Not only did you miss the point, but you don't understand how Wikipedia works: by consensus. There is no such thing as "experts", unless they are self-appointed experts. What you were witnessing was sarcasm, sorry you missed it.
You have to be reasonable here, either Joe has the capacity to qualify for a PPL...
Or they dumb down the test claiming that the requirements for these "new" vehicles is too high, the computers do most of the work, etc. Look at the current requirements for getting a car license, and yet watch the people put on make up, text, talk and other activities that make them dangerous. The larger the number of people flying, the larger the percentage that are doing stupid crap instead of paying attention.
And if GM starts making flying cars, you can bet they will be padding the coffers of politicians to get the requirements lowered so more people can buy these flying cars. More licenses equals more sales equals more money, and it becomes a self-feeding frenzy for politicians and CEOs. Not to mention that there isn't any way that flying is going to be more environmentally friendly than driving: it is a simple matter of physics that it requires more energy to get to altitude, and the last thing we need is transportation that requires MORE energy than we already can provide for ourselves.
I tend to agree, although the scientists that died of high velocity lead poisoning does sound like something Israel could and would do, very effectively. The problem with the US is that we are always too obvious, try to be "loved", and overly open about stuff like this. We save the secret spying and covert operations on our own citizens.
Most of your serious diesel engines are also I6, from Ram (Dodge) trucks to rigs. Even the bigger V12's diesels are basically twin banked I6s. The old 240z engines, old land rovers (before they were pretty, back when they were tough), as well as many other more serious engines.
Part of the problem is how long they are, which is more of a problem in front wheel drive. By design, the engine should be lower maintenance, it is just the cars they put them in that are high maintenance. Having all your intake on one side, exhaust on the other would seem to make design easier as well. And while I enjoy a nice rat engine as much as the next guy, I still think I6 engines actually look cooler. Yea, I'm not in lots of company on that one. The V6 is simply more compact and has a much shorter crank and cams, thus requiring lower grade steel and fewer connecting points. They also require harmonic balancing and have everything crammed so close together that you can't tell where engine ends and accessory begins.
As for gas turbines, I'm not sure sure that they would be such a good choice for a Camry or Accord;) Maybe a very small one (if they scale that small) for a car that is primarily electric with a decoupled gas engine for charging. If we could get the metallurgy right enough to reduce the size and cost, I always thought some type of sterling engine would be a great add-on for a gas engine for supplemental charging. In theory.
What you are linking to is someone else's oversimplification of The Laffer Curve, complete with their own oversimplified images. Not exactly a valid citation for the claim.
You THINK you understand what I mean when I say "like a real business", as if that is a singular thing, but you do not. Not all businesses have "dictators", and most businesses are not run like the narrow minded version you have inside your head. It is painfully obvious that you have never owned or managed a business, or had a job within a quality organization.
"Like a real business" doesn't imply a particular method, it implies a system of leadership with clear, tangible goals and accountability throughout the organization. There are many ways to fry that catfish. What makes them good or bad isn't the flow chart of power, it is how it is run day to day.
There may very well be scores of former editors that were once willing to donate but got turned off by Wikipedia's mananagement, but unless those scores of people were millionaires willing to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash, they aren't really going to have any effect at all on Wikipedia's need for donations.
Saying that the thousands of people who can donate a few hundred per year "aren't really going to have any effect at all on Wikipedia's need for donations." is exactly the same type of arrogance that leads to droves of contributors leaving. Do you even realize how that kind of statement guarantees that people will not contribute to the project? It is the same attitude of the admins, that they are the expert and even if 50 editors disagree, it doesn't matter as those 50 people don't has as much effect as themselves. That they care more than those 50 people combined.
And yes, most USERS don't care, but that isn't the issue. The issue is the pool of potential contributors, those of us that have been involved with using and supporting free software for a couple decades and have the means to not donate millions, but our efforts combined IS millions. Saying it doesn't matter just proves that you have exactly what it takes to be a Wikipedia admin.
I think that is the main point: You take a barrel of oil and you get to use it twice. And while the whole world is fretting about CO2, the idea of reducing the footprint of plastic trash from 100% to 1% is nothing to sneeze at. Add the other ongoing research to create alcohol out of cellulose (another major portion of trash), and all of a sudden you are virtually "mining" trash by reusing the plastics and paper, making recovering of the aluminum and steel easier. This also decreases water pollution in the long run.
What matters is that using plastics to create oil isn't going to INCREASE CO2, as those cars would be burning something or another to run regardless of source. What also matters is that this would DECREASE the need for agriculture to be specific for fuels, which pushes food prices up and increases the amount of fertilizer (and other pollutants) in the system. It isn't a silver bullet that fixes pollution, but it can be part of a better overall energy policy.
Um, no you are wrong. There are scores of people with the means to donate to Wikipedia, and were serious editors at one time, but the "system" turned us away from helping in any way. Wikipedia has a lot of good things going, but their management structure is so flawed and filled with self serving, basement dwelling admins that have an axe to grind, that it turns off many people with the means to contribute. Take a look at the number of people who have thousands of edits but haven't editing or contributed in a long time.
The current structure of Wikipedia administration is fatally flawed. It is functional, but flawed to the point of pissing off quality contributors of both time and money. The concept is valid, the execution is not. If not for a few corporations throwing away money in their direction, it would already be gone. Simply put, it needs to be run like a real business, with real accountability and system of checks and balances that is less subject to the whims of a few anonymous individuals. As it is, it is run like a college project, which is why it is in constant financial distress.
To correct my earlier statement, while engines make more HP at high compressions, they do so by producing more NO2, so they pollute more. And I agree with the turbo comment. Actually, straight 6 engines are more balanced by design, no need to externally balanced. I'm shocked I haven't seen more implementation of them. A well designed I6 with a turbo can be made small enough to still be used in front wheel drive and have extra power on tap when needed, but that isn't what is "sexy".
On the server side, I would argue that Linux it is easier. I'm not an "expert" although I have used Linux for years, and I remote backup data with a script that simply tars, gzips, and sftp's the data securely using 'expect'. Including rotating a couple dozen backups, it is a few dozen lines of script, and since it is sftp, it is encrypted on the journey. Not for rookies, granted, but it is simple and easy and doesn't require THAT much to figure out and doesn't require baby sitting, can be run as a cron job, etc.. I can't imagine it would be any more difficult for a desktop, assuming you have a remote place to sftp to.
As with many other tools in Linux, setting it up is a bit more complicated but maintaining it is trivial when compared to Windows.
From the article: There were concerns about how the open source database would fare under Oracle's leadership, but those concerns are now being put to rest by Oracle with the release of MySQL 5.5
Um, no, not all concerns are put to rest. This was a pretty fluffy piece of journalism, just quotes and feel good words. I'm glad that MySQL has moved up a notch, but I'm still looking really hard at PostgreSQL as a possibility in the long run.
Sugar beets have plenty of sugar, around 20% of the beet is sugar. And it grows perfectly in the north central USA, such as the Dakotas, Minnesota and Michigan, or farther south. The problem is that corn gets tons of subsidies from the government (corporate welfare for the Monsanto asshats) and beets do not. Beets will get you around 20% more fuel per acre than corn but costs more because of the subsidies on corn. Without the subsidies, it would likely be comparable or cheaper to use sugar beets. You also get about 8x more gallons of fuel than using soybeans for oil, although oil has around 20% higher carbon density, thus it is about 5x to 6x more net BTU per acre with sugar beets/alcohol versus soybeans/biodiesel.
And alcohol has MUCH lower energy density than petrol. It also absorbs water, enough so that I just found it trashed about $500 worth of carbs on two of my electrical generators. Alcohol doesn't get better HP, it simply is less prone to detonation, so it can be run in higher comrpression engines, which by their very nature, are less efficient. So you can end up with more HP by jacking the compression up, but then your mileage goes down even more, in relative terms. This isn't exactly in keeping with green philosophies, is it?
You can't really say you use alcohol to help the environment, then drive a 300HP car that gets a combined 25MPG, unless the goal is to be hypocritical.
My point was simple: testing for medical advances that can save lives is acceptable. Testing for products to make us "pretty" or make our lives "more convenient" AND that causes distress to the animal, is not acceptable.
I hope so. If not, what would stop your competitor from simply swamping your ecommerce servers with garbage to hurt your sales and presumably improve their own? How is a DDOS any different than blocking the entrance to a brick and mortar business to prevent customers from entering? In both cases, you are simply jamming up entry to a place of commerce to prevent the company from doing regular business. Should Coca Cola Corporation be allowed to constantly attack Pepsi's website and prevent customers from reaching it? I'm using commerce as an example because it is most obvious, but even a blog has as much right of expression as a corporation. So far.
There are appropriate times to break the law, to make a political point, and I'm all for the appropriate use of civil disobedience, but I'm not so convinced that what Anonymous is doing is all that helpful.
To be fair, Muhammad didn't marry her until she was nine, so he was having sex with 9 year old, not a 6 year old. But according to Wikipedia, she was a very mature 9 year old, and...
"The sources do not offer much more information about Aisha's childhood years, but mention that after the wedding, she continued to play with her toys, and that Muhammad entered into the spirit of these games." cite: Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman, Oxford University Press 1961, page 102.
Ah yes, and before that, we used to buy CD's chock full of those games, loaded with files.bbs indexing, to put on the BBS. Nothing beats the satisfaction of your first color game download over a 2400 or 14.4k modem.
Unless the Interstate Commerce clause comes into play, and considering the nature of the internet and that Comcast's actions are crossing state lines, then yes, the Feds would have a cause to take action. Probably no inclination, but a cause.
The same law that sets the tax rate at 55%, unless they sell it at market value. Remember, these are lawyers writing the laws, if anyone knows crooked, they do.
Faxes aren't going anywhere any time soon. It is still more convenient for many tasks, and software hasn't done a great job when it comes to standardization of attachments. I still get email attachments from people who just installed the newest version of Microsoft Office, and when I tell them to save it in an older format, they have no fucking clue what that means. They just save in the default format, which is always the "new" format, and we don't run MS Office in our office, on purpose. We run OpenOffice (which is now LibreOffice) but I digress. So I tell them "Then fax it to me" because I don't have the time to explain why they are a 'tard for not knowing how to save a file as a "word 95" file.
And of course, what they end up sending me is nothing more than plain text anyway, which could have been done using Notepad, but they have no idea what that is. Sometimes they use a fancy font, usually one that is barely readable. We avoid this by simply having a "print to PDF" feature in our office, so we just send everyone a PDF when we email, unless of course we are just sending text, in which case we type it. Unless it is a page from an old owners manual, in which case we just copy it then fax it.
Have I made myself clear? No? Good. Because most people in the biz world are too busy trying to get business done to care how they get it, and faxing is easy, cheap and fast.
As for checks/cheques, they will also be around for a long time as they are handy for a creating paper trail and delaying payment for a couple days. And you can fax them to the other party to show them that the check is in the mail, which doesn't make much sense as technically, it is in a fax machine, but it makes them feel good if you are a week behind on the payment for some reason. Then you wait another week, send the check, and blame the post office. I times are really hard, you can just seal an empty envelope, then use a letter opener to open the empty envelope, then mail that, then when the receiving party says the envelope was open and empty, tell them that someone must have stolen the check, so it isn't your fault, and that you will send another check TODAY, which you then fax a copy of, wait one week, then mail.
So in short, the reason that faxes and cheques exist is that they are simple and efficient.
How do they enforce that tax for dying on someone who has no estate and no next of kin?
If there is no estate, then there is nothing to tax, na dthen there is no tax. Just like you pay $0 income tax if you make $0.
That isn't the problem. Ask someone in the middle of the USA who has a family farm what happens. They appraise your farm at a million dollars (even though great grandpa bought it for $1000) and if you can't pay the tax, you have to sell the land. That is the real problem: not people who leave money, but people who leave farms or other real estate, which are typically appraised higher than they can really sell for. Many a family farm has been broken up (and sold to Monsanto) due to the death tax. It is currently set much higher, but before the current tax rate it was quite low, and it will return to that low amount if the tax rates aren't renewed.
Regardless of the amount, even if someone has $100 million dollars, WHY does the government get 55% of it simply because someone dies? They already paid tax on it when it was earned, as capital gains or income. The fact is, people with 100 million DON'T pay it, they can afford shelters to move it around before they die. It is the "rich" people with theoretically $1m in land or equipment (farmers, typically) that get the shaft. Again, where is the justification for taking over half of your life's work away from you when you die, instead of letting you leave it to your family?
That's ok, they also have a tax for dying as well, called the estate tax. Which, of course, is taxing the income they already taxed you for simply because you died. These things are just part of why I vote for Libertarians. A little more anarchy is a good thing.
Ok lets ignore the parties. Do you think it is unconstitutional or not?
To put in my 2c, as the bill is, I also think it is unconstitutional and always did. I'm not big on the idea of a federally managed single payer system, but that appears to be the only way to have insurance for everyone without a constitutional amendment. I also don't like our current system which is entirely broken, so there really is no "good" answer to the healthcare problem on the table, from my perspective.
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Not only did you miss the point, but you don't understand how Wikipedia works: by consensus. There is no such thing as "experts", unless they are self-appointed experts. What you were witnessing was sarcasm, sorry you missed it.
You have to be reasonable here, either Joe has the capacity to qualify for a PPL...
Or they dumb down the test claiming that the requirements for these "new" vehicles is too high, the computers do most of the work, etc. Look at the current requirements for getting a car license, and yet watch the people put on make up, text, talk and other activities that make them dangerous. The larger the number of people flying, the larger the percentage that are doing stupid crap instead of paying attention.
And if GM starts making flying cars, you can bet they will be padding the coffers of politicians to get the requirements lowered so more people can buy these flying cars. More licenses equals more sales equals more money, and it becomes a self-feeding frenzy for politicians and CEOs. Not to mention that there isn't any way that flying is going to be more environmentally friendly than driving: it is a simple matter of physics that it requires more energy to get to altitude, and the last thing we need is transportation that requires MORE energy than we already can provide for ourselves.
I tend to agree, although the scientists that died of high velocity lead poisoning does sound like something Israel could and would do, very effectively. The problem with the US is that we are always too obvious, try to be "loved", and overly open about stuff like this. We save the secret spying and covert operations on our own citizens.
Most of your serious diesel engines are also I6, from Ram (Dodge) trucks to rigs. Even the bigger V12's diesels are basically twin banked I6s. The old 240z engines, old land rovers (before they were pretty, back when they were tough), as well as many other more serious engines.
Part of the problem is how long they are, which is more of a problem in front wheel drive. By design, the engine should be lower maintenance, it is just the cars they put them in that are high maintenance. Having all your intake on one side, exhaust on the other would seem to make design easier as well. And while I enjoy a nice rat engine as much as the next guy, I still think I6 engines actually look cooler. Yea, I'm not in lots of company on that one. The V6 is simply more compact and has a much shorter crank and cams, thus requiring lower grade steel and fewer connecting points. They also require harmonic balancing and have everything crammed so close together that you can't tell where engine ends and accessory begins.
As for gas turbines, I'm not sure sure that they would be such a good choice for a Camry or Accord ;) Maybe a very small one (if they scale that small) for a car that is primarily electric with a decoupled gas engine for charging. If we could get the metallurgy right enough to reduce the size and cost, I always thought some type of sterling engine would be a great add-on for a gas engine for supplemental charging. In theory.
What you are linking to is someone else's oversimplification of The Laffer Curve, complete with their own oversimplified images. Not exactly a valid citation for the claim.
You THINK you understand what I mean when I say "like a real business", as if that is a singular thing, but you do not. Not all businesses have "dictators", and most businesses are not run like the narrow minded version you have inside your head. It is painfully obvious that you have never owned or managed a business, or had a job within a quality organization.
"Like a real business" doesn't imply a particular method, it implies a system of leadership with clear, tangible goals and accountability throughout the organization. There are many ways to fry that catfish. What makes them good or bad isn't the flow chart of power, it is how it is run day to day.
There may very well be scores of former editors that were once willing to donate but got turned off by Wikipedia's mananagement, but unless those scores of people were millionaires willing to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash, they aren't really going to have any effect at all on Wikipedia's need for donations.
Saying that the thousands of people who can donate a few hundred per year "aren't really going to have any effect at all on Wikipedia's need for donations." is exactly the same type of arrogance that leads to droves of contributors leaving. Do you even realize how that kind of statement guarantees that people will not contribute to the project? It is the same attitude of the admins, that they are the expert and even if 50 editors disagree, it doesn't matter as those 50 people don't has as much effect as themselves. That they care more than those 50 people combined.
And yes, most USERS don't care, but that isn't the issue. The issue is the pool of potential contributors, those of us that have been involved with using and supporting free software for a couple decades and have the means to not donate millions, but our efforts combined IS millions. Saying it doesn't matter just proves that you have exactly what it takes to be a Wikipedia admin.
I think that is the main point: You take a barrel of oil and you get to use it twice. And while the whole world is fretting about CO2, the idea of reducing the footprint of plastic trash from 100% to 1% is nothing to sneeze at. Add the other ongoing research to create alcohol out of cellulose (another major portion of trash), and all of a sudden you are virtually "mining" trash by reusing the plastics and paper, making recovering of the aluminum and steel easier. This also decreases water pollution in the long run.
What matters is that using plastics to create oil isn't going to INCREASE CO2, as those cars would be burning something or another to run regardless of source. What also matters is that this would DECREASE the need for agriculture to be specific for fuels, which pushes food prices up and increases the amount of fertilizer (and other pollutants) in the system. It isn't a silver bullet that fixes pollution, but it can be part of a better overall energy policy.
Um, no you are wrong. There are scores of people with the means to donate to Wikipedia, and were serious editors at one time, but the "system" turned us away from helping in any way. Wikipedia has a lot of good things going, but their management structure is so flawed and filled with self serving, basement dwelling admins that have an axe to grind, that it turns off many people with the means to contribute. Take a look at the number of people who have thousands of edits but haven't editing or contributed in a long time.
The current structure of Wikipedia administration is fatally flawed. It is functional, but flawed to the point of pissing off quality contributors of both time and money. The concept is valid, the execution is not. If not for a few corporations throwing away money in their direction, it would already be gone. Simply put, it needs to be run like a real business, with real accountability and system of checks and balances that is less subject to the whims of a few anonymous individuals. As it is, it is run like a college project, which is why it is in constant financial distress.
Or perhaps the FSM is simply changing the results to make us THINK that string theory is false, to test our faith.
To correct my earlier statement, while engines make more HP at high compressions, they do so by producing more NO2, so they pollute more. And I agree with the turbo comment. Actually, straight 6 engines are more balanced by design, no need to externally balanced. I'm shocked I haven't seen more implementation of them. A well designed I6 with a turbo can be made small enough to still be used in front wheel drive and have extra power on tap when needed, but that isn't what is "sexy".
It's a little more complicated in Linux
On the server side, I would argue that Linux it is easier. I'm not an "expert" although I have used Linux for years, and I remote backup data with a script that simply tars, gzips, and sftp's the data securely using 'expect'. Including rotating a couple dozen backups, it is a few dozen lines of script, and since it is sftp, it is encrypted on the journey. Not for rookies, granted, but it is simple and easy and doesn't require THAT much to figure out and doesn't require baby sitting, can be run as a cron job, etc.. I can't imagine it would be any more difficult for a desktop, assuming you have a remote place to sftp to.
As with many other tools in Linux, setting it up is a bit more complicated but maintaining it is trivial when compared to Windows.
From the article: There were concerns about how the open source database would fare under Oracle's leadership, but those concerns are now being put to rest by Oracle with the release of MySQL 5.5
Um, no, not all concerns are put to rest. This was a pretty fluffy piece of journalism, just quotes and feel good words. I'm glad that MySQL has moved up a notch, but I'm still looking really hard at PostgreSQL as a possibility in the long run.
Sugar beets have plenty of sugar, around 20% of the beet is sugar. And it grows perfectly in the north central USA, such as the Dakotas, Minnesota and Michigan, or farther south. The problem is that corn gets tons of subsidies from the government (corporate welfare for the Monsanto asshats) and beets do not. Beets will get you around 20% more fuel per acre than corn but costs more because of the subsidies on corn. Without the subsidies, it would likely be comparable or cheaper to use sugar beets. You also get about 8x more gallons of fuel than using soybeans for oil, although oil has around 20% higher carbon density, thus it is about 5x to 6x more net BTU per acre with sugar beets/alcohol versus soybeans/biodiesel.
And alcohol has MUCH lower energy density than petrol. It also absorbs water, enough so that I just found it trashed about $500 worth of carbs on two of my electrical generators. Alcohol doesn't get better HP, it simply is less prone to detonation, so it can be run in higher comrpression engines, which by their very nature, are less efficient. So you can end up with more HP by jacking the compression up, but then your mileage goes down even more, in relative terms. This isn't exactly in keeping with green philosophies, is it?
You can't really say you use alcohol to help the environment, then drive a 300HP car that gets a combined 25MPG, unless the goal is to be hypocritical.
My point was simple: testing for medical advances that can save lives is acceptable. Testing for products to make us "pretty" or make our lives "more convenient" AND that causes distress to the animal, is not acceptable.
Are denial of service "attacks" even a crime?
I hope so. If not, what would stop your competitor from simply swamping your ecommerce servers with garbage to hurt your sales and presumably improve their own? How is a DDOS any different than blocking the entrance to a brick and mortar business to prevent customers from entering? In both cases, you are simply jamming up entry to a place of commerce to prevent the company from doing regular business. Should Coca Cola Corporation be allowed to constantly attack Pepsi's website and prevent customers from reaching it? I'm using commerce as an example because it is most obvious, but even a blog has as much right of expression as a corporation. So far.
There are appropriate times to break the law, to make a political point, and I'm all for the appropriate use of civil disobedience, but I'm not so convinced that what Anonymous is doing is all that helpful.
To be fair, Muhammad didn't marry her until she was nine, so he was having sex with 9 year old, not a 6 year old. But according to Wikipedia, she was a very mature 9 year old, and...
"The sources do not offer much more information about Aisha's childhood years, but mention that after the wedding, she continued to play with her toys, and that Muhammad entered into the spirit of these games." cite: Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman, Oxford University Press 1961, page 102.
Surely, nothing about that sounds unusual.
Technically, more people wanted gore, but bush was forced on them by the Supremes.
Ah yes, and before that, we used to buy CD's chock full of those games, loaded with files.bbs indexing, to put on the BBS. Nothing beats the satisfaction of your first color game download over a 2400 or 14.4k modem.
Unless the Interstate Commerce clause comes into play, and considering the nature of the internet and that Comcast's actions are crossing state lines, then yes, the Feds would have a cause to take action. Probably no inclination, but a cause.
The same law that sets the tax rate at 55%, unless they sell it at market value. Remember, these are lawyers writing the laws, if anyone knows crooked, they do.
Faxes aren't going anywhere any time soon. It is still more convenient for many tasks, and software hasn't done a great job when it comes to standardization of attachments. I still get email attachments from people who just installed the newest version of Microsoft Office, and when I tell them to save it in an older format, they have no fucking clue what that means. They just save in the default format, which is always the "new" format, and we don't run MS Office in our office, on purpose. We run OpenOffice (which is now LibreOffice) but I digress. So I tell them "Then fax it to me" because I don't have the time to explain why they are a 'tard for not knowing how to save a file as a "word 95" file.
And of course, what they end up sending me is nothing more than plain text anyway, which could have been done using Notepad, but they have no idea what that is. Sometimes they use a fancy font, usually one that is barely readable. We avoid this by simply having a "print to PDF" feature in our office, so we just send everyone a PDF when we email, unless of course we are just sending text, in which case we type it. Unless it is a page from an old owners manual, in which case we just copy it then fax it.
Have I made myself clear? No? Good. Because most people in the biz world are too busy trying to get business done to care how they get it, and faxing is easy, cheap and fast.
As for checks/cheques, they will also be around for a long time as they are handy for a creating paper trail and delaying payment for a couple days. And you can fax them to the other party to show them that the check is in the mail, which doesn't make much sense as technically, it is in a fax machine, but it makes them feel good if you are a week behind on the payment for some reason. Then you wait another week, send the check, and blame the post office. I times are really hard, you can just seal an empty envelope, then use a letter opener to open the empty envelope, then mail that, then when the receiving party says the envelope was open and empty, tell them that someone must have stolen the check, so it isn't your fault, and that you will send another check TODAY, which you then fax a copy of, wait one week, then mail.
So in short, the reason that faxes and cheques exist is that they are simple and efficient.
How do they enforce that tax for dying on someone who has no estate and no next of kin?
If there is no estate, then there is nothing to tax, na dthen there is no tax. Just like you pay $0 income tax if you make $0.
That isn't the problem. Ask someone in the middle of the USA who has a family farm what happens. They appraise your farm at a million dollars (even though great grandpa bought it for $1000) and if you can't pay the tax, you have to sell the land. That is the real problem: not people who leave money, but people who leave farms or other real estate, which are typically appraised higher than they can really sell for. Many a family farm has been broken up (and sold to Monsanto) due to the death tax. It is currently set much higher, but before the current tax rate it was quite low, and it will return to that low amount if the tax rates aren't renewed.
Regardless of the amount, even if someone has $100 million dollars, WHY does the government get 55% of it simply because someone dies? They already paid tax on it when it was earned, as capital gains or income. The fact is, people with 100 million DON'T pay it, they can afford shelters to move it around before they die. It is the "rich" people with theoretically $1m in land or equipment (farmers, typically) that get the shaft. Again, where is the justification for taking over half of your life's work away from you when you die, instead of letting you leave it to your family?
Tax on being alive.
That's ok, they also have a tax for dying as well, called the estate tax. Which, of course, is taxing the income they already taxed you for simply because you died. These things are just part of why I vote for Libertarians. A little more anarchy is a good thing.
Ok lets ignore the parties. Do you think it is unconstitutional or not?
To put in my 2c, as the bill is, I also think it is unconstitutional and always did. I'm not big on the idea of a federally managed single payer system, but that appears to be the only way to have insurance for everyone without a constitutional amendment. I also don't like our current system which is entirely broken, so there really is no "good" answer to the healthcare problem on the table, from my perspective.