Actually, since those bankers (and many CEOs which benefit from low or zero taxation) are exactly the people who are part of the problem - taxing the "rich" will, indeed, get to them.
A more salient point is that if you do not perform some basic triage (namely increasing taxes to plug that sucking chest wound), the patient will die. Cutting of the expensive supplies (programs) of oxygen and food will not, at this point, help - though once he is healed, it would be a good idea to put him on a sensible diet.
That's interesting, and your math is suspect. We are currently covering about 60% of our expenditures with tax revenue, and yet I don't know of a single individual (or household) or corporation that is paying a total AGI rate greater than about 25-26%. I make a bit into 6 figures, have nearly zero deductions (no mortgage, no health costs), and I pay about 12% on my income. Do I want to pay more? No. Could I pay more? Yes. And a 60% increase in my tax rates (to about 20%) would cover the budget. And, trust me, the folks paying 25% could just as easily (or moreso) pay 40% and still put food on the table.
I'm not sure where your math comes from, but to say we couldn't pay for the Gov't would be just plain wrong.
May I ask, Mr. AC - which programs that benefit you - would you like to eliminate? (note, many programs you may not realize benefit you, like the military, any large employer in your area which is a federal contractor, etc.) We need to scale back, but it cannot be done suddenly, or the great depression will look like a walk in the park.
(1) How would you not be backing up to a local resource? (2) Why would you not be using encryption at your user site before sending data to the remote server?
If you're small, choose a small service like SpiderOak. If you're large, build a custom front end.
I don't have particularly sensitive data, so I don't encrypt at my end, though in theory I could (but it would be a pain) and SO had issues with their distributed synchronization back then (note: if I were big enough, I could have hired an IT person to manage the my servers and set op a client side sync that worked). I have no less than 4 copies of my data at two separate local locations, at least one of which is always off-line, in addition to the remote service.
Distrust is a good thing, but it can, imho, be managed.
I'm sure (no, I know) that there is a subset that wants the status symbol, whether its the iFoo for the metrosexual, or the Nexus Foo for the geek crowd - it's the same thing. Most of us just want a device that will do what we need to function, and do it with a minimum of fussing. Apple provides mediocre products that fill 95% of the average users needs and require near zero setup and maintenance - QED.
In the horrible parlance of automotive analogies, I don't need a vehicle that can do 0-60 in under 6 seconds, nor do 0.95g on a skid pad. Those things are nice, and there will be times I wish I had them, but most of the time I just want to get my kid to school safely, or carry groceries back from the store. And unless I'm refilling the wiper fluid, I never want to open the hood.
Very possibly the most insightful post for this article, and I'm without mod points this week. If you value your time at all, and don't want to make your server one of your personal hobbies, it's always better to pay for email service - even it it means just getting a domain and buying an apps account (if you are scared of free).
It depends on what you do. I'll admit I got my iPad (v1, after the 2 came out so I could save ~$300) because I knew it had certain apps in the store that would be good (I have an iPhone, which won out over the Nexus 1 about 20 months ago).
There are some apps that work regardless - web surfing, netflix, local streaming, email, text input. Then there are productivity apps, like the software for the remote storage service (aka cloud) I use, PDF reading and annotation, calendaring/journaling, structural steel design and property apps (I'm a struct engr) etc. And, of course, stuff that's just fun - like a good piano app, games that my 9 yo likes, flipboard, and a host of others.
I actually use it for a pretty wide variety of tasks. It's the cheapest way (at $15/mo) to get cellular data so I can pull up calculations, cut sheets, specs, and drawings from my office server when I'm in the field or in a project meeting. I can also store and synchronize my entire sheet music library for my chorus, quartet, and special event groups on it so I can review/practice music wherever I am. When my daughter went on a vacation this summer with my wife and in-laws, we loaded up a couple of books and about 2 dozen movies for the trip. She watched about 4-5 movies and read something close to 1000 pages, while my wife got directions and planned side trips on it, all in a form factor that fit easily into her mini-backpack.
Mine is actually quite useful, and I prefer the form factor for reading, sharing, and consuming information. It sucks rocks at creating, and I still have a small notebook for when I'm going to go somewhere and have to do work (reports, drawings). It fills a niche, and does it very well - but it would be useless, or at least cumbersome, without a wide variety of purpose-built software.
Until there is a robust application ecosystem for the tablet, it will remain niche. Who cares if you save $100, but you can't do anything fun with it? Hundreds of apps - even if they're all good - means very little competition on pricing and features, and lots of black market segments (insert fart app joke here). It the reason I skipped the android tablets this past spring - a dearth of full screen apps.
Wait a minute - I can buy "long distance" phone services from hundreds of different providers once I pay for my $15 basic access phone plan (basically the line charge). Because of that, I pay about 2-3c/minute, versus 25c/min back in the 80s under Ma Bell.
Require the local data service providers to open up to all vendors - or better yet, forbid the line owner from having any legal business connection to the data provider -and you'll see a huge reduction in rates.
I remember it like I remember the other two events. It's odd, as I was pretty dismissive of it, but it was in the front office of Bldg 5 at GSFC, and a secretary was showing it to me (yes, at NASA, back then, even the secretaries were geek-cool).
All these threads bring back memories of that time (Trumpet Winsock, Gopher, etc...) which was just after I got out of college. Cool stuff, indeed.
Exactly. Unless you were used to using a 110baud acoustically coupled modem, 300 was still slow. And you could still whistle into the phone and make it print characters on the screen. 1200baud - now that was cool, and 2400 was just ludicrous (when they worked, which was suspect at times), as well as being beyond the budget of those of us still in school.
That was my comment on seeing a secretary at Goddard Space Flight Center had one of the first versions of Mosaic (Summer 93?). I was already good at finding stuff with gopher and archie; I didn't need yet another interface.
I will say, though, that by the spring of '94, I had changed my tune, and I told my wife that "in the future" you would see trucks and billboards with web addresses instead of 1-800 numbers. It is very possibly my only prescient statement regarding mass marketing, and I failed to act on it financially. So, I'm stuck with saying "I knew it would happen," having a witness who has, if anything, a reverse bias to telling people I'm right instead of being a rich dot.com'er/cybersquatter.
Yeah, I'm always worried about using a browser to read...WTF?
PDF is about the only format where you can mix a lot of elements, get it to look like you meant it to, and has a huge array of readers on nearly every known platform. No, it won't reflow well, but if you want you formatting preserved you don't want reflow anyway. It's being used in more and more industries as an archival format beacuse it is so easily readable. Text extraction is simple; my reader/editor of choice can easily pull text out of a document - just highlight and copy.
Well, I'm an engineer who has worked both ends of the spectrum - aerospace and construction. "Disposable" has it's place, no doubt, but durability is often underrated in many things.
As you mentioned, they don't pull and reuse nails because today that isn't cost effective (mat'l vs labor). The key is that nails are still made of steel. If you were to make a nail of sintered pot metal (or whatever the substance is on a 3D printer), it's not going to have the mechanical properties of a traditional nail, and though it may work just find under low loads, it will fail under higher - or perhaps just cyclic - loading.
You might liken the change to either screws or to "gun" nails. Gun nails aren't nearly as good as "old" nails, mostly because you can pneumatically drive a thinner nail than you can hand drive. So a 3.25" long nail can be driven with a 0.131" diameter, whereas a hand driven 3.25" nail (aka 16d or 16 penny common) will be 0.162" diameter. Shear and withdrawal resistance is proportional to nail diameter, so a 16d "gun" nail isn't nearly as strong as a 16d hand nail.
Do you know why screws are frowned upon in construction? It's because they are not a ductile as nails, and tend to fail in a brittle way. That makes them lousy as connectors in seismic events. Nails help ensure a wide hysteresis loop that allows lumber structures to dissipate seismic energy and survive far beyond their calculated strength (they get 2x the strength bonus vs hot rolled steel, and 4-5x bonus over masonry per lb of static resistance).
Sorry, 88F is not what I consider "comfortable,"and way to fucking hot to work effectively in. At 78F, my productivity drops noticeably (I know, because when I think "damned its hot in this office" I look ever and my thermostat is at 77-79F). Also, not everyone gets to ideally site their house on a generously sized lot on the properly sloped hill.
That said, if it meant keeping things running for a couple of days instead of a couple of hours, it's easy enough to open the windows, turn off the lights and other heat-generating appliances and just realize that the power's out and you're not going to get nearly as much done as you expected to. If I give up my quad-core PC and triple-monitor setup for my netbook I can burn about 1/40 of the electricity. The reason I don't do that every day is that even if I'm only 20% more efficient on the big screens, It costs me 25c a day extra in power for $240 in extra billings. Not a hard choice to make.
It depends on what you use it for. Often we use facebook to coordinate and publicize community and school theatrical events. I'm in my 40s, but have quite a few school aged "friends" (from 10 and up) and may friends in the drama and music departments of several schools. It's easy to have community, church, or extra-curricular activities where"friendships" spill across age barriers. Not all relationships between students and teachers are classroom based, and they don't have to be "creepy."
The natural progression of most products is towards disposable goods. The danger of this generation (and likely the next) of replication machines is that the materials will not have the kind of physical properties that make things durable. Luckily we've been weaned off durable, and now we expect to be able to break most items with moderate human force. And these items will fit the bill in that case.
Making components for system critical or life safety functions, except as en emergency "everyone will die if the part isn't here right now" condition, is a bad, bad idea. Of course, there are too many people in the world...maybe this is just another way to thin out the herd?
There are lots of places to be semi-anonymous. I use my/. handle on a bunch of forums - it's my second online personality that's a bit more outgoing than I would otherwise be on a public forum. My FB (and, presumably, Google+ when I get there) profile will be with my real name, and only involve people I know. Hell, I don't even allow "friends" on FB who are business colleagues, generally. If business contacts find me, I tell them I have a limited circle of hobby and family acquaintences on FB, and I send them a linkedin request.
I guess my point is that we shouldn't be getting wrapped around the axle about Google+ requiring real names. If you want to have a cute handle, go somewhere else. No shoes, no shirt, no service.
No, I'm pretty sure he got it right. The 45MJ number is based on a stoichiometric reaction of 1kg of butane with the necessary additional mass of oxygen for complete combustion. You should be getting about 60x the life of a Li-Ion cell, but you're only getting 3x, so you're operating at 5% "efficiency". The battery doesn't store the O2, nor in the O2 included in the 45MJ/kg, so it's straight algebra.
Please look at the first slots of the tax table. Note that the minimum tax for where you've earned any money is $1.
Well, it does appear you can read, which is a good start. I suggest you look up the tax forms to determine what "line 43 means". I'll give you a hint: it's not what you earn. For the typical household - married, one child (not you personally, I didn't post about you personally)
401k and Cafeteria plan (I'm going to ball park here, but you should be putting away 10%) = ($2800) Personal Exemption $3650 x 3 people = ($10,950) Standard Deduction ($11,600) (I won't even put a guess on itemized deductions - we'll assume renters) So using the least advantageous method of getting a typical AGI, I come up with $25,350 in deductions/exemptions right off the top. But wait, there's more! You get a $1000 tax credit for your kid, which means that you can make up to $35,350 a year and pay ZERO taxes.
Now, it's going to take a little math, but using our tax-planner disadvantaged family, I come up with the 2% mark for Federal Income taxes at about $43,000 ($866 taxes after the child tax credit). It's true - if you've got no good deductions - $60k will put you all the way up at 5.5%. Which is less than you'll pay in FICA, at 7.65%.
Although I was a couple of percent off at the 60k number, I stand by the statement that FIT is very low for most of the US population.
You realize that, if you filled out your W4 properly, none of that is Federal Income Taxes, right? If you didn't, your Federal Income Tax refund will very close to the amount that was withheld.
It's been a decade since I've looked at my paycheck - that's when I started my own company - but I can tell you that most of what is coming out is for other things:
SS & Medicare: yes, you're paying into the system in return for (you hope) benefits when you're old and can no longer work State Taxes: Remember all the cuts the Feds are making? Guess who's having to pick up the slack. Heathcare: Do you kick in for your company health care costs? Gov't has nothing to do with this. 401k: Money from you today, to you tomorrow. You're not really relying on SS are you? Cafeteria Plan: You know all the stuff your company healthcare doesn't cover, well the money you put here never shows up on your taxes and you get to spend it on healthcare stuff tax free Union Dues: Don't look at me, I'm not in one.
There's a lot of shit that comes out of your paycheck, but most of it is done that way SO YOU DON'T PAY TAXES ON IT. It's called "above the line" deductions, and it reduces how much your employer said to make to Uncle Sam. With the exception of SS and State Taxes, the rest are all stuff that's directly for you, and never get's sent to any government.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, since those bankers (and many CEOs which benefit from low or zero taxation) are exactly the people who are part of the problem - taxing the "rich" will, indeed, get to them.
A more salient point is that if you do not perform some basic triage (namely increasing taxes to plug that sucking chest wound), the patient will die. Cutting of the expensive supplies (programs) of oxygen and food will not, at this point, help - though once he is healed, it would be a good idea to put him on a sensible diet.
That's interesting, and your math is suspect. We are currently covering about 60% of our expenditures with tax revenue, and yet I don't know of a single individual (or household) or corporation that is paying a total AGI rate greater than about 25-26%. I make a bit into 6 figures, have nearly zero deductions (no mortgage, no health costs), and I pay about 12% on my income. Do I want to pay more? No. Could I pay more? Yes. And a 60% increase in my tax rates (to about 20%) would cover the budget. And, trust me, the folks paying 25% could just as easily (or moreso) pay 40% and still put food on the table.
I'm not sure where your math comes from, but to say we couldn't pay for the Gov't would be just plain wrong.
May I ask, Mr. AC - which programs that benefit you - would you like to eliminate? (note, many programs you may not realize benefit you, like the military, any large employer in your area which is a federal contractor, etc.) We need to scale back, but it cannot be done suddenly, or the great depression will look like a walk in the park.
(1) How would you not be backing up to a local resource?
(2) Why would you not be using encryption at your user site before sending data to the remote server?
If you're small, choose a small service like SpiderOak.
If you're large, build a custom front end.
I don't have particularly sensitive data, so I don't encrypt at my end, though in theory I could (but it would be a pain) and SO had issues with their distributed synchronization back then (note: if I were big enough, I could have hired an IT person to manage the my servers and set op a client side sync that worked). I have no less than 4 copies of my data at two separate local locations, at least one of which is always off-line, in addition to the remote service.
Distrust is a good thing, but it can, imho, be managed.
I'm sure (no, I know) that there is a subset that wants the status symbol, whether its the iFoo for the metrosexual, or the Nexus Foo for the geek crowd - it's the same thing. Most of us just want a device that will do what we need to function, and do it with a minimum of fussing. Apple provides mediocre products that fill 95% of the average users needs and require near zero setup and maintenance - QED.
In the horrible parlance of automotive analogies, I don't need a vehicle that can do 0-60 in under 6 seconds, nor do 0.95g on a skid pad. Those things are nice, and there will be times I wish I had them, but most of the time I just want to get my kid to school safely, or carry groceries back from the store. And unless I'm refilling the wiper fluid, I never want to open the hood.
Earth.
Very possibly the most insightful post for this article, and I'm without mod points this week. If you value your time at all, and don't want to make your server one of your personal hobbies, it's always better to pay for email service - even it it means just getting a domain and buying an apps account (if you are scared of free).
It depends on what you do. I'll admit I got my iPad (v1, after the 2 came out so I could save ~$300) because I knew it had certain apps in the store that would be good (I have an iPhone, which won out over the Nexus 1 about 20 months ago).
There are some apps that work regardless - web surfing, netflix, local streaming, email, text input. Then there are productivity apps, like the software for the remote storage service (aka cloud) I use, PDF reading and annotation, calendaring/journaling, structural steel design and property apps (I'm a struct engr) etc. And, of course, stuff that's just fun - like a good piano app, games that my 9 yo likes, flipboard, and a host of others.
I actually use it for a pretty wide variety of tasks. It's the cheapest way (at $15/mo) to get cellular data so I can pull up calculations, cut sheets, specs, and drawings from my office server when I'm in the field or in a project meeting. I can also store and synchronize my entire sheet music library for my chorus, quartet, and special event groups on it so I can review/practice music wherever I am. When my daughter went on a vacation this summer with my wife and in-laws, we loaded up a couple of books and about 2 dozen movies for the trip. She watched about 4-5 movies and read something close to 1000 pages, while my wife got directions and planned side trips on it, all in a form factor that fit easily into her mini-backpack.
Mine is actually quite useful, and I prefer the form factor for reading, sharing, and consuming information. It sucks rocks at creating, and I still have a small notebook for when I'm going to go somewhere and have to do work (reports, drawings). It fills a niche, and does it very well - but it would be useless, or at least cumbersome, without a wide variety of purpose-built software.
Until there is a robust application ecosystem for the tablet, it will remain niche. Who cares if you save $100, but you can't do anything fun with it? Hundreds of apps - even if they're all good - means very little competition on pricing and features, and lots of black market segments (insert fart app joke here). It the reason I skipped the android tablets this past spring - a dearth of full screen apps.
Wait a minute - I can buy "long distance" phone services from hundreds of different providers once I pay for my $15 basic access phone plan (basically the line charge). Because of that, I pay about 2-3c/minute, versus 25c/min back in the 80s under Ma Bell.
Require the local data service providers to open up to all vendors - or better yet, forbid the line owner from having any legal business connection to the data provider -and you'll see a huge reduction in rates.
I remember it like I remember the other two events. It's odd, as I was pretty dismissive of it, but it was in the front office of Bldg 5 at GSFC, and a secretary was showing it to me (yes, at NASA, back then, even the secretaries were geek-cool).
All these threads bring back memories of that time (Trumpet Winsock, Gopher, etc...) which was just after I got out of college. Cool stuff, indeed.
Exactly. Unless you were used to using a 110baud acoustically coupled modem, 300 was still slow. And you could still whistle into the phone and make it print characters on the screen. 1200baud - now that was cool, and 2400 was just ludicrous (when they worked, which was suspect at times), as well as being beyond the budget of those of us still in school.
That was my comment on seeing a secretary at Goddard Space Flight Center had one of the first versions of Mosaic (Summer 93?). I was already good at finding stuff with gopher and archie; I didn't need yet another interface.
I will say, though, that by the spring of '94, I had changed my tune, and I told my wife that "in the future" you would see trucks and billboards with web addresses instead of 1-800 numbers. It is very possibly my only prescient statement regarding mass marketing, and I failed to act on it financially. So, I'm stuck with saying "I knew it would happen," having a witness who has, if anything, a reverse bias to telling people I'm right instead of being a rich dot.com'er/cybersquatter.
I've got a plotter ($15k) a copier ($14k) in my home office. Does that count?
Yeah, I'm always worried about using a browser to read...WTF?
PDF is about the only format where you can mix a lot of elements, get it to look like you meant it to, and has a huge array of readers on nearly every known platform. No, it won't reflow well, but if you want you formatting preserved you don't want reflow anyway. It's being used in more and more industries as an archival format beacuse it is so easily readable. Text extraction is simple; my reader/editor of choice can easily pull text out of a document - just highlight and copy.
The music and movie industries have already tried that tack, and it doesn't seem to be working.
Well, I'm an engineer who has worked both ends of the spectrum - aerospace and construction. "Disposable" has it's place, no doubt, but durability is often underrated in many things.
As you mentioned, they don't pull and reuse nails because today that isn't cost effective (mat'l vs labor). The key is that nails are still made of steel. If you were to make a nail of sintered pot metal (or whatever the substance is on a 3D printer), it's not going to have the mechanical properties of a traditional nail, and though it may work just find under low loads, it will fail under higher - or perhaps just cyclic - loading.
You might liken the change to either screws or to "gun" nails. Gun nails aren't nearly as good as "old" nails, mostly because you can pneumatically drive a thinner nail than you can hand drive. So a 3.25" long nail can be driven with a 0.131" diameter, whereas a hand driven 3.25" nail (aka 16d or 16 penny common) will be 0.162" diameter. Shear and withdrawal resistance is proportional to nail diameter, so a 16d "gun" nail isn't nearly as strong as a 16d hand nail.
Do you know why screws are frowned upon in construction? It's because they are not a ductile as nails, and tend to fail in a brittle way. That makes them lousy as connectors in seismic events. Nails help ensure a wide hysteresis loop that allows lumber structures to dissipate seismic energy and survive far beyond their calculated strength (they get 2x the strength bonus vs hot rolled steel, and 4-5x bonus over masonry per lb of static resistance).
didn't they used to sell an attachment that bolted onto the rear axle of a truck that turned a generator?
Sorry, 88F is not what I consider "comfortable,"and way to fucking hot to work effectively in. At 78F, my productivity drops noticeably (I know, because when I think "damned its hot in this office" I look ever and my thermostat is at 77-79F). Also, not everyone gets to ideally site their house on a generously sized lot on the properly sloped hill.
That said, if it meant keeping things running for a couple of days instead of a couple of hours, it's easy enough to open the windows, turn off the lights and other heat-generating appliances and just realize that the power's out and you're not going to get nearly as much done as you expected to. If I give up my quad-core PC and triple-monitor setup for my netbook I can burn about 1/40 of the electricity. The reason I don't do that every day is that even if I'm only 20% more efficient on the big screens, It costs me 25c a day extra in power for $240 in extra billings. Not a hard choice to make.
It depends on what you use it for. Often we use facebook to coordinate and publicize community and school theatrical events. I'm in my 40s, but have quite a few school aged "friends" (from 10 and up) and may friends in the drama and music departments of several schools. It's easy to have community, church, or extra-curricular activities where"friendships" spill across age barriers. Not all relationships between students and teachers are classroom based, and they don't have to be "creepy."
The natural progression of most products is towards disposable goods. The danger of this generation (and likely the next) of replication machines is that the materials will not have the kind of physical properties that make things durable. Luckily we've been weaned off durable, and now we expect to be able to break most items with moderate human force. And these items will fit the bill in that case.
Making components for system critical or life safety functions, except as en emergency "everyone will die if the part isn't here right now" condition, is a bad, bad idea. Of course, there are too many people in the world...maybe this is just another way to thin out the herd?
And if Jayma Mays shows up in that movie naked, I'm there.
(Yes, she's in my list of five. Just sayin'...)
There are lots of places to be semi-anonymous. I use my /. handle on a bunch of forums - it's my second online personality that's a bit more outgoing than I would otherwise be on a public forum. My FB (and, presumably, Google+ when I get there) profile will be with my real name, and only involve people I know. Hell, I don't even allow "friends" on FB who are business colleagues, generally. If business contacts find me, I tell them I have a limited circle of hobby and family acquaintences on FB, and I send them a linkedin request.
I guess my point is that we shouldn't be getting wrapped around the axle about Google+ requiring real names. If you want to have a cute handle, go somewhere else. No shoes, no shirt, no service.
No, I'm pretty sure he got it right. The 45MJ number is based on a stoichiometric reaction of 1kg of butane with the necessary additional mass of oxygen for complete combustion. You should be getting about 60x the life of a Li-Ion cell, but you're only getting 3x, so you're operating at 5% "efficiency". The battery doesn't store the O2, nor in the O2 included in the 45MJ/kg, so it's straight algebra.
Please look at the first slots of the tax table. Note that the minimum tax for where you've earned any money is $1.
Well, it does appear you can read, which is a good start. I suggest you look up the tax forms to determine what "line 43 means". I'll give you a hint: it's not what you earn. For the typical household - married, one child (not you personally, I didn't post about you personally)
401k and Cafeteria plan (I'm going to ball park here, but you should be putting away 10%) = ($2800)
Personal Exemption $3650 x 3 people = ($10,950)
Standard Deduction ($11,600) (I won't even put a guess on itemized deductions - we'll assume renters)
So using the least advantageous method of getting a typical AGI, I come up with $25,350 in deductions/exemptions right off the top. But wait, there's more! You get a $1000 tax credit for your kid, which means that you can make up to $35,350 a year and pay ZERO taxes.
Now, it's going to take a little math, but using our tax-planner disadvantaged family, I come up with the 2% mark for Federal Income taxes at about $43,000 ($866 taxes after the child tax credit). It's true - if you've got no good deductions - $60k will put you all the way up at 5.5%. Which is less than you'll pay in FICA, at 7.65%.
Although I was a couple of percent off at the 60k number, I stand by the statement that FIT is very low for most of the US population.
You realize that, if you filled out your W4 properly, none of that is Federal Income Taxes, right? If you didn't, your Federal Income Tax refund will very close to the amount that was withheld.
It's been a decade since I've looked at my paycheck - that's when I started my own company - but I can tell you that most of what is coming out is for other things:
SS & Medicare: yes, you're paying into the system in return for (you hope) benefits when you're old and can no longer work
State Taxes: Remember all the cuts the Feds are making? Guess who's having to pick up the slack.
Heathcare: Do you kick in for your company health care costs? Gov't has nothing to do with this.
401k: Money from you today, to you tomorrow. You're not really relying on SS are you?
Cafeteria Plan: You know all the stuff your company healthcare doesn't cover, well the money you put here never shows up on your taxes and you get to spend it on healthcare stuff tax free
Union Dues: Don't look at me, I'm not in one.
There's a lot of shit that comes out of your paycheck, but most of it is done that way SO YOU DON'T PAY TAXES ON IT. It's called "above the line" deductions, and it reduces how much your employer said to make to Uncle Sam. With the exception of SS and State Taxes, the rest are all stuff that's directly for you, and never get's sent to any government.