Advocating a 90% tax rate is fiscally responsible?
First of all, you need to learn the difference between marginal and average tax rates.
Second - Yes. Not spending more than you make counts as rule #1 of fiscal responsibility. I disapprove of the vast majority of government spending and would far prefer we balance the budget through cuts; but as long as neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can refrain from writing rubber checks, we'd damned well better back them with something other than green ink.
That said - We last saw a top marginal rate of 91% from 1946 through 1963. Y'know, the post-WWII era, the "baby boom", one of the most prosperous eras in US history for the lower and middle classes? I don't normally go for rose-tinted glasses, but tough to see much but pink about that (unless you can't see anything through all the green).
Hmmm. Ok, you go first.
As soon as I make over $1,766,000 per year (the inflation adjusted 90% bracket floor in 1946), yes, I will gladly pay 90% of anything over that.
Computer neophytes are the reason that the IT department exists in the first place.
No. IT needs to make sure the end users have the technology resources available to do their jobs, and to some degree, help users resolve unusual events in their computing environment. When the same user calls every single morning asking for a password reset, you don't blame IT - Their manager has a "Come to Jesus" chat, that they need to either catch on or move on.
IT doesn't exist to teach people basic computer skills, any more than the Accounting department exists to teach people basic math or Marketing helps people pick out their drapes to match their trim.
IT's sole role is support.
Yes, to a degree - IT supports the technology side of the user/computer equation.
If the IT department for Munich either failed to train users how to use their equipment
...Then they did their jobs, by not trying to pull double-duty in a domain of knowledge outside their expertise, ie, training. An organization that hires an engineer (not otherwise specializing in education) to do end-user training has already failed at a strategic level, before we even get to the level of users and computers.
I find it almost funny that we so often blame IT for its arrogance in thinking they can do anyone's job better - Then fault them for not doing someone else's job better.
I would vote for Donald Trump before voting for Jeb based on this issue.
I would vote for Don before Jeb for a lot of reasons. In fact, of the current Republican slate, I'd pretty much vote for Trump over all of them, because I consider him "mostly harmless" by comparison. I'd like to say I prefer Rand, but Rand has that whole "religiot" angle going that I just can't tolerate.
Sadly enough, as a fiscal conservative (and social liberal), I'd actually call Sanders my candidate of choice so far. Yep - The self-proclaimed socialist shows more fiscal responsibility than all 38 GOPpers running.
And they wonder why people don't show more interest in our elections...
Most of what they mean by "waste" buildup in that context refers to intracellular debris, though, not the sort of wastes that circulate in the blood and eventually get excreted.
Still very cool, though, because currently, sepsis has up to a 50% fatality rate - We literally have almost no ways to effectively treat it.
Although not really practical, I go to restaurants to eat food, not admire some bullshit "art" project. If any chef seriously has a problem with me taking a picture of my dinner, that pretty much cinches it that I don't want to eat there.
Then again, for the same reason, I have zero interest in taking pictures of my dinner, never mind posting it online - Seriously, WTF, what sociopathic height of vanity does it take to believe anyone wants to see what I had for dinner?
Yes, far more often, but not as used in this context. Slashdot has its share of regularly scheduled trolls (browse at -1 and you'll see an entirely different Slashdot). And yet, we manage to keep the signal over the noise despite that.
Instead, numerous internet communities attempt to shout down dissent by redefining the word "troll" to mean "anyone with a viewpoint different than the consensus". Try advocating for fiscal responsibility rather than government handouts on any "social justice" friendly site, and watch how quickly they throw out that word.
Dealing with "real" trolls require nothing more than some crude mechanism for up/downvoting comments. When we start describing coherent comments that we may disagree with as "trolling", however, we have crossed over into blatant censorship on ideological grounds.
The internet is not "professional", or even remotely "family friendly". Simple as that.
And no, you don't need to give me a forum to speak my mind on your website - You have every right to host an echo chamber. Just don't act surprised when your "community" consists of nothing but Tumblrinas (or just vanishes altogether).
Annual insolation, even after considering weather, counts as a well-documented stat across the entire US. Why would they limit this to just a few key cities?
Google says these listings are sponsored, so chances are it'll get a bit of a kickback when it generates a sales lead for these companies.
Oh, riiight! "We don't have any partners outside those cities yet, so the rest of you can go fuck yourselves". Got it.
If, however, you collect all the data in aggregate and then discuss it during their annual performance review, and have it play a factor in their compensation, that could definitely be a strong motivator for people not to be off-task:
This entire discussion (not just responding to you) has completely missed one really critical factor here in measuring "productivity" - Hourly vs salaried employees.
As an hourly employee, yes, your employer has a reasonable expectation that you will spend a fair portion of your billable time engaged in productive activities. We can debate what "fair" means in that context (for highly skilled work, I would argue anything over 50% as the naive pipe-dreams of a slave driver), but the underlying idea of time-for-money makes sense.
As a salaried employee, however (ie, the vast majority of IT outside contracting and helpdesk), my employer doesn't "own" my time. My boss knows I read Slashdot and write this very post from work; he doesn't care. He cares that I get my work done, period. Now, if the work doesn't get done, we can look deeper into whether I spent 35+ hours a week on Slashdot, or because of a laughably optimistic schedule or budget. But the deeper issue I mean to make here, my boss has no right to micromanage my time, because he hasn't "bought" my time. He has bought a certain level of output of my brain, nothing more.
A back of the envelope calculation (96M balls covering 175 acres) gives a diameter of around 3.4" per ball - So more like ball-pit balls, than ping-pong balls.
Why limit ourselves to only one color? Make a bicolored ball, slightly heavier on the black side. There you go, efficient at blocking heat during the day but also efficient at allowing the water to radiate it away at night.
I think, though, the first response to this thread nailed it - They chose black for the same reason power, phone, cable, and virtually every other type of exterior grade wiring comes primarily in black - UV resistance. Probably not a good idea to put 96 million rapidly deteriorating sources of pollution into a reservoir.:)
I have a Fitbit (got it for free, I wouldn't actually pay for a high-tech step counter).
I also work out on a treadmill every morning before work. It counts my steps very accurately (it can even tell if I "cheat", and stop counting).
The Fitbit gives completely fictional numbers vs the treadmill. I mean, on most days, it would come to within 75% correct, but on one particular day, the Fitbit literally said I did 3x as many steps as I really did. I stopped even bothering to wear it after that.
Privacy rights aside (I vehemently oppose giving our corporate masters access to anything even vaguely resembling medical data), where do we stand when I may literally pay more for my insurance than the guy at the next desk for no other reason than Fitbit's crappy quality control?
/ Side note - The sleep tracking sucks even harder than the step counting. I took it off one night after activating sleep mode. It said I had something like 17 interruptions to my sleep. Uh-huh.
FTFA: "Right now, as designed, the reactor should be capable of producing about three times as much electricity as is needed to keep it running, but the design could probably be improved to increase that proportion to about five or six times"
My money's on Lockheed's design
Lockheed's design does indeed look pretty cool, but keep in mind that it counts as 100% vaporware at this point. By comparison, tokomaks count as a mature, fairly well understood technology. Making them net positive counts as merely an engineering problem, not a feat that requires invoking any groundbreaking new physics (and indeed, this new MIT design should prove net positive thanks to advances in largely unrelated materials science).
All this so the cameras don't think you have a face. They still record you, and can tell you are a person by the way you move. And since you will be the only douchedork wearing these around, you should be easy to find.
I only have a small objection to simply having a fixed length history security camera record me for the off chance that a robbery happens during its two week storage window.
I have a huge objection to having a network of near-100% coverage cameras actually identifying me and logging my every movement while out in public. I don't care whether Madison Avenue or the NSA does it, I strongly object to both.
So yes, wearing giant bug-glasses, or a Jedi robe, or an IR LED tiara, or any other obvious means of concealing my face would stand out like a sore thumb to a human reviewing the footage; if it keeps the camera from automatically checking me in and out of some Big Brother sponsored version of FourSquare, however, I'd call that a drastic improvement vs an increasingly obvious future state of zero privacy.
Transmission costs are a fraction of production costs. This is unlikely to change.
If by "a fraction" you mean "11/10ths", then I agree: I pay 10% more for the distribution side of my electric bill than for the supply side.
Keep in mind that "transmission" costs don't just mean the price of a few million miles of copper wire, one-and-done. It also includes substations and service vehicles and metering and invoicing and overtime wages when a storm takes thousands of wires down, etc.
In order for the cost of electricity to approach zero, we need to move to an on-site self-serve model of production. As long as we still require utility companies to maintain a fragile quilt of wires crisscrossing the planet, we may well manage to "save the planet", but we won't see the massive cost savings necessary to convince people to move to renewables in the first place.
Which just goes to show a lot of indie media is composed of fucking retards
It really doesn't fucking matter whether talking about a black or a white or a hispanic or an asian getting shot in the back by a cop, the "officer's pistol" didn't magically "discharge". The cop murdered a non-threat, plain and simple.
And never mind the recent rash of suicides for traffic violations - I have to give them credit, that takes their disdain for the general population to a new low. They couldn't get much more blunt about how the feel about us short of literally pissing on us at every traffic stop. "Don't worry, I've marked you, the next one will pass you by".
I never really followed politics much when I was younger, but has it always been like this?
You will occasionally find people who get very, very offended when you point out that Democrats and Republicans differ only in name. These people, sadly, really do believe that the next Obama will change things, and then grow all the more bitter when he ends up just like the rest of the worthless fucks in DC.
But yes, it has pretty much always gone like this. Every charismatic young buck looks like the next Prez Rickard, right up until he turns into the next Tricky Dick.
Townshend was wrong. It's seems like you can just keep fooling us over and over again.
They call it a "lock and key". Totally uncrackable over the internet or via USB, and although exploits do exist, for higher quality setups they take considerable time with physical access to the device.
The "IoT" is not our friend, folks - It turns solid, reliable old-school products into yet another vector for malware in your house. And if you think reinstalling Windows sucks, how about having your oven go into self-cleaning mode during your vacation without the safety latch closed? How about having your blender "playfully" get your cat's attention with brief pulses before going full puree? How about overriding your on-demand hot water heater to its "steam clean" setting with you in the shower?
I love toys, including electronics. But the fewer things in my house vulnerable to remote exploits, the better. My toaster should have one dial and one lever and zero computers, period.
Their permit said that they would not have this wanted fugitive perform. They violated the terms of their permit, so were shut down. This is pretty straightforward and they had to know this would happen - they probably wanted the publicity.
Would the police also have shut them down if they started playing clips of Roman Polanski (wanted in the US for raping a 13 year old girl) movies?
Sure, they can ban him from appearing. But "straightfoward", for effectively playing a movie by someone with an opinion they don't want heard? Yeah, I would call that straightforward - A straightforward violation of the first amendment.
Although the password keeper point struck me as interesting, I take issue with the "experts" stance on updates.
People don't shun (non-OS) updates because they "might" install malware - They shun them because they do install unwanted tag-alongs (if not outright malware). Flash tries to install its partner-of-the-week every time you update it. Chrome just added push notifications. Java... Let's not even go there. And let's not overlook the fact that most users can't tell a legit update prompt from a drive-by installer.
Security experts have a bias here because they:
1) can usually tell the legit updates from the bogus ones (and know enough to get the bloat-free version of the update); and
2) can themselves remove or repair the occasional spyware that slips through, without needing to pay BestBuy $150 for five minutes' work on a machine only worth $300 in the first place.
Yes and no - That would count as a valid reason, if not for the fact that Wu has five minutes of fame solely because of GG. No one gives the least damn about the co-founder of some two-bit game studio.
When your pony has only one trick, no one comes to the show to hear its opinions on the merits of alfalfa vs clover. Heck, until the trolls showed up and explained why we should care about this Q&A, I dismissed it as a blatant Dicevertisement.
Slashdot Mirror
Advocating a 90% tax rate is fiscally responsible?
First of all, you need to learn the difference between marginal and average tax rates.
Second - Yes. Not spending more than you make counts as rule #1 of fiscal responsibility. I disapprove of the vast majority of government spending and would far prefer we balance the budget through cuts; but as long as neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can refrain from writing rubber checks, we'd damned well better back them with something other than green ink.
That said - We last saw a top marginal rate of 91% from 1946 through 1963. Y'know, the post-WWII era, the "baby boom", one of the most prosperous eras in US history for the lower and middle classes? I don't normally go for rose-tinted glasses, but tough to see much but pink about that (unless you can't see anything through all the green).
Hmmm. Ok, you go first.
As soon as I make over $1,766,000 per year (the inflation adjusted 90% bracket floor in 1946), yes, I will gladly pay 90% of anything over that.
I'll take a risk of getting cancer over a guarantee of it.
Computer neophytes are the reason that the IT department exists in the first place.
...Then they did their jobs, by not trying to pull double-duty in a domain of knowledge outside their expertise, ie, training. An organization that hires an engineer (not otherwise specializing in education) to do end-user training has already failed at a strategic level, before we even get to the level of users and computers.
No. IT needs to make sure the end users have the technology resources available to do their jobs, and to some degree, help users resolve unusual events in their computing environment. When the same user calls every single morning asking for a password reset, you don't blame IT - Their manager has a "Come to Jesus" chat, that they need to either catch on or move on.
IT doesn't exist to teach people basic computer skills, any more than the Accounting department exists to teach people basic math or Marketing helps people pick out their drapes to match their trim.
IT's sole role is support.
Yes, to a degree - IT supports the technology side of the user/computer equation.
If the IT department for Munich either failed to train users how to use their equipment
I find it almost funny that we so often blame IT for its arrogance in thinking they can do anyone's job better - Then fault them for not doing someone else's job better.
I would vote for Donald Trump before voting for Jeb based on this issue.
I would vote for Don before Jeb for a lot of reasons. In fact, of the current Republican slate, I'd pretty much vote for Trump over all of them, because I consider him "mostly harmless" by comparison. I'd like to say I prefer Rand, but Rand has that whole "religiot" angle going that I just can't tolerate.
Sadly enough, as a fiscal conservative (and social liberal), I'd actually call Sanders my candidate of choice so far. Yep - The self-proclaimed socialist shows more fiscal responsibility than all 38 GOPpers running.
And they wonder why people don't show more interest in our elections...
Most of what they mean by "waste" buildup in that context refers to intracellular debris, though, not the sort of wastes that circulate in the blood and eventually get excreted. Still very cool, though, because currently, sepsis has up to a 50% fatality rate - We literally have almost no ways to effectively treat it.
Riiiight. You go do that.
Although not really practical, I go to restaurants to eat food, not admire some bullshit "art" project. If any chef seriously has a problem with me taking a picture of my dinner, that pretty much cinches it that I don't want to eat there.
Then again, for the same reason, I have zero interest in taking pictures of my dinner, never mind posting it online - Seriously, WTF, what sociopathic height of vanity does it take to believe anyone wants to see what I had for dinner?
Yes, far more often, but not as used in this context. Slashdot has its share of regularly scheduled trolls (browse at -1 and you'll see an entirely different Slashdot). And yet, we manage to keep the signal over the noise despite that.
Instead, numerous internet communities attempt to shout down dissent by redefining the word "troll" to mean "anyone with a viewpoint different than the consensus". Try advocating for fiscal responsibility rather than government handouts on any "social justice" friendly site, and watch how quickly they throw out that word.
Dealing with "real" trolls require nothing more than some crude mechanism for up/downvoting comments. When we start describing coherent comments that we may disagree with as "trolling", however, we have crossed over into blatant censorship on ideological grounds.
The internet is not "professional", or even remotely "family friendly". Simple as that.
And no, you don't need to give me a forum to speak my mind on your website - You have every right to host an echo chamber. Just don't act surprised when your "community" consists of nothing but Tumblrinas (or just vanishes altogether).
Annual insolation, even after considering weather, counts as a well-documented stat across the entire US. Why would they limit this to just a few key cities?
Google says these listings are sponsored, so chances are it'll get a bit of a kickback when it generates a sales lead for these companies.
Oh, riiight! "We don't have any partners outside those cities yet, so the rest of you can go fuck yourselves". Got it.
If, however, you collect all the data in aggregate and then discuss it during their annual performance review, and have it play a factor in their compensation, that could definitely be a strong motivator for people not to be off-task:
This entire discussion (not just responding to you) has completely missed one really critical factor here in measuring "productivity" - Hourly vs salaried employees.
As an hourly employee, yes, your employer has a reasonable expectation that you will spend a fair portion of your billable time engaged in productive activities. We can debate what "fair" means in that context (for highly skilled work, I would argue anything over 50% as the naive pipe-dreams of a slave driver), but the underlying idea of time-for-money makes sense.
As a salaried employee, however (ie, the vast majority of IT outside contracting and helpdesk), my employer doesn't "own" my time. My boss knows I read Slashdot and write this very post from work; he doesn't care. He cares that I get my work done, period. Now, if the work doesn't get done, we can look deeper into whether I spent 35+ hours a week on Slashdot, or because of a laughably optimistic schedule or budget. But the deeper issue I mean to make here, my boss has no right to micromanage my time, because he hasn't "bought" my time. He has bought a certain level of output of my brain, nothing more.
Wow. I say this as a huge fan of Jackson's work, but... Phone it in much, here?
Nothing but one liners, and mostly along the lines of "yeah, go fuck yourself, Slashdotters" at that. Disappointing.
A back of the envelope calculation (96M balls covering 175 acres) gives a diameter of around 3.4" per ball - So more like ball-pit balls, than ping-pong balls.
Why limit ourselves to only one color? Make a bicolored ball, slightly heavier on the black side. There you go, efficient at blocking heat during the day but also efficient at allowing the water to radiate it away at night.
:)
I think, though, the first response to this thread nailed it - They chose black for the same reason power, phone, cable, and virtually every other type of exterior grade wiring comes primarily in black - UV resistance. Probably not a good idea to put 96 million rapidly deteriorating sources of pollution into a reservoir.
The el-cheapo one (Flex, I guess?). Like I said, I got it for free. :)
Still - Pedometers don't exactly count as high tech. A $75 toy should at least beat a $5 one.
I have a Fitbit (got it for free, I wouldn't actually pay for a high-tech step counter).
I also work out on a treadmill every morning before work. It counts my steps very accurately (it can even tell if I "cheat", and stop counting).
The Fitbit gives completely fictional numbers vs the treadmill. I mean, on most days, it would come to within 75% correct, but on one particular day, the Fitbit literally said I did 3x as many steps as I really did. I stopped even bothering to wear it after that.
Privacy rights aside (I vehemently oppose giving our corporate masters access to anything even vaguely resembling medical data), where do we stand when I may literally pay more for my insurance than the guy at the next desk for no other reason than Fitbit's crappy quality control?
/ Side note - The sleep tracking sucks even harder than the step counting. I took it off one night after activating sleep mode. It said I had something like 17 interruptions to my sleep. Uh-huh.
even a tenfold improvement leaves them wanting.
FTFA: "Right now, as designed, the reactor should be capable of producing about three times as much electricity as is needed to keep it running, but the design could probably be improved to increase that proportion to about five or six times"
My money's on Lockheed's design
Lockheed's design does indeed look pretty cool, but keep in mind that it counts as 100% vaporware at this point. By comparison, tokomaks count as a mature, fairly well understood technology. Making them net positive counts as merely an engineering problem, not a feat that requires invoking any groundbreaking new physics (and indeed, this new MIT design should prove net positive thanks to advances in largely unrelated materials science).
All this so the cameras don't think you have a face. They still record you, and can tell you are a person by the way you move. And since you will be the only douchedork wearing these around, you should be easy to find.
I only have a small objection to simply having a fixed length history security camera record me for the off chance that a robbery happens during its two week storage window.
I have a huge objection to having a network of near-100% coverage cameras actually identifying me and logging my every movement while out in public. I don't care whether Madison Avenue or the NSA does it, I strongly object to both.
So yes, wearing giant bug-glasses, or a Jedi robe, or an IR LED tiara, or any other obvious means of concealing my face would stand out like a sore thumb to a human reviewing the footage; if it keeps the camera from automatically checking me in and out of some Big Brother sponsored version of FourSquare, however, I'd call that a drastic improvement vs an increasingly obvious future state of zero privacy.
Transmission costs are a fraction of production costs. This is unlikely to change.
If by "a fraction" you mean "11/10ths", then I agree: I pay 10% more for the distribution side of my electric bill than for the supply side.
Keep in mind that "transmission" costs don't just mean the price of a few million miles of copper wire, one-and-done. It also includes substations and service vehicles and metering and invoicing and overtime wages when a storm takes thousands of wires down, etc.
In order for the cost of electricity to approach zero, we need to move to an on-site self-serve model of production. As long as we still require utility companies to maintain a fragile quilt of wires crisscrossing the planet, we may well manage to "save the planet", but we won't see the massive cost savings necessary to convince people to move to renewables in the first place.
Which just goes to show a lot of indie media is composed of fucking retards
It really doesn't fucking matter whether talking about a black or a white or a hispanic or an asian getting shot in the back by a cop, the "officer's pistol" didn't magically "discharge". The cop murdered a non-threat, plain and simple.
And never mind the recent rash of suicides for traffic violations - I have to give them credit, that takes their disdain for the general population to a new low. They couldn't get much more blunt about how the feel about us short of literally pissing on us at every traffic stop. "Don't worry, I've marked you, the next one will pass you by".
I never really followed politics much when I was younger, but has it always been like this?
You will occasionally find people who get very, very offended when you point out that Democrats and Republicans differ only in name. These people, sadly, really do believe that the next Obama will change things, and then grow all the more bitter when he ends up just like the rest of the worthless fucks in DC.
But yes, it has pretty much always gone like this. Every charismatic young buck looks like the next Prez Rickard, right up until he turns into the next Tricky Dick.
Townshend was wrong. It's seems like you can just keep fooling us over and over again.
Meet the new boss - Same as the old boss.
They call it a "lock and key". Totally uncrackable over the internet or via USB, and although exploits do exist, for higher quality setups they take considerable time with physical access to the device.
The "IoT" is not our friend, folks - It turns solid, reliable old-school products into yet another vector for malware in your house. And if you think reinstalling Windows sucks, how about having your oven go into self-cleaning mode during your vacation without the safety latch closed? How about having your blender "playfully" get your cat's attention with brief pulses before going full puree? How about overriding your on-demand hot water heater to its "steam clean" setting with you in the shower?
I love toys, including electronics. But the fewer things in my house vulnerable to remote exploits, the better. My toaster should have one dial and one lever and zero computers, period.
Their permit said that they would not have this wanted fugitive perform. They violated the terms of their permit, so were shut down. This is pretty straightforward and they had to know this would happen - they probably wanted the publicity.
Would the police also have shut them down if they started playing clips of Roman Polanski (wanted in the US for raping a 13 year old girl) movies?
Sure, they can ban him from appearing. But "straightfoward", for effectively playing a movie by someone with an opinion they don't want heard? Yeah, I would call that straightforward - A straightforward violation of the first amendment.
Although the password keeper point struck me as interesting, I take issue with the "experts" stance on updates.
People don't shun (non-OS) updates because they "might" install malware - They shun them because they do install unwanted tag-alongs (if not outright malware). Flash tries to install its partner-of-the-week every time you update it. Chrome just added push notifications. Java... Let's not even go there. And let's not overlook the fact that most users can't tell a legit update prompt from a drive-by installer.
Security experts have a bias here because they:
1) can usually tell the legit updates from the bogus ones (and know enough to get the bloat-free version of the update); and
2) can themselves remove or repair the occasional spyware that slips through, without needing to pay BestBuy $150 for five minutes' work on a machine only worth $300 in the first place.
Yes and no - That would count as a valid reason, if not for the fact that Wu has five minutes of fame solely because of GG. No one gives the least damn about the co-founder of some two-bit game studio.
When your pony has only one trick, no one comes to the show to hear its opinions on the merits of alfalfa vs clover. Heck, until the trolls showed up and explained why we should care about this Q&A, I dismissed it as a blatant Dicevertisement.
Did you actually have a point, or just wanted to play a flaming douchenozzle on Slashdot?