My cousin is the CFO for a startup company called I-tech (shameless plug) and he actually went to college with the CEO of the Gartner Group. He has a million stories about how this guy was a real poser and didn't know his arse from a hole in the ground. Again, this is all heresy but my cousin is a real straight shooter so I believe him.
So, do you think the CEO writes these forcasts?
Re:Courage has two ingrediants (or so i've heard).
on
Sub-Orbital Skydiving
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· Score: 1
what you use the courage for is up for personal interpretation
Well, I would think a bottle of Jack would be appropriate for summoning up some "courage".
Why does/. keep perpetuating this lie that the Coumbine kids were these picked on geeks. Even a quick glance over any of the reporting that came out since the story broke, for example, this story at Salon shows that these were fucked up kids who were sick and wanted to be famous.
I know its trendy and all to claim "victimhood" in soceity these days, (usually as a precursor to sueing someone or ttrying to get some law passed to tip the scales back in our favor), but this navel gazing by "geeks" is pathetic.
Most of the flat tax proposals I have seen call for getting rid of the current tax code and having something along the lines of :
1) What was your gross income
2) Multiply by.2 (or some other number)
3) Send it in (Or have it taken from your paycheck, makes payroll taxes much easier).
In fact, the main complaints people have are that they lose their interest deducations or their house, chartible contributions, etc...
I think that a flat tax like that, combined with an earned income credit for the poor is definitely the way to go. Think of the money saved by trimming the IRS. No more worrying about April 15th. No more of those silly "1,000 credit for owning a alternative fuel based car" type things Gore likes so much...
We have the right to say "no" because it's in the majority's best interest to say so
That's a damn slipperly slope you are on there.
You know, its probably in the majorities interest if you had a nice salad for lunch instead of the burger and fries. You'd be healthier, put less of a burden on the medical system, and you know how the green types hate corporate farms. I know... punitive taxes on fast food! And you are looking a little tubby... I know! Tax credits for joggers!
Having said that I agree that people should pay the full cost for some of these infrastructure items, otherwise you are subsudizing living in the burbs. But Nader's ideas are presented more as "tax things I don't like". Good thing he has the proverbial snowball's chance.
Plus, if someone wants to sell their farmland to a developer, and that developer wants to build houses on it, and people want to pay to live there, who the hell are we to say that they shouldn't have the right to decide where they live?
If pollution (for example) is a concern, why not pass laws or regulations that affect polluters (like the very successful-even-the-Green-like it Emissions trading program) instead of trying to twist the tax code to do something that its not very good at doing?
For a counterexample of how this doesn't work very well, look at the luxury taxes that were implemented in (I want to say '94, might have been '96). Hey, we want to tax those who buy yachts and luxary cars. Result: Pretty much the elimination of the entire American yacht industry, elimination of thousands of jobs, and most likely a negative revenue inflow.
I'd really put meat in the process of progressive taxation. The richer people are, the more the percentage you pay. After all, it's their influence that rigged the system to get them that rich to begin with. And, second, we should tax things we don't like. We should tax stock market speculation. We should tax pollution. We should tax activities that we don't like, like sprawl, in order to get a better planning system and better zoning system. And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest labor, like food."
Silly me, I thought the reason we had a tax code was to raise revenue, not to engage in this sort of asinine social micromanagement..... Until we get smart and implement a flat tax, people are just going to engage in whatever sort of financial misdirection they can to avoid paying taxes (as they should).
Me, I'm voting for Bush, since I think we all deserve a tax break, not just those of us who engage in whatever behavior the government wants to encourage....
But then, I don't like direct election of the Senate, either... I think it undermines the purpose of the Senate, and makes the Senators accountable to the wrong body. But that's just me.
Wow, its not often you hear about people complaining about this old chestnut. I agree with you to a certain extent, although the longer Senate terms do tend to give them a certain amount to leeway (I mean, who remembers any votes from 1995, which was when the Senators up for re-election started their terms...)
Heh, are you still pissed about us getting off the gold standard?:)
Yet the last time the Republicans or Democrats did not control both the Congress and the White House (and indirectly, the judiciary) was in 1854, when the Republicans ousted the Whigs.
You kind of gloss over this point. You forget that the Republicans were a very young (less than 10 yrs old) party at this point with very radical ideas at the time (abolutionists...). Heck, it would be about the same as the Libertarians or Reform parties doing the same about now.
You point about people perfering only Republicans and Democrats for the past 150+ years is kind of disingenous as well. Whenever a third party comes along that attracts any kind of attention the two major parties absorb the ideas of these parties. Take a look at the push toward deficit reduction which was a major part of Perot's campaign in '88. No one was talking about it then, now the Republicans bring it up all the time, and Gore runs on it as one of the Clinton administrations major achievements.
As far as your other ideas go...
elimination of the electoral college, to be replaced by direct popular election
Great, if you live in a smaller state, you will never be a part of a federal election.
institute preferential or Borda voting instead of winner take all
proportional representation should be instituted for seats in the House and Senate
The founders of this country were acutely aware of the parlimatarian system, and chose not to implement it. I don't think the majority of Americans would be too hip to voting for parties without knowing who they were voting for.
ballot access should be open to anyone willing to pay the marginal cost of adding the candidates name to the ballot
Agreed, however ballot access and voting are right reserved by the states so there isn't much that can be done on a national level about that. Most midwestern and western states have pretty liberal ballot access laws (although I understand they are pretty Byzentine back East.)
option to delegate one's vote to someone else. Why? Because, on most issues, I have neither the time, interest, or skill to adequately evaluate who or what is most likely to achieve the goals I want. However, I do know individuals who do have the time, interest, and skill whose judgement I trust, and I would like them to decide. As it is now, a man who uses a bookmark to read People magazine has the same influence has as a man who has a PhD. in economics.
Ah, God forbit we let the plebians vote. If you aren't educated on the issues, do us a favor and don't vote.... or just vote Republican:)
How do they get screenshots for these consoles? Do they sit there with a camera and take pictures of the TV set like we did when we were 8 and got a high score on an activision game and were trying to get our "Pitfall Harry's Adventure Troop" patch or whatever it is? Or do they run the console output into a video card? My experience has always been that you can get decidedly mixed results when trying to take screenshots of things that use overlay buffers for output (like most PC-TV thingys...). Anyone know?
Fine how about this... the statement that the original post made, that x is OK if enough people say x is OK, is among the more asinine pieces of "logic" I've heard lately.
So the bus boycotts in the 60's were wrong since they were harming the profitability of the bus drivers? It isn't they're fault that civil rights didn't exist at the time. idiot
Yeah, those bus companies were instrumental in passive civil rights legislation... geez...
I'm not for a tax cut. I'm for higher taxes, lower for the poor (in fact a "negative income tax" for those at the poverty level, which means they would get cash back) and much higher for the wealthy
Heh, yeah, the "higher taxes" thing worked oh-so-well for Mondale in '84. You think they'd learn....
So if the concern is that for any given access control package a certain number of sites may be blocked which should not be, why not use a proxy which has say, 3 of these packages loaded up on it. Certainly each package probably has mistakes in its resolution routine, but the odds of an perfectly innocent site being mistakenly blocked in 3 different packages seems rare. 2 out of 3 say OK and you are in....
No it isn't. Companies have differnt price levels for different market segments all the time. Look at CPUs. Intel and AMD have one price list for top level purchasers (your Compaqs and IBMs and such), another for integrators and another for their channel distributors.
Slashdot Mirror
...but some of the flight attendents I've seen lately haven't been too hot.
*insert comedy drum noise here*
Thank you, drive safely, tip your waitresses, good night!
My cousin is the CFO for a startup company called I-tech (shameless plug) and he actually went to college with the CEO of the Gartner Group. He has a million stories about how this guy was a real poser and didn't know his arse from a hole in the ground. Again, this is all heresy but my cousin is a real straight shooter so I believe him.
So, do you think the CEO writes these forcasts?
what you use the courage for is up for personal interpretation
Well, I would think a bottle of Jack would be appropriate for summoning up some "courage".
Why does /. keep perpetuating this lie that the Coumbine kids were these picked on geeks. Even a quick glance over any of the reporting that came out since the story broke, for example, this story at Salon shows that these were fucked up kids who were sick and wanted to be famous.
I know its trendy and all to claim "victimhood" in soceity these days, (usually as a precursor to sueing someone or ttrying to get some law passed to tip the scales back in our favor), but this navel gazing by "geeks" is pathetic.
want to be free... its was to cost $4.95 a month.
Most of the flat tax proposals I have seen call for getting rid of the current tax code and having something along the lines of :
.2 (or some other number)
1) What was your gross income
2) Multiply by
3) Send it in (Or have it taken from your paycheck, makes payroll taxes much easier).
In fact, the main complaints people have are that they lose their interest deducations or their house, chartible contributions, etc...
I think that a flat tax like that, combined with an earned income credit for the poor is definitely the way to go. Think of the money saved by trimming the IRS. No more worrying about April 15th. No more of those silly "1,000 credit for owning a alternative fuel based car" type things Gore likes so much...
We have the right to say "no" because it's in the majority's best interest to say so
That's a damn slipperly slope you are on there.
You know, its probably in the majorities interest if you had a nice salad for lunch instead of the burger and fries. You'd be healthier, put less of a burden on the medical system, and you know how the green types hate corporate farms. I know... punitive taxes on fast food! And you are looking a little tubby... I know! Tax credits for joggers!
Having said that I agree that people should pay the full cost for some of these infrastructure items, otherwise you are subsudizing living in the burbs. But Nader's ideas are presented more as "tax things I don't like". Good thing he has the proverbial snowball's chance.
What would you propose to halt urban sprawl?
Zoning laws.
Plus, if someone wants to sell their farmland to a developer, and that developer wants to build houses on it, and people want to pay to live there, who the hell are we to say that they shouldn't have the right to decide where they live?
If pollution (for example) is a concern, why not pass laws or regulations that affect polluters (like the very successful-even-the-Green-like it Emissions trading program) instead of trying to twist the tax code to do something that its not very good at doing?
For a counterexample of how this doesn't work very well, look at the luxury taxes that were implemented in (I want to say '94, might have been '96). Hey, we want to tax those who buy yachts and luxary cars. Result: Pretty much the elimination of the entire American yacht industry, elimination of thousands of jobs, and most likely a negative revenue inflow.
I certainly hope those of you, especially in states that have very close races, vote your conscience and vote for Nader.
Those of us who want to see Bush elected will certainly appreciate it....
I'd really put meat in the process of progressive taxation. The richer people are, the more the percentage you pay. After all, it's their influence that rigged the system to get them that rich to begin with. And, second, we should tax things we don't like. We should tax stock market speculation. We should tax pollution. We should tax activities that we don't like, like sprawl, in order to get a better planning system and better zoning system. And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest labor, like food."
Silly me, I thought the reason we had a tax code was to raise revenue, not to engage in this sort of asinine social micromanagement..... Until we get smart and implement a flat tax, people are just going to engage in whatever sort of financial misdirection they can to avoid paying taxes (as they should).
Me, I'm voting for Bush, since I think we all deserve a tax break, not just those of us who engage in whatever behavior the government wants to encourage....
But then, I don't like direct election of the Senate, either... I think it undermines the purpose of the Senate, and makes the Senators accountable to the wrong body. But that's just me.
:)
Wow, its not often you hear about people complaining about this old chestnut. I agree with you to a certain extent, although the longer Senate terms do tend to give them a certain amount to leeway (I mean, who remembers any votes from 1995, which was when the Senators up for re-election started their terms...)
Heh, are you still pissed about us getting off the gold standard?
You make some good points but...
:)
Yet the last time the Republicans or Democrats did not control both the Congress and the White House (and indirectly, the judiciary) was in 1854, when the Republicans ousted the Whigs.
You kind of gloss over this point. You forget that the Republicans were a very young (less than 10 yrs old) party at this point with very radical ideas at the time (abolutionists...). Heck, it would be about the same as the Libertarians or Reform parties doing the same about now.
You point about people perfering only Republicans and Democrats for the past 150+ years is kind of disingenous as well. Whenever a third party comes along that attracts any kind of attention the two major parties absorb the ideas of these parties. Take a look at the push toward deficit reduction which was a major part of Perot's campaign in '88. No one was talking about it then, now the Republicans bring it up all the time, and Gore runs on it as one of the Clinton administrations major achievements.
As far as your other ideas go...
elimination of the electoral college, to be replaced by direct popular election
Great, if you live in a smaller state, you will never be a part of a federal election.
institute preferential or Borda voting instead of winner take all
proportional representation should be instituted for seats in the House and Senate
The founders of this country were acutely aware of the parlimatarian system, and chose not to implement it. I don't think the majority of Americans would be too hip to voting for parties without knowing who they were voting for.
ballot access should be open to anyone willing to pay the marginal cost of adding the candidates name to the ballot
Agreed, however ballot access and voting are right reserved by the states so there isn't much that can be done on a national level about that. Most midwestern and western states have pretty liberal ballot access laws (although I understand they are pretty Byzentine back East.)
option to delegate one's vote to someone else. Why? Because, on most issues, I have neither the time, interest, or skill to adequately evaluate who or what is most likely to achieve the goals I want. However, I do know individuals who do have the time, interest, and skill whose judgement I trust, and I would like them to decide. As it is now, a man who uses a bookmark to read People magazine has the same influence has as a man who has a PhD. in economics.
Ah, God forbit we let the plebians vote. If you aren't educated on the issues, do us a favor and don't vote.... or just vote Republican
How do they get screenshots for these consoles? Do they sit there with a camera and take pictures of the TV set like we did when we were 8 and got a high score on an activision game and were trying to get our "Pitfall Harry's Adventure Troop" patch or whatever it is? Or do they run the console output into a video card? My experience has always been that you can get decidedly mixed results when trying to take screenshots of things that use overlay buffers for output (like most PC-TV thingys...). Anyone know?
Fine how about this ... the statement that the original post made, that x is OK if enough people say x is OK, is among the more asinine pieces of "logic" I've heard lately.
Yeah, this is the kind of fucking insightful kind of response I expect to see on /. these days.
So the bus boycotts in the 60's were wrong since they were harming the profitability of the bus drivers? It isn't they're fault that civil rights didn't exist at the time. idiot
Yeah, those bus companies were instrumental in passive civil rights legislation... geez...
Conscience strikes: should I see this movie and give my money to Time-Warner?
Um, sure... how else are you going to see it?
I'm not for a tax cut. I'm for higher taxes, lower for the poor (in fact a "negative income tax" for those at the poverty level, which means they would get cash back) and much higher for the wealthy
Heh, yeah, the "higher taxes" thing worked oh-so-well for Mondale in '84. You think they'd learn....
The worst case scenario is of course the banning of links.
You mean the banning of links to illegal material.
Was there a privacy notice on the census form? I don't remember seeing one....
So, why shouldn't the government be able to collect and correlate information about its citizens?
So if the concern is that for any given access control package a certain number of sites may be blocked which should not be, why not use a proxy which has say, 3 of these packages loaded up on it. Certainly each package probably has mistakes in its resolution routine, but the odds of an perfectly innocent site being mistakenly blocked in 3 different packages seems rare. 2 out of 3 say OK and you are in....
People can't even agree if light behaves as a wave or a particle. The only coherent explication is that all science is wrong.
No it isn't. Companies have differnt price levels for different market segments all the time. Look at CPUs. Intel and AMD have one price list for top level purchasers (your Compaqs and IBMs and such), another for integrators and another for their channel distributors.