State and local taxes are deductable. Any city that provides a service like this is getting a tax subsidy from the rest of us.
So, from a strictly self-interest stand point, cities should continue to provide more and more services, since that will lower their overall Federal tax burden.
Of course, that means more federal debt and eventually more taxes for the rest of us.
So the next time you wonder how it is a city can have high taxes and not be hurt much economically, remember that the federal government is making it possible.
This entry by an economist comments on the situation in New York City.
They gave up on their roots when they decided they needed the Christian Right.
And they did need them. The Democrats dominated government for 50 years. Appealing to Christians was their only way in. And even with Reagan, they only had a piece of congressional control for 6 years.
In fact, I think 2004 was the first time in 70+ years that the Republicans had both the congress and Presidency. The Democrats had that numerous times over those same 70 years.
What party wants to amend the US Constitution to tell the states that they can't legalize same-sex marriage? The Right hates States' Rights. The digusting thing about the Right though is that they use the rhetoric of States' Rights while systematically eroding it.
If they didn't care about states' rights, why are they bothering with the amendment process?
They can just do what the Democrats did: invoke the interstate commerce clause and regulate.
I mean, why do they put themselves through all the trouble?
Prohibition was *repealed* under FDR. With another constitutional amendment. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it.
That only proves my point.
It was easy under FDR to claim addition Federal powers. Yet when it came time to reduce the Federal government's power, in this case over alcohol, it took another amendment.
Even with prohibition appealed, the Federal government expanded its powers by invoking the interstate commerce clause. They claimed that, even with the appeal of prohibition, they STILL had power to regulate alcohol. That's why there is no amendment prohibiting marijuana, or cocain, or similar because this new found power made it unnessary.
And what about the income tax amendment of the same period? You think it's there just so the government can collect taxes? That amendment also repeals the previous constitution requirement that tax money be fairly apportioned to the states. The income tax amendment changed that. Now the government can assert its power by refusing to give states back the money they paid in taxes unless the states agree to the federal government's demands -- another power grab.
The left is the political wing that supported FDR, Mr. Nationalize Everything, and thinks that "states' rights" is just a codeword for racism.
The philosophy is coming back to bite them on the ass, I suppose.
The shift during the FDR admin should be obvious to everyone. Consider for example prohibition of alcohol, which required an amendment, and later federal laws regulating things like marijuana.
As conservative as people were to want prohibition, they followed the difficult process of getting an amendment to the constitution. They needed to convince 75% of the states and 2/3 of congress.
When the political left took over with FDR, they basically just blew off the process and claimed "hey, the federal government had the power all along! (now that we're in charge).
I wonder why some US people still say that they live in the land of the Free with all the regulation that their government is imposing on them...
Do you include regulations on people in industry or business?
What about forcing people to serve customers they may not want to serve? Are people free to be jerks in business? Should they be free to descriminate? Do you consider involuntary servitude a loss of freedom?
Often times when people complain about the loss of freedom, they usual mean just their own. What about you?
We could avoid much hostility and conflict if we'd just agree to let each community decide for itself what is permitted.
The right tries to set standards for the whole country, while the left refuses to allow anyone to set any standards anywhere.
Folks, there are all sorts of people out there and just as many ideas about how communities ought to operate.
Some like the order and peace that comes with tough limits on behavior, and some like the thrill of anarchy.
So long as people have the right to choose the city/town/village/rural backwater compatible with their outlook I don't see what the problem is leaving each community to decide for itself what is or isn't appropriate.
"The birthday paradox states that if there are 23 people in a room then there is a slightly more than 50:50 chance that at least two of them will have the same birthday. For 60 or more people, the probability is greater than 99%. This is not a paradox in the sense of it leading to a logical contradiction; it is a paradox in the sense that it is a mathematical truth that contradicts common intuition. Most people estimate that the chance is much lower than 50:50."
Applied here, suppose you have 365 songs. How many random selections must be played before you have about a 50:50 chance of hearing a repeat? Just 23 songs.
What most people want is not random selection, but random order.
If nothing actually uses that memory. For example, if you had 15TB of RAM (I don't like over-exaggerating), the vast majority would be doing nothing, hence it wouldn't be helpful.
It depends on what you mean by "doing nothing".
With 15TB you could do massive pre-computation of scene details. When it came time to render, you could access some part of the 15TB for real-time display. Your interactions with the scene might mean that you never get near accessing a total of 15TB, but all the data needs to be there just in case.
So, is it doing nothing just because you might never access it?
with 16 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines clocked at 540MHz. The graphics card's 512MB of DDR3 SDRAM operate at 1180MHz speed and have 256-bit memory interface. Kinda sad but this card is more powerful then my PC on it's stats alone
The real shame is how hard it is to use all this power for anything but games.
A big part of the problem has been the "one way" AGP bus. It's great for getting data to the card, but its as slow as basic PCI when getting data back. PCI-Express should help change this.
The other problem is the difficulty in getting information about low-level programming of the card's hardware and the fact that this often changes from generation to generation of card.
Still, I think eventually most computing will be done with GPU like hardware with an Intel/AMD processor as a peripheral for compatibility.
We have promoted the freedom of money to move here and there with no friction, move in, profit, move on to the next market. I say this is fine if the labor that the capital requires can also move freely across borders with no friction or with as little friction as the money.
Then free markets will have more meaning.
But the movement of money has actually reduced the need for labor to move. Now, instead of labor traveling a thousand miles, the capital travels to the labor. That a much better situation for labor.
Consider for example the 40,000 mostly Irish laborers that died abord ships, in a single year, while coming to America for work.
So you readily admit your "free market" nonsense term means that you get yours and some poor asshole in China gets barely tolerable wage slavery?
No. We BOTH get something. That's why the wage earner bothers working. Its a form of reciprocity. Do you think he just stuffs dollars under his matress? No. He later trades them for goods and services.
So it's not slavery. It's trade.
Let me ask you something: why do "free markets" always mean that labor has almost no value? Yet, interestingly - labor must surely carry the force of democracy, there simply being more laborers than owners.
Labor has almost no value because labor is common and labor accomplishes little without organization or the right equipment.
I can dig and hole and fill it back in, claiming that I worked hard, but what has been accomplished?
And so what if labor must carry the force of democracy? Democracy is just a collective decision making procedure and as such often produces mediocre results. There is no magic in democracy. There is nothing special about a bunch of people getting together and claiming authority over all because they have the larger numbers.
So why aren't laborers more in charge of the world as we know it?
Because they are ignorant. Not stupid, mind you, just ignorant. The people in power know how capital works. Labor is kept in the dark by capitalists that fear competition from more potential capitalists, and by "labor advocates" that don't know shit about how capital works and don't care. Hell, they promote ignorance of how capital works. They're always promising labor some utopia out there if we just throw the capitalists out.
Maybe there's a wealth and power factor I'm just not considering...
What you should consider is the real improvement in the lives of chinese labor. Forget the unconfortable feeling you get when you consider the small wage the laborer is earning. That feeling isn't logic or reason. That feeling is blinding you to the genuine improvement in the life of a person that would otherwise be a rural peasant with no options.
It reminds me of the experiments done with people where a person is given the option of taking $10 or not. The catch is that the person is told another person will receive $10, or $100 or $500 if they choose to take the $10.
It's interesting how the average person acts. The average person will often refuse the $10 if the other person gets $100 or $500.
When economists are tested, however, they almost always take the $10.
I submit that you should act like an economist and let the Chinese peasant have his $10 rather than nothing.
I repeat: show me one free market anywhere on earth. Just one. Pretty please?
There are degrees of freedom. China looks to be moving towards greater freedom in it's economy and it seems to be working.
I'm sure the Chinese who put together your $50 DVD-player in sixteen hour shifts every day for a wage they can barely survive on beg to differ.
Oh, you're sure, are you?
The arrogance of certainty.
It so happens that many Chinese working putting together DVD players, etc, do so because the alternative was working as peasant farmers and they didn't want to do that. They know that by earning a wage at a factory they can obtain things they'd never hope to get as farmers.
As small as that wage is, it's still an improvement.
America needs to stop living in fear and start addressing the real threats to society - one of them being the gun culture.
I agree that culture needs to change, but it's not gun culture. It's the thug culture common among Blacks and "macho" Hispanics (and now being adopted by young white men encouraged by things like video games.)
Selected U.S. Homicide Rates by Race for 2000 (per 100,000)
Race Total Non-gun White-Non-Hispanic 2.76 1.31 Black 22.28 6.14 White-Hispanic 9.59 3.14 All U.S. 6.09 2.17
The increased sample rate would more accuratly represent the music especialy at higher frequencys. This is because the nyquist sampling therom (1/2 sample rate = highest detectable freq) is a minimum requirement for capturing a frequency at that limit -- it doesn't mean that it's at all accurate.
One of my pet peeves is when people use Nyquist to justify a certain sampling rate without realizing that you need ALL the samples SIMULTANEOUSLY to perfectly reconstruct the signal.
Simply running the last few X samples through a filter isn't going to do it.
We all know that, when Word underlines a word as being misspelled, it has performed a search of the spelling dictionary and come up dry, and therefore not returned any results. But it has still performed a search. We know that.
You're anthropomorphizing.
The computer is not literally searching. It is simply mechanically following a set of instructions. The lable "search" is for our benefit.
And your definition of what consitutes "reasonable" is poor. A reasonable search doesn't have to find anything to be considered reasonable. There only has to be cause. The search may prove fruitless, but that doesn't mean it was unreasonable.
If a police car drives over me while there is no-one in it, and with the accelerator stuck down have I been run over?
That's not the same thing.
Consider this: the computer you're using "sees" everything you type and everything you watch and listen to.
Is it violating your privacy?
It seems silly to think so.
A violation of privacy seems to require a conscious observer to gain information improperly. A maching is not a conscious observer. It can't know or learn anything about you.
The article brings up an interesting question: Can a machine violate your privacy?
Consider the hypothetical(?) packet sniffer that alerts on packets that contain evidence of criminal activity but lets all other packets go on without an alert.
If the authorities never see the contents of the packets for themselves, has a search really been made?
Can a machine/program violate your privacy if no one gets to see what the program has seen?
Slashdot Mirror
State and local taxes are deductable. Any city that provides a service like this is getting a tax subsidy from the rest of us.
So, from a strictly self-interest stand point, cities should continue to provide more and more services, since that will lower their overall Federal tax burden.
Of course, that means more federal debt and eventually more taxes for the rest of us.
So the next time you wonder how it is a city can have high taxes and not be hurt much economically, remember that the federal government is making it possible.
This entry by an economist comments on the situation in New York City.
Were journalists really any better than bloggers, or did they just want us to believe that?
Consider how difficult it was to check the assertions of journalists before the arrival of the internet.
The CBS memos affair was a good example. What did they get away with in the past simply because it was too difficult to verify their sources?
Wouldn't very slight randomizing of packet timestamps completely nullify this method?
I dont think so.
The technique measures the skew in the clock, NOT the variance in the clock.
Besides, the time stamps are already somewhat randomized by the other things going on in the system.
The technique probably alrady uses some sort of averaging to overcome this.
They gave up on their roots when they decided they needed the Christian Right.
And they did need them. The Democrats dominated government for 50 years. Appealing to Christians was their only way in. And even with Reagan, they only had a piece of congressional control for 6 years.
In fact, I think 2004 was the first time in 70+ years that the Republicans had both the congress and Presidency. The Democrats had that numerous times over those same 70 years.
What party wants to amend the US Constitution to tell the states that they can't legalize same-sex marriage? The Right hates States' Rights. The digusting thing about the Right though is that they use the rhetoric of States' Rights while systematically eroding it.
If they didn't care about states' rights, why are they bothering with the amendment process?
They can just do what the Democrats did: invoke the interstate commerce clause and regulate.
I mean, why do they put themselves through all the trouble?
No. The facts don't support your claim.
That only proves my point.
It was easy under FDR to claim addition Federal powers. Yet when it came time to reduce the Federal government's power, in this case over alcohol, it took another amendment.
Even with prohibition appealed, the Federal government expanded its powers by invoking the interstate commerce clause. They claimed that, even with the appeal of prohibition, they STILL had power to regulate alcohol. That's why there is no amendment prohibiting marijuana, or cocain, or similar because this new found power made it unnessary.
And what about the income tax amendment of the same period? You think it's there just so the government can collect taxes? That amendment also repeals the previous constitution requirement that tax money be fairly apportioned to the states. The income tax amendment changed that. Now the government can assert its power by refusing to give states back the money they paid in taxes unless the states agree to the federal government's demands -- another power grab.
It's interesting that Republicans talk about strengthening States' Rights and Federalism, except when it doesn't suit them.
The greatest expansion of federal power came with the "progressives" of the 30s and FDR.
Before that, the Federal government had more limited powers, even with the Republicans in charge.
It's ashame the Republicans gave up on their roots.
The left is the political wing that supported FDR, Mr. Nationalize Everything, and thinks that "states' rights" is just a codeword for racism.
The philosophy is coming back to bite them on the ass, I suppose.
The shift during the FDR admin should be obvious to everyone. Consider for example prohibition of alcohol, which required an amendment, and later federal laws regulating things like marijuana.
As conservative as people were to want prohibition, they followed the difficult process of getting an amendment to the constitution. They needed to convince 75% of the states and 2/3 of congress.
When the political left took over with FDR, they basically just blew off the process and claimed "hey, the federal government had the power all along! (now that we're in charge).
I wonder why some US people still say that they live in the land of the Free with all the regulation that their government is imposing on them...
Do you include regulations on people in industry or business?
What about forcing people to serve customers they may not want to serve? Are people free to be jerks in business? Should they be free to descriminate? Do you consider involuntary servitude a loss of freedom?
Often times when people complain about the loss of freedom, they usual mean just their own. What about you?
We could avoid much hostility and conflict if we'd just agree to let each community decide for itself what is permitted.
The right tries to set standards for the whole country, while the left refuses to allow anyone to set any standards anywhere.
Folks, there are all sorts of people out there and just as many ideas about how communities ought to operate.
Some like the order and peace that comes with tough limits on behavior, and some like the thrill of anarchy.
So long as people have the right to choose the city/town/village/rural backwater compatible with their outlook I don't see what the problem is leaving each community to decide for itself what is or isn't appropriate.
This reminds me of the birthday paradox:
"The birthday paradox states that if there are 23 people in a room then there is a slightly more than 50:50 chance that at least two of them will have the same birthday. For 60 or more people, the probability is greater than 99%. This is not a paradox in the sense of it leading to a logical contradiction; it is a paradox in the sense that it is a mathematical truth that contradicts common intuition. Most people estimate that the chance is much lower than 50:50."
Applied here, suppose you have 365 songs. How many random selections must be played before you have about a 50:50 chance of hearing a repeat? Just 23 songs.
What most people want is not random selection, but random order.
If nothing actually uses that memory. For example, if you had 15TB of RAM (I don't like over-exaggerating), the vast majority would be doing nothing, hence it wouldn't be helpful.
It depends on what you mean by "doing nothing".
With 15TB you could do massive pre-computation of scene details. When it came time to render, you could access some part of the 15TB for real-time display. Your interactions with the scene might mean that you never get near accessing a total of 15TB, but all the data needs to be there just in case.
So, is it doing nothing just because you might never access it?
with 16 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines clocked at 540MHz. The graphics card's 512MB of DDR3 SDRAM operate at 1180MHz speed and have 256-bit memory interface.
Kinda sad but this card is more powerful then my PC on it's stats alone
The real shame is how hard it is to use all this power for anything but games.
A big part of the problem has been the "one way" AGP bus. It's great for getting data to the card, but its as slow as basic PCI when getting data back. PCI-Express should help change this.
The other problem is the difficulty in getting information about low-level programming of the card's hardware and the fact that this often changes from generation to generation of card.
Still, I think eventually most computing will be done with GPU like hardware with an Intel/AMD processor as a peripheral for compatibility.
We have promoted the freedom of money to move here and there with no friction, move in, profit, move on to the next market.
I say this is fine if the labor that the capital requires can also move freely across borders with no friction or with as little friction as the money.
Then free markets will have more meaning.
But the movement of money has actually reduced the need for labor to move. Now, instead of labor traveling a thousand miles, the capital travels to the labor. That a much better situation for labor.
Consider for example the 40,000 mostly Irish laborers that died abord ships, in a single year, while coming to America for work.
Now the capital can come to the labor.
So you readily admit your "free market" nonsense term means that you get yours and some poor asshole in China gets barely tolerable wage slavery?
No. We BOTH get something. That's why the wage earner bothers working. Its a form of reciprocity. Do you think he just stuffs dollars under his matress? No. He later trades them for goods and services.
So it's not slavery. It's trade.
Let me ask you something: why do "free markets" always mean that labor has almost no value? Yet, interestingly - labor must surely carry the force of democracy, there simply being more laborers than owners.
Labor has almost no value because labor is common and labor accomplishes little without organization or the right equipment.
I can dig and hole and fill it back in, claiming that I worked hard, but what has been accomplished?
And so what if labor must carry the force of democracy? Democracy is just a collective decision making procedure and as such often produces mediocre results. There is no magic in democracy. There is nothing special about a bunch of people getting together and claiming authority over all because they have the larger numbers.
So why aren't laborers more in charge of the world as we know it?
Because they are ignorant. Not stupid, mind you, just ignorant. The people in power know how capital works. Labor is kept in the dark by capitalists that fear competition from more potential capitalists, and by "labor advocates" that don't know shit about how capital works and don't care. Hell, they promote ignorance of how capital works. They're always promising labor some utopia out there if we just throw the capitalists out.
Maybe there's a wealth and power factor I'm just not considering...
What you should consider is the real improvement in the lives of chinese labor. Forget the unconfortable feeling you get when you consider the small wage the laborer is earning. That feeling isn't logic or reason. That feeling is blinding you to the genuine improvement in the life of a person that would otherwise be a rural peasant with no options.
It reminds me of the experiments done with people where a person is given the option of taking $10 or not. The catch is that the person is told another person will receive $10, or $100 or $500 if they choose to take the $10.
It's interesting how the average person acts. The average person will often refuse the $10 if the other person gets $100 or $500.
When economists are tested, however, they almost always take the $10.
I submit that you should act like an economist and let the Chinese peasant have his $10 rather than nothing.
I repeat: show me one free market anywhere on earth. Just one. Pretty please?
There are degrees of freedom. China looks to be moving towards greater freedom in it's economy and it seems to be working.
I'm sure the Chinese who put together your $50 DVD-player in sixteen hour shifts every day for a wage they can barely survive on beg to differ.
Oh, you're sure, are you?
The arrogance of certainty.
It so happens that many Chinese working putting together DVD players, etc, do so because the alternative was working as peasant farmers and they didn't want to do that. They know that by earning a wage at a factory they can obtain things they'd never hope to get as farmers.
As small as that wage is, it's still an improvement.
But maybe you know better than they do.
Although China seems to be proving that it's free markets rather than democracy that leads to prosperity.
America needs to stop living in fear and start addressing the real threats to society - one of them being the gun culture.
I agree that culture needs to change, but it's not gun culture. It's the thug culture common among Blacks and "macho" Hispanics (and now being adopted by young white men encouraged by things like video games.)
Selected U.S. Homicide Rates by Race for 2000 (per 100,000)
Race Total Non-gun
White-Non-Hispanic 2.76 1.31
Black 22.28 6.14
White-Hispanic 9.59 3.14
All U.S. 6.09 2.17
Data obtained from theCDC.
As a parent there is only so much you can do.
Unless you lock your kid in the basement, he's going to be raised, whether you like it or not, by plenty of other people.
What then? 2 years? 5? Off with his head? Whatt is going to rehabilitate him?
An ass-kicking.
Oh wait. That's not civilized.
Being civilized means the uncivilized get to walk all over us.
Perhaps Ward Churchill can help us understand why Mr Grisby deserved to be robbed.
The increased sample rate would more accuratly represent the music especialy at higher frequencys. This is because the nyquist sampling therom (1/2 sample rate = highest detectable freq) is a minimum requirement for capturing a frequency at that limit -- it doesn't mean that it's at all accurate.
One of my pet peeves is when people use Nyquist to justify a certain sampling rate without realizing that you need ALL the samples SIMULTANEOUSLY to perfectly reconstruct the signal.
Simply running the last few X samples through a filter isn't going to do it.
We all know that, when Word underlines a word as being misspelled, it has performed a search of the spelling dictionary and come up dry, and therefore not returned any results. But it has still performed a search. We know that.
You're anthropomorphizing.
The computer is not literally searching. It is simply mechanically following a set of instructions. The lable "search" is for our benefit.
And your definition of what consitutes "reasonable" is poor. A reasonable search doesn't have to find anything to be considered reasonable. There only has to be cause. The search may prove fruitless, but that doesn't mean it was unreasonable.
If a police car drives over me while there is no-one in it, and with the accelerator stuck down have I been run over?
That's not the same thing.
Consider this: the computer you're using "sees" everything you type and everything you watch and listen to.
Is it violating your privacy?
It seems silly to think so.
A violation of privacy seems to require a conscious observer to gain information improperly. A maching is not a conscious observer. It can't know or learn anything about you.
The article brings up an interesting question: Can a machine violate your privacy?
Consider the hypothetical(?) packet sniffer that alerts on packets that contain evidence of criminal activity but lets all other packets go on without an alert.
If the authorities never see the contents of the packets for themselves, has a search really been made?
Can a machine/program violate your privacy if no one gets to see what the program has seen?
Just because one event happens after another does not mean that event 1 caused event 2.
And yet, the only thing we can mean by "cause" is that event 1 always seems to be followed by event 2.