cnn and nytimes are observing the effects of various things without looking at GDP, and the return on the tax dollar cut 'investment'.
Please look up the data here: http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo/
One-year change in real GDP for a given policy change per dollar Tax Provisions Non-refundable rebate 1.02 Refundable rebate 1.26 Payroll tax holiday 1.29 Across the board tax cut 1.03 Accelerated depreciation 0.27 Extend alternative minimum tax patch 0.48 Make income tax cuts expiring in 2010 permanent 0.29 Make expiring dividend and capital gains tax cuts permanent 0.37 Reduce corporate tax rates 0.30 Spending Provisions Extend unemployment compensation benefits 1.64 Temporary increase in food stamps 1.73 Revenue transfers to state governments 1.36 Increase infrastructure spending 1.59 Source: Mark Zandi, Moodyâ(TM)s Economy.com.
This is one of the "anti-bail-out" posts that I actually agree with.
It does set a bad precedent. However, it has to be done to fix the economy.
Hopefully, after all this is over, we can put the regulations back in place that Regan removed, and add some additional ones to help prevent this from happening again.
I've read the parent post a dozen times now, and it makes less and less sense every time I read it.
The president and congress have no problem inciting mob rule and violence? WTF? You honestly believe that? Exaggerate much?
We have a president going on a comedy show, doing town hall meetings, because he is continually trying to stay in communication with the people... you know... that mob that SHOULD rule the country.
About "disingenuously declaring shock"... he has to for political reasons of course... but if people were being intelligent about this, we wouldn't care.
170 million is a drop in the bucket, is standard business practice, without the bonuses AIG despite having money would cease to function, as its employees would leave.
I keep hearing "why are we giving bonuses to people that caused the mess". AIG's employees caused the mess? Really? They were doing what everyone else was doing, and what was working very well for a very long time. If they didn't do "what caused the mess" they would have been fired.
This is very similar to the IT sayings like "no one every got fired for choosing IBM" "or microsoft", etc.. it was standard business practice to do what they were doing in almost every major financial institution.
Is it risky to base your entire IT structure on one vendor controlled platform? Sure. Do people do it anyway and stay succesful? Yup.
It is hard to pickup all the nuances of your post, due to your limited language skills, so I doubt I understand most of your ranting...
Thank you for that post. This country has had a great depression in the past, and data on what works and doesn't work to get us out of a depression.
What Obama is doing is necessary. This has absolutely nothing to do with scratching backs or 'old boy networks'.
Stimulus means massive amounts of money injected into banking, infrastructure, and other proven methods to increase spending and lending.
On another side of this debate:
I find it absolutely infuriating that the Republicans in the house and senate are blatantly ignoring the facts about what is and isn't stimulating.
For example, the below is true:
Tax cuts: Not stimulating. Food stamps: Stimulating.
The congressional research center has great data on the effects of many things, and the numbers just do not support the Republican notion that tax cuts and 'less spending' will in any way get us out of depression.
Reminds me of an NPR radio show I listened to a week or so ago.
It was about all the aid that western countries have given to Africa. The basic gist was that the aid has hurt the countries, by not providing incentive to innovate and create infrastructure on their own.....
Apparently there are many/some/vocal (not sure) leaders/writers etc.. that are native Africans, asking for the aid to please stop.
I don't know enough about the history of aid in Africa to comment in detail on it, but I found it an interesting twist: that even our pure food aid is beginning to be viewed as a mistake by some.
The articles I read did not suggest using food crops for biofuels.
Rather, the starvation would be a result of previously food producing land being used to produce switchgrass or other biofuel crops, thereby driving the cost of food up.
"To say that all Christians, such as myself, are lazy doubters is as unrealistic as to say that Atheists have a monopoly on intelligent thought."
I don't think anyone would say "all christians are lazy doubters".
But you must admit, having a set 'facts' in ones head, only supported by faith, means that there is a chance that a faith-based 'fact' can color, contradict, or entirely cancel out a fact that has scientific evidence behind it.. if you aren't careful about separating those fact sets.
Having a clear, logical (as can be) world view as a Christian actually takes a lot more mental work than an Atheist world view.
Most Christians do not take the time to read books on the philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, etc.. and never truly reconcile their 'faith based things they know' with their 'science based things they know'.
An Atheist really has no work to do in making their world view logically sound. They only have one set of 'facts' to work with.
I currently have a relative with little time left. She is a fairly devout Christian.
In her case, despite odds of success near 0, she is trying every treatment possible to overcome the condition.
I am sure that the reasons devout people fight death are varied, but in my relative's case, she fights for the small chance to not have her family saddened. I'm sure she doesn't want to leave her 3 children either.
But in general, I would guess that many devout Christians, who love their families and hate to see them sad, almost feel a bit 'christ-like' as they suffer for a chance at a better outcome.
I personally wouldn't choose to fight to my last breath if I knew that it was pointless, and I would hope that my family would support me in ending things sooner.
Sun has a good chunk of the education market. I can't recall a school using IBM hardware or software.
Likewise, Sun has made huge strides in virtualization, and their ultrasparc processors are extremely powerful, and cheap. In fact, their entire ultrasparc server line is, overall, very cheap for the performance.
Sun also has a much more 'hip' image than IBM, owning the popular mysql, and generally being more trendy. Somewhat like the Apple of the server world.
This purchase would make IBM much more relevant in several areas. I'm not exactly sure what Sun gets out of the deal though.
IT gets a bad rap for having a large amount of "brilliant esoteric magic workers" because it is a field that is poorly understood by our society at large.
If everyone understood basic code, management especially, that "brilliant but ahole magic programmer" would most likely be seen as just an average ahole with poor social skills.
The vast majority of projects in IT can be broken down to simple code steps. "Brilliance" in code is usually not required.
And I'd argue that the majority of programmers who are considered "brilliant" in an average workplace, are most likely just really motivated self-learners. That is not a measure of intelligence, more likely, it is simply a measure of how much a programmer enjoys programming.
"Wait... Didn't Obama say he was all for transparency? How less transparent can you get that you can't even disclose a treaty about copyright without it being a matter of "national security". Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
"Jamie Love, director of the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International, filed the Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in this week's denial from the White House. The denial letter (PDF) was sent to Love on Tuesday by Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. "
Do you know how many FOIA requests the Whitehouse deals with? http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/omb/foia/foiaan05.pdf That one report I found, shows that 200+ were processed in one year. I highly doubt that the president has time to review each one. It is handled by staff.
All this 'new boss same as the old boss' stuff is a bit unfair imo. And he did say that his staff was pouring through all the old orders and he'll revoke them as time allows.
Here is what I see as major differences between the old and new administration in this very short time period we have to evaluate him.
1. Problem solving: The mini-summits he has to discuss issues. Can you imagine GWB having a mini summit and then giving the first comment/question to say, Nancy Pelosi? Yet Obama did that, giving the first comment to McCain. 2. Selling his ideas rather than staying behind in Washington while politicians huffed and puffed and showboated. He went straight to the people and put the pressure on, attempting to counter-act the rhetoric. 3. He interviewed on an Arabic news station. 4. He is directing his international staff to be open to discussion from anyone.
If you want more, lookup Rachel Maddows short video segment called "Best Month Ever".
Regardless, his background, his family, his GRADES, other things like... oh... not having alcohol and cocaine problems in the past... etc...gives me hope that given time, he'll make things better.
Honestly, if you were hiring at a business that needed an employee to analyze and make critical decisions about a wide range of problems, you think there's no difference between Bush and Obama?
Give the guy a break. You can call him the 'same as the old boss' after we see the end of 8 years of work.
""The problem is that teachers don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of control over the end product: namely, their own students. At best they can guide and influence, but even in the best of situations, more often than not students will be affected by things completely beyond the teacher's ability to predict or control. It is thus grossly unfair to use student performance as a measure of teacher performance, simply because the ties between them are much too loose.""
Wouldn't all the uncontrollable factors somewhat cancel out across a large enough sampling of classrooms?
Or at least several baselines and rates of growth (growth in student success) could be established to measure from. Categorized by the major factors that can contribute to educational success or failure.
For instance: Baseline/Growth A: inner city w/ poverty rate of X
That could be 1 baseline & growth rate that all inner city teachers could be measured against.
A teacher at a public school in an affluent suburb would be subject to another baseline.
Many jobs give bonuses based on factors beyond the employees control. Although, in general, they are linked to performance as best as possible.
"As to why Obama's doing it, well, two reasons. First, it satisfies a niche constituency, who like to see abortion-related topics pressed to the forefront at every opportunity. Second, his tax plan does probably kill off the possibility of private funding."
First, this is only an abortion related topic if you have no clue where the majority of the cells come from, and second, most sustained medical funding comes from foundations who have specialized missions, taxes are irrelevant to their mission.
Likewise, other funding would come from venture capitalists. They won't stop funding 'ventures' just because they have 5-10% more taxes.
Good points. "Life is a continuum" is most likely the best way to look at the situation, unfortunately, it does not really answer anything.
Lets go to a point in the future where science is able to support life of any type indefinitely.
Take a full grown human, conscience, perfectly healthy.
Cut off his/her arms in an accident. Everyone would agree that the person is still human and conscience and deserving of protection.
Both legs gone. Still a person. Torso gone, science sustains the head with pumps etc.. still a person. Lower jaw gone. Both eyes gone. Part of the brain gone. Keep going, keep removing.
At what point along the continuum would even the most hardened religious right agree that the remaining cells are no longer "a person"?
What if what was left was just a piece of say.. elbow in a jar, kept alive by advances in science?
What makes a person complete? Where along the continuum of growth (or loss) does a person stop being a person?
These are philosophical questions, not scientific ones. At some point, an arbitrary definition of person must be made.
At this point in time, the courts and half of America, has agreed that the moment of conception is not the definition of a person.
Likewise, they have agreed that a brain dead 'person' is no longer a person. But what about "just a little bit of activity". When is dead, dead enough?
These are questions that can only be answered by making arbitrary definitions of life/death.
As time and science march on, we've seen religion slowly evolve into a set of beliefs that are untestable in most cases. "Smart" religions have changed, moving away from a "god of the gaps" approach (whereby if science can't explain it, the resulting gap must be god), to areas of philosophy that will always be untestable.
I think that as more time passes, say, several hundred more years, religions will find a better balance with science, namely, by removing their notion of spirituality from the natural world, and placing it in a realm outside of science.
I can see a day when Catholics (for example) do not have an opinion on abortion or contraception, as that is merely part of the 'natural world' and not part of being spiritual in any way. Well, one can hope.
I would most likely support him even if he were 10x more callous and pushy.
Science needs a few more pushy folks shouting at least as loud as the literal-religious/ultra-conservative-religious/whatever you want to label them...
Some religious person might say "You'll burn in hell if you don't believe in X".
Dawkins (I assume) might say "You'll make bad choices and are being a bit dumb for believing in X".
As far as I'm concerned, being threatened with an eternity in agony and torment is mild compared with what I've heard about Dawkins approach:)
"This is a complete non-story and the sort of symbolic political crap...."
I do not think this is a non-story at all. Far from it.
When people elected to public office make contradictory statements, hold views that are illogical, and display a huge lack of scientific understanding (caused either by a personal lack of understanding or a lack of qualified advisors in said subject), then it should be deemed very newsworthy.
The citizens of Oklahoma are now more informed about their public officials' shortcomings.
Should the phone company be charged with helping to facilitate escort/prostitution services?
I see full page adds for escort/prostitutes in all sorts of magazines and daily newspapers.
Once again, if enough "breakers of the law" are congregating in one place to "break the law", you'd think that the Sheriff would be stoked to have all those people in one place to investigate.
Craigslist shouldn't have to police any of their posts. It is a method of communication that is no different than a physical billboard (besides the scope and ease of use).
Graphs do show some correlation with other data though. Whether it's the cause or just the effect, I'm not sure.
Visualizingeconomics.com has some pretty neat graphs.
It seems to be down right now:(
I wanted to link to a graph comparing the differences in wealth between rich and poor, and one that overlayed the differences in taxes.
Basically, it looks EXACTLY like the great depression (graph ran from 1919 to present). Massive income gap between the top and bottom, and a very low (historically speaking) taxation of the rich.
A) 1000 a day is fairly small. I server 12,000 unique logins per day with 1 web server (multiple back-ends, so point b) B) Rather than cluster the entire application/site, it is usually better to separate the applications and processes and give them either their own virtualized server space or their own physical server.
Database on one server Middleware/application on another Static content on another, etc..
Not only can you figure out bottlenecks easier, but when/if you need to upgrade, you are putting resources directly where they are needed.
In terms of high availability, (in addition to the usual hardware duplications and backups/failovers, etc..) I would recommend virtualizing all your services into something like ZFS containers or vmware.
If a server dies, being able to quickly transfer a virtual zone (from backup) to a new server is very nice.
There is evidence of wars 7,000 years ago. And I am fully aware that Catal is land-locked:) I was attempting to show that large cities did in fact exist pre-greek, pre-egyptian, and more likely than not, we are probably missing quite a few large cities due to the rise in the ocean over time.
>"Please repeat after me: Plato didn't speak Egyptian. Plato didn't ever visit Egypt. Plato had exactly zero access to any >Egyptian knowledge beyond what traders brought to Athens. Plato wasn't L. Ron Hubbard."
Huh? Plato referred to a "source", not himself. Most likely, his source, was traders bringing mythology up from Egypt. People that.. you know, most probably spoke several languages. Your sentence, >"It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians."
That is what I was explaining: its not mentioned in any archives (if you can call them that) in Egypt because of the reasons I previously listed (in a nutshell, secrecy and self-centered culture).
>"I love, by the way, how you've managed to turn the single worst practice of the Egyptian priests, systematic exclusion of >nearly everyone from free access to information, into some kind of argument for their possession of knowledge going back >thousands of years before the First Dynasty.
I did no such thing. I just said that they were secretive and symbolic, and that could be a reason why there is no records in Egypt of Plato's Atlantis. It is also just as likely that a trader or merchant that told Plato the story, said "the egyptians told me this story" and he was wrong about its origin.
>"Just because there's a big natural disaster mentioned in ancient texts doesn't mean you get to point to any prehistoric >period of increased rainfall and say "that's what they were talking about." You have to make a colorable argument to connect >the two using more than just correlation/causation,"
Someone already is doing that, and is making great headway right now. I just watched a history channel show on it. He looked at all the flood myths, plotted their density and relative levels of how bad the flood was in their eyes, and pinpointed a likely comet impact area off the coast of Madagascar. In addition, there were comet/crater impact scientists (forgot their names, google around, you'll find them) how have been looking at ocean sea floor cores from the area and discovered fairly good evidence for an impact.
Lots of similar myths, and hard physical evidence. Like most of science, it is 100% yet (or ever:), but getting there. At any rate, all I wanted to show was an example of most likely real knowledge persisting through vasts amounts of time.
>"You can start fuming about how evil academics are now."
My degree is in Anthropology, and I'm not a 'nutty atlantis believer' if that is what you think. I just have an interest in Near Eastern pre-history.
The rich provide the bulk of the federal tax dollars because they have the bulk of the country's money. You can argue about the percent of income taxed based on your bracket (forever) but posting numbers like yours only show where the money is, and do not illuminate any percent of income taxed disparities.
As you can see, the super rich get taxed fairly hard.
However, look at the differences in gross income pre and post tax. The inequality in after tax income is so massive between the top 1% and just about anyone else, that I have no problem taxing them 40% and redistributing their wealth.
Go google for income inequality chart/graph. The rich have been getting richer, so I'm not feeling too sorry for them.
"The new Administration has fallen far short of a lot of people's expectations, including mine. "
In terms of their initial decisions, or the amount they have accomplished (or not accomplished)? Because it is pretty safe to say that Obama has done more in the first month than nearly any president in history.
Slashdot Mirror
cnn and nytimes are observing the effects of various things without looking at GDP, and the return on the tax dollar cut 'investment'.
Please look up the data here:
http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo/
One-year change in real GDP for a given policy change per dollar
Tax Provisions
Non-refundable rebate 1.02
Refundable rebate 1.26
Payroll tax holiday 1.29
Across the board tax cut 1.03
Accelerated depreciation 0.27
Extend alternative minimum tax patch 0.48
Make income tax cuts expiring in 2010 permanent 0.29
Make expiring dividend and capital gains tax cuts permanent 0.37
Reduce corporate tax rates 0.30
Spending Provisions
Extend unemployment compensation benefits 1.64
Temporary increase in food stamps 1.73
Revenue transfers to state governments 1.36
Increase infrastructure spending 1.59
Source: Mark Zandi, Moodyâ(TM)s Economy.com.
This is one of the "anti-bail-out" posts that I actually agree with.
It does set a bad precedent. However, it has to be done to fix the economy.
Hopefully, after all this is over, we can put the regulations back in place that Regan removed, and add some additional ones to help prevent this from happening again.
Should I bust out the correlation != causation?
And McCain was the 3rd top receiver of AIG campaign funds.
What is this modded +5 insightful?
I've read the parent post a dozen times now, and it makes less and less sense every time I read it.
The president and congress have no problem inciting mob rule and violence? WTF? You honestly believe that? Exaggerate much?
We have a president going on a comedy show, doing town hall meetings, because he is continually trying to stay in communication with the people... you know... that mob that SHOULD rule the country.
About "disingenuously declaring shock"... he has to for political reasons of course... but if people were being intelligent about this, we wouldn't care.
170 million is a drop in the bucket, is standard business practice, without the bonuses AIG despite having money would cease to function, as its employees would leave.
I keep hearing "why are we giving bonuses to people that caused the mess". AIG's employees caused the mess? Really? They were doing what everyone else was doing, and what was working very well for a very long time. If they didn't do "what caused the mess" they would have been fired.
This is very similar to the IT sayings like "no one every got fired for choosing IBM" "or microsoft", etc.. it was standard business practice to do what they were doing in almost every major financial institution.
Is it risky to base your entire IT structure on one vendor controlled platform? Sure. Do people do it anyway and stay succesful? Yup.
It is hard to pickup all the nuances of your post, due to your limited language skills, so I doubt I understand most of your ranting...
Thank you for that post. This country has had a great depression in the past, and data on what works and doesn't work to get us out of a depression.
What Obama is doing is necessary. This has absolutely nothing to do with scratching backs or 'old boy networks'.
Stimulus means massive amounts of money injected into banking, infrastructure, and other proven methods to increase spending and lending.
On another side of this debate:
I find it absolutely infuriating that the Republicans in the house and senate are blatantly ignoring the facts about what is and isn't stimulating.
For example, the below is true:
Tax cuts: Not stimulating.
Food stamps: Stimulating.
The congressional research center has great data on the effects of many things, and the numbers just do not support the Republican notion that tax cuts and 'less spending' will in any way get us out of depression.
Reminds me of an NPR radio show I listened to a week or so ago.
It was about all the aid that western countries have given to Africa. The basic gist was that the aid has hurt the countries, by not providing incentive to innovate and create infrastructure on their own.....
Apparently there are many/some/vocal (not sure) leaders/writers etc.. that are native Africans, asking for the aid to please stop.
I don't know enough about the history of aid in Africa to comment in detail on it, but I found it an interesting twist: that even our pure food aid is beginning to be viewed as a mistake by some.
The articles I read did not suggest using food crops for biofuels.
Rather, the starvation would be a result of previously food producing land being used to produce switchgrass or other biofuel crops, thereby driving the cost of food up.
"To say that all Christians, such as myself, are lazy doubters is as unrealistic as to say that Atheists have a monopoly on intelligent thought."
I don't think anyone would say "all christians are lazy doubters".
But you must admit, having a set 'facts' in ones head, only supported by faith, means that there is a chance that a faith-based 'fact' can color, contradict, or entirely cancel out a fact that has scientific evidence behind it.. if you aren't careful about separating those fact sets.
Having a clear, logical (as can be) world view as a Christian actually takes a lot more mental work than an Atheist world view.
Most Christians do not take the time to read books on the philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, etc.. and never truly reconcile their 'faith based things they know' with their 'science based things they know'.
An Atheist really has no work to do in making their world view logically sound. They only have one set of 'facts' to work with.
I currently have a relative with little time left. She is a fairly devout Christian.
In her case, despite odds of success near 0, she is trying every treatment possible to overcome the condition.
I am sure that the reasons devout people fight death are varied, but in my relative's case, she fights for the small chance to not have her family saddened. I'm sure she doesn't want to leave her 3 children either.
But in general, I would guess that many devout Christians, who love their families and hate to see them sad, almost feel a bit 'christ-like' as they suffer for a chance at a better outcome.
I personally wouldn't choose to fight to my last breath if I knew that it was pointless, and I would hope that my family would support me in ending things sooner.
Sun has a good chunk of the education market. I can't recall a school using IBM hardware or software.
Likewise, Sun has made huge strides in virtualization, and their ultrasparc processors are extremely powerful, and cheap. In fact, their entire ultrasparc server line is, overall, very cheap for the performance.
Sun also has a much more 'hip' image than IBM, owning the popular mysql, and generally being more trendy. Somewhat like the Apple of the server world.
This purchase would make IBM much more relevant in several areas. I'm not exactly sure what Sun gets out of the deal though.
IT gets a bad rap for having a large amount of "brilliant esoteric magic workers" because it is a field that is poorly understood by our society at large.
If everyone understood basic code, management especially, that "brilliant but ahole magic programmer" would most likely be seen as just an average ahole with poor social skills.
The vast majority of projects in IT can be broken down to simple code steps. "Brilliance" in code is usually not required.
And I'd argue that the majority of programmers who are considered "brilliant" in an average workplace, are most likely just really motivated self-learners. That is not a measure of intelligence, more likely, it is simply a measure of how much a programmer enjoys programming.
"Wait... Didn't Obama say he was all for transparency? How less transparent can you get that you can't even disclose a treaty about copyright without it being a matter of "national security". Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
"Jamie Love, director of the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International, filed the Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in this week's denial from the White House. The denial letter (PDF) was sent to Love on Tuesday by Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. "
Do you know how many FOIA requests the Whitehouse deals with?
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/omb/foia/foiaan05.pdf
That one report I found, shows that 200+ were processed in one year. I highly doubt that the president has time to review each one. It is handled by staff.
All this 'new boss same as the old boss' stuff is a bit unfair imo. And he did say that his staff was pouring through all the old orders and he'll revoke them as time allows.
Here is what I see as major differences between the old and new administration in this very short time period we have to evaluate him.
1. Problem solving: The mini-summits he has to discuss issues. Can you imagine GWB having a mini summit and then giving the first comment/question to say, Nancy Pelosi? Yet Obama did that, giving the first comment to McCain.
2. Selling his ideas rather than staying behind in Washington while politicians huffed and puffed and showboated. He went straight to the people and put the pressure on, attempting to counter-act the rhetoric.
3. He interviewed on an Arabic news station.
4. He is directing his international staff to be open to discussion from anyone.
If you want more, lookup Rachel Maddows short video segment called "Best Month Ever".
Regardless, his background, his family, his GRADES, other things like... oh... not having alcohol and cocaine problems in the past... etc...gives me hope that given time, he'll make things better.
Honestly, if you were hiring at a business that needed an employee to analyze and make critical decisions about a wide range of problems, you think there's no difference between Bush and Obama?
Give the guy a break. You can call him the 'same as the old boss' after we see the end of 8 years of work.
""The problem is that teachers don't (and shouldn't) have that kind of control over the end product: namely, their own students. At best they can guide and influence, but even in the best of situations, more often than not students will be affected by things completely beyond the teacher's ability to predict or control. It is thus grossly unfair to use student performance as a measure of teacher performance, simply because the ties between them are much too loose.""
Wouldn't all the uncontrollable factors somewhat cancel out across a large enough sampling of classrooms?
Or at least several baselines and rates of growth (growth in student success) could be established to measure from. Categorized by the major factors that can contribute to educational success or failure.
For instance:
Baseline/Growth A: inner city w/ poverty rate of X
That could be 1 baseline & growth rate that all inner city teachers could be measured against.
A teacher at a public school in an affluent suburb would be subject to another baseline.
Many jobs give bonuses based on factors beyond the employees control. Although, in general, they are linked to performance as best as possible.
T
"As to why Obama's doing it, well, two reasons. First, it satisfies a niche constituency, who like to see abortion-related topics pressed to the forefront at every opportunity. Second, his tax plan does probably kill off the possibility of private funding."
First, this is only an abortion related topic if you have no clue where the majority of the cells come from, and second, most sustained medical funding comes from foundations who have specialized missions, taxes are irrelevant to their mission.
Likewise, other funding would come from venture capitalists. They won't stop funding 'ventures' just because they have 5-10% more taxes.
Good points.
"Life is a continuum" is most likely the best way to look at the situation, unfortunately, it does not really answer anything.
Lets go to a point in the future where science is able to support life of any type indefinitely.
Take a full grown human, conscience, perfectly healthy.
Cut off his/her arms in an accident. Everyone would agree that the person is still human and conscience and deserving of protection.
Both legs gone. Still a person.
Torso gone, science sustains the head with pumps etc.. still a person.
Lower jaw gone. Both eyes gone. Part of the brain gone. Keep going, keep removing.
At what point along the continuum would even the most hardened religious right agree that the remaining cells are no longer "a person"?
What if what was left was just a piece of say.. elbow in a jar, kept alive by advances in science?
What makes a person complete? Where along the continuum of growth (or loss) does a person stop being a person?
These are philosophical questions, not scientific ones. At some point, an arbitrary definition of person must be made.
At this point in time, the courts and half of America, has agreed that the moment of conception is not the definition of a person.
Likewise, they have agreed that a brain dead 'person' is no longer a person. But what about "just a little bit of activity". When is dead, dead enough?
These are questions that can only be answered by making arbitrary definitions of life/death.
As time and science march on, we've seen religion slowly evolve into a set of beliefs that are untestable in most cases. "Smart" religions have changed, moving away from a "god of the gaps" approach (whereby if science can't explain it, the resulting gap must be god), to areas of philosophy that will always be untestable.
I think that as more time passes, say, several hundred more years, religions will find a better balance with science, namely, by removing their notion of spirituality from the natural world, and placing it in a realm outside of science.
I can see a day when Catholics (for example) do not have an opinion on abortion or contraception, as that is merely part of the 'natural world' and not part of being spiritual in any way. Well, one can hope.
I would most likely support him even if he were 10x more callous and pushy.
Science needs a few more pushy folks shouting at least as loud as the literal-religious/ultra-conservative-religious/whatever you want to label them...
Some religious person might say "You'll burn in hell if you don't believe in X".
Dawkins (I assume) might say "You'll make bad choices and are being a bit dumb for believing in X".
As far as I'm concerned, being threatened with an eternity in agony and torment is mild compared with what I've heard about Dawkins approach:)
"This is a complete non-story and the sort of symbolic political crap...."
I do not think this is a non-story at all. Far from it.
When people elected to public office make contradictory statements, hold views that are illogical, and display a huge lack of scientific understanding (caused either by a personal lack of understanding or a lack of qualified advisors in said subject), then it should be deemed very newsworthy.
The citizens of Oklahoma are now more informed about their public officials' shortcomings.
doTheSend()... that is amusing. I think it is even funnier that they left the code in:
C:\Documents and Settings\qeuc34\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\Skills\
So..I guess they could only afford one copy of Visual Studio, and it is....on the server..../boggle
And production code running from "My Documents" haha.
Should the phone company be charged with helping to facilitate escort/prostitution services?
I see full page adds for escort/prostitutes in all sorts of magazines and daily newspapers.
Once again, if enough "breakers of the law" are congregating in one place to "break the law", you'd think that the Sheriff would be stoked to have all those people in one place to investigate.
Craigslist shouldn't have to police any of their posts. It is a method of communication that is no different than a physical billboard (besides the scope and ease of use).
After all, it nicely lists all the sex providers for him to go after.
Of course, that would be a lot of work for him. So I can understand his desire to secure society by making the location of sex providers obscure ;)
Graphs do show some correlation with other data though. Whether it's the cause or just the effect, I'm not sure.
Visualizingeconomics.com has some pretty neat graphs.
It seems to be down right now:(
I wanted to link to a graph comparing the differences in wealth between rich and poor, and one that overlayed the differences in taxes.
Basically, it looks EXACTLY like the great depression (graph ran from 1919 to present). Massive income gap between the top and bottom, and a very low (historically speaking) taxation of the rich.
W
A) 1000 a day is fairly small. I server 12,000 unique logins per day with 1 web server (multiple back-ends, so point b)
B) Rather than cluster the entire application/site, it is usually better to separate the applications and processes and give them either their own virtualized server space or their own physical server.
Database on one server
Middleware/application on another
Static content on another, etc..
Not only can you figure out bottlenecks easier, but when/if you need to upgrade, you are putting resources directly where they are needed.
In terms of high availability, (in addition to the usual hardware duplications and backups/failovers, etc..) I would recommend virtualizing all your services into something like ZFS containers or vmware.
If a server dies, being able to quickly transfer a virtual zone (from backup) to a new server is very nice.
>"So no, they weren't going to be fighting any wars"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare
There is evidence of wars 7,000 years ago. And I am fully aware that Catal is land-locked:) I was attempting to show that large cities did in fact exist pre-greek, pre-egyptian, and more likely than not, we are probably missing quite a few large cities due to the rise in the ocean over time.
>"Please repeat after me: Plato didn't speak Egyptian. Plato didn't ever visit Egypt. Plato had exactly zero access to any >Egyptian knowledge beyond what traders brought to Athens. Plato wasn't L. Ron Hubbard."
Huh? Plato referred to a "source", not himself. Most likely, his source, was traders bringing mythology up from Egypt. People that.. you know, most probably spoke several languages. Your sentence,
>"It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians."
That is what I was explaining: its not mentioned in any archives (if you can call them that) in Egypt because of the reasons I previously listed (in a nutshell, secrecy and self-centered culture).
>"I love, by the way, how you've managed to turn the single worst practice of the Egyptian priests, systematic exclusion of >nearly everyone from free access to information, into some kind of argument for their possession of knowledge going back >thousands of years before the First Dynasty.
I did no such thing. I just said that they were secretive and symbolic, and that could be a reason why there is no records in Egypt of Plato's Atlantis. It is also just as likely that a trader or merchant that told Plato the story, said "the egyptians told me this story" and he was wrong about its origin.
>"Just because there's a big natural disaster mentioned in ancient texts doesn't mean you get to point to any prehistoric >period of increased rainfall and say "that's what they were talking about." You have to make a colorable argument to connect >the two using more than just correlation/causation,"
Someone already is doing that, and is making great headway right now. I just watched a history channel show on it. He looked at all the flood myths, plotted their density and relative levels of how bad the flood was in their eyes, and pinpointed a likely comet impact area off the coast of Madagascar. In addition, there were comet/crater impact scientists (forgot their names, google around, you'll find them) how have been looking at ocean sea floor cores from the area and discovered fairly good evidence for an impact.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/did-a-comet-cause-the-great-flood/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=
Lots of similar myths, and hard physical evidence. Like most of science, it is 100% yet (or ever:), but getting there. At any rate, all I wanted to show was an example of most likely real knowledge persisting through vasts amounts of time.
>"You can start fuming about how evil academics are now."
My degree is in Anthropology, and I'm not a 'nutty atlantis believer' if that is what you think. I just have an interest in Near Eastern pre-history.
You are describing a symptom, not a cause.
The rich provide the bulk of the federal tax dollars because they have the bulk of the country's money. You can argue about the percent of income taxed based on your bracket (forever) but posting numbers like yours only show where the money is, and do not illuminate any percent of income taxed disparities.
This will show you what you really wanted to describe, the disparity in income tax percent:
http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2008/03/16/average-income-pretax-vs-aftertax-2005/
As you can see, the super rich get taxed fairly hard.
However, look at the differences in gross income pre and post tax. The inequality in after tax income is so massive between the top 1% and just about anyone else, that I have no problem taxing them 40% and redistributing their wealth.
Go google for income inequality chart/graph. The rich have been getting richer, so I'm not feeling too sorry for them.
"The new Administration has fallen far short of a lot of people's expectations, including mine. "
In terms of their initial decisions, or the amount they have accomplished (or not accomplished)?
Because it is pretty safe to say that Obama has done more in the first month than nearly any president in history.
http://www.truveo.com/Best-month-ever/id/288230385403245323