It's more likely that a lot of the UN actions have been voted because of US-backing. Let's not kid ourselves, the actions undertaken by the US government are because the US government _wants_ to, and it will do whatever it wants even without UN-backing (Iraq war, anyone?).
I haven't been, but how about a real-life example of how one of my friend has been "monitored".
She's American-born, holds an American passport, but is not white and studies in Canada. On a drive home (note, drive, not even flying) from Canada, she gets stopped at the border, her car gets searched, is detained for hours, has her cellphone messages checked, and is asked to unlock her computer, and they look at every single document and personal picture on her computer. Then they proceed to question her and ask her if she knows why she got stopped.
Why, you ask? Well, apparently being brown qualifies you as a terrorist threat despite having lived all your life in the US and studying in the crime nest that is Canada.
No, no IP was stolen. It was just "war on terror". The actions that result from it, though, are uncannily similar.
Conclusion: travel light. Period.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
It's because the tax you pay on real estate covers the cost of the infrastructure necessary to support it. Your house needs to be connected to the electricity grid, water system, it's accessible by roads, whatever. Also, property tax, while related to your property's market value, is only a small fraction of it.
Consider paying income taxes, or even capital gain taxes, on stocks. You bought 10k worth of shares and it doubled? Well, are you prepared to pay out 35% (warning: number coming out of thin air) of your paper profits, hence of your original investment, even though you haven't sold, and thus do not have any cash to pay for it? You would need to keep a huge amount of cash on hand, _just to be sure you don't get screwed by your stock gains_. That kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?
Basically, stocks are investments. You get taxed on the money you make, when you make it, and every other cost you already pay for through transaction costs.
[...] they could be invaded, replaced their government with a pupp..., i mean, democratic leader, and put them in a modern world while oil or other natural resource is given to some friendly corporations.
Too bad they don't have much oil, else you'd see one more "democratic" country.
The deal isn't any worst than buying Apple or Amazon stock right now. The growth potential is more modest, but it is still has higher potential of returns than investing in bonds.
Wrong.
The deal is, currently, a _lot_ worse than buying Apple. Apple sells for a P/E of 12.99, meaning that in 13 years, they will earn as much in profit as the current price they're valued at (that's the simple explanation, without accounting for their sizable amount of cash for which you pay when you buy a share), _without flat profits_, ie, no growth. Facebook sells, if the rumors of 150M$ net profit are true and the valuation of 75-100B$ are true, at a P/E of what, 500? The _only_ reason someone would remotely consider paying that price for its stock is expectations of massive growth.
Writing code professionally does not ensure you know what good practices are, in fact I'd argue that very often it shows you the contrary.
I have a B. Eng, and have coded professionally for a living for a small "agile" company and a big multinational software shop. Working in a small agile company is fun, but despite implementation of "best practices", the projects/company is not nearly complex enough for you to understand how problems scale. Working in a big shop teaches you that the theory that you learned in school is not always applied, that it should, but that realistically, with deadlines, upper management directives and global industry trends, it's not always realistic to have a perfect software development process.
Also, I don't know what university you went to. All my software engineering classes involved projects with at least a 4-5 people team and a customer, and in fact shows you more of the entire software lifecycle (including requirement gathering, specs, prototyping, testing, UAT and such) than a job at many companies where you'll be stuck doing one part of the cycle. It's not equivalent to working for 3-4 years, but not any less valuable.
Copyright is about the expression of an idea, not an idea.
A dog that talks, lives with humans and has adventures with them is an idea. If you create a comic book based on that idea, you are not violating copyright.
You would be violating copyright if your dog happens to look like Snoopy, has adventures involving baseball and a yellow bird as friend, because then you're deviating from the idea to simply copy someone else's expression of it.
I took Thrun's AI class, and passed. It was fun, I learned some things, but it was _not_ an university class, by which I mean that while the material was clearly university-level material, it was skimmed over like we would do in high school. I understand it's impractical to test an implementation of AI algorithms for 100,000 students, but well, that's one of the differences between "real class" and "online class".
I don't know if a biology degree without labs, or an engineering degree without labs, would be worth anything. Sure, you would learn basic theory, understand the principle... but you know, that's not enough. It's like saying you understand high-level physics without doing the math around it, it's just not the same level of mastery.
My personal opinion, is that he could replace some technical training schools and teach you CS/IT basics, but I really don't like when people think that learning physics or math is useless in CS/Engineering. These are things that shape your mind and give you a thought-process that is hard to acquire otherwise. And the social skills that universities teach you, through face-to-face group projects and labs? Invaluable, and unlikely to be acquired online.
You are aware that China doesn't recognize dual-citizenship, yes? If you managed that feat, please let me know how it works.
For the rest, I'd also rather be living on my own land farming.:)
They cried, because in a tightly controlled country with government media, the loss of your leader is like losing a family member. It's like losing the person the entire country, and you yourself, relied on. They cried because they were at a loss as to what to do. It's losing the person running the country, the only person capable of doing so (or so they believed), and having certainty replaced by uncertainty. If you're a believer, it's like losing your prophet.
That might not have been the situation for everyone, but for a big percentage of the population, it was entirely genuine.
He didn't even say he didn't make enough money... in his comments section, he points out that most of his paying customers were free users first. That to me means freemium works, even for him.
His biggest complaint about his whole experiment seems to be that his "free" users marked his mail as spam. However, one thing stands out: to use his site/service, you have to agree to a TOS, in which he mentions that he might send you mails. There is no opt-out button. That's worse than a sneaky default spam mail with a well-hidden opt-out checkbox... in his case, there is no such checkbox. You want to use his service? Then you agree to his spam. To me that means his service is not free, but hey, maybe I value my privacy more than a letter to Santa.
I understand he put hours and money into creating and hosting his site, but that does not entitle him to believe his mail is important, especially when there is no option to opt-out in the first place... and the fact most of his paying customers were free users first points to the fact he's just whining for whining, and doesn't understand what "freemium" means.
Your number is based off of _two_ years of history, right in the greatest market crash in recent history, when your own article says: "Interviews with more than 100 people with net worths (or former net worths) of $10 million or more, and a wave of new studies on the rich, suggest a different cause: the "financialization" of wealth. Simply put, more wealth today is tied to the stock market than to broader economic growth."
Again, from your WSJ article:
"When the economy grows, their incomes grow up to three times faster than the rest of the country's. When the economy falls, their incomes fall two or three times as much."
[...]
"Suddenly, in 1982, the wealthiest broke away from the rest of the economy and formed their own virtual country. Their incomes began soaring higher during good times. The top 1% of earners more than doubled their share of national income, to 20% as of 2008. Looking at another measure, the richest 1% increased their share of wealth from just over 20% to more than 33%."
How about this one instead, coming from the CBO (http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12485):
"CBO finds that, between 1979 and 2007, income grew by:
275 percent for the top 1 percent of households,
65 percent for the next 19 percent,
Just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent, and
18 percent for the bottom 20 percent."
That is through the 1987 Black Monday crash, the Gulf War, the Japanese bubble, the dotcom bubble and what have you.
So can we please agree on one thing? Over the longer term, in modern times, there is increasing disparity of wealth in the United States. It doesn't matter that the rich's income or net worth drops by 50% during a recession. The individuals involved will possibly get it back once the market recovers, and regardless, the rich as a social class are earning more and more.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more likely that a lot of the UN actions have been voted because of US-backing. Let's not kid ourselves, the actions undertaken by the US government are because the US government _wants_ to, and it will do whatever it wants even without UN-backing (Iraq war, anyone?).
TSA serves an important function, i.e. it pretends to keep terrorists off our airplanes, while treating almost everyone like one!
There, fixed that for you.
I haven't been, but how about a real-life example of how one of my friend has been "monitored".
She's American-born, holds an American passport, but is not white and studies in Canada. On a drive home (note, drive, not even flying) from Canada, she gets stopped at the border, her car gets searched, is detained for hours, has her cellphone messages checked, and is asked to unlock her computer, and they look at every single document and personal picture on her computer. Then they proceed to question her and ask her if she knows why she got stopped.
Why, you ask? Well, apparently being brown qualifies you as a terrorist threat despite having lived all your life in the US and studying in the crime nest that is Canada.
No, no IP was stolen. It was just "war on terror". The actions that result from it, though, are uncannily similar.
Conclusion: travel light. Period.
It's because the tax you pay on real estate covers the cost of the infrastructure necessary to support it. Your house needs to be connected to the electricity grid, water system, it's accessible by roads, whatever. Also, property tax, while related to your property's market value, is only a small fraction of it.
Consider paying income taxes, or even capital gain taxes, on stocks. You bought 10k worth of shares and it doubled? Well, are you prepared to pay out 35% (warning: number coming out of thin air) of your paper profits, hence of your original investment, even though you haven't sold, and thus do not have any cash to pay for it? You would need to keep a huge amount of cash on hand, _just to be sure you don't get screwed by your stock gains_. That kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?
Basically, stocks are investments. You get taxed on the money you make, when you make it, and every other cost you already pay for through transaction costs.
[...] they could be invaded, replaced their government with a pupp..., i mean, democratic leader, and put them in a modern world while oil or other natural resource is given to some friendly corporations.
Too bad they don't have much oil, else you'd see one more "democratic" country.
Shouldn't the true colour be red? As with, for example, albinos, people that don't produce melanin?
The deal isn't any worst than buying Apple or Amazon stock right now. The growth potential is more modest, but it is still has higher potential of returns than investing in bonds.
Wrong.
The deal is, currently, a _lot_ worse than buying Apple. Apple sells for a P/E of 12.99, meaning that in 13 years, they will earn as much in profit as the current price they're valued at (that's the simple explanation, without accounting for their sizable amount of cash for which you pay when you buy a share), _without flat profits_, ie, no growth. Facebook sells, if the rumors of 150M$ net profit are true and the valuation of 75-100B$ are true, at a P/E of what, 500? The _only_ reason someone would remotely consider paying that price for its stock is expectations of massive growth.
Writing code professionally does not ensure you know what good practices are, in fact I'd argue that very often it shows you the contrary.
I have a B. Eng, and have coded professionally for a living for a small "agile" company and a big multinational software shop. Working in a small agile company is fun, but despite implementation of "best practices", the projects/company is not nearly complex enough for you to understand how problems scale. Working in a big shop teaches you that the theory that you learned in school is not always applied, that it should, but that realistically, with deadlines, upper management directives and global industry trends, it's not always realistic to have a perfect software development process.
Also, I don't know what university you went to. All my software engineering classes involved projects with at least a 4-5 people team and a customer, and in fact shows you more of the entire software lifecycle (including requirement gathering, specs, prototyping, testing, UAT and such) than a job at many companies where you'll be stuck doing one part of the cycle. It's not equivalent to working for 3-4 years, but not any less valuable.
Copyright is about the expression of an idea, not an idea.
A dog that talks, lives with humans and has adventures with them is an idea. If you create a comic book based on that idea, you are not violating copyright.
You would be violating copyright if your dog happens to look like Snoopy, has adventures involving baseball and a yellow bird as friend, because then you're deviating from the idea to simply copy someone else's expression of it.
I took Thrun's AI class, and passed. It was fun, I learned some things, but it was _not_ an university class, by which I mean that while the material was clearly university-level material, it was skimmed over like we would do in high school. I understand it's impractical to test an implementation of AI algorithms for 100,000 students, but well, that's one of the differences between "real class" and "online class".
I don't know if a biology degree without labs, or an engineering degree without labs, would be worth anything. Sure, you would learn basic theory, understand the principle... but you know, that's not enough. It's like saying you understand high-level physics without doing the math around it, it's just not the same level of mastery.
My personal opinion, is that he could replace some technical training schools and teach you CS/IT basics, but I really don't like when people think that learning physics or math is useless in CS/Engineering. These are things that shape your mind and give you a thought-process that is hard to acquire otherwise. And the social skills that universities teach you, through face-to-face group projects and labs? Invaluable, and unlikely to be acquired online.
You are aware that China doesn't recognize dual-citizenship, yes? If you managed that feat, please let me know how it works. For the rest, I'd also rather be living on my own land farming. :)
This is false. My parents were there.
They cried, because in a tightly controlled country with government media, the loss of your leader is like losing a family member. It's like losing the person the entire country, and you yourself, relied on. They cried because they were at a loss as to what to do. It's losing the person running the country, the only person capable of doing so (or so they believed), and having certainty replaced by uncertainty. If you're a believer, it's like losing your prophet.
That might not have been the situation for everyone, but for a big percentage of the population, it was entirely genuine.
He didn't even say he didn't make enough money... in his comments section, he points out that most of his paying customers were free users first. That to me means freemium works, even for him.
His biggest complaint about his whole experiment seems to be that his "free" users marked his mail as spam. However, one thing stands out: to use his site/service, you have to agree to a TOS, in which he mentions that he might send you mails. There is no opt-out button. That's worse than a sneaky default spam mail with a well-hidden opt-out checkbox... in his case, there is no such checkbox. You want to use his service? Then you agree to his spam. To me that means his service is not free, but hey, maybe I value my privacy more than a letter to Santa.
I understand he put hours and money into creating and hosting his site, but that does not entitle him to believe his mail is important, especially when there is no option to opt-out in the first place... and the fact most of his paying customers were free users first points to the fact he's just whining for whining, and doesn't understand what "freemium" means.
Your number is based off of _two_ years of history, right in the greatest market crash in recent history, when your own article says:
"Interviews with more than 100 people with net worths (or former net worths) of $10 million or more, and a wave of new studies on the rich, suggest a different cause: the "financialization" of wealth. Simply put, more wealth today is tied to the stock market than to broader economic growth."
Again, from your WSJ article:
"When the economy grows, their incomes grow up to three times faster than the rest of the country's. When the economy falls, their incomes fall two or three times as much."
[...]
"Suddenly, in 1982, the wealthiest broke away from the rest of the economy and formed their own virtual country. Their incomes began soaring higher during good times. The top 1% of earners more than doubled their share of national income, to 20% as of 2008. Looking at another measure, the richest 1% increased their share of wealth from just over 20% to more than 33%."
How about this one instead, coming from the CBO (http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12485): "CBO finds that, between 1979 and 2007, income grew by:
275 percent for the top 1 percent of households,
65 percent for the next 19 percent,
Just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent, and
18 percent for the bottom 20 percent."
That is through the 1987 Black Monday crash, the Gulf War, the Japanese bubble, the dotcom bubble and what have you.
So can we please agree on one thing? Over the longer term, in modern times, there is increasing disparity of wealth in the United States. It doesn't matter that the rich's income or net worth drops by 50% during a recession. The individuals involved will possibly get it back once the market recovers, and regardless, the rich as a social class are earning more and more.