Uniform, as in a single election for all 28 members, either use daylight savings or don't and whether to use winter or summer time. Otherwise you'll have some which stick with daylight savings and some who don't and possibly inconsistency with regard to winter or summer time.
That said, switching everyone (globally) over to a 24hr UTC clock and getting over mental hangups about sucking up the minor adjustment of what "morning" means for you would be much better overall. You know what is much better than being able to determine what time is morning for someone when setting a meeting? Instantly knowing what time someone is talking about when they propose one, with no ambiguity, ever and intuitively know how early or late that will be for you. People can give instant feedback and nobody ever makes an error or is confused about what time an event is supposed to occur.
Why not? It's just a number. Everyone just switch to a 24hr UTC clock... it isn't like you don't have the existing offsets as a guide to get started. It would be an annoying transition but it is still consistent from day to day so you'd adjust pretty quickly.
There are advantages and downsides but the advantages of all having the same clock are pretty substantial especially given how globally connected everyone is. Arranging a meeting with someone in the UK or France? You just set a time and everyone will automatically know if its a reasonable hour. No more missed meetings improper timing because of timezone conversion, no more ambiguity about which time zone was meant when someone says "we'll meet back up at 5 tomorrow"
"the USA high school program needs a total overhaul, frankly we should be doing more to teach "civics" so that kids come out of school knowing both their rights and responsibilities as citizens,"
This was a requirement in middle school. To know both the US and State Constitution. A state requirement in Illinois and it was expanded on as a requirement in high school with American history.
"life skills" like how to manage a household, finance (esp taxes), basic repairs (at least understand enough to know who to call when something breaks), cooking, cleaning, how to look for a job, etc, etc, etc"
There are classes on many of these things offered in high school and middle school. Home Ec, various shop classes, business math, etc. But honestly the best place to learn these things isn't in school it is from your parents. School is not intended to be a one stop shop for everything you need to learn in life.
What they are missing in high school is "Critical Thinking" except perhaps as part of a debate extra curricular. The last thing they want is students knowing how to frame good arguments. Basic repairs is something school isn't going to help with, youtube and the internet do the job just fine if someone can get over their fear of TRYING.
I live in a red state but I've lived in many states. Honestly the only differences from one to the next are minor. The water is treated in much the same manner everywhere. People are choosing to drink bottled water while regulations declare it to be perfectly fine that doesn't mean they have to. People who actually need to drink bottled water usually have well problems. I'd certainly drink a glass in Georgia before I'd drink in LA or NYC which are by far the most polluted places I've been. In general you find the most pollution in heavily populated places.
In this particular red state I've found utility rates to the be lowest I've seen in the country, not the average but the low rates are available to anyone who bothers to shop on the deregulated market. Currently I pay less than $0.04/KWH net after everything is included for 100% renewable. You can choose dirty power, up to a couple years ago it was cheaper but now there is so much renewable that the state is on track to be 100% renewable within the next couple years without any special state level incentives. The market has just chosen renewable and driven down prices. Housing costs are low. I live in a reasonably wealthy suburb and you can rent a 1200 sq ft 3 bedroom house with a pool here for $1200/mo while I hear SF is sitting at 3x that. I've looked into tech positions in CA but the salaries aren't higher the cost of living is just dramatically higher. The air is clear, there is no smog, there is no income tax, businesses don't pay tax either unless they gross more than a million so that small business ventures and startups aren't hurt and the rates are reasonable.
You also don't have extra and unreasonable firearms restrictions and registration so crime is low and neighborhoods are safe. Even the 'bad' parts of town aren't really that bad compared to other places I've been. The politicians do tend to be nutballs but the economic policy actually plays out better in the real world so I don't worry about it much.
Nope the red states that are doing poorly are gutters largely because you've gutted their industry and outsourced it to China. You've tried to replace it with a growing financial and tech industry which is the primary export of blue states. Oh and you've pumped millions into bottom rate agricultural labor with lax immigration policies crushing those states agriculture economies. +Tech +Finance +Mexican labor subsidized agriculture +Cheap Chinese goods is a recipe for boosting the economies of blue states while depressing the industry of entire regions of red states.
Consumers are willing to pay for a streaming service and we don't mind there being 10-20 streaming services but all of them need to have all the premium content included and for it to stay. Nobody cares about the non-premium content at all. So content makers, stop splitting off your own streaming services and stop selling exclusive access. Let consumers have their cake and eat it to and race these guys to the bottom and make up the difference by making them all pay for content all the time instead of one at a time.
Instead of charging per piece of content charge by first view and second view from a given unique household. Second view carries the highest premium because that means something was worth watching again. Beyond second view who cares? That or charge for simultaneous streams but it is harder to spread the royalties out that way. As for advertising subsidized movies and tv, let that go the way of dodo.
"HAHAHAHA! please cite the last war that the US actually won."
All of them? The US hasn't engaged in any actual invasions so withdrawing isn't defeat, success is measured by achieving the stated objective. Saddam is toppled kuwait liberated, Victory. The man himself found hiding in a hole and executed, check. Afghanistan liberated from Al Queda, victory. Bin Laden himself dug out and executed, check. Vietnam cost so much you could argue it wasn't a victory but the US successfully prevented the communists from advancing. That was really all a proxy fight with the USSR and the USSR doesn't exist today while the US does. Korea was part of that same fight.
Before that we weren't really in any wars since WWII. Last I checked we defeated the Germans, saved the British and the Russians, and liberated the rest of Europe in that one. Now you could argue the British and Russians didn't need saving and would have been okay but you are definitely looking through rose tinted glasses if you think they had any hope of achieving better than a stalemate without the US and that is a huge stretch for the British because they only survived to the offensive and to the work of Turing because of US aid. The UK was a besieged fortress and US supplies are the only thing that prevented the Germans from starving them out.
"hell, look at how long it takes to get your military out of a country."
What on earth makes you think we actually want to be fully successful at getting our military out of a country? Are you really so blind that you can't see that "failure" has resulted in a network of US military bases around the globe which are within range of any target in the world if we are willing to cross airspace?
The first shot fired in your scenario would by the UK. As for going nuclear, that would be ridiculously foolish. It would be madness no matter who did it. Only the absolutely insane would go nuclear for real, those are for making serious threats not actual deployment. But if they are that crazy the UK doesn't have nuclear arms sufficient to tackle the US. There is no scenario that goes nuclear where a UK remains afterward and the US doesn't. And the winds involved are such that they wouldn't be likely to harm the US they'd create a near instant collapse for most of the rest of Europe within the space of hours.
The UK and Europe aren't weak, they could blacken the eye of the US and in concerted effort maybe break its nose as well. That is enough to make the US hesitate. But they would be annihilated in the conflict. Actually playing hard ball and picking that fight would be suicide. Police here in the US are armed and we have an expression "death by cop." It is a suicide tactic in which someone points a gun at or shoots at police in order to force the police to kill them to protect themselves. That is the same thing you are suggesting here, that the UK and by extension Europe would kill themselves by pointing a gun at the US and forcing it to protect itself.
You propose the UK destroy itself and Europe alongside it just to spite a longstanding ally. I know you guys like to come up with alternative dialogues over there but you'd all be Nazi's or more likely either Russians or USians right now without the "sleeping giant" having been woken and defending you rather than letting Germany finish you off and then splitting the carcass with the Russians.
"People in those high tax states don't "get out of" paying their fair share... in fact, they have been paying MORE than their fair share for decades as those low tax red states litteraly steal money from blue states to make their state function."
This is how our tax system works, just like citizens with more income owe a larger share, states which contain more of them owe a larger share. Just because your state pays more than another state in doesn't mean the people of your state paid their full share. It means your incomes are so disproportionate that you were able to dodge a large chunk of your fair share and still paid more. No small part of that is the people in blue states have advanced economic agendas that hurt the trades of midwestern and southern states while promoting their own trades. They then impose local and state taxes that have erroneously diverted federal income tax and then promoted increasing federal programs and subsidies. The other states see a larger increase with every additional program tacked on.
Corrections like this serve to help give you perspective on the cost of taxes and federal programs. It really is no different on the state level than the individual but people in blue states don't like to have the same logic applied to the state level as the individual. Want states to pay more than they take, start cutting out the programs that pay money to states and implement a tax cut for what they cost.
There is no way to untangle this broken and twisted knot that doesn't negatively impact both red and blue states at many stages. There is also no fair way that doesn't put a squeeze on high earners to pay their entire fair share. This is going to put a squeeze on state programs, then local programs. Eventually this will require increases to property taxes and there won't be havens for the wealthy to dodge by sinking their wealth into real estate.
"Make the CEO of any company caught hiring illegal aliens spew a year in jail for each illegal employed, and the problem will disappear pretty quickly."
The real immigration problem has little to do with illegal aliens and everything to do with legally imported workers to toss Americans out of high paying tech jobs. They distract you with strawberry pickers while they displace 50k six figure jobs a year. It floods the market and stagnates wages. Whether you actually work in those fields or not this kills the economy and drives the economic depression that leads to you pointing fingers at strawberry pickers.
The rest of the country got a tax cut, actually you did as well, what paid for the tax cut is no longer allowing your city/state to hijack income tax dollars. Since your state/city still hasn't fixed their taxes to no longer attempt to hijack income tax from the feds you should take the issue up with them. They'll just have to cut costs/programs or increase sales/gross receipt taxes instead of pilfering income taxes.
Really that is the best thing. People in New York shouldn't get out of paying their fair share of federal income tax which should look just like someone in Alabama with the same income. That is one step. The next is wealthy areas incorporating separately so their income taxes go entirely to their schools and rob poor neighborhoods of their funding.
"When a foreign worker is hired and moves to the US, they're gonna be spending their pay check in the US to buy food, clothes, services, etc."
Minimally. The countries which export these workers run investment programs to give better returns from home. Meaning a huge chunk of their salaries get funneled directly out the US. And then of course there are the workers who send money back to their families. We really shouldn't allow visa workers either option.
That is extremely misleading. There is a very drastic difference between what a worker pays for health care and what they pay for health insurance and you are conflating the two. The Canadian is paying the bottom line figure with no bill when they receive care.
The health insurance $4000/yr will get you right now usually carries a several thousand dollar deductible, has a whole slew of exclusions, and generally only pays at 80-90% on what is covered. Which would put the real costs paid per year in the US at least 4 fold as high. One broken bone, surgery, or hospital stay required would put an individual at or above the $16k figure.
Yes, and even if the salaries are within a reasonable margin the flood of additional workers stagnates wages. That is what companies want to avoid, paying tech engineers salaries on par with other fields of engineering.
Fair point, we shouldn't be keeping out the (legal) immigrants per say. Instead we should be penalizing companies based on their utilization of foreign workers and in that process we should count foreign subsidiaries.
We could do something like introduce the concept of a tax debit which corresponds to a credit and has to paid without regard to anything else in their taxes which raises the net cost for any and all foreign tech workers and contractors (including domestic) to at least 250k + any benefits. Thus we eliminate any and all cost savings and pave the way to the salary levels they are trying to avoid (salaries on par with the median for other types of engineer).
How exactly are they actually going to make the US leave short of an act of war? Currently they are pushing. Once upon a time the UK had a mighty British empire and the American colonies needed an ally to defeat them but today I think an act of aggression against the American military is a shoving match nobody sane would want. Even if it were the entire EU, which it no longer is, militarily they wouldn't stand a chance and that is without nuclear weapons considered.
"No, but claiming that it is better than the insurance-based healthcare the US has, tend to make you appear dumb."
Please stop talking. You are making us all look horrible. Continue not being willing to help others and wanting a short line in the form of denying others lifesaving care. But stop pretending the insurance-based healthcare even remotely makes economic sense, it doesn't. We spend more tax dollars failing to provide government health care in the US than other nations with comparable overall quality of care spend paying for that care entirely with house calls.
"Well someone has to. You seem to forget it in your superiority."
Says the inferior and arrogant backward culture. Seriously you can just go back and forth on this nonsense all day.
"Huh? It failed? As far as I can tell the USA wants more money put into it."
I believe that is merely wanting you to pay your equal share or dissolve it.
"Have fun with your new buddies in Communist China.
Your brain doesn't appear to be working. If you've already had your morning coffee then may I suggest calling 911, you may have just had a stroke."
No, you are deciding it is a better idea to hand your intelligence and networks over to the intelligence industry of the country that runs the great firewall, opposes democracy, and burns peaceful monks alive alongside mowing down students with tanks. As far as I can tell it is purely out of petty spite. You demand proof they will spy as if it isn't petty and naive to pretend that whoever you buy from is going to do that, that was a given the minute you didn't develop your own chips for sensitive purposes like this. The question isn't whether or not they are going to spy but WHO you are giving the data to. Your long standing allies with common interests or the guys who won't speak to you if don't pretend Tibet was always part of their nation.
"You repeat this ad nauseum despite having been told with references all over again that the figure is bullshit."
One is an example of a democratic ally having had access to something you didn't intend. The other is a regime opposed to democracy and with a train of human rights violations in their wake to make African dictatorships blush.
The issue isn't just that someone will have their hands in the cookie jar, that is a given. The issue is WHO you are letting have their hands in the cookie jar.
The US government is bad but it doesn't even begin to compare to China with their great firewall, public shaming of citizens, massacre in the square, annexation and burning alive much of Tbt, and on and on. The US might poke their noses into the data of Europe, unlike others I won't pretend we haven't had revealed what was revealed. But the US still pursues common interests with Europe.
This US is like the Russian spy on Turings team when cracking Enigma. He served to send valuable intelligence to an ALLY. Letting China in out of spite because you dislike Trump is like bringing a German spy in on the same project.
How is the NSA looking after terrorist concerns is any way related to looking after commercial interests? Because there was a company involved somewhere?
Most of the "breakthroughs" in AI are from about 20 years ago. Turns out much of what failed then failed because their neural nets were too small. Also, sometimes things work when rediscovered because the person is implementing the idea independently without the baggage of wrong ideas that seemed correct and lead people down the wrong path.
Everything but incremental improvements "didn't really work" until one day someone figured out how to make it work. Hopefully they give appropriate credit.
"Browsers are complex. They provide a functionality previously not even dreamt about, and for all the complaints they do so quite efficiently."
Before browsers? Sure. Since netscape? Not really. The original FF was a huge improvement and rewrite. At this point it is more of a bloated and crappy implementation than Netscape was. The only big advance you actually see being used is javascript communication back to the server. It's a browser, it needs to run rendering of a markup language, css markup, and some lightweight client side scripting for display interaction and input validation. Everything else is bloat being stacked on trying to use a screwdriver as the one tool to rule them all. Do you know what happens when you don't do that? Other applications actually made to run and perform the task do the job and optimize as appropriate for their actual application.
"What do you think that cache is being used for? Preloading functions that may be used by the JS engine. JIT compilation where possible and loading in memory so it's faster when available."
And yet, everything actually loads and renders more slowly because of all the bloat capabilities being packed in the browser that more than offset any gains.
And what kind of horribly implemented script parser requires more than maybe 30mb loaded in its entirety into ram in the first place? That isn't a trim parser by the way, 30mb is a massive amount of space for a solution like that, a trim solution would be single digits.
At this point everything is bloated with the bad development practices you found in AOL, Netscape 5+, Internet Explorer 4+, Photoshop 5+ systems got faster and faster and these things just got slower and slower and because they enabled cheap, lazy, and fast development the dev practices that produced this garbage propagated.
You can get most of the performance you are talking about with targeted caching and carefully selected best performing optimizations and orders of magnitude gains beyond that just by going back and eliminating dependencies, cruft, misfeatures, and actually spending three months focusing on the optimization that everyone says "offers tiny gains that aren't worth it" until you just write code efficiently as a matter of habit that doesn't require constant thought. If you do, the common wisdom will actually be true and it won't be worthwhile to micro-optimize and refactor your code except on the hot spots the profiler highlights.
Slashdot Mirror
Uniform, as in a single election for all 28 members, either use daylight savings or don't and whether to use winter or summer time. Otherwise you'll have some which stick with daylight savings and some who don't and possibly inconsistency with regard to winter or summer time.
That said, switching everyone (globally) over to a 24hr UTC clock and getting over mental hangups about sucking up the minor adjustment of what "morning" means for you would be much better overall. You know what is much better than being able to determine what time is morning for someone when setting a meeting? Instantly knowing what time someone is talking about when they propose one, with no ambiguity, ever and intuitively know how early or late that will be for you. People can give instant feedback and nobody ever makes an error or is confused about what time an event is supposed to occur.
Why not? It's just a number. Everyone just switch to a 24hr UTC clock... it isn't like you don't have the existing offsets as a guide to get started. It would be an annoying transition but it is still consistent from day to day so you'd adjust pretty quickly.
There are advantages and downsides but the advantages of all having the same clock are pretty substantial especially given how globally connected everyone is. Arranging a meeting with someone in the UK or France? You just set a time and everyone will automatically know if its a reasonable hour. No more missed meetings improper timing because of timezone conversion, no more ambiguity about which time zone was meant when someone says "we'll meet back up at 5 tomorrow"
Yes, get rid of daylight savings by all means but whatever the choice is make it uniform!
"the USA high school program needs a total overhaul, frankly we should be doing more to teach "civics" so that kids come out of school knowing both their rights and responsibilities as citizens,"
This was a requirement in middle school. To know both the US and State Constitution. A state requirement in Illinois and it was expanded on as a requirement in high school with American history.
"life skills" like how to manage a household, finance (esp taxes), basic repairs (at least understand enough to know who to call when something breaks), cooking, cleaning, how to look for a job, etc, etc, etc"
There are classes on many of these things offered in high school and middle school. Home Ec, various shop classes, business math, etc. But honestly the best place to learn these things isn't in school it is from your parents. School is not intended to be a one stop shop for everything you need to learn in life.
What they are missing in high school is "Critical Thinking" except perhaps as part of a debate extra curricular. The last thing they want is students knowing how to frame good arguments. Basic repairs is something school isn't going to help with, youtube and the internet do the job just fine if someone can get over their fear of TRYING.
I live in a red state but I've lived in many states. Honestly the only differences from one to the next are minor. The water is treated in much the same manner everywhere. People are choosing to drink bottled water while regulations declare it to be perfectly fine that doesn't mean they have to. People who actually need to drink bottled water usually have well problems. I'd certainly drink a glass in Georgia before I'd drink in LA or NYC which are by far the most polluted places I've been. In general you find the most pollution in heavily populated places.
In this particular red state I've found utility rates to the be lowest I've seen in the country, not the average but the low rates are available to anyone who bothers to shop on the deregulated market. Currently I pay less than $0.04/KWH net after everything is included for 100% renewable. You can choose dirty power, up to a couple years ago it was cheaper but now there is so much renewable that the state is on track to be 100% renewable within the next couple years without any special state level incentives. The market has just chosen renewable and driven down prices. Housing costs are low. I live in a reasonably wealthy suburb and you can rent a 1200 sq ft 3 bedroom house with a pool here for $1200/mo while I hear SF is sitting at 3x that. I've looked into tech positions in CA but the salaries aren't higher the cost of living is just dramatically higher. The air is clear, there is no smog, there is no income tax, businesses don't pay tax either unless they gross more than a million so that small business ventures and startups aren't hurt and the rates are reasonable.
You also don't have extra and unreasonable firearms restrictions and registration so crime is low and neighborhoods are safe. Even the 'bad' parts of town aren't really that bad compared to other places I've been. The politicians do tend to be nutballs but the economic policy actually plays out better in the real world so I don't worry about it much.
Nope the red states that are doing poorly are gutters largely because you've gutted their industry and outsourced it to China. You've tried to replace it with a growing financial and tech industry which is the primary export of blue states. Oh and you've pumped millions into bottom rate agricultural labor with lax immigration policies crushing those states agriculture economies. +Tech +Finance +Mexican labor subsidized agriculture +Cheap Chinese goods is a recipe for boosting the economies of blue states while depressing the industry of entire regions of red states.
Exactly
Consumers are willing to pay for a streaming service and we don't mind there being 10-20 streaming services but all of them need to have all the premium content included and for it to stay. Nobody cares about the non-premium content at all. So content makers, stop splitting off your own streaming services and stop selling exclusive access. Let consumers have their cake and eat it to and race these guys to the bottom and make up the difference by making them all pay for content all the time instead of one at a time.
Instead of charging per piece of content charge by first view and second view from a given unique household. Second view carries the highest premium because that means something was worth watching again. Beyond second view who cares? That or charge for simultaneous streams but it is harder to spread the royalties out that way. As for advertising subsidized movies and tv, let that go the way of dodo.
"HAHAHAHA! please cite the last war that the US actually won."
All of them? The US hasn't engaged in any actual invasions so withdrawing isn't defeat, success is measured by achieving the stated objective. Saddam is toppled kuwait liberated, Victory. The man himself found hiding in a hole and executed, check. Afghanistan liberated from Al Queda, victory. Bin Laden himself dug out and executed, check. Vietnam cost so much you could argue it wasn't a victory but the US successfully prevented the communists from advancing. That was really all a proxy fight with the USSR and the USSR doesn't exist today while the US does. Korea was part of that same fight.
Before that we weren't really in any wars since WWII. Last I checked we defeated the Germans, saved the British and the Russians, and liberated the rest of Europe in that one. Now you could argue the British and Russians didn't need saving and would have been okay but you are definitely looking through rose tinted glasses if you think they had any hope of achieving better than a stalemate without the US and that is a huge stretch for the British because they only survived to the offensive and to the work of Turing because of US aid. The UK was a besieged fortress and US supplies are the only thing that prevented the Germans from starving them out.
"hell, look at how long it takes to get your military out of a country."
What on earth makes you think we actually want to be fully successful at getting our military out of a country? Are you really so blind that you can't see that "failure" has resulted in a network of US military bases around the globe which are within range of any target in the world if we are willing to cross airspace?
The first shot fired in your scenario would by the UK. As for going nuclear, that would be ridiculously foolish. It would be madness no matter who did it. Only the absolutely insane would go nuclear for real, those are for making serious threats not actual deployment. But if they are that crazy the UK doesn't have nuclear arms sufficient to tackle the US. There is no scenario that goes nuclear where a UK remains afterward and the US doesn't. And the winds involved are such that they wouldn't be likely to harm the US they'd create a near instant collapse for most of the rest of Europe within the space of hours.
The UK and Europe aren't weak, they could blacken the eye of the US and in concerted effort maybe break its nose as well. That is enough to make the US hesitate. But they would be annihilated in the conflict. Actually playing hard ball and picking that fight would be suicide. Police here in the US are armed and we have an expression "death by cop." It is a suicide tactic in which someone points a gun at or shoots at police in order to force the police to kill them to protect themselves. That is the same thing you are suggesting here, that the UK and by extension Europe would kill themselves by pointing a gun at the US and forcing it to protect itself.
You propose the UK destroy itself and Europe alongside it just to spite a longstanding ally. I know you guys like to come up with alternative dialogues over there but you'd all be Nazi's or more likely either Russians or USians right now without the "sleeping giant" having been woken and defending you rather than letting Germany finish you off and then splitting the carcass with the Russians.
"People in those high tax states don't "get out of" paying their fair share... in fact, they have been paying MORE than their fair share for decades as those low tax red states litteraly steal money from blue states to make their state function."
This is how our tax system works, just like citizens with more income owe a larger share, states which contain more of them owe a larger share. Just because your state pays more than another state in doesn't mean the people of your state paid their full share. It means your incomes are so disproportionate that you were able to dodge a large chunk of your fair share and still paid more. No small part of that is the people in blue states have advanced economic agendas that hurt the trades of midwestern and southern states while promoting their own trades. They then impose local and state taxes that have erroneously diverted federal income tax and then promoted increasing federal programs and subsidies. The other states see a larger increase with every additional program tacked on.
Corrections like this serve to help give you perspective on the cost of taxes and federal programs. It really is no different on the state level than the individual but people in blue states don't like to have the same logic applied to the state level as the individual. Want states to pay more than they take, start cutting out the programs that pay money to states and implement a tax cut for what they cost.
There is no way to untangle this broken and twisted knot that doesn't negatively impact both red and blue states at many stages. There is also no fair way that doesn't put a squeeze on high earners to pay their entire fair share. This is going to put a squeeze on state programs, then local programs. Eventually this will require increases to property taxes and there won't be havens for the wealthy to dodge by sinking their wealth into real estate.
"Make the CEO of any company caught hiring illegal aliens spew a year in jail for each illegal employed, and the problem will disappear pretty quickly."
The real immigration problem has little to do with illegal aliens and everything to do with legally imported workers to toss Americans out of high paying tech jobs. They distract you with strawberry pickers while they displace 50k six figure jobs a year. It floods the market and stagnates wages. Whether you actually work in those fields or not this kills the economy and drives the economic depression that leads to you pointing fingers at strawberry pickers.
So, you live in California, New York, IL?
The rest of the country got a tax cut, actually you did as well, what paid for the tax cut is no longer allowing your city/state to hijack income tax dollars. Since your state/city still hasn't fixed their taxes to no longer attempt to hijack income tax from the feds you should take the issue up with them. They'll just have to cut costs/programs or increase sales/gross receipt taxes instead of pilfering income taxes.
Really that is the best thing. People in New York shouldn't get out of paying their fair share of federal income tax which should look just like someone in Alabama with the same income. That is one step. The next is wealthy areas incorporating separately so their income taxes go entirely to their schools and rob poor neighborhoods of their funding.
"When a foreign worker is hired and moves to the US, they're gonna be spending their pay check in the US to buy food, clothes, services, etc."
Minimally. The countries which export these workers run investment programs to give better returns from home. Meaning a huge chunk of their salaries get funneled directly out the US. And then of course there are the workers who send money back to their families. We really shouldn't allow visa workers either option.
That is extremely misleading. There is a very drastic difference between what a worker pays for health care and what they pay for health insurance and you are conflating the two. The Canadian is paying the bottom line figure with no bill when they receive care.
The health insurance $4000/yr will get you right now usually carries a several thousand dollar deductible, has a whole slew of exclusions, and generally only pays at 80-90% on what is covered. Which would put the real costs paid per year in the US at least 4 fold as high. One broken bone, surgery, or hospital stay required would put an individual at or above the $16k figure.
Yes, and even if the salaries are within a reasonable margin the flood of additional workers stagnates wages. That is what companies want to avoid, paying tech engineers salaries on par with other fields of engineering.
Many are far more severe including pretty much all of Europe
"3. Keep out them damn immigrants"
Fair point, we shouldn't be keeping out the (legal) immigrants per say. Instead we should be penalizing companies based on their utilization of foreign workers and in that process we should count foreign subsidiaries.
We could do something like introduce the concept of a tax debit which corresponds to a credit and has to paid without regard to anything else in their taxes which raises the net cost for any and all foreign tech workers and contractors (including domestic) to at least 250k + any benefits. Thus we eliminate any and all cost savings and pave the way to the salary levels they are trying to avoid (salaries on par with the median for other types of engineer).
How exactly are they actually going to make the US leave short of an act of war? Currently they are pushing. Once upon a time the UK had a mighty British empire and the American colonies needed an ally to defeat them but today I think an act of aggression against the American military is a shoving match nobody sane would want. Even if it were the entire EU, which it no longer is, militarily they wouldn't stand a chance and that is without nuclear weapons considered.
"No, but claiming that it is better than the insurance-based healthcare the US has, tend to make you appear dumb."
Please stop talking. You are making us all look horrible. Continue not being willing to help others and wanting a short line in the form of denying others lifesaving care. But stop pretending the insurance-based healthcare even remotely makes economic sense, it doesn't. We spend more tax dollars failing to provide government health care in the US than other nations with comparable overall quality of care spend paying for that care entirely with house calls.
"Well someone has to. You seem to forget it in your superiority."
Says the inferior and arrogant backward culture. Seriously you can just go back and forth on this nonsense all day.
"Huh? It failed? As far as I can tell the USA wants more money put into it."
I believe that is merely wanting you to pay your equal share or dissolve it.
"Have fun with your new buddies in Communist China.
Your brain doesn't appear to be working. If you've already had your morning coffee then may I suggest calling 911, you may have just had a stroke."
No, you are deciding it is a better idea to hand your intelligence and networks over to the intelligence industry of the country that runs the great firewall, opposes democracy, and burns peaceful monks alive alongside mowing down students with tanks. As far as I can tell it is purely out of petty spite. You demand proof they will spy as if it isn't petty and naive to pretend that whoever you buy from is going to do that, that was a given the minute you didn't develop your own chips for sensitive purposes like this. The question isn't whether or not they are going to spy but WHO you are giving the data to. Your long standing allies with common interests or the guys who won't speak to you if don't pretend Tibet was always part of their nation.
"You repeat this ad nauseum despite having been told with references all over again that the figure is bullshit."
And you are nitpicking.
One is an example of a democratic ally having had access to something you didn't intend. The other is a regime opposed to democracy and with a train of human rights violations in their wake to make African dictatorships blush.
The issue isn't just that someone will have their hands in the cookie jar, that is a given. The issue is WHO you are letting have their hands in the cookie jar.
The US government is bad but it doesn't even begin to compare to China with their great firewall, public shaming of citizens, massacre in the square, annexation and burning alive much of Tbt, and on and on. The US might poke their noses into the data of Europe, unlike others I won't pretend we haven't had revealed what was revealed. But the US still pursues common interests with Europe.
This US is like the Russian spy on Turings team when cracking Enigma. He served to send valuable intelligence to an ALLY. Letting China in out of spite because you dislike Trump is like bringing a German spy in on the same project.
How is the NSA looking after terrorist concerns is any way related to looking after commercial interests? Because there was a company involved somewhere?
Most of the "breakthroughs" in AI are from about 20 years ago. Turns out much of what failed then failed because their neural nets were too small. Also, sometimes things work when rediscovered because the person is implementing the idea independently without the baggage of wrong ideas that seemed correct and lead people down the wrong path.
Everything but incremental improvements "didn't really work" until one day someone figured out how to make it work. Hopefully they give appropriate credit.
"Browsers are complex. They provide a functionality previously not even dreamt about, and for all the complaints they do so quite efficiently."
Before browsers? Sure. Since netscape? Not really. The original FF was a huge improvement and rewrite. At this point it is more of a bloated and crappy implementation than Netscape was. The only big advance you actually see being used is javascript communication back to the server. It's a browser, it needs to run rendering of a markup language, css markup, and some lightweight client side scripting for display interaction and input validation. Everything else is bloat being stacked on trying to use a screwdriver as the one tool to rule them all. Do you know what happens when you don't do that? Other applications actually made to run and perform the task do the job and optimize as appropriate for their actual application.
"What do you think that cache is being used for? Preloading functions that may be used by the JS engine. JIT compilation where possible and loading in memory so it's faster when available."
And yet, everything actually loads and renders more slowly because of all the bloat capabilities being packed in the browser that more than offset any gains.
And what kind of horribly implemented script parser requires more than maybe 30mb loaded in its entirety into ram in the first place? That isn't a trim parser by the way, 30mb is a massive amount of space for a solution like that, a trim solution would be single digits.
At this point everything is bloated with the bad development practices you found in AOL, Netscape 5+, Internet Explorer 4+, Photoshop 5+ systems got faster and faster and these things just got slower and slower and because they enabled cheap, lazy, and fast development the dev practices that produced this garbage propagated.
You can get most of the performance you are talking about with targeted caching and carefully selected best performing optimizations and orders of magnitude gains beyond that just by going back and eliminating dependencies, cruft, misfeatures, and actually spending three months focusing on the optimization that everyone says "offers tiny gains that aren't worth it" until you just write code efficiently as a matter of habit that doesn't require constant thought. If you do, the common wisdom will actually be true and it won't be worthwhile to micro-optimize and refactor your code except on the hot spots the profiler highlights.