As long as you call them the "Bush tax cuts" or "Bush's tax cuts for the rich" and not simply "a reduction in the tax rate all tax payers pay", you are politicizing it.
If would be tax cuts for everyone if the top 1% didn't get a cut of of $58,000 per person, and the average of the rest get a cut of about $1,000 per person. The cuts go disproportionately to the richest Americans, on the theory that they would use this money to boost the economy and create jobs. I don't think many people are going to argue that's happening. Of course, the new argument is that it's because the cuts haven't been made permanent... Because that's what we want to do with all failed experiments, keep them running forever.
The problem with that is "Why but the cow if you're giving the milk away for free"? What incentive would Republican politicians have to deal fairly with tax increases once they've achieved a bunch of spending cuts? They'd just insist that even more cuts need to be made. I think Obama learned from the Health care debacle that trying to meet the Republicans half way, just leads to them demanding that he walk another half of the way, and then another half of the way, and so on.
Also the vast majority of "simplified" tax schemes are thinly veiled tax giveaways to the rich. A flat tax always hurts the people at the bottom end a lot more than it does the people at the top end. Because there a minimum costs to living a reasonable life and those costs decline as percentage of your income as your income rises, below the poverty line those costs may be in excess of 100% of your income.
Lastly, it's really not "worth it" to collect $2 for each of the American citizens who are living below the poverty line. First it costs a lot more than $2 to collect that money through income taxes, and second they probably pay sales taxes on legitimate purchases so it's highly unlikely that there are many people that actually pay no taxes at all.
Oh, and the basic American tax system would probably work just fine if all the deductions were stripped out. Of course, you'd need a constitutional amendment to prevent the addition of deductions back into the system or the day after you new shiny tax system was in place both Democrats and Republicans would be trying to add deductions for their various sponsors and causes.
Actually I believe the "Weenie French" said the Americans were only attacking because they knew Saddam didn't have WMDs, because if he did he would almost certainly use them in relation. In other words, invading made no sense regardless of whether or not they had WMDs.
Either Saddam had weapons and would use them (the worst possible result) or he didn't and therefore wouldn't. As it turns out, it was a very insightful observation. Since the "evidence" that Saddam had WMDs was manufactured based on the claims of one alcoholic, drug-addicted, informant who hadn't been to Iraq in years and depended on his CIA handlers for continued access to both alcohol and drugs.
I hope you understand that was the plan for the Bush tax cuts, reducing the tax bill for the richest Americans and throw in some some small things to buy middle class votes. The "money saved" by the Bush tax cuts went overwhelmingly to the richest Americans. The median top 1% family would pay about $58,000 less in taxes, while the median family in the 3rd quintile would see their tax bill decrease by less than $1,000.
Except this is what the Republicans are actually saying:
Republicans: We need to increase spending on the military and cut everything else and we need to cut taxes on the rich.
The Republicans are actually preparing a bill which will cancel the automatic military cuts, and they were willing to raise taxes on the middle class in exchange for tax cuts for the rich. They seem to have little real interest in balancing the budget.
Why doesn't anyone recongnize that if you took every penny from the top 1% we'd still be completely screwed because we spend way too much.
Because that's not actually true. The richest Americans have about $1 trillion in cash reserves and American corporations have about $1.5 trillion in cash reserves. That's money that's not doing anything other than earning interest. There's an interesting argument to be made that that money is being kept out of the economy because taxes on the rich and corporations are actually too low.
Wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest Americans. The top 400 have about as much wealth as the bottom 50%. This means that the rewards of society are overwhelming going to the richest Americans, which probably means they aren't paying as much as they should in taxes. After all you'd expect the people profiting from the status quo to pay to maintain it, right?
Tellingly, from the report I read the Republicans were actually willing to raise taxes, but only for the middle and lower class and as long as the highest income bracket got a permanent 7% reduction in their marginal tax rate (from 35% to 28%).
Hey you're the idiot who claimed Internet Explorer was "free". I hate to break this to you but Internet explorer isn't "a feature", it's a separate application that was bundled into the OS for the purpose of eliminating a threat to the Windows platform. Maybe your problem is that you fly into a blind rage whenever anyone levels any criticism at Microsoft? It's not like this is particularly controversial. We're talking about facts in a court of law. Or are you still trying to fight a court case from 1999 for your lord and savior, Microsoft?
In any case, I've had enough of your ill-tempered idiocy.
The cost of Internet Explorer is bundle into Windows, or do you really think Microsoft develops IE as a charitable activity? Did you even bother to think before posting?
Every OS on the planet packages a default browser and there is no reason not too.
Microsoft should have included what they eventually ended up doing for the EU, by providing a "choose your browser" option where you select which browser you would like to use. They didn't because the primary goal of IE was to prevent people from using Netscape.
Anti-Trust was supposed to be designed to help consumers not hurt them
Predatory pricing is great until the competition dies and prices get raised. Microsoft can afford to give away IE because they can bundle the costs into their operating system. In reality when you pay for Windows, you pay for Windows and IE. You just never have the option of not paying for IE. Soon you'll be paying for Windows, IE and MS AV.
To be honest, I used both chkrootkit and rkhunter for years on all the servers at an ISP I used to work at. Neither one ever detected a rootkit. (They didn't miss any rootkits either, at least that we ever found). They did, however, detect a couple of user-space infections where users allowed their passwords to be stolen and had IRC servers uploaded to their web accounts.
Frankly, you don't understand and you might not be capable of understanding that it doesn't matter whether or not they require there be no option to disable it. Requiring that the secure boot be present and enabled by default is enough. That will prevent some percentage of people from installing a different operating system and that's what Microsoft wants. The OEMS who don't put in a way to disable it is just an expected bonus. It's still anti-competitive behaviour when it's not 100% effective.
My "analogy" is about how your claim doesn't hold water, and is quite accurate. It actually is irrelevant who designed UEFI.
"Your honour, I find the defendant Guilty because he was probably going to murder that person. Even though the person is still alive and well, he hates his guts so lets lock him up just in case".
Do you even understand how a court works? The prosecutor's claims should look more like this (assuming it's not a jury trial):
"Your honour, the defendant attempted to kill this poor innocent victim. He had the weapon, the opportunity and the motive, fortunately, the defendant missed. Let's not forget he has a long history of murder convictions and will likely try again, given the opportunity. Given these facts, I think you'll find you have no option other than finding him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt..."
Your honor, my client couldn't possibly be the murderer because he did not design the gun...
Do you really think a jury would believe that defence?
It doesn't matter whether Microsoft designed UEFI or not. Microsoft is requiring it be present to get the coveted "designed for Windows 8" certifications. The OEMs have money on the line and they're going to do whatever Microsoft tells them to do, lest they lose out to the other OEMs.
Contrary to your stupid example, Microsoft has a well known history of using unethical and often illegal tactics to protect their operating system monopoly. They are no longer entitled to the benefit of doubt when they appear to be engaged in similar unethical market manipulation.
This is actually a problem just about everywhere except the factory floor. The 2008 economic collapse? There's a pretty good chance the ultimate cause was poor productivity metrics for investment bankers. They were rewarded for earning high returns, there was no consideration given to the amount of risk those returns generated. When they discovered the magic of the mortgage securities and a housing bubble they found ways to earn higher and higher returns by playing games with the securities, as long as housing prices continued to climb there were few defaults, the bubble hid the risk from the managers.
Measuring productivity for any creative task is difficult and attempting to reward people based on that measurement is fraught with danger. Often the rewards decrease productivity by focusing people away from the actual goal.
The reason it doesn't work for software is that writing software is a creative process. There's a qualitative difference between writing software and putting one piece of a TV together on an assembly line. Many managers try to apply the factory model of management to creative jobs. You can't manage accountants, software developers, writers, graphic artists, musicians, or any of the other host of creative people like they are assembly line workers because the jobs aren't at all the same. Factory workers could be replaced by non-sentient robots that repeat the same task over and over again if the robots were inexpensive enough. The try getting a robot to design an effective ad campaign for a major product. You just can't.
That's why a lot of modern "management" fails. They keep trying to treat "knowledge workers" like "meat robots".
The American political system is broken. The first past the post system creates a system where to promote a third candidate you need to weaken the candidate from among the top 2 that you would favor otherwise. Take for example two of the policy proposals of some of the Republican candidates:
Destroy the EPA and effectively end all anti-pollution laws in the U.S.
Rewrite the tax code to shift more of the tax burden onto the middle class (flat tax/999)
If you are against either of those policies you either vote for the non-Republican front runner, or you help the Republican candidate to get elected by voting for someone else. That's because first past the post voting has inherently problems. That's why people often vote for candidates they don't really like. That's why the Democrats and Republicans have near complete control of American politics. Combine that with a media that is often in bed with one or both of the political parties and there is little chance for an effective third party to rise.
To gain power a third party would need to convince a large block of voters that both parties are equally bad, but in doing so it would inevitably pull more voters from one party than the other and in doing so damage the representation of their interests until the party was able to win. The system is effectively broken, for a chance at long-term gain voters must sacrifice short term interests. That's a sacrifice which is difficult to make and that's why third party candidates routinely get 1% of the vote. A vote for a third party candidate is effectively a vote for your political enemy.
Not really, that's what the Tea Party Express was about. They're the group that was created after the Tea Party started to take control of the movement and bend it towards the will of the specific Republicans who fund the Express. The Tea Party Express allowed Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers to redirect the anger with the Republican party against the Democrats and moderate Republicans.
There's more to "war policy" than just the "withdrawal from Iraq". The withdrawal is on a timetable negotiated with the government of Iraq after the last presidential election, I'm guessing the time table was "good enough" so that it didn't warrant re-negotiation. On the other hand, Obama hasn't invaded any countries in his first 3 years, and that does seems like a significant departure from the Bush war policy.
No, actually it won't. What it will do is get the greater evil elected which will then reinforce the need to vote for the lesser of two evils. The only solution is to press for electoral reform from both parties. Americans need to make it clear that it is unacceptable for any politician from any party to be against changing the voting system to something that actually works.
That's why it's a "trap". To get (temporarily) out of the system you need to sacrifice your short term interests for the chance to maybe get better representation in the future. Canada went thought this cycle, in many people's opinion, the new party that replaced the previous party is actually worse than the original. It is more controlled and controlling, secretive, and relies on American style attack adds to win elections. That's a real problem, the party that comes out might be more organized and more corrupt.
That's why the actual voting system needs to be changed. That can only be done be a sudden popular uprising against both major parties. It doesn't matter if it's part of a third party or comes from within one or both of the current dominant parties. The voting system has to be changed. Unless the voting system changes you will always be faced with the lesser of two or maybe three evils. The other systems minimize the problem of being forced to vote strategically and thus allow new parties to rise to power without having to destroy their ideological predecessors.
That's exactly what they did. The company agree to make a public park so they could build the skyscraper next to it and generate an income from it, otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to build and operate the building next to the park (at least not the way it was built).
These guys claim to have a list of 269 war crimes attributable to the George Bush Administration.
Canada has refused to consider war crimes charges against Bush because it would "damage diplomatic relations with the United States". I wouldn't be surprised if most of the U.S. allies won't prosecute (or even complain) for the same reason.
That's actually part of what the protests are trying to accomplish. It's difficult for any politician to get anything worthwhile done unless there is a broad base of public support for the policy. Even if something is smart and morally correct, if it's unpopular your opponent can get elected and revoke it.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as you call them the "Bush tax cuts" or "Bush's tax cuts for the rich" and not simply "a reduction in the tax rate all tax payers pay", you are politicizing it.
If would be tax cuts for everyone if the top 1% didn't get a cut of of $58,000 per person, and the average of the rest get a cut of about $1,000 per person. The cuts go disproportionately to the richest Americans, on the theory that they would use this money to boost the economy and create jobs. I don't think many people are going to argue that's happening. Of course, the new argument is that it's because the cuts haven't been made permanent... Because that's what we want to do with all failed experiments, keep them running forever.
The problem with that is "Why but the cow if you're giving the milk away for free"? What incentive would Republican politicians have to deal fairly with tax increases once they've achieved a bunch of spending cuts? They'd just insist that even more cuts need to be made. I think Obama learned from the Health care debacle that trying to meet the Republicans half way, just leads to them demanding that he walk another half of the way, and then another half of the way, and so on.
Also the vast majority of "simplified" tax schemes are thinly veiled tax giveaways to the rich. A flat tax always hurts the people at the bottom end a lot more than it does the people at the top end. Because there a minimum costs to living a reasonable life and those costs decline as percentage of your income as your income rises, below the poverty line those costs may be in excess of 100% of your income.
Lastly, it's really not "worth it" to collect $2 for each of the American citizens who are living below the poverty line. First it costs a lot more than $2 to collect that money through income taxes, and second they probably pay sales taxes on legitimate purchases so it's highly unlikely that there are many people that actually pay no taxes at all.
Oh, and the basic American tax system would probably work just fine if all the deductions were stripped out. Of course, you'd need a constitutional amendment to prevent the addition of deductions back into the system or the day after you new shiny tax system was in place both Democrats and Republicans would be trying to add deductions for their various sponsors and causes.
Actually I believe the "Weenie French" said the Americans were only attacking because they knew Saddam didn't have WMDs, because if he did he would almost certainly use them in relation. In other words, invading made no sense regardless of whether or not they had WMDs.
Either Saddam had weapons and would use them (the worst possible result) or he didn't and therefore wouldn't. As it turns out, it was a very insightful observation. Since the "evidence" that Saddam had WMDs was manufactured based on the claims of one alcoholic, drug-addicted, informant who hadn't been to Iraq in years and depended on his CIA handlers for continued access to both alcohol and drugs.
I hope you understand that was the plan for the Bush tax cuts, reducing the tax bill for the richest Americans and throw in some some small things to buy middle class votes. The "money saved" by the Bush tax cuts went overwhelmingly to the richest Americans. The median top 1% family would pay about $58,000 less in taxes, while the median family in the 3rd quintile would see their tax bill decrease by less than $1,000.
Except this is what the Republicans are actually saying:
Republicans: We need to increase spending on the military and cut everything else and we need to cut taxes on the rich.
The Republicans are actually preparing a bill which will cancel the automatic military cuts, and they were willing to raise taxes on the middle class in exchange for tax cuts for the rich. They seem to have little real interest in balancing the budget.
Why doesn't anyone recongnize that if you took every penny from the top 1% we'd still be completely screwed because we spend way too much .
Because that's not actually true. The richest Americans have about $1 trillion in cash reserves and American corporations have about $1.5 trillion in cash reserves. That's money that's not doing anything other than earning interest. There's an interesting argument to be made that that money is being kept out of the economy because taxes on the rich and corporations are actually too low.
Wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest Americans. The top 400 have about as much wealth as the bottom 50%. This means that the rewards of society are overwhelming going to the richest Americans, which probably means they aren't paying as much as they should in taxes. After all you'd expect the people profiting from the status quo to pay to maintain it, right?
Tellingly, from the report I read the Republicans were actually willing to raise taxes, but only for the middle and lower class and as long as the highest income bracket got a permanent 7% reduction in their marginal tax rate (from 35% to 28%).
You certainly seem incapable of understanding the point.
Hey you're the idiot who claimed Internet Explorer was "free". I hate to break this to you but Internet explorer isn't "a feature", it's a separate application that was bundled into the OS for the purpose of eliminating a threat to the Windows platform. Maybe your problem is that you fly into a blind rage whenever anyone levels any criticism at Microsoft? It's not like this is particularly controversial. We're talking about facts in a court of law. Or are you still trying to fight a court case from 1999 for your lord and savior, Microsoft?
In any case, I've had enough of your ill-tempered idiocy.
The cost of Internet Explorer is bundle into Windows, or do you really think Microsoft develops IE as a charitable activity?
Did you even bother to think before posting?
Every OS on the planet packages a default browser and there is no reason not too.
Microsoft should have included what they eventually ended up doing for the EU, by providing a "choose your browser" option where you select which browser you would like to use. They didn't because the primary goal of IE was to prevent people from using Netscape.
Anti-Trust was supposed to be designed to help consumers not hurt them
Predatory pricing is great until the competition dies and prices get raised. Microsoft can afford to give away IE because they can bundle the costs into their operating system. In reality when you pay for Windows, you pay for Windows and IE. You just never have the option of not paying for IE. Soon you'll be paying for Windows, IE and MS AV.
To be honest, I used both chkrootkit and rkhunter for years on all the servers at an ISP I used to work at. Neither one ever detected a rootkit. (They didn't miss any rootkits either, at least that we ever found). They did, however, detect a couple of user-space infections where users allowed their passwords to be stolen and had IRC servers uploaded to their web accounts.
Frankly, you don't understand and you might not be capable of understanding that it doesn't matter whether or not they require there be no option to disable it. Requiring that the secure boot be present and enabled by default is enough. That will prevent some percentage of people from installing a different operating system and that's what Microsoft wants. The OEMS who don't put in a way to disable it is just an expected bonus. It's still anti-competitive behaviour when it's not 100% effective.
My "analogy" is about how your claim doesn't hold water, and is quite accurate. It actually is irrelevant who designed UEFI.
"Your honour, I find the defendant Guilty because he was probably going to murder that person. Even though the person is still alive and well, he hates his guts so lets lock him up just in case".
Do you even understand how a court works? The prosecutor's claims should look more like this (assuming it's not a jury trial):
"Your honour, the defendant attempted to kill this poor innocent victim. He had the weapon, the opportunity and the motive, fortunately, the defendant missed. Let's not forget he has a long history of murder convictions and will likely try again, given the opportunity. Given these facts, I think you'll find you have no option other than finding him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt..."
Your honor, my client couldn't possibly be the murderer because he did not design the gun...
Do you really think a jury would believe that defence?
It doesn't matter whether Microsoft designed UEFI or not. Microsoft is requiring it be present to get the coveted "designed for Windows 8" certifications. The OEMs have money on the line and they're going to do whatever Microsoft tells them to do, lest they lose out to the other OEMs.
Contrary to your stupid example, Microsoft has a well known history of using unethical and often illegal tactics to protect their operating system monopoly. They are no longer entitled to the benefit of doubt when they appear to be engaged in similar unethical market manipulation.
This is actually a problem just about everywhere except the factory floor. The 2008 economic collapse? There's a pretty good chance the ultimate cause was poor productivity metrics for investment bankers. They were rewarded for earning high returns, there was no consideration given to the amount of risk those returns generated. When they discovered the magic of the mortgage securities and a housing bubble they found ways to earn higher and higher returns by playing games with the securities, as long as housing prices continued to climb there were few defaults, the bubble hid the risk from the managers.
Measuring productivity for any creative task is difficult and attempting to reward people based on that measurement is fraught with danger. Often the rewards decrease productivity by focusing people away from the actual goal.
The reason it doesn't work for software is that writing software is a creative process. There's a qualitative difference between writing software and putting one piece of a TV together on an assembly line. Many managers try to apply the factory model of management to creative jobs. You can't manage accountants, software developers, writers, graphic artists, musicians, or any of the other host of creative people like they are assembly line workers because the jobs aren't at all the same. Factory workers could be replaced by non-sentient robots that repeat the same task over and over again if the robots were inexpensive enough. The try getting a robot to design an effective ad campaign for a major product. You just can't.
That's why a lot of modern "management" fails. They keep trying to treat "knowledge workers" like "meat robots".
One of us must not be listening very well because I don't hear what you're hearing.
The American political system is broken. The first past the post system creates a system where to promote a third candidate you need to weaken the candidate from among the top 2 that you would favor otherwise. Take for example two of the policy proposals of some of the Republican candidates:
If you are against either of those policies you either vote for the non-Republican front runner, or you help the Republican candidate to get elected by voting for someone else. That's because first past the post voting has inherently problems. That's why people often vote for candidates they don't really like. That's why the Democrats and Republicans have near complete control of American politics. Combine that with a media that is often in bed with one or both of the political parties and there is little chance for an effective third party to rise.
To gain power a third party would need to convince a large block of voters that both parties are equally bad, but in doing so it would inevitably pull more voters from one party than the other and in doing so damage the representation of their interests until the party was able to win. The system is effectively broken, for a chance at long-term gain voters must sacrifice short term interests. That's a sacrifice which is difficult to make and that's why third party candidates routinely get 1% of the vote. A vote for a third party candidate is effectively a vote for your political enemy.
And in your world there's no middle ground between passive acceptance and violent revolution?
Not really, that's what the Tea Party Express was about. They're the group that was created after the Tea Party started to take control of the movement and bend it towards the will of the specific Republicans who fund the Express. The Tea Party Express allowed Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers to redirect the anger with the Republican party against the Democrats and moderate Republicans.
There's more to "war policy" than just the "withdrawal from Iraq". The withdrawal is on a timetable negotiated with the government of Iraq after the last presidential election, I'm guessing the time table was "good enough" so that it didn't warrant re-negotiation. On the other hand, Obama hasn't invaded any countries in his first 3 years, and that does seems like a significant departure from the Bush war policy.
No, actually it won't. What it will do is get the greater evil elected which will then reinforce the need to vote for the lesser of two evils. The only solution is to press for electoral reform from both parties. Americans need to make it clear that it is unacceptable for any politician from any party to be against changing the voting system to something that actually works.
That's why it's a "trap". To get (temporarily) out of the system you need to sacrifice your short term interests for the chance to maybe get better representation in the future. Canada went thought this cycle, in many people's opinion, the new party that replaced the previous party is actually worse than the original. It is more controlled and controlling, secretive, and relies on American style attack adds to win elections. That's a real problem, the party that comes out might be more organized and more corrupt.
That's why the actual voting system needs to be changed. That can only be done be a sudden popular uprising against both major parties. It doesn't matter if it's part of a third party or comes from within one or both of the current dominant parties. The voting system has to be changed. Unless the voting system changes you will always be faced with the lesser of two or maybe three evils. The other systems minimize the problem of being forced to vote strategically and thus allow new parties to rise to power without having to destroy their ideological predecessors.
That's exactly what they did. The company agree to make a public park so they could build the skyscraper next to it and generate an income from it, otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to build and operate the building next to the park (at least not the way it was built).
These guys claim to have a list of 269 war crimes attributable to the George Bush Administration.
Canada has refused to consider war crimes charges against Bush because it would "damage diplomatic relations with the United States". I wouldn't be surprised if most of the U.S. allies won't prosecute (or even complain) for the same reason.
That's actually part of what the protests are trying to accomplish. It's difficult for any politician to get anything worthwhile done unless there is a broad base of public support for the policy. Even if something is smart and morally correct, if it's unpopular your opponent can get elected and revoke it.