As a specific example, in 1998 we saw that CPU "bits" had been doubling every few years, so we didn't expect that 20 years later SQL Server and all the other popular software still wouldn't be able to handle 128-bit values. We thought we could use 128-bit addressing and computers in general would be able to use these 128-bit values after a few years.
If we're had used 64-bit addresses, that would give us 18 quadrillion IP addresses. That's this many:
18,446,744,073,709,551,616
If we knew then what we know now, we may well have used 64-bit addresses in IPv6. 18 quadrillion is plenty of IPs. We figured that by 2018 computers would be able to handle 128-bit numbers. We were wrong - most software can't. By "we" I mean *I* made that argument. I was wrong.
Yes, with the latest AVX. AVX didn't exist 20 years ago. I'm talking about what we expected 20 years ago. We had gone from 8-bit to 16-bit, then 16-bit to 32-bits, then from 32 to 64-bit. It seemed entirely logical that we'd go from 64 to 128. Instead, things went in different directions.
I'm talking about what we expected 20 years ago. We had gone from 8-bit to 16-bit, then 16-bit to 32-bits, then from 32 to 64-bit. It seemed entirely logical that we'd go from 64 to 128.
If someone went on a tirade cussing out the developers for the occasional profanity, and demanding everyone else change their behavior, I would tell them to fuck off. From what I can tell, they do didn't have a freak out, they just did a pull request to clean things up.
> I'd think that maybe they could devote their debugging efforts to more annoying bugs...
While I don't disagree, I also note that their work is slightly more useful than what you and I contributed to OpenJDK.
If this person wants to remove the F bombs to make it more "professional", okay - doesn't hurt me. Go ahead and clean it up if you want to.
> Why is that surprising? That corresponds to 16 exibytes (well 8 if you have signed pointers). There's no machine on the planet which could make use of pointers of that size.
It's not just about pointers. The CPU processes *everything* n-bits at a time, with n-bit precision. I mentioned Nintendo 64. It had 4MB of RDRAM. The 64 bit processor wasn't because it needed large pointers to address a huge amount of memory.:)
Along with all internal operations being n-bits at a time, 16-bit computers normally used the 16-bit ISA bus, 32-bit computers used the 32-bit PCI bus. Bus bandwidth was a problem and a 128-bit bus seemed likely in the future.
One thing that happened is we moved computation to the GPU, which does millions of bits at a time. Bus bandwidth certainly increased with PCI-e, but because it's too hard to keep 64 bits in sync, PCI-E switched from parallel (PCI) to serial at a much faster clock.
Similarly for external ports. Rather than making a wider (and therefore higher bandwidth) parallel port, we dropped parallel ports and switched to universal Serial bus, USB.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I had or did most (though not all) of those things 20 years ago. Not only did we think it was possible, we had them in a typical home.
Goijg in order, starting from the top: Lots of music in a pocket-sized device (iPod)
This one is kinda new, the first consumer mp3 players came out 20 years ago. As I kid I got unlimited wireless streaming music on my Walkman. We called it radio.
VoIP / audio over the net
20 years ago I was setting up an early installation of live internet video with sound
64 bit processors
Nintendo 64 came out more than 20 years ago, so kids owned 64 bit processors. The surprise is that although we went from 8 bit to 64 bit in 25 years, after another 25 years we're still on 64 bit.
Hybrid cars
Been around since the 1970s
Burning a CD
You're kidding, right? While setting up the live internet video software, I burned a CD
Lots of internet video stored by one company (YouTube)
30 years ago, most of the video was on Prodigy, then AOL took over
Wireless internet / wifi
The actual wifi standard was over 20 years ago. In my storage room I probably still have Proxim wireless cards, which predate the wifi standard. So I had wireless internet in my home 25 years ago.
Editing video on your computer
How do you think we slices up those movies to make cool gifs to put on our Geocities pages?
DVR
We called it a VCR. I also probably still have a PCI video capture card in my storage room. Maybe even an ISA one. Cards like those were popular with Windows Media Center, a DVR that with Windows 15 years ago. 20 years ago, the DVR was a separate application that didn't come with Windows. *Renting* a DVR instead of owning it is new.
Video chat
Refer back above. We used it for naked girls, what we now call "cam girls".
I know the FCC put substantial conditions on the merger and hasn't yet approved the latest plan, revised to meet their conditions. The FCC should rule soon, unless they ask for more changes.
I haven't heard anything from the FTC for a few months, though. Anyone heard anything on that front?
DOJ seemed to be open to the idea, if it passes muster with FCC and FTC, but I haven't heard any news there either.
Hobby drones (quadcopters) are almost all the same set of sizes. Weight of outdoor drones falls into two classes. Racing drones are limited to 800 grams by rule, with a 150 gram class also being popular. (The 35 gram class could be classified as an indoor drone).
The other group is the utility, camera-carrying drones. The outdoor size of a camera drone weighs about 1.3 Kg. That's the vast majority of "drones" - all the ones costing been $300-$1000.
The big (and VERY expensive) commercial drones that Amazon builds are a tiny, tiny fraction of drones.
Hobby drones (quadcopters) are almost all the same set of sizes. The outdoor size weighs about 1.3 Kg. That's the vast majority of "drones" - all the ones costing been $300-$1000.
The big (and VERY expensive) commercial drones that Amazon builds are a tiny, tiny fraction of drones.
To hit a typical hobby drone (aka quadcopter, "drone" has many meanings), it would have had to be quite near the airport. A 737 coming in for landing descends at about 700 feet per minute. Drones are typically flown at 10 to 300 feet, with 500 feet possible. That means the 737 would need to be within seconds of landing to be low enough for a drone impact.
It's quite very illegal to fly a drone so near an airport. In the US, you can't even fly ten feet off the ground with five miles of an airport, without permission from the airport. I figure Mexico is probably similar.
There are several species of geese in the air this time of year near the US-Mexico border. It seems to me that's more likely than someone standing at the airport fence flying a drone up so high they can barely see it (and the wind at that altitude would tend to take it away from them).
Certainly not with a nose-up attitude:) Zero pitch would probably be a good idea. You can land in a nose-down attitude at supersonic speeds, but only once.
* For those unfamiliar, the "attitude" of a plane is which way it is pointing and leaning. (Pitch and roll, and sometimes yaw, depending on context).
It doesn't really vary much at all with velocity per se (partly because the definition of Cd includes a division by V2 term).
Its pretty much constant from 1 kmh through the entire subsonic regime to over 1,000 kmh. Just below Mach 2 the Cd is right back to its subsonic value and remains constant at hypersonic velocities. It's onlyduring that transition from about Mach 1 to Mach 2 that the suddenly very different behavior of air flows makes it wonky for that particular range.
You are correct that V2 is a very important term, of course. However, the V2 is divided by V to get the drag per distance, which is what matters for passenger flights. You're trying to get from point A to point B, not trying to fly for one hour. Therefore the V squared term ends up as just V.
This divisiin by V has some very interesting and counterintuitive implications for gliders.
Drag is really bad from just about Mach 0.8 to about 1.8 or so. That doesn't have anything to do with the engines or anything else you can control. It's a constant known as cD that isn't largely independent of aircraft design.
Meaning you need to cruise at about Mach 2 to have reasonable efficiency in terms of drag.
Supersonic flight isn't just "subsonic flight, but faster". The design of a high speed aircraft is all about how the air flows around the aircraft and through the engines. At Mach 1, which is kinda like "the maximum speed of air", that totally changes. Things work completely differently.
So you have to design your engine for Mach 2, your airframe, etc. All of these will be designed very differently than they would be for subsonic flight. Especially if you intend to fly over land, you're going to need to fly subsonic a significant portion of the time (plus you need to take off and land, and you're not landing at supersonic speeds).
So you have a problem. You need a plane designed to work very well at Mach 2, and it has to be designed to work well subsonic. These are two very different designs. It's hard to have the same plane do well with both. It's kinda like designing an ocean-going ship that's also a bicycle.
> Experience doesn't mean shit. Performance does. If someone is doing the same job and getting the same results then they should be getting paid the same.
You can "should" all you want, but these are the facts. If Linus's resume has the experience "I created Linux and managed it for 20 years", he's going to be able to get a certain salary. If Bob's resume shows his experience is "I saw a Linux computer once", he's going to be able to get a certain salary.
Bob can whine all day about "my code is just as good, I *should* make just as much as Linus", but that's not reality. Reality is your qualifications, your education, expertise, demonstrated results, and communication skills determine how much competing companies will offer you, and therefore how much your company needs to pay to keep you.
You can think all day that your performance is as good as mine in designing security controls, but because I have proven experience and skills in that area, I'm going to get better job offers than you in that field. That's reality.
> I've always been puzzled why employees are so willing to go along with not sharing their pay data since keeping it a secret generally only benefits the company.
Often, a manager is budgeted a certain amount of money for raises. Employees are competing with each other for chunks of the budget.
If you have more experience, or more valuable experience, than your direct boss it might be good to keep quiet. It can be harder to get a raise when your boss knows you already make more than they do, and they think they should get that chunk of the salary budget. Similarly for peer employees who may have been at the company longer, but perhaps are less productive or have less specialized skills.
The last time I switched jobs, one company that wanted to hire me increased their offer by 25% to compete with the other company that wanted me. I'm sure that 25% increase in the offer would put my salary higher than many of my co-workers. It would have been in my best interest to take the money and be quiet, while doing good work to earn a raise a year later. Publicizing to all of my co-workers that I was being paid much more than them wouldn't have been helpful to me.
On the contrary, if you think other employees with lower qualifications are being paid more, sure that could be an argument for you getting a raise. If you can show that you're better qualified and more productive than Bob, you can argue that that your salary should be at least as high as Bob's. So it depends on where you think you are on the scale, near the top or near the bottom.
On the third hand, if you're making less than Sally, finding that out might only piss you off. If you ask the boss "why does Sally get paid more than me?", the answer might be "because Sally isn't an idiot. Sally can write an email and actually know the meaning of the words she uses".:)
In the end, what matters to me is paying my bills. How much a co-worker makes doesn't matter to me. For comparing my pay to what I could be making, I can compare to industry averages etc. A few data points of co-workers doesn't tell me as much as industry statistics, particularly because none of my co-workers has exactly the same qualifications as I. It's more useful for me to compare industry averages for people with similar qualifications.
> Your third paragraph is confusing businesses and startups. Immigrants start businesses, but usually something safe
So if I'm understanding you correctly, you're doing three things here to completely change the question, then asserting an answer that's still false, even after you changes the question. First, you change my words from "start a business" to "launch a start-up". Okay, I'm fine with that. Oxford Dictionary defines start-up as:
-- Start-up 1.1count noun A newly established business. âproblems facing start-ups and small firms in rural areasâ(TM) --
Okay, that's fine. They mean the same thing.
Then in step 2 you redefine English to say that any fairly safe business, any wise business, isn't a newly established business - only wild gambles are start-ups. Sorry, English disagrees with you.
> most successful startup founders are from rich backgrounds
If you had claimed "the top three crazy start-ups that get then most press in Silicon Valley were started by rich people", you might be right. 99.999% of start-ups are not in fact Tesla. As it is, your claim isn't just wrong, it's wildly, ridiculously wrong. Hilariously wrong. For example, the *average* investment by an angel investor is $32,000. Meaning of course the founders needed to find an angel in order to get $30K, because they don't have $30K. SBIC figures show total investment by all investors of less than a million for most start-ups.
Your criticism was that Texas has high economic growth, while maintaining personal ownership. If economic growth, twice as much as California, is good, and personal ownership is good, I'm not clear on what your point is.
Were you pointing out some ways Texas is better, with the economy doing twice as well as California, while we retain our property rather than handing it over to the government?
Especially if you've been handing out high-quality 3D replicas of your head, don't use facial recognition and expect it to be secure.
But yeah pretty much don't expect any technology made after about 1850 to be secure. If you're a spy, a piece of paper and a one time pad might be the way to go.
When I had a small business, every year I had to fill out forms to pay business personal property tax of less than $5. The state actually called me, somewhat angrily, about another tax that was less than a dollar.
How much do you think it cost the state to provide an office, computer, etc, and pay the person, to call people about a 87 cent tax? Plus the cost of the forms, my time filling out the forms, etc. It's just a compete waste.
You like that the California land is owned by the federal government. I like that the Texas land is owned by me. We both get what we want.
We don't have to argue about whose preference is better, we both get what we want. For now, anyway. The feds have already gone way past their Constitutional authority, and it keeps getting worse. Hopefully I'll be able to leave you guys to do things your way, in your state. I gtfo of there.
Two things wrong with this plan. You mentioned the first one: handing tax money to ISPs.
The second one: We have far too many different taxes, and associated paperwork and bureaucracy, already. No need to invent a new type of tax. If we DID want to give taxpayer money to X, just write them a check and if that means increasing taxes, do it. Propose a 1% increase in the existing taxes to pay for it. We don't need 784 different taxes.
We had a discussion here on Slashdot about that last week. Even before you see the top line of your paycheck, two taxes have been invisibly taken out of your pay, "paid by the company", they say, but it's part of the cost of employing you - really part of your pay. Then three more taxes come out that show up on your paycheck. As you take your paycheck to the bank, you're paying gas tax to drive your car, which you pay an annual tax on. Take the money out of the bank and spend it? Sales tax. Pay the mortgage with it? Property tax. Pay a doctor bill or buy something at Walgreens? Obamacare tax. The same money taxed over and over and over. Just tax our paychecks at 60% and get it over with already.
Hey cool. I *thought* you could come up with something better than "our economy is like Mexico, India, and Russia".
See that's really cool you live in a place where half the land is owned by the federal government, compared to Texas where we own our own homes that we live in. That's awesome. Renting an apartment next to a federal hazardous waste^H^H^H^H^H preserve is much better.
One of my favorite things about California is that you can pick your season. You can waterski on Saturday and snow ski on Sunday, a fairly short drive from the beach to the mountains. That's pretty neat.
As a specific example, in 1998 we saw that CPU "bits" had been doubling every few years, so we didn't expect that 20 years later SQL Server and all the other popular software still wouldn't be able to handle 128-bit values. We thought we could use 128-bit addressing and computers in general would be able to use these 128-bit values after a few years.
If we're had used 64-bit addresses, that would give us 18 quadrillion IP addresses. That's this many:
18,446,744,073,709,551,616
If we knew then what we know now, we may well have used 64-bit addresses in IPv6. 18 quadrillion is plenty of IPs. We figured that by 2018 computers would be able to handle 128-bit numbers. We were wrong - most software can't. By "we" I mean *I* made that argument. I was wrong.
> with the latest AVX
Yes, with the latest AVX. AVX didn't exist 20 years ago. I'm talking about what we expected 20 years ago.
We had gone from 8-bit to 16-bit, then 16-bit to 32-bits, then from 32 to 64-bit. It seemed entirely logical that we'd go from 64 to 128. Instead, things went in different directions.
I'm talking about what we expected 20 years ago.
We had gone from 8-bit to 16-bit, then 16-bit to 32-bits, then from 32 to 64-bit. It seemed entirely logical that we'd go from 64 to 128.
If someone went on a tirade cussing out the developers for the occasional profanity, and demanding everyone else change their behavior, I would tell them to fuck off. From what I can tell, they do didn't have a freak out, they just did a pull request to clean things up.
> I'd think that maybe they could devote their debugging efforts to more annoying bugs...
While I don't disagree, I also note that their work is slightly more useful than what you and I contributed to OpenJDK.
If this person wants to remove the F bombs to make it more "professional", okay - doesn't hurt me. Go ahead and clean it up if you want to.
> Why is that surprising? That corresponds to 16 exibytes (well 8 if you have signed pointers). There's no machine on the planet which could make use of pointers of that size.
It's not just about pointers. The CPU processes *everything* n-bits at a time, with n-bit precision. I mentioned Nintendo 64. It had 4MB of RDRAM. The 64 bit processor wasn't because it needed large pointers to address a huge amount of memory. :)
Along with all internal operations being n-bits at a time, 16-bit computers normally used the 16-bit ISA bus, 32-bit computers used the 32-bit PCI bus. Bus bandwidth was a problem and a 128-bit bus seemed likely in the future.
One thing that happened is we moved computation to the GPU, which does millions of bits at a time. Bus bandwidth certainly increased with PCI-e, but because it's too hard to keep 64 bits in sync, PCI-E switched from parallel (PCI) to serial at a much faster clock.
Similarly for external ports. Rather than making a wider (and therefore higher bandwidth) parallel port, we dropped parallel ports and switched to universal Serial bus, USB.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I had or did most (though not all) of those things 20 years ago. Not only did we think it was possible, we had them in a typical home.
Goijg in order, starting from the top:
Lots of music in a pocket-sized device (iPod)
This one is kinda new, the first consumer mp3 players came out 20 years ago. As I kid I got unlimited wireless streaming music on my Walkman. We called it radio.
VoIP / audio over the net
20 years ago I was setting up an early installation of live internet video with sound
64 bit processors
Nintendo 64 came out more than 20 years ago, so kids owned 64 bit processors. The surprise is that although we went from 8 bit to 64 bit in 25 years, after another 25 years we're still on 64 bit.
Hybrid cars
Been around since the 1970s
Burning a CD
You're kidding, right? While setting up the live internet video software, I burned a CD
Lots of internet video stored by one company (YouTube)
30 years ago, most of the video was on Prodigy, then AOL took over
Wireless internet / wifi
The actual wifi standard was over 20 years ago. In my storage room I probably still have Proxim wireless cards, which predate the wifi standard. So I had wireless internet in my home 25 years ago.
Editing video on your computer
How do you think we slices up those movies to make cool gifs to put on our Geocities pages?
DVR
We called it a VCR. I also probably still have a PCI video capture card in my storage room. Maybe even an ISA one. Cards like those were popular with Windows Media Center, a DVR that with Windows 15 years ago. 20 years ago, the DVR was a separate application that didn't come with Windows. *Renting* a DVR instead of owning it is new.
Video chat
Refer back above. We used it for naked girls, what we now call "cam girls".
I know the FCC put substantial conditions on the merger and hasn't yet approved the latest plan, revised to meet their conditions. The FCC should rule soon, unless they ask for more changes.
I haven't heard anything from the FTC for a few months, though. Anyone heard anything on that front?
DOJ seemed to be open to the idea, if it passes muster with FCC and FTC, but I haven't heard any news there either.
Hobby drones (quadcopters) are almost all the same set of sizes. Weight of outdoor drones falls into two classes. Racing drones are limited to 800 grams by rule, with a 150 gram class also being popular. (The 35 gram class could be classified as an indoor drone).
The other group is the utility, camera-carrying drones. The outdoor size of a camera drone weighs about 1.3 Kg. That's the vast majority of "drones" - all the ones costing been $300-$1000.
The big (and VERY expensive) commercial drones that Amazon builds are a tiny, tiny fraction of drones.
Hobby drones (quadcopters) are almost all the same set of sizes. The outdoor size weighs about 1.3 Kg. That's the vast majority of "drones" - all the ones costing been $300-$1000.
The big (and VERY expensive) commercial drones that Amazon builds are a tiny, tiny fraction of drones.
To hit a typical hobby drone (aka quadcopter, "drone" has many meanings), it would have had to be quite near the airport. A 737 coming in for landing descends at about 700 feet per minute. Drones are typically flown at 10 to 300 feet, with 500 feet possible. That means the 737 would need to be within seconds of landing to be low enough for a drone impact.
It's quite very illegal to fly a drone so near an airport. In the US, you can't even fly ten feet off the ground with five miles of an airport, without permission from the airport. I figure Mexico is probably similar.
There are several species of geese in the air this time of year near the US-Mexico border. It seems to me that's more likely than someone standing at the airport fence flying a drone up so high they can barely see it (and the wind at that altitude would tend to take it away from them).
Certainly not with a nose-up attitude :)
Zero pitch would probably be a good idea.
You can land in a nose-down attitude at supersonic speeds, but only once.
* For those unfamiliar, the "attitude" of a plane is which way it is pointing and leaning. (Pitch and roll, and sometimes yaw, depending on context).
It doesn't really vary much at all with velocity per se (partly because the definition of Cd includes a division by V2 term).
Its pretty much constant from 1 kmh through the entire subsonic regime to over 1,000 kmh. Just below Mach 2 the Cd is right back to its subsonic value and remains constant at hypersonic velocities. It's onlyduring that transition from about Mach 1 to Mach 2 that the suddenly very different behavior of air flows makes it wonky for that particular range.
You are correct that V2 is a very important term, of course.
However, the V2 is divided by V to get the drag per distance, which is what matters for passenger flights. You're trying to get from point A to point B, not trying to fly for one hour. Therefore the V squared term ends up as just V.
This divisiin by V has some very interesting and counterintuitive implications for gliders.
Drag is really bad from just about Mach 0.8 to about 1.8 or so. That doesn't have anything to do with the engines or anything else you can control. It's a constant known as cD that isn't largely independent of aircraft design.
Meaning you need to cruise at about Mach 2 to have reasonable efficiency in terms of drag.
Supersonic flight isn't just "subsonic flight, but faster". The design of a high speed aircraft is all about how the air flows around the aircraft and through the engines. At Mach 1, which is kinda like "the maximum speed of air", that totally changes. Things work completely differently.
So you have to design your engine for Mach 2, your airframe, etc. All of these will be designed very differently than they would be for subsonic flight. Especially if you intend to fly over land, you're going to need to fly subsonic a significant portion of the time (plus you need to take off and land, and you're not landing at supersonic speeds).
So you have a problem. You need a plane designed to work very well at Mach 2, and it has to be designed to work well subsonic. These are two very different designs. It's hard to have the same plane do well with both. It's kinda like designing an ocean-going ship that's also a bicycle.
> Experience doesn't mean shit. Performance does. If someone is doing the same job and getting the same results then they should be getting paid the same.
You can "should" all you want, but these are the facts.
If Linus's resume has the experience "I created Linux and managed it for 20 years", he's going to be able to get a certain salary.
If Bob's resume shows his experience is "I saw a Linux computer once", he's going to be able to get a certain salary.
Bob can whine all day about "my code is just as good, I *should* make just as much as Linus", but that's not reality. Reality is your qualifications, your education, expertise, demonstrated results, and communication skills determine how much competing companies will offer you, and therefore how much your company needs to pay to keep you.
You can think all day that your performance is as good as mine in designing security controls, but because I have proven experience and skills in that area, I'm going to get better job offers than you in that field. That's reality.
> I've always been puzzled why employees are so willing to go along with not sharing their pay data since keeping it a secret generally only benefits the company.
Often, a manager is budgeted a certain amount of money for raises. Employees are competing with each other for chunks of the budget.
If you have more experience, or more valuable experience, than your direct boss it might be good to keep quiet. It can be harder to get a raise when your boss knows you already make more than they do, and they think they should get that chunk of the salary budget. Similarly for peer employees who may have been at the company longer, but perhaps are less productive or have less specialized skills.
The last time I switched jobs, one company that wanted to hire me increased their offer by 25% to compete with the other company that wanted me. I'm sure that 25% increase in the offer would put my salary higher than many of my co-workers. It would have been in my best interest to take the money and be quiet, while doing good work to earn a raise a year later. Publicizing to all of my co-workers that I was being paid much more than them wouldn't have been helpful to me.
On the contrary, if you think other employees with lower qualifications are being paid more, sure that could be an argument for you getting a raise. If you can show that you're better qualified and more productive than Bob, you can argue that that your salary should be at least as high as Bob's. So it depends on where you think you are on the scale, near the top or near the bottom.
On the third hand, if you're making less than Sally, finding that out might only piss you off. If you ask the boss "why does Sally get paid more than me?", the answer might be "because Sally isn't an idiot. Sally can write an email and actually know the meaning of the words she uses". :)
In the end, what matters to me is paying my bills. How much a co-worker makes doesn't matter to me. For comparing my pay to what I could be making, I can compare to industry averages etc. A few data points of co-workers doesn't tell me as much as industry statistics, particularly because none of my co-workers has exactly the same qualifications as I. It's more useful for me to compare industry averages for people with similar qualifications.
> Texas certainly has high economic growth and meanwhile exploits every resource to its fullest to which has been my point all along.
Okay, thanks for stating your point clearly.
When you just point out that, unlike California, Texas didn't cede half its land to the federal government, it's a bit unclear what your point is.
> Your third paragraph is confusing businesses and startups. Immigrants start businesses, but usually something safe
So if I'm understanding you correctly, you're doing three things here to completely change the question, then asserting an answer that's still false, even after you changes the question. First, you change my words from "start a business" to "launch a start-up". Okay, I'm fine with that. Oxford Dictionary defines start-up as:
--
Start-up
1.1count noun
A newly established business.
âproblems facing start-ups and small firms in rural areasâ(TM)
--
Okay, that's fine. They mean the same thing.
Then in step 2 you redefine English to say that any fairly safe business, any wise business, isn't a newly established business - only wild gambles are start-ups. Sorry, English disagrees with you.
> most successful startup founders are from rich backgrounds
If you had claimed "the top three crazy start-ups that get then most press in Silicon Valley were started by rich people", you might be right. 99.999% of start-ups are not in fact Tesla. As it is, your claim isn't just wrong, it's wildly, ridiculously wrong. Hilariously wrong. For example, the *average* investment by an angel investor is $32,000. Meaning of course the founders needed to find an angel in order to get $30K, because they don't have $30K. SBIC figures show total investment by all investors of less than a million for most start-ups.
Your criticism was that Texas has high economic growth, while maintaining personal ownership. If economic growth, twice as much as California, is good, and personal ownership is good, I'm not clear on what your point is.
Were you pointing out some ways Texas is better, with the economy doing twice as well as California, while we retain our property rather than handing it over to the government?
Especially if you've been handing out high-quality 3D replicas of your head, don't use facial recognition and expect it to be secure.
But yeah pretty much don't expect any technology made after about 1850 to be secure. If you're a spy, a piece of paper and a one time pad might be the way to go.
Did I misunderstand when I thought you meant you preferred California-style federal ownership vs Texas individual ownership?
Maybe your emphasis was on "economic growth", your point is that having a big economy is bad?
> When on earth did I ever say I liked any part of California being owned by the fed?
You said:
--
Texas has been so driven by economic growth that it has almost not public land left.
--
I take that to mean you prefer California, where most of the land is owned by the federal government, vs Texas, where we each own our land.
When I had a small business, every year I had to fill out forms to pay business personal property tax of less than $5. The state actually called me, somewhat angrily, about another tax that was less than a dollar.
How much do you think it cost the state to provide an office, computer, etc, and pay the person, to call people about a 87 cent tax? Plus the cost of the forms, my time filling out the forms, etc. It's just a compete waste.
You like that the California land is owned by the federal government.
I like that the Texas land is owned by me. We both get what we want.
We don't have to argue about whose preference is better, we both get what we want. For now, anyway. The feds have already gone way past their Constitutional authority, and it keeps getting worse. Hopefully I'll be able to leave you guys to do things your way, in your state. I gtfo of there.
Two things wrong with this plan.
You mentioned the first one: handing tax money to ISPs.
The second one:
We have far too many different taxes, and associated paperwork and bureaucracy, already. No need to invent a new type of tax. If we DID want to give taxpayer money to X, just write them a check and if that means increasing taxes, do it. Propose a 1% increase in the existing taxes to pay for it. We don't need 784 different taxes.
We had a discussion here on Slashdot about that last week.
Even before you see the top line of your paycheck, two taxes have been invisibly taken out of your pay, "paid by the company", they say, but it's part of the cost of employing you - really part of your pay. Then three more taxes come out that show up on your paycheck. As you take your paycheck to the bank, you're paying gas tax to drive your car, which you pay an annual tax on. Take the money out of the bank and spend it? Sales tax. Pay the mortgage with it? Property tax. Pay a doctor bill or buy something at Walgreens? Obamacare tax. The same money taxed over and over and over. Just tax our paychecks at 60% and get it over with already.
Hey cool. I *thought* you could come up with something better than "our economy is like Mexico, India, and Russia".
See that's really cool you live in a place where half the land is owned by the federal government, compared to Texas where we own our own homes that we live in. That's awesome. Renting an apartment next to a federal hazardous waste^H^H^H^H^H preserve is much better.
One of my favorite things about California is that you can pick your season. You can waterski on Saturday and snow ski on Sunday, a fairly short drive from the beach to the mountains. That's pretty neat.