The government does know how much you should probably be paying, if the amount that you do pay is very different from what they expect then they'll come after you.
Obviously this means that the government could essentially do your taxes for you, as you suggest, and you would only point to whatever they got wrong or whatever additional deductions you want to claim. The tax preparer lobby has convinced members of congress that this would be unfair competition, however.
The roads provide for commerce as well. Trust me, every dollar sunk into infrastructure like that is returned multiple times in increased tax revenue.
The point he was making was that money spent on infrastructure could just as easily be going to railroads or the like, but instead it all gets spent on cars.
Regarding the cost of oil, the world is significantly different than it was 11 years ago - the high cost of oil is thanks to the Arab Spring. The OPEC countries (primarily Saudi Arabia) need money to keep their citizens from revolting. Simple as that. I've even got a reference for you:
As for how much gas _should_ cost: frankly, it's still too cheap. It's my opinion that commodities should be taxed when they themselves, through use, cost taxpayer dollars. In other words, gas needs to be taxed at a rate which will offset the environmental damage that's done by using it. This is true regardless of the cost of crude oil.
Sorry, reading that last bit I think I come off a little snide. Not the intention. I'm just operating from memory on the video, but I do think that my memory is pretty good.
Ah, I see the problem. Until I got to you last line there I'd thought maybe we were having two separate conversations. Look, there are plenty of nutty and self-interested people who deny climate change because "the facts aren't all in" or "further research is needed" or whatever, and this has pushed climatologists to ever more extreme language to counter them. They start trowing around words like "fact" and "indisputable." It's an unfortunate perversion made necessary by the public's inability to deal with things that aren't certainty.
There's a similar problem with evolution, but there's the thing: people aren't saying things like "evolution is a fact" or "climate change is a certainty that needs to be dealt with" lightly. Climate change has a huge amount of supporting data and very few credible detractors while evolution is one of the most thoroughly demonstrated theories in science. This fructose theory has no credible detractors (that I know of), that's good. As for support... there's a correlation between increased sugar consumption and a rise in obesity and diabetes, as you say. This is simply not sufficient to start throwing around absolutes. Especially in medicine and double especially when it comes to dietary advice:
I am admittedly shy about accepting health advice, but I have good reason to be. Most health reporting is just malarkey. That's true for science reporting in general actually, but health reporting is half of all science reporting because the public just eats that shit up. Antioxidents help you live longer? Bunk. Fish oil makes you smarter? Bunk. "Staying hydrated?" Bunk.
As for the video, yeah I know it's ninety minutes. I thought about providing a more specific reference but came to my senses before I wasted an hour and a half just to win an internet argument. I also wish you wouldn't use the term "mainstream medicine." Around here we just call that "medicine."
He says pretty clearly that he's talking about metabolic processes that make sense to him, that he's verified with a colleague to be plausible, and that he believes to be true. He also says that there are several studies in progress, including one that he is conducting at UCSF, which he hopes will vindicate his hypothesis, but which are not yet complete.
Also, from the article you linked:
To be precise, the F.D.A. reviewers said that other than its contribution to calories, “no conclusive evidence on sugars demonstrates a hazard to the general public when sugars are consumed at the levels that are now current.” This is another way of saying that the evidence by no means refuted the kinds of claims that Lustig is making now and other researchers were making then, just that it wasn’t definitive or unambiguous.
Emphasis mine. This was in 1986, well after the Yudkin book that you mention.
No, don't do this. Robert Lustig's claims are as yet unsubstantiated. He himself admits this. He makes a compelling case for his theory and there's no reason why you shouldn't follow his advice, but you should not just assume him to be correct and above all you must not pass this on to other people as though it were fact.
This is exactly the danger in reporting unpublished papers and why Lustig is the only one making the television circuit, despite being in a pretty broad field.
That could maybe make sense, sort of, if all of the money weren't being poured into denying climate change rather than supporting it. The oil companies, some of the largest companies in the world, have been spending money hand over fist doing whatever they can to cast doubt on the science. Meanwhile, the other side has... solar panel manufacturers? Windmill operators? Come on, that's chump change.
The political climate is influenced by the money, not the other way around. The party with the greatest ties to the oil companies supports the oil companies, the party without those ties doesn't.
It's a little more complicated than you're indicating here. Addressing just Gitmo - Obama did his damnedest to close it, all blame for that lies with congress. However, with that plan failed, Obama, or someone, has managed to get detainees real trials for their accused crimes in proper civilian courts. There was an interview with Jack Goldsmith (an Attorney General for Bush) just a couple days ago on the Daily Show where he discussed this:
Of course, the detainees are still stuck in Gitmo instead of a regular prison. This is a waste of money among other things, but if they've been tried and convicted then that's the primary ethical violation resolved.
It's hard to defend the persecution of whistle blowers, but I don't know anything about this case other than what's in the summary.... I expect that's true for most people on Slashdot.
All right, let's get this straight: there is no AGW community. There is no conspiracy by evil enviro-commies. There is no group of people who identify themselves as global warming believers. Climate change is not a church. There is (almost) no one who benefits from climate change - climatologists who write papers about climate change would happily write papers about something else.
Calling it climate change is not an attempt to trick people. The fact is, we have to call it climate change now because there are a bunch of mouth breathers who say, "But it's still cold in the winter time! Common sense tells me that global warming doesn't exist. You are all out to get me."
Finally, endlessly addressing concerns of people who adamantly refuse to believe that their noses are attached to their faces, despite decades of mirrors and photographs and countless measurements by thousands of nose experts, is a not a productive use of anyone's time.
That's farming nothing but rice, and I believe requires artificial fertilizer (which you have to get from somewhere). Hydroponics is the only way to sustainably support even as many people as we have now, let alone how many we'll have in the future. Here's a random unsubstantiated quote:
Assume that net agricultural topsoil loss rates are directly proportional to human population--an assumption that correlates well with global variations in topsoil loss. In order to reduce gross agricultural topsoil loss to the natural rate of agricultural topsoil creation, the Earth's population would need to fall to about a fifth of its present value--perhaps 1.2 billion. Escalation of irrigated land degradation due to salination could drop this figure to well under one billion.
just add a control device like a kinect or something to interface
Have you actually used a Kinect? You can't control things for shit. It's a novelty and maybe a convenience device for simple interface commands, no more.
People have this doomsday attitude regarding cell phone and tablet gaming, as though it's inevitable that they not only can but will replace control pad gaming or mouse and keyboard gaming. It is not going to happen. The interface just isn't there, and tack-on products like you suggest reduce portability, reduce the user base, and add clutter to something that's supposed to be starkly simple.
A touch interface is certainly good for some things, point and click adventures are great for this, but you're talking about a supplement, not a replacement, to traditional gaming.
I realize that when you say this you intended the apps that display the information, exposing the privacy violation, but why not ban the data aggregators causing the privacy violation in the first place? Why not ban Foursquare?
Because they're bigger and have more money? Probably because people would protest, but I don't think they'd protest too hard unless some pundit declared that this was big bad government sweeping in to take away their freedom to publicly expose themselves. I'm rambling, but the US currently has no laws limiting this kind of data collection by private organizations and that's a significant problem.
According to unsubstantiated claims made by Robert Lustig, fructose is the component of sugar that's really bad for you. Glucose is fairly benign. So higher fructose may mean less total corn syrup is needed, but you're still getting a larger amount of the bad element.
Of course, Robert Lustig also says that there's no significant difference between high fructose corn syrup and sugar. So... there you go. Obviously you shouldn't base your dietary choices on speculation, but sugary drinks are a demonstrated problem. Whether they're worse if made with sugar or corn syrup is an open question.
it's making sweeping (and frequently incorrect) remarks about 50% of the population
Also frequently correct. When you really look at sexual attraction, what motivates it is often unflattering. Being attracted to "confidence" is just socially acceptable code for power or dominance. This is often related to wealth, another thing to which you're not supposed to admit to being attracted. Men have a simpler drive, but we're usually told to be ashamed to look at a woman's body - this is objectification, etc.
On the one hand, it's easy to see why stigmas like these exist: looking no further than a woman's body is an easy path to misery, men who are the most dominant are often also the most abusive. Our biology is what it is, however, and it does us no good to just deny it. These sorts of comments are just people venting their frustration, don't make too much out of it.
This appears to be a genuine story, no fooling involved. Grandparent was at least on topic, despite being AC. If you're going to cuss out Slashdot for posting fake stories then at least wait for them to actually post a fake story.
You can also go prepaid. I have a Nexus One with a prepaid T-Mobile SIM - $100 is good for a year if I don't use it too much, but I don't get any data. Have to look around for wifi when I occasionally need it.
The other nice thing about prepaid is that you don't have to give up any personal information, not even your name. I've got a firewall on my phone and I'm reasonably sure that unwelcome data isn't getting out, but it's still nice to have that extra bit of confidence.
Okay, I'll bite: since Origin is basically just a clone of Steam, what is this value that Steam adds and Origin doesn't?
I'll answer speculatively: most people that I've talked to who like Steam say that they like it because it gives them a way to keep their games organized. There might be some other junk about chat and forums and whatnot, but having their games library all in one place is the main thing. Origin does this too, so what makes Steam good and Origin bad? The answer I hear is, "All of my games are already on Steam. I don't want to keep another service running, I want everything all in one place."
in one of their final forms usually called humans.
This being the point, of course. It's the fact that humans have determined themselves to be final and taken steps to ensure that this is the case that causes people to look at us and see an aberration. If humans were simply one more step on the evolutionary chain then it would be easier to refer to ourselves as natural.
Of course... the fact that we've defined "natural" to mean "things which are are unrelated to humans" probably has something to do with it as well.
Except that what we're talking about here is the morality of business. There's often a view in these parts that businesses are necessarily amoral. In fact, while the law allows them to be completely self-centered entities, it does not require that. Executives must protect shareholder value, but that doesn't mean maximizing profits with no care or concern for the consequences.
A company is really just a group of people working together. Mobs are notorious for having lax ethics, but that doesn't mean that we should hold them to a lower standard.
Well, it appears that Foxconn is increasing salaries and lowering required hours and I can't imagine that that only applies to Apple products. I'm sure that it applies to everyone. Certainly I don't want Apple to use this as an anticompetitive weapon, but I'm glad that Samsung is being forced to improve the lives of their (indirect) workers alongside Apple and everyone else. This would also make for a pretty impractical weapon, given that it looks like it's going to take sixteen months to implement and it will increase costs for Apple in the long term.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "giving Apple this power." Apple has this power mostly because of their size, but also because of their persnickety nature when it comes to production quality - it's apparently a get for manufacturers to be able to say that they produce for Apple.
Yes, "But Timmy's doing it too!" is never a valid excuse.
The other reason Apple gets singled out is because of their singular ability to change things if they had the will to do so - manufacturer’s will bend over backwards for an Apple contract in a way that they won't do for any other company.
Can you please explain to me how there is infinite wealth in our closed system?
Many economics models assume essentially infinite growth. Like all models, these are intended to be applied only over a limited scope - in this case, one where growth will not be effected by the obviously limited nature of resources on our planet (usually this means a short time frame).
Some people choose to interpret this in another way, however.
Slashdot Mirror
The government does know how much you should probably be paying, if the amount that you do pay is very different from what they expect then they'll come after you.
Obviously this means that the government could essentially do your taxes for you, as you suggest, and you would only point to whatever they got wrong or whatever additional deductions you want to claim. The tax preparer lobby has convinced members of congress that this would be unfair competition, however.
China also has more than 3,000 front companies in the U.S.
See? That's what you call a job creator. Outsourcing works both ways.
The roads provide for commerce as well. Trust me, every dollar sunk into infrastructure like that is returned multiple times in increased tax revenue.
The point he was making was that money spent on infrastructure could just as easily be going to railroads or the like, but instead it all gets spent on cars.
Regarding the cost of oil, the world is significantly different than it was 11 years ago - the high cost of oil is thanks to the Arab Spring. The OPEC countries (primarily Saudi Arabia) need money to keep their citizens from revolting. Simple as that. I've even got a reference for you:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/04/02/149684373/the-real-reason-gas-costs-4-a-gallon
As for how much gas _should_ cost: frankly, it's still too cheap. It's my opinion that commodities should be taxed when they themselves, through use, cost taxpayer dollars. In other words, gas needs to be taxed at a rate which will offset the environmental damage that's done by using it. This is true regardless of the cost of crude oil.
Sorry, reading that last bit I think I come off a little snide. Not the intention. I'm just operating from memory on the video, but I do think that my memory is pretty good.
Ah, I see the problem. Until I got to you last line there I'd thought maybe we were having two separate conversations. Look, there are plenty of nutty and self-interested people who deny climate change because "the facts aren't all in" or "further research is needed" or whatever, and this has pushed climatologists to ever more extreme language to counter them. They start trowing around words like "fact" and "indisputable." It's an unfortunate perversion made necessary by the public's inability to deal with things that aren't certainty.
There's a similar problem with evolution, but there's the thing: people aren't saying things like "evolution is a fact" or "climate change is a certainty that needs to be dealt with" lightly. Climate change has a huge amount of supporting data and very few credible detractors while evolution is one of the most thoroughly demonstrated theories in science. This fructose theory has no credible detractors (that I know of), that's good. As for support... there's a correlation between increased sugar consumption and a rise in obesity and diabetes, as you say. This is simply not sufficient to start throwing around absolutes. Especially in medicine and double especially when it comes to dietary advice:
http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidemiology-and-meat/
I am admittedly shy about accepting health advice, but I have good reason to be. Most health reporting is just malarkey. That's true for science reporting in general actually, but health reporting is half of all science reporting because the public just eats that shit up. Antioxidents help you live longer? Bunk. Fish oil makes you smarter? Bunk. "Staying hydrated?" Bunk.
As for the video, yeah I know it's ninety minutes. I thought about providing a more specific reference but came to my senses before I wasted an hour and a half just to win an internet argument. I also wish you wouldn't use the term "mainstream medicine." Around here we just call that "medicine."
Robert Lustig's claims are as yet unsubstantiated. He himself admits this.
Do you have a reference where he says that?
It's in the talk he gave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
He says pretty clearly that he's talking about metabolic processes that make sense to him, that he's verified with a colleague to be plausible, and that he believes to be true. He also says that there are several studies in progress, including one that he is conducting at UCSF, which he hopes will vindicate his hypothesis, but which are not yet complete.
Also, from the article you linked:
To be precise, the F.D.A. reviewers said that other than its contribution to calories, “no conclusive evidence on sugars demonstrates a hazard to the general public when sugars are consumed at the levels that are now current.” This is another way of saying that the evidence by no means refuted the kinds of claims that Lustig is making now and other researchers were making then, just that it wasn’t definitive or unambiguous.
Emphasis mine. This was in 1986, well after the Yudkin book that you mention.
No, don't do this. Robert Lustig's claims are as yet unsubstantiated. He himself admits this. He makes a compelling case for his theory and there's no reason why you shouldn't follow his advice, but you should not just assume him to be correct and above all you must not pass this on to other people as though it were fact.
This is exactly the danger in reporting unpublished papers and why Lustig is the only one making the television circuit, despite being in a pretty broad field.
That what the missiles are for, no trial required. Seriously, "just kill them all" is not a valid route to take for a police action.
That could maybe make sense, sort of, if all of the money weren't being poured into denying climate change rather than supporting it. The oil companies, some of the largest companies in the world, have been spending money hand over fist doing whatever they can to cast doubt on the science. Meanwhile, the other side has... solar panel manufacturers? Windmill operators? Come on, that's chump change.
The political climate is influenced by the money, not the other way around. The party with the greatest ties to the oil companies supports the oil companies, the party without those ties doesn't.
It's a little more complicated than you're indicating here. Addressing just Gitmo - Obama did his damnedest to close it, all blame for that lies with congress. However, with that plan failed, Obama, or someone, has managed to get detainees real trials for their accused crimes in proper civilian courts. There was an interview with Jack Goldsmith (an Attorney General for Bush) just a couple days ago on the Daily Show where he discussed this:
... I expect that's true for most people on Slashdot.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/wed-april-4-2012-jack-l--goldsmith
Of course, the detainees are still stuck in Gitmo instead of a regular prison. This is a waste of money among other things, but if they've been tried and convicted then that's the primary ethical violation resolved.
It's hard to defend the persecution of whistle blowers, but I don't know anything about this case other than what's in the summary.
All right, let's get this straight: there is no AGW community. There is no conspiracy by evil enviro-commies. There is no group of people who identify themselves as global warming believers. Climate change is not a church. There is (almost) no one who benefits from climate change - climatologists who write papers about climate change would happily write papers about something else.
Calling it climate change is not an attempt to trick people. The fact is, we have to call it climate change now because there are a bunch of mouth breathers who say, "But it's still cold in the winter time! Common sense tells me that global warming doesn't exist. You are all out to get me."
Finally, endlessly addressing concerns of people who adamantly refuse to believe that their noses are attached to their faces, despite decades of mirrors and photographs and countless measurements by thousands of nose experts, is a not a productive use of anyone's time.
Assume that net agricultural topsoil loss rates are directly proportional to human population--an assumption that correlates well with global variations in topsoil loss. In order to reduce gross agricultural topsoil loss to the natural rate of agricultural topsoil creation, the Earth's population would need to fall to about a fifth of its present value--perhaps 1.2 billion. Escalation of irrigated land degradation due to salination could drop this figure to well under one billion.
just add a control device like a kinect or something to interface
Have you actually used a Kinect? You can't control things for shit. It's a novelty and maybe a convenience device for simple interface commands, no more.
People have this doomsday attitude regarding cell phone and tablet gaming, as though it's inevitable that they not only can but will replace control pad gaming or mouse and keyboard gaming. It is not going to happen. The interface just isn't there, and tack-on products like you suggest reduce portability, reduce the user base, and add clutter to something that's supposed to be starkly simple.
A touch interface is certainly good for some things, point and click adventures are great for this, but you're talking about a supplement, not a replacement, to traditional gaming.
I don't think there are any quadrotors that have the kind of range he's asking for.
Why, ban these apps, of course.
I realize that when you say this you intended the apps that display the information, exposing the privacy violation, but why not ban the data aggregators causing the privacy violation in the first place? Why not ban Foursquare?
Because they're bigger and have more money? Probably because people would protest, but I don't think they'd protest too hard unless some pundit declared that this was big bad government sweeping in to take away their freedom to publicly expose themselves. I'm rambling, but the US currently has no laws limiting this kind of data collection by private organizations and that's a significant problem.
According to unsubstantiated claims made by Robert Lustig, fructose is the component of sugar that's really bad for you. Glucose is fairly benign. So higher fructose may mean less total corn syrup is needed, but you're still getting a larger amount of the bad element.
Of course, Robert Lustig also says that there's no significant difference between high fructose corn syrup and sugar. So... there you go. Obviously you shouldn't base your dietary choices on speculation, but sugary drinks are a demonstrated problem. Whether they're worse if made with sugar or corn syrup is an open question.
it's making sweeping (and frequently incorrect) remarks about 50% of the population
Also frequently correct. When you really look at sexual attraction, what motivates it is often unflattering. Being attracted to "confidence" is just socially acceptable code for power or dominance. This is often related to wealth, another thing to which you're not supposed to admit to being attracted. Men have a simpler drive, but we're usually told to be ashamed to look at a woman's body - this is objectification, etc.
On the one hand, it's easy to see why stigmas like these exist: looking no further than a woman's body is an easy path to misery, men who are the most dominant are often also the most abusive. Our biology is what it is, however, and it does us no good to just deny it. These sorts of comments are just people venting their frustration, don't make too much out of it.
This appears to be a genuine story, no fooling involved. Grandparent was at least on topic, despite being AC. If you're going to cuss out Slashdot for posting fake stories then at least wait for them to actually post a fake story.
You can also go prepaid. I have a Nexus One with a prepaid T-Mobile SIM - $100 is good for a year if I don't use it too much, but I don't get any data. Have to look around for wifi when I occasionally need it.
The other nice thing about prepaid is that you don't have to give up any personal information, not even your name. I've got a firewall on my phone and I'm reasonably sure that unwelcome data isn't getting out, but it's still nice to have that extra bit of confidence.
Okay, I'll bite: since Origin is basically just a clone of Steam, what is this value that Steam adds and Origin doesn't?
I'll answer speculatively: most people that I've talked to who like Steam say that they like it because it gives them a way to keep their games organized. There might be some other junk about chat and forums and whatnot, but having their games library all in one place is the main thing. Origin does this too, so what makes Steam good and Origin bad? The answer I hear is, "All of my games are already on Steam. I don't want to keep another service running, I want everything all in one place."
This is customer lock-in, it's not a good thing.
in one of their final forms usually called humans.
This being the point, of course. It's the fact that humans have determined themselves to be final and taken steps to ensure that this is the case that causes people to look at us and see an aberration. If humans were simply one more step on the evolutionary chain then it would be easier to refer to ourselves as natural.
Of course... the fact that we've defined "natural" to mean "things which are are unrelated to humans" probably has something to do with it as well.
Except that what we're talking about here is the morality of business. There's often a view in these parts that businesses are necessarily amoral. In fact, while the law allows them to be completely self-centered entities, it does not require that. Executives must protect shareholder value, but that doesn't mean maximizing profits with no care or concern for the consequences.
A company is really just a group of people working together. Mobs are notorious for having lax ethics, but that doesn't mean that we should hold them to a lower standard.
Well, it appears that Foxconn is increasing salaries and lowering required hours and I can't imagine that that only applies to Apple products. I'm sure that it applies to everyone. Certainly I don't want Apple to use this as an anticompetitive weapon, but I'm glad that Samsung is being forced to improve the lives of their (indirect) workers alongside Apple and everyone else. This would also make for a pretty impractical weapon, given that it looks like it's going to take sixteen months to implement and it will increase costs for Apple in the long term.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "giving Apple this power." Apple has this power mostly because of their size, but also because of their persnickety nature when it comes to production quality - it's apparently a get for manufacturers to be able to say that they produce for Apple.
Yes, "But Timmy's doing it too!" is never a valid excuse.
The other reason Apple gets singled out is because of their singular ability to change things if they had the will to do so - manufacturer’s will bend over backwards for an Apple contract in a way that they won't do for any other company.
Can you please explain to me how there is infinite wealth in our closed system?
Many economics models assume essentially infinite growth. Like all models, these are intended to be applied only over a limited scope - in this case, one where growth will not be effected by the obviously limited nature of resources on our planet (usually this means a short time frame).
Some people choose to interpret this in another way, however.