a paper trail, you are going to get bad employees. And then when you fire them, they will sue you. It feeds on itself. If you just do a three strikes thing, when the employee knows their job is on the line they are going to be much less likely to sue when they finally screw up. As a bonus, your employees have good feedback on their job performance.
That's because we actually did things to stop many of those things from happening. We reduced smog by mandating standards. Like your catalytic converter. It takes the really bad pollutants and turns them into less bad pollutants. If you are going to be burning fossil fuels, CO2 and water is the best possible exhaust.
I don't disagree with the possibility that big energy and big auto would want to put out propaganda, but in this case, it is not in their interest to do so. Anything that reduces demand for fossil energy and cars increases the demand for alternatives. Which they also produce.
It isn't so much that he is ignorant, but that he is even ignorant about his own religion. His god punishes humans for bad behavior. He presumes that his god won't destroy the earth to punish us for shitting up the joint?
Seismic events don't really matter. The Earth is going to do what it is going to do. Whatever it does, we add to the problem by burning fossil fuels. Doesn't matter whether it is 90% of the problem, or 1% of the problem. We are contributing to it.
There is a difference between semi-permanent missile defense structures in an aggressive country that knows it might be attacked, and temporary missile launchers installed just in case a threat might emerge out of thin air. Also, it only matters if the enemy cares about not blowing up civilians. The aggressive country would purposely install defense hardware near civilian locations so that when the other aggressive country disables that hardware, the first country can cry about how evil the second country is for blowing up civilians.
So if the UK defense dept thought that they were at risk for a military invasion, then yes, they would be assholes for installing military hardware in residential areas. You don't put targets on your civilians. But that's not what these are for. They are for mitigating the damage should a hijacked aircraft stray into the protected airspace. I am sure that they have designed landing and takeoff patterns for the nearby airports such that it will be obvious when an aircraft is or is not pointed in the right direction.
I'm a lefty, and I complain about the nanny state too. I'm all for universal health care and taxing everyone what it takes to pay the bills. But I just can't stand it when they make laws that restrict actual freedom for lots of people, just to appease the "what about the children" pearl-clutchers.
I thought it was flight cycles that determined the "age" of an aircraft? Flight hours determines the age of engines, but cycles (takeoffs and landings) determine the airframe's age.
Chernobyl is the largest reason the cold war ended.
I'm not sure that's true, but the fact that the Americans immediately said "what can we do to help, just let us know" and not "suck it, commies," didn't hurt.
The correct way to write is to position the paper and the hand so that the hand is below the line of text being written. Nobody should be dragging their hands through previously written text, regardless of handedness.
If I can use a car analogy, this would mean that in a car with this kind of setup, I could turn the wheel and then let it return to center, and the car would keep turning? I would have to issue a "left turn command" just to get it to stop turning right? That seems asinine. I thought that control paradigm went out with "Asteroids" and those 80's sit-down car driving arcade games where the wheel can spin freely.
I understand where that system is a benefit- if you are in a crosswind, or in a climb, it is less fatiguing to not have to hold the stick off-center the whole time. But wouldn't it be a better system to just have a trim tab, or an auto-trim mode? It seems like whatever fatigue you eliminate on one hand, you double when a pilot is trying to do delicate maneuvers like landing. What would be a single quick nudge to make a correction would have to be a nudge-wait-unnudge operation.
Back to the car analogy, it sounds like trying to drive in traffic using only the cruise control.
I only have 0.5 hours of recorded flight time, and even I know two important things that the people in that cockpit seemingly didn't:
1) Only one person can have control of the aircraft at once. When the captain says "my aircraft", the second in command takes his hands off the controls.
2) Pulling back on the stick makes a stall worse, not better. A stall is lack of airspeed. The solution for a stall is to increase airspeed. Either with the engines, or by pushing the stick forward, or both.
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What you are saying, I think, is that the very rich are so few in number (on the very far end of the tail of the distribution curve), that their actual contribution to the coffers is a drop in the ocean compared to the bulk of taxpayers. You are sort of right, but you are also off by an order or two of magnitude. (All numbers rounded, taken from the 2009 tax year). There are 138 million taxpayers in the US, and they all earn approx 7.825 trillion taxable dollars, and pay $866b in income taxes. (So, an average tax burden of $6275 per taxpayer.)
The top 1% of taxpayers is about 1.38 million people. Those one percent of people earn about $1 million a piece, and pay about $320,000 a piece in income taxes. The top one percent of taxpayers earn 16.9% of all the taxable income in the US, and their share of all income tax revenue is 36.7%. (In other words, the whole other 99% only earn 83.1% of the total income and contribute 63.3% of the income tax revenue.)
OK, let's look at the top 0.1%. 138,000 taxpayers. They collectively earn $610,000,000,000 or 7.8% of the income, with an average income of about $4.4 million. They pay in total $148 billion in income taxes, or a 17% share of the total income tax burden. Which is $866 billion.
What I think that means is that if we taxed them at 100%, our taxes would go down 70% (roughly, since of the $866b in tax burden, $610b of it would already be taken care of. And if we taxed then at 0%, our taxes would go up 20% (again, roughly, because we would have another $148 billion to come up with on top of the $718 billion we already pay.
If by "taxing every worker to death" you mean "some of the lowest tax rates of the last 100 years", then you are correct. Otherwise, you are mistaken.
I agree with you 100%, but in the current system, from a macro standpoint, I pay a certain % more in taxes to "subsidize" the businesses (and consumers of that product) that don't pay their fair share. Under your system, or the parent's system, the money would get captured one way or the other in order to pay the bills. Instead, they funnel money out of the tax base.
Yes, but it also concentrates the footprint of the area generating the heat, requiring more and more exotic heat spreaders.
I'm not sure about the prices two years later, but four years later, my Dell is still going for a quarter of what I paid for it.
And half of a lot of money is still a lot of money. You could have just spent the half in the first place on a decent Dell that's spec'ed better. (If you ignore Velben-good, fake features like the wrought from a block of pure virgin aluminum, and polished by the tears of a unicorn.)
All that said, you are right, the tight control over the models does help the secondary market.
I agree. Defined benefit programs ought to be illegal. I mean, it's nice for the employees who manage to collect, but it ends us screwing up businesses and future employees. I'm not sure if the statistic is correct, but it has to be close to the truth: more of the price of a GM car goes to pay retiree benefits than it does to pay the people who actually built the thing.
When you are too lazy to do the hard work of maintaining a paper trail, you are going to get bad employees. And then when you fire them, they will sue you. It feeds on itself. If you just do a three strikes thing, when the employee knows their job is on the line they are going to be much less likely to sue when they finally screw up. As a bonus, your employees have good feedback on their job performance.
That's because we actually did things to stop many of those things from happening. We reduced smog by mandating standards. Like your catalytic converter. It takes the really bad pollutants and turns them into less bad pollutants. If you are going to be burning fossil fuels, CO2 and water is the best possible exhaust.
I don't disagree with the possibility that big energy and big auto would want to put out propaganda, but in this case, it is not in their interest to do so. Anything that reduces demand for fossil energy and cars increases the demand for alternatives. Which they also produce.
It isn't so much that he is ignorant, but that he is even ignorant about his own religion. His god punishes humans for bad behavior. He presumes that his god won't destroy the earth to punish us for shitting up the joint?
Seismic events don't really matter. The Earth is going to do what it is going to do. Whatever it does, we add to the problem by burning fossil fuels. Doesn't matter whether it is 90% of the problem, or 1% of the problem. We are contributing to it.
I would definitely rack mount the structured cabling, up in a corner somewhere. But yeah, you don't really need or want rack mount servers.
It's not even correctable. All he does is invoke the "security theater" strawman and then rails against it.
If the incredibly inconvenient airport security should be enough to prevent another 9/11 style incident, then it isn't security theater.
There is a difference between semi-permanent missile defense structures in an aggressive country that knows it might be attacked, and temporary missile launchers installed just in case a threat might emerge out of thin air. Also, it only matters if the enemy cares about not blowing up civilians. The aggressive country would purposely install defense hardware near civilian locations so that when the other aggressive country disables that hardware, the first country can cry about how evil the second country is for blowing up civilians.
So if the UK defense dept thought that they were at risk for a military invasion, then yes, they would be assholes for installing military hardware in residential areas. You don't put targets on your civilians. But that's not what these are for. They are for mitigating the damage should a hijacked aircraft stray into the protected airspace. I am sure that they have designed landing and takeoff patterns for the nearby airports such that it will be obvious when an aircraft is or is not pointed in the right direction.
Just in case.
I'm a lefty, and I complain about the nanny state too. I'm all for universal health care and taxing everyone what it takes to pay the bills. But I just can't stand it when they make laws that restrict actual freedom for lots of people, just to appease the "what about the children" pearl-clutchers.
I thought it was flight cycles that determined the "age" of an aircraft? Flight hours determines the age of engines, but cycles (takeoffs and landings) determine the airframe's age.
I bet they don't get paid that much to do documentaries on cable.
Chernobyl is the largest reason the cold war ended.
I'm not sure that's true, but the fact that the Americans immediately said "what can we do to help, just let us know" and not "suck it, commies," didn't hurt.
The correct way to write is to position the paper and the hand so that the hand is below the line of text being written. Nobody should be dragging their hands through previously written text, regardless of handedness.
*vomit*
How hard would it be to install a bubble-in-glass like you have on a carpenter's level?
If I can use a car analogy, this would mean that in a car with this kind of setup, I could turn the wheel and then let it return to center, and the car would keep turning? I would have to issue a "left turn command" just to get it to stop turning right? That seems asinine. I thought that control paradigm went out with "Asteroids" and those 80's sit-down car driving arcade games where the wheel can spin freely.
I understand where that system is a benefit- if you are in a crosswind, or in a climb, it is less fatiguing to not have to hold the stick off-center the whole time. But wouldn't it be a better system to just have a trim tab, or an auto-trim mode? It seems like whatever fatigue you eliminate on one hand, you double when a pilot is trying to do delicate maneuvers like landing. What would be a single quick nudge to make a correction would have to be a nudge-wait-unnudge operation.
Back to the car analogy, it sounds like trying to drive in traffic using only the cruise control.
I only have 0.5 hours of recorded flight time, and even I know two important things that the people in that cockpit seemingly didn't:
1) Only one person can have control of the aircraft at once. When the captain says "my aircraft", the second in command takes his hands off the controls.
2) Pulling back on the stick makes a stall worse, not better. A stall is lack of airspeed. The solution for a stall is to increase airspeed. Either with the engines, or by pushing the stick forward, or both.