no one who commits torture for any reason should be protected from retaliation, orders or not.
Illegal orders are still illegal, and our military personnel are trained to know that. Ignoring it and doing it just because "it's orders" is not a justifiable defense, IMO.
If someone didn't have allegiance to their country, what in the world makes you think putting your hand on a book and mumbling some words would change that?
DX systems suffer because they are burying copper in the ground (which is often aggressive to copper), and then pumping refrigerant through them. any puncture or breach would cause a leak of refrigerant instead of non toxic glycol solution.
DX and "Pump and Dump" geo-exchange systems are both, IMHO, likely to be outlawed in areas with environmental and building codes. Existing systems would probably be grandfathered but in the end I believe closed loop well or "slinky field" type systems will end up the winners.
You are free not to join a community that has decided on its own standards and values, or one that has decided to protect each other's property values as well.
We are very free. You don't have to live there at all; you can live in the middle of nowhere and be as loud as you like.
but when your actions actually affect the people around you; no, you are not free to do whatever you want, and you should not be.
That said, it should be illegal to prevent renewables from being installed, IMHO, and i would never live in a community with those standards.
exactly how much area are you losing when you put in a dam?
Is that really significant beyond a very local area, compared to the removal of the extraction/pollution costs of dirtier energy?
I would strongly doubt it. and I care nothing about co2. I do care about resource depletion, environmental toxicity, and collapsing foodstocks. Burning coal and its mercury is worse for our consumption of salmon than hydroelectric dams are, in my view.
I am not aware of any shortfalls in lumber, or other products that is even remotely attributed to hydro power. the only people railing against responsible hydro power (with, say, the amazing innovation of fish ladders) are NIMBYs, who are a plague on the entire environmental responsibility movement.
practically speaking though, when you are evaluating a residential heating system, calling a geothermal system 300% efficient compared to a boiler running at 90% is an effective and correct comparison. Your source is the ground, and you are not going to deplete the energy in the ground (long term).
It may actually be a COP, but that just obfuscates the real fact that to get X heat into your structure, the energy consumed is relative those numbers in a direct comparison. Say you were using electricity at 100% efficiency at point of use and geo at 300% efficiency; your numbers would work. the analysis would be correct.
Your terminology may not be correct, but substantively, nitpicking over the terminology is a side arguement, not a refutation.
the question hypothesized that IF Bush did this, people supportive of democrats would freak out because he would be 'militarizing space', and presumes that Obama planning to do the same will be met with great indifference by democrats or even lauded as a smart move. and vice versa on both points for republicans.
Which is very true, the US political system IS entirely focused on fake comparisons between the parties (republicans being "small government" while running the biggest deficits in history.. all of them, recently... for example... Democrats being "weak" when they get us into military conflicts even more often than republicans being another). The difference between the two is more of perception and image than of substance.
I said if you cannot see that 10% of 10k is insanely difficult to part with, while 10% of 100k is not nearly as hard to part with, then you have no empathy because you lack very basic understanding of the kinds of choices you are making at 10k and 100k/year respectively, or you would realize your statement makes no sense at all.
While, again, your choices at 100k might cause problems for you paying your tax bill, at 10k, you just have problems, no choice involved, if asked to pay an equal percentage.
I am saying the tax code cannot be perfect. but a flat rate is inherently not fair, because it's far easier for an equally capable and intelligent person to easily pay their tax bill at a higher income than for a poorer person. They are carrying different BURDENS. This apparently does not matter to you or enter your equation of "fairness", and so I accuse your equation of "fairness" of being far too simplistic. While a more nuanced, progressive tax scheme may still present different burdens on different people because of their own personal choice and circumstance, unless you know of some measure that can perfectly determine this burden for any given person, nothing can be perfect.
To put this another way, say it's just food. If I have one pound of food a day, giving up half is a massive burden. If I have a hundred pounds of food a day, giving up half is a huge amount of food, but it's not as personally threatening by a long shot. Asking us both to give up half our food is by no measure that takes human well being into account fair. it is fair only by a strict mathematical proportion. Coming along and whining about what happens if you give 99 pounds of your hundred pounds away does nothing to address the argument at all.
If you are against X ENTIRELY, as you seem to say and as that example would seem to indicate, you must be an anarchist, as you believe then that no government has any right to collect any money whatsoever, whether by "fair" measures or not. Remember X is whatever amount government needs to run, as I have defined it many times over now. Since you are apparently an anarchist, this conversation is a waste of time. Not that I am unsympathic to anarchists, I just find them all horribly misguided and totally out of touch with reality to the point where reason is really a waste of time, because they are all advocating for some world that can never and will never exist. Cute though.
if you're not an anarchist, you totally flunk reading comprehension regarding X, and this conversation is still a waste of time, because you can't even comprehend and respond to actual arguments, all you can do is accuse me of making arguments I am not making, accuse me of lying, and worming out of my statements to the point where you are just masturbating your own tired ideology, loosely at the direction of my words. That makes for a pretty disappointing "discussion".
I am not saying government knows best. I am not saying that government is the "solution" to anything. I have no idea what X is and I'm not advocating for any particular value of X, X again being the amount of money government NEEDS TO RUN... which could mean anything, I don't care what value you choose for X as long as you agree that we need a government, and it needs some money. If X is a hundred times less than what government is asking for today, great.... that's a separate conversation. Whether we collect X from income, sales, property or whatever is also not a part of this. Whether or not I would prefer to have another $10k in my pocket right now is irrelevant. But X itself is inviolate IF you agree we need a government. Ok so far? I can't imagine you have any disagreement here, since this is pretty basic, but if we don't agree on this then I guess you're an anarchist and we can end the discussion now because we don't have agreement in our very basic assumptions.
I am saying that WHATEVER X is, needs to be shared FAIRLY amongst the populace, and fairness is influenced by how much of a burden you place upon the people, not simply an equal proportion. Obviously we cannot determine perfect fairness in this respect from a percentage and an income alone, as if you make as much as I do we may both be in different circumstances. However, we have to do the best we can do, and we know also that a flat percentage is not fair for someone making much less with equal money management skills to myself. IN GENERAL. Which is the best the tax code can do.
Obviously if you bought an even more expensive house than I did, and have chosen to buy a new car or two, and live in an expensive area, you might be in trouble at $100k/year. But you might be in trouble at a flat rate 10 percent too; that's not the tax code's issue, that's your personal finance issue. The tax code is required only to determine what your fair SHARE of the burden is relative to your income, not how smart or dumb you are with your actual money. Again, assuming that you agree that you should be paying your fair share of government's expenses... X... whatever you think X should be.
We are not asking whether you give to charity or about "helping" the poor, simply not crushing them with unnecessary burdens that are, in general, far easier for others to pay. I am not talking about what government is doing with X. Just how to collect the money to pay for it.
for whatever it's worth, X right now is too high, IMO. I would prefer to stop fighting wars and cut X in half. I'm actually in a worst case scenario right now as far as tax burden to available cash, with a growing business so my income is much higher on paper than I get to actually take home. having my share be smaller would directly employ at least one more person immediately. but even so, even with my share of X being figured on a pile of cash I don't actually have available to me unless I choose to stop growing, so I have to pay my share of X from a pile of cash which is half of what X was figured on, it is still FAR EASIER than it was when I was making $10k, or $15k, or even $20k/year and still making much more basic decisions like skipping meals, doctors, and car maintenance. obviously I have to still make hard decisions. I don't have everything I could possibly need or want.
But this is totally different ballgame than being poor. As in, it's totally ridiculous to compare the two at a flat rate. the only way I would be in the same trouble as someone who makes $10k would be by choice: at 10k, you have no choice.
I have made both 10k and 100k in my life so far, but way to assume. while 100k is not rich, it is certainly much, much more comfortable than 10k. and my current tax bill, while extremely high, is much less of a burden to me than a smaller percentage was when I was poorer.
Back then, it influenced what kind of food I ate, whether or not I ever went to the dentist/doctor or did car maintenance so I could get to work in a timely fashion.
These days, it might change the type of house I can own, how good my health insurance plan is, how fast I can stock up a retirement fund and what kind of college I might be able to afford to send my daughter to. It may even effect how many employees I can pay, and what I can pay them. Of course, you can cut my taxes and hope that I will pay more employees more money and then recoup that tax from their payroll, but it's a diminishing return for sure. There is some possibility there... unless I have enough employees, in which case, you just pad my bank account further.
That is a very different level of burden, in any case. Increasing burden on people who have not even yet hit all the 'necessities', and NOT shifting that burden to those for whom it is a much smaller burden in terms of necessities, is not fair.
Your choice to unwisely dispose of your income does not change the fact that government requires taxes to function, and of the taxes required, a richer person is quite fairly asked to pay a shifted amount of the burden compared to a poorer person. We can quibble about how much taxes government requires to function, sure, or whether or not you are smarter than government. But if we agree there is and should be a government, it needs money to function, and the amount of money is X, then I should have to pay a bigger slice of X proportionate to my current income than my 10k/year self should have paid. Absolutely, the is no question here at all, and anyone who can't see that is obviously an ideologue with no grasp of the realities of living poor, or no empathy whatsoever for other human beings. And I don't mean touchy feeling gets all sick at the thought of people living dirty empathy, I mean a basic level of compassion for people who have to do without basic necessities like good health care, healthy food, or maintenance on the things they need to make a living in order to meet rent.
I also don't mean that everyone poor manages their money as effectively as they could or that their lives would automatically be better with a little more money in their pocket. But it sure as hell means a lot more to someone poor than it does to someone like me.
And anyone 100k+ crying 'poormouth' is a total douchebag. It isn't a recipe for riches (especially if, like me, you made an unwise house purchase recently) but it's a totally different ballgame than poor.
you've hit on the real issue: it is DISPARITY between different levels of society that causes problems, as it relates to privacy.
If powerful people in our society had no privacy at all, it would be very hard for them to manipulate people, pull shady deals against the common good, etc. that is a good thing, as it would appear FUD and deception are the two most commonly wielded political tools as far as I can tell.
I would go so far as to say if we all lost privacy to some degree, as long as the powerful lost it just as much, it would work out better in the long run. However, I doubt that will be the case initially at least, which makes privacy a tool of power as long as some people have it and others don't... that's a heavy advantage.
the major question in my mind would be military.. it would be nearly impossible to fight a war without privacy. so then you need to except the military (probably not a great idea if you like democracy), expand this to a worldwide policy (tricky at best), or find some less than total level of privacy reduction which kind of changes the conversation..
Not hitting first means you get hit first sometimes. That's a basic truth, no arguement.
However, you get hit a lot less than you do if you just go around hitting people whenever you think they might be a bit sketchy. That's why you don't hit first, not because it guarantees that you will never be hit.
I'm not saying we can never intervene to repel an aggressor on anyone but ourselves. However, the bar has got to be pretty damn high for me to support it. And it should be done with a military sized for defense, not worldwide imperialism, to further ensure that it is only done in times of great need.
You can find a saying for nearly anything. "Violence never solved anything" is similarly common and ignorant.
I prefer a traditional definition of "defense". You know; defending yourself from aggressors. Not, aggressing so you don't have to defend yourself from aggressors, which should expose a basic moral dilemna fairly quickly with just a moment's consideration..
How about that all of it is geared towards plutocratic, militaristic, nationalistic, socially conservative repression?
I'm a fan of a strong national defense. Too bad whenever I see anyone use that phrase, they really seem to mean a strong national Offense. I guess "that's the best defense" in some minds.
Can you possibly figure out why someone might find that terrible?
Let me tell you that physical aggression between people and worrying about getting hurt are two entirely different things. You are grouping them together but they are not even casually related.
I have been in more fights than I care to count (when I was younger), mainly because I was an easy target. I didn't want to fight and I didn't like it, it didn't make me more of a man, and in fact when I tried to kill a kid who attacked me once (I snapped completely) in an after school "down at the tracks" fight, I can only say it's good that I was enough of a wuss to be unable to actually tear his throat out with my bare hands with them clamped around his windpipe, because otherwise the rest of my life probably would have been a total waste after I entered the correctional system.
Testosterone sure can cause homicide. If you've never "seen red" (that's a literal truth, by the way), then you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.
What almost turned me into a repressed fiend hell bent on vengeful murder was constant harassment in school. And I had plenty of outlets for "testosterone". I just didn't have a gang of friends who liked to fight because they had nothing better to do with their time.
the ones who did? Mostly heroin addicts or in jail now. I guess that fight instinct really served them really well when dodging unwanted sex in the prison showers. They would probably have been better off as "emo cry babies", eh, if it kept them out in the first place?
ah, but then they wouldn't be "real men" and your whole sense of male ego would be based on bullshit.
the hijackers, by the way, said the plane was wired to blow up, not "sit down and shut up or I'll cut you". Up until then, hijackers always landed planes peacefully and everyone had always been trained to do what they were told during a hijacking, which in the, what, fifty years of commercial aviation prior had saved more lives than you can count. But suddenly, everyone was supposed to buck decades of learned experience and just magically know that THIS time, THESE hijackers were on a suicide mission of colossal scale?
do you prefer that the rest of representatives just vote uninformed about legislation they don't understand or, often, haven't even read?
Personally I wish ALL legislators voted "present" more than "yea" or "nay". Cause I"m pretty sure they usually aren't very sure about what they are voting for. this would leave the voting to those who DO understand a particular issue. But, then people like you would condemn them for being human beings who do not know all, so they have to vote anyway, and we wonder why our political system promotes mediocrity so much.
Unfortunately, most just take the party word for how they should vote on any given piece of leglislation. There simply isn't time for independant research on everything that comes up the pike.
I am not an obama supporter, but that argument has got to be the weakest one ever and I'm sick of reading it. When I go to a voting booth, if I don't know very clearly how I want to respond to a given ballot item, I don't vote on it. I am VERY HAPPY that a legislator might feel the same way. An executive might not have that luxury but, then again, he will have a lot more resources at his disposal as well.
that was hardly the point of the post, that was just a simplified caricature of our current situation.
the point is, even though the amount of money a CEO got pales in comparison to what is being thrown around now: the CEO is in the position to guide policy at their corporations, and the lesser amount of money is still more than sufficient to cause short term focus to become their most rational course of action, as long as they don't care about the fallout once they are gone.
In other words, while what is happening NOW is a much greater inefficiency in the system than that caused by the "free market" directly, actions taken by those in the free market can result in this sort of conundrum, even when their direct actions were for much lesser sums of money, individually.
no, by your definition, it's all about doing massive pump and dump schemes, and when the whole market crashes behind you, well, too bad.... you got yours.
put it another way. I am Joe executive. I can make, say, $100 million here. After that, I need nothing, ever again, as long as I shall live. All I have to do is put you in a position, american government, where you choose between total economic meltdown or massive bailout... costing everyone else and me money.
Hey, I just got everyone to pay me to live in luxury for the rest of my life. yay me!
Seriously, you guys really don't notice how things work out here, do you? They are not the "least" of the problem. They are the problem, the ones who care, rationally, only for their own self interest. Not for others. and who parley that into positions of power.
they are the same ones in government fucking it up.
so if you can't trust the capitalists, and you can't trust the government... doesn't leave you much.
at least with government I can still vote. that's something, at least. that's why I side more on that side than the other, though not very heavily. Like most people.
I think only individuals give a fig about self-preservation.
companies and institutions are made up of individuals, it's true. Individuals who care primarily about their own self preservation, and that of the company only insofar as they intend to stay with the company and its continued existence serves them.
If the top players do not need the company to continue to meet their needs (perhaps because they are already fantastically wealthy), then their impetus to protect the company at all costs is very low.
In fact, it is in their best interest, if possible, to loot the company of as much as possible as quickly as possible and exit the rotting husk before it collapses. That would be the best capitalist strategy for anyone with enough power to do so; simply take the capital with you (or, "enough" of it at least) on the way out. As long as you have way more than you ever desire to spend, you win completely, congratulations!
Long term survival in a company is desired by who? not typically from the company itself, with the possible exception of family businesses or ego-driven despots. No one making big bucks today, should rationally care whether the company they work for makes it another hundred years. Just longer than they intend to work there.
Greenspan is surprised that people are completely rational and don't overly identify with corporate structures like he apparently does?
Or that people who are NOT rational choose to gamble on longer odds in order to potentially make even bigger bucks?
He realizes that people play the lottery, right? go to vegas? have finite working careers and lifespans?
Greenspan is no more blind to all of this than any free marketeer who acts like market "systems" are somehow mechanical and truly self correcting. He's not particularly crazy or anything; they are all missing the basic truth here; people are both irrational, and coldly rational, and as long as that is true, the market is not able to "self correct" without severe trauma. Much as the same way we don't just shrug and let the snow that comes every year cause us to freeze just because it is "natural", we take steps to minimize the difficulties that can arise from the cold; we build houses, we heat them. When we see that "natural" market forces cause massive depressions, runs, gouging, profiteering, cartels, irrational exuberance, inflation, and more, we would logically take steps to counteract those undesirable forces. Unless you disagree with the value of a stable society.
Back to the company: I don't think it's short sighted at all to focus on short term profits, if you think you can make enough to really set you up in life, and you're confident that other opportunities will follow you later in life, as many people do. do you? It's just that some are left without chairs when the music stops...
because we have not had two, Bush and his crew has succeeded?
Funny, I would have regarded pinning our entire military force down in a country I didn't like in the first place, and bankrupting said country while causing them to give up everything that made them strong in the first place as a victory. A damn big victory, in fact, if I were a little pissant wannabe dictator.
Maybe you should read some history and realize that most big powers are their own undoing. we're doing a bang up job of it here. I find your arguement that perhaps we *shouldn't* have been in WWII interesting indeed. Your revisionist historian probably needs to re-read the actual situation outside of america around that time period.
and thirty years from now, when the shit they are doing today is declassified (IF, I should say, since so much from even the 50's still isn't), your kids will say "Hey, things have backed off since the 00's, chill out, the corruption is behind us".
Seriously; how hard do you have to want it to believe what you are spewing? Or do you really believe that corruption was pretty constant.. in every society in human history.. but american since 1970 conquered it!
It's viewpoints JUST LIKE YOURS that allow such trangressions to occur. Demonize "snot-nosed black-flag-waving peace activists", then if anything bad happens to them, well hey, they probably deserved it. they are breaking rules after all, and being nuisances. why can't they just get jobs and shut up, right?
well sure, but the timeframe you're talking about could very easily outstrip the timeframe that makes the effects we're looking to mitigate become problems.
for instance, use your arguement to address mercury, for example. someday, infinitely cheap energy may allow us to clean everything up to be non toxic.
However, before then, we may all die of heavy metal poisoning if we don't clean something up with CURRENT technology.
Your arguements makes no sense on timeframes that actually matter to us humans.
and if you think fusion power is only 40 years away, well, I would definitely call that optimistic. we're still driving internal combustion engines, for criminey's sake.
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no one who commits torture for any reason should be protected from retaliation, orders or not.
Illegal orders are still illegal, and our military personnel are trained to know that. Ignoring it and doing it just because "it's orders" is not a justifiable defense, IMO.
quick math problem: go from 10 percent to 15, and your percentage increase is....?
If someone didn't have allegiance to their country, what in the world makes you think putting your hand on a book and mumbling some words would change that?
closed loop wells don't use copper as the well sleeve, . they also don't replentish their water (that is why they are closed loop). right?
slinkies are not ideal... DX is, except for the breach and refrigerant issue. closed loop wells are 2nd though, AFAICT at least.
pond loop is interested, but submerging anything in water long term presents possible longevity issues as well.
DX systems suffer because they are burying copper in the ground (which is often aggressive to copper), and then pumping refrigerant through them. any puncture or breach would cause a leak of refrigerant instead of non toxic glycol solution.
DX and "Pump and Dump" geo-exchange systems are both, IMHO, likely to be outlawed in areas with environmental and building codes. Existing systems would probably be grandfathered but in the end I believe closed loop well or "slinky field" type systems will end up the winners.
You are free not to join a community that has decided on its own standards and values, or one that has decided to protect each other's property values as well.
We are very free. You don't have to live there at all; you can live in the middle of nowhere and be as loud as you like.
but when your actions actually affect the people around you; no, you are not free to do whatever you want, and you should not be.
That said, it should be illegal to prevent renewables from being installed, IMHO, and i would never live in a community with those standards.
exactly how much area are you losing when you put in a dam?
Is that really significant beyond a very local area, compared to the removal of the extraction/pollution costs of dirtier energy?
I would strongly doubt it. and I care nothing about co2. I do care about resource depletion, environmental toxicity, and collapsing foodstocks. Burning coal and its mercury is worse for our consumption of salmon than hydroelectric dams are, in my view.
I am not aware of any shortfalls in lumber, or other products that is even remotely attributed to hydro power. the only people railing against responsible hydro power (with, say, the amazing innovation of fish ladders) are NIMBYs, who are a plague on the entire environmental responsibility movement.
practically speaking though, when you are evaluating a residential heating system, calling a geothermal system 300% efficient compared to a boiler running at 90% is an effective and correct comparison. Your source is the ground, and you are not going to deplete the energy in the ground (long term).
It may actually be a COP, but that just obfuscates the real fact that to get X heat into your structure, the energy consumed is relative those numbers in a direct comparison. Say you were using electricity at 100% efficiency at point of use and geo at 300% efficiency; your numbers would work. the analysis would be correct.
Your terminology may not be correct, but substantively, nitpicking over the terminology is a side arguement, not a refutation.
the question hypothesized that IF Bush did this, people supportive of democrats would freak out because he would be 'militarizing space', and presumes that Obama planning to do the same will be met with great indifference by democrats or even lauded as a smart move. and vice versa on both points for republicans.
Which is very true, the US political system IS entirely focused on fake comparisons between the parties (republicans being "small government" while running the biggest deficits in history.. all of them, recently... for example... Democrats being "weak" when they get us into military conflicts even more often than republicans being another). The difference between the two is more of perception and image than of substance.
I said if you cannot see that 10% of 10k is insanely difficult to part with, while 10% of 100k is not nearly as hard to part with, then you have no empathy because you lack very basic understanding of the kinds of choices you are making at 10k and 100k/year respectively, or you would realize your statement makes no sense at all.
While, again, your choices at 100k might cause problems for you paying your tax bill, at 10k, you just have problems, no choice involved, if asked to pay an equal percentage.
I am saying the tax code cannot be perfect. but a flat rate is inherently not fair, because it's far easier for an equally capable and intelligent person to easily pay their tax bill at a higher income than for a poorer person. They are carrying different BURDENS. This apparently does not matter to you or enter your equation of "fairness", and so I accuse your equation of "fairness" of being far too simplistic. While a more nuanced, progressive tax scheme may still present different burdens on different people because of their own personal choice and circumstance, unless you know of some measure that can perfectly determine this burden for any given person, nothing can be perfect.
To put this another way, say it's just food. If I have one pound of food a day, giving up half is a massive burden. If I have a hundred pounds of food a day, giving up half is a huge amount of food, but it's not as personally threatening by a long shot. Asking us both to give up half our food is by no measure that takes human well being into account fair. it is fair only by a strict mathematical proportion. Coming along and whining about what happens if you give 99 pounds of your hundred pounds away does nothing to address the argument at all.
If you are against X ENTIRELY, as you seem to say and as that example would seem to indicate, you must be an anarchist, as you believe then that no government has any right to collect any money whatsoever, whether by "fair" measures or not. Remember X is whatever amount government needs to run, as I have defined it many times over now. Since you are apparently an anarchist, this conversation is a waste of time. Not that I am unsympathic to anarchists, I just find them all horribly misguided and totally out of touch with reality to the point where reason is really a waste of time, because they are all advocating for some world that can never and will never exist. Cute though.
if you're not an anarchist, you totally flunk reading comprehension regarding X, and this conversation is still a waste of time, because you can't even comprehend and respond to actual arguments, all you can do is accuse me of making arguments I am not making, accuse me of lying, and worming out of my statements to the point where you are just masturbating your own tired ideology, loosely at the direction of my words. That makes for a pretty disappointing "discussion".
I am not saying government knows best. I am not saying that government is the "solution" to anything. I have no idea what X is and I'm not advocating for any particular value of X, X again being the amount of money government NEEDS TO RUN... which could mean anything, I don't care what value you choose for X as long as you agree that we need a government, and it needs some money. If X is a hundred times less than what government is asking for today, great.... that's a separate conversation. Whether we collect X from income, sales, property or whatever is also not a part of this. Whether or not I would prefer to have another $10k in my pocket right now is irrelevant. But X itself is inviolate IF you agree we need a government. Ok so far? I can't imagine you have any disagreement here, since this is pretty basic, but if we don't agree on this then I guess you're an anarchist and we can end the discussion now because we don't have agreement in our very basic assumptions.
I am saying that WHATEVER X is, needs to be shared FAIRLY amongst the populace, and fairness is influenced by how much of a burden you place upon the people, not simply an equal proportion. Obviously we cannot determine perfect fairness in this respect from a percentage and an income alone, as if you make as much as I do we may both be in different circumstances. However, we have to do the best we can do, and we know also that a flat percentage is not fair for someone making much less with equal money management skills to myself. IN GENERAL. Which is the best the tax code can do.
Obviously if you bought an even more expensive house than I did, and have chosen to buy a new car or two, and live in an expensive area, you might be in trouble at $100k/year. But you might be in trouble at a flat rate 10 percent too; that's not the tax code's issue, that's your personal finance issue. The tax code is required only to determine what your fair SHARE of the burden is relative to your income, not how smart or dumb you are with your actual money. Again, assuming that you agree that you should be paying your fair share of government's expenses... X... whatever you think X should be.
We are not asking whether you give to charity or about "helping" the poor, simply not crushing them with unnecessary burdens that are, in general, far easier for others to pay. I am not talking about what government is doing with X. Just how to collect the money to pay for it.
for whatever it's worth, X right now is too high, IMO. I would prefer to stop fighting wars and cut X in half. I'm actually in a worst case scenario right now as far as tax burden to available cash, with a growing business so my income is much higher on paper than I get to actually take home. having my share be smaller would directly employ at least one more person immediately. but even so, even with my share of X being figured on a pile of cash I don't actually have available to me unless I choose to stop growing, so I have to pay my share of X from a pile of cash which is half of what X was figured on, it is still FAR EASIER than it was when I was making $10k, or $15k, or even $20k/year and still making much more basic decisions like skipping meals, doctors, and car maintenance. obviously I have to still make hard decisions. I don't have everything I could possibly need or want.
But this is totally different ballgame than being poor. As in, it's totally ridiculous to compare the two at a flat rate. the only way I would be in the same trouble as someone who makes $10k would be by choice: at 10k, you have no choice.
I have made both 10k and 100k in my life so far, but way to assume. while 100k is not rich, it is certainly much, much more comfortable than 10k. and my current tax bill, while extremely high, is much less of a burden to me than a smaller percentage was when I was poorer.
Back then, it influenced what kind of food I ate, whether or not I ever went to the dentist/doctor or did car maintenance so I could get to work in a timely fashion.
These days, it might change the type of house I can own, how good my health insurance plan is, how fast I can stock up a retirement fund and what kind of college I might be able to afford to send my daughter to. It may even effect how many employees I can pay, and what I can pay them. Of course, you can cut my taxes and hope that I will pay more employees more money and then recoup that tax from their payroll, but it's a diminishing return for sure. There is some possibility there... unless I have enough employees, in which case, you just pad my bank account further.
That is a very different level of burden, in any case. Increasing burden on people who have not even yet hit all the 'necessities', and NOT shifting that burden to those for whom it is a much smaller burden in terms of necessities, is not fair.
Your choice to unwisely dispose of your income does not change the fact that government requires taxes to function, and of the taxes required, a richer person is quite fairly asked to pay a shifted amount of the burden compared to a poorer person. We can quibble about how much taxes government requires to function, sure, or whether or not you are smarter than government. But if we agree there is and should be a government, it needs money to function, and the amount of money is X, then I should have to pay a bigger slice of X proportionate to my current income than my 10k/year self should have paid. Absolutely, the is no question here at all, and anyone who can't see that is obviously an ideologue with no grasp of the realities of living poor, or no empathy whatsoever for other human beings. And I don't mean touchy feeling gets all sick at the thought of people living dirty empathy, I mean a basic level of compassion for people who have to do without basic necessities like good health care, healthy food, or maintenance on the things they need to make a living in order to meet rent.
I also don't mean that everyone poor manages their money as effectively as they could or that their lives would automatically be better with a little more money in their pocket. But it sure as hell means a lot more to someone poor than it does to someone like me.
And anyone 100k+ crying 'poormouth' is a total douchebag. It isn't a recipe for riches (especially if, like me, you made an unwise house purchase recently) but it's a totally different ballgame than poor.
That is fair. the same percentage of your income is a greater burden to those with less income than it is to someone with a lot of income.
if I make 10k/year, 1k in taxes SUCKS.
If I make 100k/year, 10k in taxes is no big deal.
There is nothing "fair" about flat tax. Simple, yes, but not "fair".
you've hit on the real issue: it is DISPARITY between different levels of society that causes problems, as it relates to privacy.
If powerful people in our society had no privacy at all, it would be very hard for them to manipulate people, pull shady deals against the common good, etc. that is a good thing, as it would appear FUD and deception are the two most commonly wielded political tools as far as I can tell.
I would go so far as to say if we all lost privacy to some degree, as long as the powerful lost it just as much, it would work out better in the long run. However, I doubt that will be the case initially at least, which makes privacy a tool of power as long as some people have it and others don't... that's a heavy advantage.
the major question in my mind would be military.. it would be nearly impossible to fight a war without privacy. so then you need to except the military (probably not a great idea if you like democracy), expand this to a worldwide policy (tricky at best), or find some less than total level of privacy reduction which kind of changes the conversation..
Not hitting first means you get hit first sometimes. That's a basic truth, no arguement.
However, you get hit a lot less than you do if you just go around hitting people whenever you think they might be a bit sketchy. That's why you don't hit first, not because it guarantees that you will never be hit.
I'm not saying we can never intervene to repel an aggressor on anyone but ourselves. However, the bar has got to be pretty damn high for me to support it. And it should be done with a military sized for defense, not worldwide imperialism, to further ensure that it is only done in times of great need.
You can find a saying for nearly anything. "Violence never solved anything" is similarly common and ignorant.
I prefer a traditional definition of "defense". You know; defending yourself from aggressors. Not, aggressing so you don't have to defend yourself from aggressors, which should expose a basic moral dilemna fairly quickly with just a moment's consideration..
How about that all of it is geared towards plutocratic, militaristic, nationalistic, socially conservative repression?
I'm a fan of a strong national defense. Too bad whenever I see anyone use that phrase, they really seem to mean a strong national Offense. I guess "that's the best defense" in some minds.
Can you possibly figure out why someone might find that terrible?
Let me tell you that physical aggression between people and worrying about getting hurt are two entirely different things. You are grouping them together but they are not even casually related.
I have been in more fights than I care to count (when I was younger), mainly because I was an easy target. I didn't want to fight and I didn't like it, it didn't make me more of a man, and in fact when I tried to kill a kid who attacked me once (I snapped completely) in an after school "down at the tracks" fight, I can only say it's good that I was enough of a wuss to be unable to actually tear his throat out with my bare hands with them clamped around his windpipe, because otherwise the rest of my life probably would have been a total waste after I entered the correctional system.
Testosterone sure can cause homicide. If you've never "seen red" (that's a literal truth, by the way), then you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.
What almost turned me into a repressed fiend hell bent on vengeful murder was constant harassment in school. And I had plenty of outlets for "testosterone". I just didn't have a gang of friends who liked to fight because they had nothing better to do with their time.
the ones who did? Mostly heroin addicts or in jail now. I guess that fight instinct really served them really well when dodging unwanted sex in the prison showers. They would probably have been better off as "emo cry babies", eh, if it kept them out in the first place?
ah, but then they wouldn't be "real men" and your whole sense of male ego would be based on bullshit.
the hijackers, by the way, said the plane was wired to blow up, not "sit down and shut up or I'll cut you". Up until then, hijackers always landed planes peacefully and everyone had always been trained to do what they were told during a hijacking, which in the, what, fifty years of commercial aviation prior had saved more lives than you can count. But suddenly, everyone was supposed to buck decades of learned experience and just magically know that THIS time, THESE hijackers were on a suicide mission of colossal scale?
Way to go with the revisionist history, buddy.
do you prefer that the rest of representatives just vote uninformed about legislation they don't understand or, often, haven't even read?
Personally I wish ALL legislators voted "present" more than "yea" or "nay". Cause I"m pretty sure they usually aren't very sure about what they are voting for. this would leave the voting to those who DO understand a particular issue. But, then people like you would condemn them for being human beings who do not know all, so they have to vote anyway, and we wonder why our political system promotes mediocrity so much.
Unfortunately, most just take the party word for how they should vote on any given piece of leglislation. There simply isn't time for independant research on everything that comes up the pike.
I am not an obama supporter, but that argument has got to be the weakest one ever and I'm sick of reading it. When I go to a voting booth, if I don't know very clearly how I want to respond to a given ballot item, I don't vote on it. I am VERY HAPPY that a legislator might feel the same way. An executive might not have that luxury but, then again, he will have a lot more resources at his disposal as well.
that was hardly the point of the post, that was just a simplified caricature of our current situation.
the point is, even though the amount of money a CEO got pales in comparison to what is being thrown around now: the CEO is in the position to guide policy at their corporations, and the lesser amount of money is still more than sufficient to cause short term focus to become their most rational course of action, as long as they don't care about the fallout once they are gone.
In other words, while what is happening NOW is a much greater inefficiency in the system than that caused by the "free market" directly, actions taken by those in the free market can result in this sort of conundrum, even when their direct actions were for much lesser sums of money, individually.
no, by your definition, it's all about doing massive pump and dump schemes, and when the whole market crashes behind you, well, too bad.... you got yours.
put it another way. I am Joe executive. I can make, say, $100 million here. After that, I need nothing, ever again, as long as I shall live. All I have to do is put you in a position, american government, where you choose between total economic meltdown or massive bailout... costing everyone else and me money.
Hey, I just got everyone to pay me to live in luxury for the rest of my life. yay me!
Seriously, you guys really don't notice how things work out here, do you? They are not the "least" of the problem. They are the problem, the ones who care, rationally, only for their own self interest. Not for others. and who parley that into positions of power.
they are the same ones in government fucking it up.
so if you can't trust the capitalists, and you can't trust the government... doesn't leave you much.
at least with government I can still vote. that's something, at least. that's why I side more on that side than the other, though not very heavily. Like most people.
I think only individuals give a fig about self-preservation.
companies and institutions are made up of individuals, it's true. Individuals who care primarily about their own self preservation, and that of the company only insofar as they intend to stay with the company and its continued existence serves them.
If the top players do not need the company to continue to meet their needs (perhaps because they are already fantastically wealthy), then their impetus to protect the company at all costs is very low.
In fact, it is in their best interest, if possible, to loot the company of as much as possible as quickly as possible and exit the rotting husk before it collapses. That would be the best capitalist strategy for anyone with enough power to do so; simply take the capital with you (or, "enough" of it at least) on the way out. As long as you have way more than you ever desire to spend, you win completely, congratulations!
Long term survival in a company is desired by who? not typically from the company itself, with the possible exception of family businesses or ego-driven despots. No one making big bucks today, should rationally care whether the company they work for makes it another hundred years. Just longer than they intend to work there.
Greenspan is surprised that people are completely rational and don't overly identify with corporate structures like he apparently does?
Or that people who are NOT rational choose to gamble on longer odds in order to potentially make even bigger bucks?
He realizes that people play the lottery, right? go to vegas? have finite working careers and lifespans?
Greenspan is no more blind to all of this than any free marketeer who acts like market "systems" are somehow mechanical and truly self correcting. He's not particularly crazy or anything; they are all missing the basic truth here; people are both irrational, and coldly rational, and as long as that is true, the market is not able to "self correct" without severe trauma. Much as the same way we don't just shrug and let the snow that comes every year cause us to freeze just because it is "natural", we take steps to minimize the difficulties that can arise from the cold; we build houses, we heat them. When we see that "natural" market forces cause massive depressions, runs, gouging, profiteering, cartels, irrational exuberance, inflation, and more, we would logically take steps to counteract those undesirable forces. Unless you disagree with the value of a stable society.
Back to the company: I don't think it's short sighted at all to focus on short term profits, if you think you can make enough to really set you up in life, and you're confident that other opportunities will follow you later in life, as many people do. do you? It's just that some are left without chairs when the music stops...
we had one terrorist attack on our soil.
because we have not had two, Bush and his crew has succeeded?
Funny, I would have regarded pinning our entire military force down in a country I didn't like in the first place, and bankrupting said country while causing them to give up everything that made them strong in the first place as a victory. A damn big victory, in fact, if I were a little pissant wannabe dictator.
Maybe you should read some history and realize that most big powers are their own undoing. we're doing a bang up job of it here. I find your arguement that perhaps we *shouldn't* have been in WWII interesting indeed. Your revisionist historian probably needs to re-read the actual situation outside of america around that time period.
... right, of course they have.
and thirty years from now, when the shit they are doing today is declassified (IF, I should say, since so much from even the 50's still isn't), your kids will say "Hey, things have backed off since the 00's, chill out, the corruption is behind us".
Seriously; how hard do you have to want it to believe what you are spewing? Or do you really believe that corruption was pretty constant.. in every society in human history.. but american since 1970 conquered it!
It's viewpoints JUST LIKE YOURS that allow such trangressions to occur. Demonize "snot-nosed black-flag-waving peace activists", then if anything bad happens to them, well hey, they probably deserved it. they are breaking rules after all, and being nuisances. why can't they just get jobs and shut up, right?
well sure, but the timeframe you're talking about could very easily outstrip the timeframe that makes the effects we're looking to mitigate become problems.
for instance, use your arguement to address mercury, for example. someday, infinitely cheap energy may allow us to clean everything up to be non toxic.
However, before then, we may all die of heavy metal poisoning if we don't clean something up with CURRENT technology.
Your arguements makes no sense on timeframes that actually matter to us humans.
and if you think fusion power is only 40 years away, well, I would definitely call that optimistic. we're still driving internal combustion engines, for criminey's sake.