You don't need to force people to "show their papers" to avoid the problem of voting multiple times. One man one vote is easy enough to enforce even without Gestapo tactics.
How?
One way that's popular in less-developed areas is to simply apply an indelible dye to the voter's hand. Since it takes a few days for the dye to wear off and the election is only for a single day, it makes it pretty hard for someone to attempt to vote more than once. Providing that the election officials are honest, anyway.
No, but it generally works as proof of identity. Around here, it's not enough to be a citizen, you have to be a registered voter. And if you're registered, you have a designated polling place where they have a book with the names of the voters. You use the Driver's License or other photo ID to prove that you match the name. Then they take your signature and check off your name to discourage repeat voting.
It's worth noting that, in the US, the Democrats and Republicans obviously recognize that the system of voting used doesn't actually work properly, which is why they implement their own runoff system in the form of their own primary elections.
Good point!
Unfortunately, doing it the way we do it means that the candidates have to out-extreme each other before they can get to the Main Event.
Actually, it's not that uncommon to have a runoff between the two top candidates, or even runoffs just to GET 2 top candidates. That way at least gives the majority a voice, even if their ideal candidate doesn't make the cut.
Whether 2 parties or 2000, no candidate is ever going to do things exactly the way I want them. Heck, that's one of the problems we have now. "My Way or No Way". At least with multiple parties you aren't as likely to fall into the trap of political thinking in pure binary terms. Nor, for that matter, are the politicians.
The "free market" never existed except on a very limited and local scale. Any time serious money gets involved then the local bandit chief, warlord, baron, duke, king, whatever wants a piece of the action. Try trading across distances, and a whole platoon of them have their hands out. With pikes and sword in the other hand.
Statists are power mad selfish assholes who can't even imagine how the rest of us are capable of living our own lives without their guidance.
I can imagine how well you'd live without their guidance. Right up to the point where the Huns came riding in and beyond. That's why we allowed the local bandit chief to come in, take over and assess taxes. And why they swore allegiance to a bigger bandit chief. And so forth.
You can't have a free market when marauders come continually pillaging, raping, murdering and looting. When the bandits lived right alongside you, they had some incentive to protect and not to kill the goose with the golden eggs. Vikings didn't have to care - they could wipe out the whole town, cart away all the valuables and pick a different one next year.
So in truth, most of our "free market" came from the statists granting freedom that they could have otherwise denied simply because granting charters to traders was a much better way of accumulating wealth than going off to pillage some other king's villages. A guy could get killed doing that.
Only in a Randian fantasy world can you really be totally self-sufficient. Anywhere else, you're not only at the mercy of anyone coming along with sufficient firepower and evil intent, you could break a leg there wouldn't be anyone around to treat it.
Not just where, but how much. Under the current system, me/my employer are only funding the health care for employees and their dependents. Under a single-payer system, we'd have to pay more, since we'd also be subsidizing the care for the unemployed, self-employed, and otherwise uninsured.
You do not understand insurance.
Insurance is nothing but gambling turned business. Given a large enough population, at any given time, odds can be reliably computed on how may will be healthy, how many will be injured, how many will have various diseases, and so forth. If everyone pays in, you have a more-or-less predictable income and a more-or-less predictable outflow. Insurance companies started by playing the spread, then advanced to investing some of the difference to provide even more income.
That means that insurance works best in 2 dimensions: population and time. Time is a factor since most of us will have periods when we pay but don't make claims, and conversely we will have times when we do make claims. So in addition to gambling, insurance is also somewhat of a savings account.
However, with the advent of computer technology - and insurance companies were early and enthusiastic adopters of computers - it became possible to "fine tune" for profitability: "cherry picking" to up the odds of people paying more than they collected and "lemon dropping" to unload the ones who were the opposite.
One of the most insidious forms of "lemon dropping" was the Pre-Existing condition. I got seriously nailed by this one, myself and had to pay an unpleasantly large bill out of pocket at a time when I was between jobs back in the early '90's and needed to conserve money for trivialities like groceries.
Obamacare put a stop to that one, and it's noteworthy that all these political candidates who promise to "totally get rid of Obamacare" are curiously mute on that topic.
Of the 3 "deadbeat" (47%?) categories that single-payer would cover, one of them - the self-employed - would, on the whole prefer to pay for their own insurance (at least to the degree that anybody wants to pay for anything anymore). Currently, however, it's usually not economical, since a single individual - or even smaller companies - don't have the leverage that a big pool has when it comes to prices.
Another of the "deadbeat" categories - the unemployed - are often people who weren't unemployed formerly and may not be unemployed in the future. As I said, insurance is something that covers time as well as population to work effectively. And even while unemployed, I always paid my bills.
There are, of course, a certain percentage of people who are true deadbeats. Don't expect that their ranks will be swelled too much just because they suddenly got "free" healthcare, though. Some people are just not going to contribute regardless. It's annoying, but I refuse to obsess about it, because there's just not enough of them to matter. People who do obsess about things like that are the ones that build stores with more security guards than cashiers. And are so determined to totally eradicate pilferage and shoplifting that they resort to measures that drive me away as a paying customer.
Because abusing an individual is easy? Because you cannot afford your own healthcare unless you support something like single-payer.
People seem to forget that employer-provided healthcare is a product of the 20th Century. It works best when you have a large enough company to provide a distinct insurance pool and the employees are mostly there for the duration of their careers. Just like pensions, as a matter of fact.
Circa 1985, however, that idea broke down. We went to "perma-temping" and other transient forms of employment and our former corporate health and retirement infrastructures don't work well in that environment. Pensions mostly got replaced by 401-Ks, but health care didn't switch over so well. Instead, it simply got more and more broken, because a political football, and generally became a mess.
Ironically, one of the biggest arguments for employer-provided healthcare was that it was unfair to "steal" people's incomes to pay for a state-sponsored system. People seem to think that when the employer provides it that it's "free". The main difference, in fact, is where (and if) the "theft" prints on the paycheck.
You know..rather that strengthening UNIONs and their like...
Why don't we try to strengthen laws for individuals....and make things easier for people to self employ, self incorporate and contract themselves.
Let each person be responsible for negotiating their own pay rates, etc.
Make it easier for people to do their own healthcare, and retirement.....have co-ops out there, etc?
Why do we keep going down the path of group-think, and putting everyone into the same bowl and treating everyone the same.
Why not make it easier for people to be in charge of, and manage their own destiny?
Give the individual more rights, and put more teeth in laws protecting the individual....not the unions.
We can ALREADY do most of that.
The problem is, that, as special as we may consider ourselves as developers, we are, in fact, a commodity and therefore subject to the market laws of commodities. You wouldn't want to blaspheme against the Free Market, I hope. Commodities are things that are generic and therefore sensible people will get them from wherever it's cheapest and most convenient.
There are some critical differences between auto workers and software developers, however. Unions do the "group-think" thing precisely because (almost) all auto workers are a pure commodity. Some may be physically advantaged, but we're essentially talking completely replaceable people whose primary difference is time in grade, not distinctive skills. In a pinch you can take the junior people out of the paint shop and put them on dashboard installation as long as someone more knowledgeable is there to ride herd on them.
Software developers are quite a different breed of cat. More like artisans, where each individual person has distinctive skills and styles. You can still swap them in and out, but not as easily as you can assembly-line workers. Historically artisans formed craft guilds. Unions are based on that model, and some of the worst features of modern-day unions came from that model, but still, there was a recognition that a craft master was autonomous, accepting commissions rather than simply scrabbling for scraps and that the exact product of the master's workshop was determined as much by the master as by the person commissioning the work.
Of course, this model fails, too. Any pimple-faced twerp who has progressed beyond the Turtle Graphics stage and learned an IDE and a framework considers "himself" to be a Master. However, real mastery is the difference between being able to hack out something and produce a professional-grade product. Meaning one that can't be subverted in under 15 minutes or crash on a routine basis.
So far, unfortunately, most clients haven't demanded Master-grade products. They've gone the fast-and-cheap route that any low-grade journeyman could provide. And precisely because we don't have the leverage or the aggregate courage to refuse to deliver garbage, we've developed a reputation for producing garbage.
TRULY creative people are not in it for the money, unless their particular form of creativity is making money. The stereotype of the "starving artist" comes precisely because there were so many of them. Although the more common case is likely to be the "just-getting-by" artist. People like Vincent van Gogh, who only sold one painting in his life. People like Linus Torvalds, who was offered all sorts of cash when Linux went mainstream, but was content with a fairly modest employment, instead (not so modest that he can't afford a Mercedes, I note). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose salary was not the miniscule amount popularly depicted, but about the equivalent of a decent software developer. J.R.R. Tolkien, who kept his day job, as did Albert Einstein. With a few exceptions, in fact, the creative people who are making the pots of cash are people of mediocre creativity but great at marketing themselves. J.K. Rowling is one of those exceptions, but she never gave the impression that becoming richer than the Queen was what she wanted or needed to do what she did - just getting off the dole sufficient.
Anyway, the whole argument is specious. No one I know of is talking about cutting the Golden Goose open. For the most part the talk is about simply returning to historical taxation levels from back before everything went in the toilet and people didn't expect something for nothing as a matter of course. Back when I paid 30% and felt a whole lot more prosperous than I do now.
I think we've pretty well proven that there is no revenue-generating system that cannot be gamed.
Income and sales taxes are popular (pardon the expression) because:
1. They're one-time events. You pay the tax when you are best able to afford it and never again. If you cannot afford an item just because of the sales tax, you really couldn't afford the item to begin with. If you cannot spare the income, you're not making enough to contribute (and fortunately, we designed our tax codes to afford relief to those in that category).
2. "ownership" taxes, such as sales taxes are a continual hemorrage. If your financial life stalls and you have no income, you can stop discretionary spending (necessities are often tax-exempt) and you'll pay no income tax. But your taxable property is the gift that keeps on giving. In reverse. Do nothing, and eventually, it all gets taken from you. You can't just coast.
One of the major reasons why so many communities are in dire financial straits right now is precisely because of the aforementioned. When people don't have income and they cannot spend, tax revenues dry up. Plus the implosion of property values added icing to the cake by shrinking that income supply as well.
The other reason was that we allowed ourselves to be persuaded that All Taxes Are Stealing and that we should cut and cut and cut on the taxes. But we expected that some sort of Free Market Trickle-Down Fairies would wave their "????" wands and it'd be all Profit and we could continue to have the same results as when we had the tax money coming in to spend. So we went from tax-and-spend, which is annoying and (sometimes) wasteful, to cut-and-spend, which is downright suicidal.
You want to know what would happen if you attacked that wealth? Eventually no one would be motivated to do the things that being to earn them such wealth. Progress would stop dead.
This is what randrrhoids actually believe.
The first. most blatant and most fatal flaw in Atlas Shrugged is that it assumes that all the creative people are Conservative/Libertarian. No Ted Turners, no Bill Gatess, no Warren Buffets. Even as young and clueless as I was when I first read it I knew that was nonsense, just like the "30-minute" speech that patently isn't. The first time I actually skipped over part of a book, no matter how tedious ("how dim does she think I am that I haven't gotten the point by now and if I didn't is hammering me over the head with it going to help?")
The idea that wealthy people will stop doing things that make them wealthy if you take some of that wealth away isn't actually codified in Rand's writings that I know of, but I think everyone pretty well agrees that after the first 200K or so of income you're no longer working to "make a living", you're working to Prove a Point. Money is just one of the more popular ways of keeping score. Naturally, everyone wants to be given things (like Lower Taxes Every Day [TM]) and nobody wants to have things taken from them, but it's not like anyone with a fat bank account is going to simply up and quit. Especially in times like these where the popular meme is that you become successful (implying wealthy) by doing something before anyone else does it first.
Sandy was a category 1 hurricane. In 1938, landfall was made by a category 3 hurricane. So is global warming making the hurricanes weaker?
Ah, but Sandy was a very low pressure storm. In that respect it was regarded at the Cat 3 level.
Sandy was a mutant. It was geographically immense (although not record-breakingly so). It never exhibited an eye (that I saw, anyway). That would mean that the low-pressure zone was unusually broad. It just barely bobbled around the Cat 1 threshold for most of its life, but because there was so much wind and water in motion, it had an effect that Cat 4's could envy. Then on top of that, it did that freak left turn and joined in with the winter weather, sweeping a massive amount of cold air down into Central Florida.
Hopefully, this is NOT going to be the new normal.
Sandy was a category 1 hurricane. In 1938, landfall was made by a category 3 hurricane. So is global warming making the hurricanes weaker?
I would actually expect global warming (assuming it exists) to make hurricanes weaker. It warms the temperate and polar regions more than it warms the tropical and sub-tropical -- resulting in less temperature differential, which means less available energy to run those massive heat engines we call hurricanes. (Or cyclones, or typhoons...)
Er, you do realize that the temperature differential that generates hurricanes is vertical, not horizontal, don't you?
It was NOT all right for Bush to do it and it is NOT all right for Obama to do it. And it will NOT be all right for Romney to do it. Nor was it right for whatever clandestine degree Clinton, Bush Sr, His Holiness Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, etc. etc. etc.
Screw your petty little partisan sniping. Some of us want to be able to live in the country we say we are, not in the country we've become.
How about they end caller ID spoofing? I'm paying for caller ID, why should the phone company allow callers to lie to me who they are?
Regrettably, most my real annoyances don't even spoof. The biggest offender of the whole lot is a local alarm company that calls 2-3 times a day 7 days a week. They're owned by an ex-cop. They put pictures of cops in their ads. They run radio commercials featuring crying burglars.
And they're in blatant violation of 2 separate Do-Not-Call lists.
What is this "Democrat Party" you speak of? Democrats belong to the Democratic Party.
I can only assume that either:
A) You are illustrating your vast intellect and knowledge of American political parties
B) You are quacking out an automated emotional response from the canned set of approved Republican put-downs (Call them the DEMOCRAT party so they won't sound like they're democratic - i.e. believe in democracy).
I hope it's B. That means you're a puppet and I can make you dance when I pull the strings. Here boy! Socialism! Socialism! Big Government! Tax the Rich! NO NUKES!!!
Immunization is not sterilization. When Smallpox was eradicated, no new "super-smallpox" moved in to take its place. It went the way of the awk, the dodo, the T-Rex and the trilobite.
The flu is more of a challenge, because it's so mutable and because it has a habit of hiding out in non-human species in 3d World countries. However, unlike sterilization, where you nuke everything and whatever's left takes over, if you immunize, the body exterminates the primary strain before it can expand, leaving more resources to go after the secondary strains. Which is sort of the reverse.
couldn't we either recycle more, (and more efficiently), and/or just consume less?
I'm all for that. Although since the Swedes have a garbage shortage, maybe they're already doing that reasonably well.
As it is, they may be producing greenhouse gases, but at least they're producing them from waste that has to be disposed of anyway and not trucking in fossil fuels that require extraction, refining and transport in addition to the energy consumed in hauling waste.
So why do Java coders turn to Eclipse? 'Because [of] a combination of shortcomings in the Java compiler and Java's OO nature,' explains Faler, 'we end up with lots and lots of small files for every interface and class in our system. On any less than trivial Java system, development quickly turns into a game of code- and file-system navigation rather than programming and code editing. This nature of Java development requires IDEs to become navigation tools above all.'
So in other words, we blew it by giving up COBOL, where everything is easy to find because it's all one big source file.
Amusing observation: I once worked in a shop where the main COBOL program in the system was so big, it blew out the COBOL compiler. More that 64,000 distinct paragraphs in the PROCEDURE DIVISION.
An IDE is an intelligent development environment. I've progressed over the years from punched cards to line-mode editors to full-screen editors to simple edit-and-debug frameworks to Emacs and ultimately to Eclipse and its relatives. I can fall back, and occasionally do, but the reason I prefer IDEs is because navigation is only a small part of it. Auto-suggestion means I don't have to remember details of each and every method I use. Dynamic JavaDoc display means I can RTFM without leaving what I'm doing. An integrated debugger means I don't have to litter my code with diagnostic print statements. The database plugin allows me to view and tweak the databases. Mylyn makes it easier to switch contexts when I have to drop everything and make emergency fixes or alternate between tasks. The refactoring plugins allow me to keep my codebase cleaner without a lot of manual effort. And so forth, and so on...
IDEs also have their darker side. Pound-foolish managers expect that they can employ cheap monkey-coders and let the IDE do the advanced thinking and that can result in some real horrors. Too much reliance on an IDE can result in projects that can't be easily maintained or can't be handed off from one person to another (since too much of the build process in in IDE customizations).
Still, an IDE that's properly employed in the hands of a skilled developer can be worth its figurative weight in gold. It's far more than just a navigational tool.
The line between religion and politics is coercion. It's important to realize (or accept) that pure religion is not coercive -- the only threats of violence one recieves in pure religion come from the immortal (god), not the mortal (other human beings). This isn't something to become angry about or fight against. It's merely something to be brushed off.
The situation is the exact opposite in politics. In politics, every opinion is essentially a threat of violence. Why? Because everything government does and could possibly do is founded on coercion (meaning violence or threat of violence). Coercion is the first prerequisite and key tool of every government, and accordingly it is the end prize that goes to the "winner" of politics. This is why people are so sensitive to political issues, whether they consciously accept it or not: if they lose, then the enemy gains the tool of violence.
The only possible way religion can threaten peace is when religion becomes intermixed with politics, thereby gaining the tool of coercion. It is therefore quite pointless to be "against" religion when religion is independent of politics -- there is no enemy to be concerned with!
In conclusion, religion is a non-issue for the non-religious. The only issue of importance is coercion, and who holds the legal "right" to wield it.
I take it that you're not expecting a visit from the Spanish Inquisition, then?
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You don't need to force people to "show their papers" to avoid the problem of voting multiple times. One man one vote is easy enough to enforce even without Gestapo tactics.
How?
One way that's popular in less-developed areas is to simply apply an indelible dye to the voter's hand. Since it takes a few days for the dye to wear off and the election is only for a single day, it makes it pretty hard for someone to attempt to vote more than once. Providing that the election officials are honest, anyway.
Driver's license is not proof of citizenship.
No, but it generally works as proof of identity. Around here, it's not enough to be a citizen, you have to be a registered voter. And if you're registered, you have a designated polling place where they have a book with the names of the voters. You use the Driver's License or other photo ID to prove that you match the name. Then they take your signature and check off your name to discourage repeat voting.
It's worth noting that, in the US, the Democrats and Republicans obviously recognize that the system of voting used doesn't actually work properly, which is why they implement their own runoff system in the form of their own primary elections.
Good point!
Unfortunately, doing it the way we do it means that the candidates have to out-extreme each other before they can get to the Main Event.
Actually, it's not that uncommon to have a runoff between the two top candidates, or even runoffs just to GET 2 top candidates. That way at least gives the majority a voice, even if their ideal candidate doesn't make the cut.
Whether 2 parties or 2000, no candidate is ever going to do things exactly the way I want them. Heck, that's one of the problems we have now. "My Way or No Way". At least with multiple parties you aren't as likely to fall into the trap of political thinking in pure binary terms. Nor, for that matter, are the politicians.
Quack quack quack quack quack.
The "free market" never existed except on a very limited and local scale. Any time serious money gets involved then the local bandit chief, warlord, baron, duke, king, whatever wants a piece of the action. Try trading across distances, and a whole platoon of them have their hands out. With pikes and sword in the other hand.
Statists are power mad selfish assholes who can't even imagine how the rest of us are capable of living our own lives without their guidance.
I can imagine how well you'd live without their guidance. Right up to the point where the Huns came riding in and beyond. That's why we allowed the local bandit chief to come in, take over and assess taxes. And why they swore allegiance to a bigger bandit chief. And so forth.
You can't have a free market when marauders come continually pillaging, raping, murdering and looting. When the bandits lived right alongside you, they had some incentive to protect and not to kill the goose with the golden eggs. Vikings didn't have to care - they could wipe out the whole town, cart away all the valuables and pick a different one next year.
So in truth, most of our "free market" came from the statists granting freedom that they could have otherwise denied simply because granting charters to traders was a much better way of accumulating wealth than going off to pillage some other king's villages. A guy could get killed doing that.
Only in a Randian fantasy world can you really be totally self-sufficient. Anywhere else, you're not only at the mercy of anyone coming along with sufficient firepower and evil intent, you could break a leg there wouldn't be anyone around to treat it.
Not just where, but how much. Under the current system, me/my employer are only funding the health care for employees and their dependents. Under a single-payer system, we'd have to pay more, since we'd also be subsidizing the care for the unemployed, self-employed, and otherwise uninsured.
You do not understand insurance.
Insurance is nothing but gambling turned business. Given a large enough population, at any given time, odds can be reliably computed on how may will be healthy, how many will be injured, how many will have various diseases, and so forth. If everyone pays in, you have a more-or-less predictable income and a more-or-less predictable outflow. Insurance companies started by playing the spread, then advanced to investing some of the difference to provide even more income.
That means that insurance works best in 2 dimensions: population and time. Time is a factor since most of us will have periods when we pay but don't make claims, and conversely we will have times when we do make claims. So in addition to gambling, insurance is also somewhat of a savings account.
However, with the advent of computer technology - and insurance companies were early and enthusiastic adopters of computers - it became possible to "fine tune" for profitability: "cherry picking" to up the odds of people paying more than they collected and "lemon dropping" to unload the ones who were the opposite.
One of the most insidious forms of "lemon dropping" was the Pre-Existing condition. I got seriously nailed by this one, myself and had to pay an unpleasantly large bill out of pocket at a time when I was between jobs back in the early '90's and needed to conserve money for trivialities like groceries.
Obamacare put a stop to that one, and it's noteworthy that all these political candidates who promise to "totally get rid of Obamacare" are curiously mute on that topic.
Of the 3 "deadbeat" (47%?) categories that single-payer would cover, one of them - the self-employed - would, on the whole prefer to pay for their own insurance (at least to the degree that anybody wants to pay for anything anymore). Currently, however, it's usually not economical, since a single individual - or even smaller companies - don't have the leverage that a big pool has when it comes to prices.
Another of the "deadbeat" categories - the unemployed - are often people who weren't unemployed formerly and may not be unemployed in the future. As I said, insurance is something that covers time as well as population to work effectively. And even while unemployed, I always paid my bills.
There are, of course, a certain percentage of people who are true deadbeats. Don't expect that their ranks will be swelled too much just because they suddenly got "free" healthcare, though. Some people are just not going to contribute regardless. It's annoying, but I refuse to obsess about it, because there's just not enough of them to matter. People who do obsess about things like that are the ones that build stores with more security guards than cashiers. And are so determined to totally eradicate pilferage and shoplifting that they resort to measures that drive me away as a paying customer.
Because abusing an individual is easy?
Because you cannot afford your own healthcare unless you support something like single-payer.
People seem to forget that employer-provided healthcare is a product of the 20th Century. It works best when you have a large enough company to provide a distinct insurance pool and the employees are mostly there for the duration of their careers. Just like pensions, as a matter of fact.
Circa 1985, however, that idea broke down. We went to "perma-temping" and other transient forms of employment and our former corporate health and retirement infrastructures don't work well in that environment. Pensions mostly got replaced by 401-Ks, but health care didn't switch over so well. Instead, it simply got more and more broken, because a political football, and generally became a mess.
Ironically, one of the biggest arguments for employer-provided healthcare was that it was unfair to "steal" people's incomes to pay for a state-sponsored system. People seem to think that when the employer provides it that it's "free". The main difference, in fact, is where (and if) the "theft" prints on the paycheck.
You know..rather that strengthening UNIONs and their like...
Why don't we try to strengthen laws for individuals....and make things easier for people to self employ, self incorporate and contract themselves.
Let each person be responsible for negotiating their own pay rates, etc.
Make it easier for people to do their own healthcare, and retirement.....have co-ops out there, etc?
Why do we keep going down the path of group-think, and putting everyone into the same bowl and treating everyone the same.
Why not make it easier for people to be in charge of, and manage their own destiny?
Give the individual more rights, and put more teeth in laws protecting the individual....not the unions.
We can ALREADY do most of that.
The problem is, that, as special as we may consider ourselves as developers, we are, in fact, a commodity and therefore subject to the market laws of commodities. You wouldn't want to blaspheme against the Free Market, I hope. Commodities are things that are generic and therefore sensible people will get them from wherever it's cheapest and most convenient.
There are some critical differences between auto workers and software developers, however. Unions do the "group-think" thing precisely because (almost) all auto workers are a pure commodity. Some may be physically advantaged, but we're essentially talking completely replaceable people whose primary difference is time in grade, not distinctive skills. In a pinch you can take the junior people out of the paint shop and put them on dashboard installation as long as someone more knowledgeable is there to ride herd on them.
Software developers are quite a different breed of cat. More like artisans, where each individual person has distinctive skills and styles. You can still swap them in and out, but not as easily as you can assembly-line workers. Historically artisans formed craft guilds. Unions are based on that model, and some of the worst features of modern-day unions came from that model, but still, there was a recognition that a craft master was autonomous, accepting commissions rather than simply scrabbling for scraps and that the exact product of the master's workshop was determined as much by the master as by the person commissioning the work.
Of course, this model fails, too. Any pimple-faced twerp who has progressed beyond the Turtle Graphics stage and learned an IDE and a framework considers "himself" to be a Master. However, real mastery is the difference between being able to hack out something and produce a professional-grade product. Meaning one that can't be subverted in under 15 minutes or crash on a routine basis.
So far, unfortunately, most clients haven't demanded Master-grade products. They've gone the fast-and-cheap route that any low-grade journeyman could provide. And precisely because we don't have the leverage or the aggregate courage to refuse to deliver garbage, we've developed a reputation for producing garbage.
TRULY creative people are not in it for the money, unless their particular form of creativity is making money. The stereotype of the "starving artist" comes precisely because there were so many of them. Although the more common case is likely to be the "just-getting-by" artist. People like Vincent van Gogh, who only sold one painting in his life. People like Linus Torvalds, who was offered all sorts of cash when Linux went mainstream, but was content with a fairly modest employment, instead (not so modest that he can't afford a Mercedes, I note). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose salary was not the miniscule amount popularly depicted, but about the equivalent of a decent software developer. J.R.R. Tolkien, who kept his day job, as did Albert Einstein. With a few exceptions, in fact, the creative people who are making the pots of cash are people of mediocre creativity but great at marketing themselves. J.K. Rowling is one of those exceptions, but she never gave the impression that becoming richer than the Queen was what she wanted or needed to do what she did - just getting off the dole sufficient.
Anyway, the whole argument is specious. No one I know of is talking about cutting the Golden Goose open. For the most part the talk is about simply returning to historical taxation levels from back before everything went in the toilet and people didn't expect something for nothing as a matter of course. Back when I paid 30% and felt a whole lot more prosperous than I do now.
Tax fraud was rampant before everything was computerized.
Now we have computers to make our tax fraud more complex and more efficient.
I think we've pretty well proven that there is no revenue-generating system that cannot be gamed.
Income and sales taxes are popular (pardon the expression) because:
1. They're one-time events. You pay the tax when you are best able to afford it and never again. If you cannot afford an item just because of the sales tax, you really couldn't afford the item to begin with. If you cannot spare the income, you're not making enough to contribute (and fortunately, we designed our tax codes to afford relief to those in that category).
2. "ownership" taxes, such as sales taxes are a continual hemorrage. If your financial life stalls and you have no income, you can stop discretionary spending (necessities are often tax-exempt) and you'll pay no income tax. But your taxable property is the gift that keeps on giving. In reverse. Do nothing, and eventually, it all gets taken from you. You can't just coast.
One of the major reasons why so many communities are in dire financial straits right now is precisely because of the aforementioned. When people don't have income and they cannot spend, tax revenues dry up. Plus the implosion of property values added icing to the cake by shrinking that income supply as well.
The other reason was that we allowed ourselves to be persuaded that All Taxes Are Stealing and that we should cut and cut and cut on the taxes. But we expected that some sort of Free Market Trickle-Down Fairies would wave their "????" wands and it'd be all Profit and we could continue to have the same results as when we had the tax money coming in to spend. So we went from tax-and-spend, which is annoying and (sometimes) wasteful, to cut-and-spend, which is downright suicidal.
You want to know what would happen if you attacked that wealth? Eventually no one would be motivated to do the things that being to earn them such wealth. Progress would stop dead.
This is what randrrhoids actually believe.
The first. most blatant and most fatal flaw in Atlas Shrugged is that it assumes that all the creative people are Conservative/Libertarian. No Ted Turners, no Bill Gatess, no Warren Buffets. Even as young and clueless as I was when I first read it I knew that was nonsense, just like the "30-minute" speech that patently isn't. The first time I actually skipped over part of a book, no matter how tedious ("how dim does she think I am that I haven't gotten the point by now and if I didn't is hammering me over the head with it going to help?")
The idea that wealthy people will stop doing things that make them wealthy if you take some of that wealth away isn't actually codified in Rand's writings that I know of, but I think everyone pretty well agrees that after the first 200K or so of income you're no longer working to "make a living", you're working to Prove a Point. Money is just one of the more popular ways of keeping score. Naturally, everyone wants to be given things (like Lower Taxes Every Day [TM]) and nobody wants to have things taken from them, but it's not like anyone with a fat bank account is going to simply up and quit. Especially in times like these where the popular meme is that you become successful (implying wealthy) by doing something before anyone else does it first.
Sandy was a category 1 hurricane. In 1938, landfall was made by a category 3 hurricane. So is global warming making the hurricanes weaker?
Ah, but Sandy was a very low pressure storm. In that respect it was regarded at the Cat 3 level.
Sandy was a mutant. It was geographically immense (although not record-breakingly so). It never exhibited an eye (that I saw, anyway). That would mean that the low-pressure zone was unusually broad. It just barely bobbled around the Cat 1 threshold for most of its life, but because there was so much wind and water in motion, it had an effect that Cat 4's could envy. Then on top of that, it did that freak left turn and joined in with the winter weather, sweeping a massive amount of cold air down into Central Florida.
Hopefully, this is NOT going to be the new normal.
Sandy was a category 1 hurricane. In 1938, landfall was made by a category 3 hurricane. So is global warming making the hurricanes weaker?
I would actually expect global warming (assuming it exists) to make hurricanes weaker. It warms the temperate and polar regions more than it warms the tropical and sub-tropical -- resulting in less temperature differential, which means less available energy to run those massive heat engines we call hurricanes. (Or cyclones, or typhoons...)
Er, you do realize that the temperature differential that generates hurricanes is vertical, not horizontal, don't you?
It was NOT all right for Bush to do it and it is NOT all right for Obama to do it. And it will NOT be all right for Romney to do it. Nor was it right for whatever clandestine degree Clinton, Bush Sr, His Holiness Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, etc. etc. etc.
Screw your petty little partisan sniping. Some of us want to be able to live in the country we say we are, not in the country we've become.
How about they end caller ID spoofing? I'm paying for caller ID, why should the phone company allow callers to lie to me who they are?
Regrettably, most my real annoyances don't even spoof. The biggest offender of the whole lot is a local alarm company that calls 2-3 times a day 7 days a week. They're owned by an ex-cop. They put pictures of cops in their ads. They run radio commercials featuring crying burglars.
And they're in blatant violation of 2 separate Do-Not-Call lists.
More likely: C) Give a gentle tug on the Democrats' strings and watch them dance. You certainly fell for it, didn't you?
The "if you're not a Republican then you must be a Democrat is one of the biggest strings of them all.
What is this "Democrat Party" you speak of? Democrats belong to the Democratic Party.
I can only assume that either:
A) You are illustrating your vast intellect and knowledge of American political parties
B) You are quacking out an automated emotional response from the canned set of approved Republican put-downs (Call them the DEMOCRAT party so they won't sound like they're democratic - i.e. believe in democracy).
I hope it's B. That means you're a puppet and I can make you dance when I pull the strings. Here boy! Socialism! Socialism! Big Government! Tax the Rich! NO NUKES!!!
Conservatives, so the old tradition went, have heads but no hearts. Liberals have hearts, but no heads.
Somehow, somewhere, something went terribly wrong.
Immunization is not sterilization. When Smallpox was eradicated, no new "super-smallpox" moved in to take its place. It went the way of the awk, the dodo, the T-Rex and the trilobite.
The flu is more of a challenge, because it's so mutable and because it has a habit of hiding out in non-human species in 3d World countries. However, unlike sterilization, where you nuke everything and whatever's left takes over, if you immunize, the body exterminates the primary strain before it can expand, leaving more resources to go after the secondary strains. Which is sort of the reverse.
"What were they thinking building a city between two bodies of water near the ocean so close to sea level"?
That it would be a hell of a good seaport?
couldn't we either recycle more, (and more efficiently), and/or just consume less?
I'm all for that. Although since the Swedes have a garbage shortage, maybe they're already doing that reasonably well.
As it is, they may be producing greenhouse gases, but at least they're producing them from waste that has to be disposed of anyway and not trucking in fossil fuels that require extraction, refining and transport in addition to the energy consumed in hauling waste.
Every little bit helps.
So why do Java coders turn to Eclipse? 'Because [of] a combination of shortcomings in the Java compiler and Java's OO nature,' explains Faler, 'we end up with lots and lots of small files for every interface and class in our system. On any less than trivial Java system, development quickly turns into a game of code- and file-system navigation rather than programming and code editing. This nature of Java development requires IDEs to become navigation tools above all.'
So in other words, we blew it by giving up COBOL, where everything is easy to find because it's all one big source file.
Amusing observation: I once worked in a shop where the main COBOL program in the system was so big, it blew out the COBOL compiler. More that 64,000 distinct paragraphs in the PROCEDURE DIVISION.
An IDE is an intelligent development environment. I've progressed over the years from punched cards to line-mode editors to full-screen editors to simple edit-and-debug frameworks to Emacs and ultimately to Eclipse and its relatives. I can fall back, and occasionally do, but the reason I prefer IDEs is because navigation is only a small part of it. Auto-suggestion means I don't have to remember details of each and every method I use. Dynamic JavaDoc display means I can RTFM without leaving what I'm doing. An integrated debugger means I don't have to litter my code with diagnostic print statements. The database plugin allows me to view and tweak the databases. Mylyn makes it easier to switch contexts when I have to drop everything and make emergency fixes or alternate between tasks. The refactoring plugins allow me to keep my codebase cleaner without a lot of manual effort. And so forth, and so on...
IDEs also have their darker side. Pound-foolish managers expect that they can employ cheap monkey-coders and let the IDE do the advanced thinking and that can result in some real horrors. Too much reliance on an IDE can result in projects that can't be easily maintained or can't be handed off from one person to another (since too much of the build process in in IDE customizations).
Still, an IDE that's properly employed in the hands of a skilled developer can be worth its figurative weight in gold. It's far more than just a navigational tool.
The line between religion and politics is coercion. It's important to realize (or accept) that pure religion is not coercive -- the only threats of violence one recieves in pure religion come from the immortal (god), not the mortal (other human beings). This isn't something to become angry about or fight against. It's merely something to be brushed off.
The situation is the exact opposite in politics. In politics, every opinion is essentially a threat of violence. Why? Because everything government does and could possibly do is founded on coercion (meaning violence or threat of violence). Coercion is the first prerequisite and key tool of every government, and accordingly it is the end prize that goes to the "winner" of politics. This is why people are so sensitive to political issues, whether they consciously accept it or not: if they lose, then the enemy gains the tool of violence.
The only possible way religion can threaten peace is when religion becomes intermixed with politics, thereby gaining the tool of coercion. It is therefore quite pointless to be "against" religion when religion is independent of politics -- there is no enemy to be concerned with!
In conclusion, religion is a non-issue for the non-religious. The only issue of importance is coercion, and who holds the legal "right" to wield it.
I take it that you're not expecting a visit from the Spanish Inquisition, then?
What is is about telephone prototypes that drives people to drink?