I have an LG Volt with 1.2 Ghz quad-core processor. It's just as productive as the new iphone. I paid $120. The guy down the hall paid $620 for a new iphone. So I paid $500 less. Suppose we make decisions like that once every three months. I put the $500 in an index mutual fund, he puts it into shiny toys. We do that from age 25 to age 50. At 50, I'll* have $183,909 in my fund, he'll have some broken antique phones. At 60, I'll have $468,368 more than him, just from buying the newest shiny electronics or "settling for" last year's smartphone model.
Combine that with me choosing a cash car instead of the lease he choose and I end up over a million dollars ahead. Once I have $2 million, then I can do and buy pretty much whatever I want, and have no stress about my financial situation.
* "I" am actually a weak example. Another guy across the hall is doing much better than me - he's on track to retire at age 48. By spending as much as the median income was in 1950s (inflation adjusted), he only has to spend 16 years of his life working.
I'll address this one as an example since it can be shown objectively, with just a little arithmetic:
>> "Give up the Starbuck's and iPhone 6 today, retire 10 years earlier."
> ten years earlier huh? for one thing the smartphone is part of modern culture how can a person who gets their data on dead trees compare to someone who has always on access to all the information in the world?
I have an LG Volt with 1.2 Ghz quad-core processor. It's just as productive as the new iphone. I paid $120. The guy down the hall paid $620 for a new iphone. So I paid $500 less. Suppose we make decisions like that once every three months. I put the $500 in an index mutual fund, he puts it into shiny toys. We do that from age 25 to age 50. At 50, I'll have $183,909 in my fund, he'll have some broken antique phones. At 60, I'll have $468,368 more than him, just from buying the newest shiny electronics or "settling for" last year's smartphone model.
Combine that with me choosing a cash car instead of the lease he choose and I end up over a million dollars ahead. Once I have $2 million, then I can do and buy pretty much whatever I want, and have no stress about my financial situation.
I've worked in a lot of fields. The examples listed were all things I've done both ways - making the short-term, impatient decision the first time, than when I had another chance I tried the long term option. I've scrubbed toilets, I've flipped burgers, I've been a programmer at the bottom of the totem pole, I've been the CEO of several different companies. I've been hired, I've been fired, and for 20 years I've been hiring and occasionally firing other people.
Most of my big mistakes through all of it were when I was thinking about what I want now, rather than the results I want five years bfrom nowm
It occurred to me my post could come across as arrogant. I screw that up plenty. I make a ton of mistakes. MOST of my dumbest mistakes involve trying to get what I want right now, rather than what will make me happy in the long term . All of the examples I listed are things I've screwed up and had to fix.
>. If the trap captures the first ant, it won't be able to capture many more ants later.
I wish all people were as smart as this plant. Give up some free time now to do your school work, get paid $800,000 more later. Give up the opportunity to cuss your boss out today, end up with a raise next month, after discussing the issue calmly and professionally. Give up the girl offering easy sex now, have a self-respecting partner for the rest of your life. Give up the Starbuck's and iPhone 6 today, retire 10 years earlier.
SO much of wisdom, and of success, comes down to this one thing, to delayed gratification.
That article expresses one theory. Of course it doesn't mention the fact that the economy in Texas has been besting the national average since long before the shale boom. Since right about time we started electing Republican governors, of turns out. Before shale, it was tech - tons of tech companies leaving California and coming to Texas.
We'll see what the future holds. I do indeed check my intuition against the facts, and I came across a really nest way of doing so. I wanted to know which is better FOR THE ECONOMY - Democrats or Republicans. There are a like lot of ways to measure that and you can devise statistics to match any conclusion you want. I decided to choose the best, most objective statistic I could of, WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT THE RESULT WOULD BE before I chose the measurement. I decided a reasonable, objective measurement would be economic growth. The president has about as much power as all of the house reps put together, and presidents stick around long enough for their efforts to have some effect, while the house and senate can switch every two years. So decided I'd compare Republican presidents vs democrat presidents. I was a bit nervous to chart the results - it might prove me wrong, very wrong.
I made one other decision before plotting the data. A new president's first budget is for the year AFTER they take office, and generally it takes that year for new policies to be formulated and go into effect, etc., so I decided to assign blame or creditcredit for that first year to the outgoing President. For example, Obama took office in 2009, but his first budget wasn't until 2010, so the 2009 economy wss under the Bush budget and Bush policies. (I actually did this in 2007, so 2009 wasn't on the chart, but 1989 was blamed on / credited to Reagan, etc.
I charted the data and like looked anxiously to see which party had better economic growth. It turned out that both parties had years of high growth and low, all over the place. The chart made one thing very obvious, though. Economic growth had ALWAYS improved under every Republican administration, and always got worse under every Democrat administration's budgets. No exceptions.
Of course after that we had the mortgage crash in 2008, making Bush Jr the only Republican president to have slowing economic growth.
It turns out the data confirmed what I had suspected - Bush was indeed the worst Republican President ever, in terms of the economy, and Republican presidents consistently improve the economy.
You can argue about which party is better for fairness or whatever, I don't know how to measure that objectively.
In a similar fashion, I reversed my position on abortion when I realized the editorials I used to write were wrong. I love learning new things and gaining a fuller understanding.
Ah, you're talking about way back then. Let's be honest about what went down, okay?
The population (a few thousand people) voted for about 25% communists. The communists struck a deal with the socialists (who also had about 25%) to share power. Note that most voters didn't vote communist or socialist, but the two parties successfully made a deal.
The communists and socialists ruled together for a few years.
The communists declared it illegal for six people to meet as a committee to remove them. - civil rights?
The communists deployed soldiers who pointed rifles at elected representatives showing up to vote against them. - civil rights?
When communists were unable to fend off the majority of the population who opposed them, they eventually left town.
So in your mind, making it illegal to meet as a committee to oppose the party currently in power is not a violation of civil rights.
It's also okay for the head of state to deploy armed units against the people trying to vote them out.
I'm just curious, did someone lie to you about what happened, or did you make that up yourself? If the latter, this is something a I never quite understood. If you know you have to make up lies to support a position, that means you know that the truth doesn't support that position. Why would you advocate a position that you KNOW to be wrong, to be unsupported by the facts? Is it THAT hard to change your mind, that you have to lie to yourself and others rather than simply say "gee, it looks like that idea isn't right after all. I wonder which idea actually is right"?
Yes, you can do that. A year or two ago the court ruled in a case where someone was doing that with textbooks. Doctrine of first sale, your fine legally.
Chinese DVDs might require a Chinese DVD player. That's a technical issue, not a legal restriction.
Thank you. I do think you'll find France, Greece, or Canada better suited to your political tastes. Really. I hope you enjoy it, wherever you go.
If by chance you find that France or Greece sucks , you cant get a job there and stuff is generally screwed up, and you decide to come back here, please understand what that means. It would mean that you've seen the actual results of the policies you espoused and decided that you DON'T like the results. If that happens, if you don't like the results of welfare state liberalism, leave your old ideas behind when you come back. Here in Texas we have a booming economy with lots of jobs. You're welcome to come here, but understand our economy is doing well because of the way we do things here. If you don't like how we do things in Texas, you're free to not move here.
> Communism is not having people like stockholders own the means of production
What does "own the means of production" mean? It means, in this context, "own a business".
What does it mean to "own" a business? To "own" a business means to get the profits from it. Stockholders get a share of the profits.
Therefore, "government owns the means of production" means "government gets the profit from businesses". That's what "owning" a business means.
If government gets 90% of the profit, for all practical purposes government is 90% owner of the business. Government essentially owns the business is called communism.
In San Marino, businesses are privately owned - stockholders (investors) elect the board of directors and get the profit. Investors get MORE of the profit than they do in the US.
WTH are you talking about. San marino isn't communist - nowhere near.
In a capitalist system, businesses are owned by private investors (in modern times, mostly people saving for retirement), and those private owners therefore get any profit the business produces.
In a communist system, the collective (government) owns the businesses and therefore gets any profit made by an enterprise.
Capitalist: private owners get the profit. Communist: government is the owner, gets the profit.
All real-world countries fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. In the United States, for example, private investors are nominally the owners, but the government takes 39% of the profit, then takes 15% the remainder when it's distributed to the owners. In San Marino, the government takes 17% of the profit.
United States: government has 39% stake, private owners have 61% San Marino: Government has 17%, private owners have 83%
The United States can therefore be said to be "twice as communist" as San Marino.
> (Note: I do not use the word "government" for a reason) owns the means of production.
And that reason is, if you were to admit that the method by which an entire country is forced to do something all together is called "government", you'd be admitting that full government control of people's lives is a precondition to communism.
"The whole of society does ____" means, in practice, "government does ____". To pretend otherwise is to lie to yourself, to _choose_ to believe falsely.
>> Further, there is no one in a position to seriously question the government.
> This is definitely not true, sometimes it happens in communism, but it doesn't need to be (and shouldn't be, freedom of speech is extremely important).
ALWAYS. Look at the USSR, communist China, Coba, Cambodia under communism - anywhere and everywhere that communism has gained a foothold in government. Care to name a counter-example? You can't, because there is none.
In THEORY, some being other than humans could have communism and human rights, on some planet other than earth. When you actually try to implement communism with humans, you ALWAYS end up with gulags. You have to, because that's the only way to impose communism upon the human spirit.
>. Civil rights are orthogonal to the economic system. You can have civil rights in a communist country. You can have private property. You just can't have private ownership of the production facilities
You can have private property, you say. Can an individual own a cordless drill? Well, a cordless drill can be used to produce a table, so it's a means of production. In pure communism, that wouldn't be allowed.
Suppose I own a drill, and enjoy making tables. My neighbor enjoys working on cars. Can he buy one of the tables I made? No, that would be a private business. Can he help me work on my car, and I give him a table. We'd both be exchanging items of value - doing business. I'd be producing tables, and only the government may produce anything. So double no, that would be two private businesses. See where this starts to be incompatible with human rights? But it gets worse:
You're not allowed to make money by building tables, or otherwise using the productive capacity of whatever is around, right, so you must work for the government. Everybody gets a government check, with the amount decided by the government. Given that all jobs are working for the government, guess who decides what job you spend your life doing? That's right, the government. That doesn't tend to produce a booming economy, so people struggle - they are poor. (See any communist country in all of history for confirmation.). What does a father struggling to provide for his kids do when a neighbor offers to buy a table from him, if he'll build it? He builds the damn thing, of course. All up and down the block mothers and fathers are working their illegal side jobs to try to provide something more for their family than the meager existence offered by the government check. The communist government can't have EVERYONE running black market businesses. If everyone is permitted to run their own little business, that's a free market, the opposite of communism. So the government has to crack down on all of these people building tables, fixing cars, and baking bread for their neighbors. When the government feels the need to keep a close eye on what each person is baking in their own kitchen do you see where this is incompatible with freedom and liberty?
By definition, communism is government control of productive capacity - the ability to create anything. That means a lot of tight control by government. When the government is in control of everything, they can get things done. Not necessarily the right thing, but they can get things done.
Further, there is noone in a position to seriously question the government. Consider if Obama ran MSNBC, CNN, and Fox, and the newspapers. Would his policies and decisions be debated in a meaningful way? Communism means the government controls all businesses, so no business is going to question the political leader.
Their patent covers unlocking the device by moving the and up at least 20cm (7.5 inches), then back down again. Moving your hand up and down a few inches while sitting in front of your computer - something many Slashdot readers have a lot of practice doing.
>. All of that is irrelevant to the point that my thought experiment was responding to, which is how much would BI cost relative to current expenditures.
Current expenditures IN ABSOLUTE TERMS is irrelevant. Here's a thought experiment for you. In the 1950s, the median income was $25k in today's dollars. Suppose EVERYONE decided that they didn't need a bigger house than their parents - not if they could get that same $25k by sitting on their butt and expecting someone else take care of them. So everyone is sitting at home, nobody is working. The taxpayer is paying for everyone. Problem - there ARE no taxpayers, because everyone is sitting home expecting the other guy to pay his bills. No taxpayers, no revenue, no payments. No payments, no food. You've just created a situation where Americans are literally starving to death. See how people's response to policies kind of matters a little bit?
There actually is a limit to how many people can sit on their butt vs how many need to be working. It's a little over 50%. One guy working can't provide for ten parasites (and wouldn't if he could). You can have have, at max, about three parasites for every two productive people. And the US is almost at that ratio now.
Having said all that, since you think it's such a good idea, I wonder why you're in the US. Greece, Cuba, France, and Iran all have economic systems that suit your preferences much better.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, when I used a cheesy mass-market OS from Microsoft, nonags.com was the place to go for good, free software with no bullshit. Is that still a good source for grandma to get software for Windows?
Just a friendly reminder - test your backups TODAY. The MAJORITY of home and small business backups don't actually work when you try to restore. Often, it quit backing up 18 months ago and nobody noticed.
Disaster recovery is part of security, so that's one security drill. To handle an intrusion, often the best course of action is to unplug the network cable and call your expert. Do not power down the machine. Do not delete anything. Do not try to fix it. Just unplug the network and call the guy. That shouldn't be hard, but it is hard if you don't know who to call. If you're shopping for somebody during a panic, you'll likely pay too much for somebody who isn't as expert as you'd like. So find your expert ahead of time and you're most of the way there.
My first two accountants were referred by my friends who had businesses, saying these CPAs were good. Both were grossly incompetent. The didn't know about basic things any small business needs to do like section 179 deduction and gave me an absolutely wrong answer when I asked how to account for home office expenses. Their errors would have cost me a few thousand dollars, had I not caught them.
The second one couldn't even get the right social security numbers on the W2s, filed late and didn't tell me, etc.
If I'm going to have to study all of this tax law and understand it, then go over everything in detail to see where they screwed up, why wouldn't I just do it myself to start with? What am I paying them for?
If you do get a CPA for a small business ask them about section 179. If they don't explain it in a way that indicates they thoroughly understand it, find another CPA.
> I'm waiting for other nations to start sending us foreign aid.
You can stop waiting. Foreign aid is most commonly in the form of loans. We've been borrowing from China for decades. As Slash would say, "First we did a little, but a little wouldn't do, so the little got more and more."
Slashdot Mirror
I have an LG Volt with 1.2 Ghz quad-core processor. It's just as productive as the new iphone. I paid $120. The guy down the hall paid $620 for a new iphone. So I paid $500 less. Suppose we make decisions like that once every three months. I put the $500 in an index mutual fund, he puts it into shiny toys. We do that from age 25 to age 50. At 50, I'll* have $183,909 in my fund, he'll have some broken antique phones. At 60, I'll have $468,368 more than him, just from buying the newest shiny electronics or "settling for" last year's smartphone model.
Combine that with me choosing a cash car instead of the lease he choose and I end up over a million dollars ahead. Once I have $2 million, then I can do and buy pretty much whatever I want, and have no stress about my financial situation.
* "I" am actually a weak example. Another guy across the hall is doing much better than me - he's on track to retire at age 48. By spending as much as the median income was in 1950s (inflation adjusted), he only has to spend 16 years of his life working.
I'll address this one as an example since it can be shown objectively, with just a little arithmetic:
>> "Give up the Starbuck's and iPhone 6 today, retire 10 years earlier."
> ten years earlier huh? for one thing the smartphone is part of modern culture how can a person who gets their data on dead trees compare to someone who has always on access to all the information in the world?
I have an LG Volt with 1.2 Ghz quad-core processor. It's just as productive as the new iphone. I paid $120. The guy down the hall paid $620 for a new iphone. So I paid $500 less. Suppose we make decisions like that once every three months. I put the $500 in an index mutual fund, he puts it into shiny toys. We do that from age 25 to age 50. At 50, I'll have $183,909 in my fund, he'll have some broken antique phones. At 60, I'll have $468,368 more than him, just from buying the newest shiny electronics or "settling for" last year's smartphone model.
Combine that with me choosing a cash car instead of the lease he choose and I end up over a million dollars ahead. Once I have $2 million, then I can do and buy pretty much whatever I want, and have no stress about my financial situation.
The humidity in this part of Texas is really annoying. Of course, it's a BIG state - there are many climates to choose from.
I've worked in a lot of fields. The examples listed were all things I've done both ways - making the short-term, impatient decision the first time, than when I had another chance I tried the long term option. I've scrubbed toilets, I've flipped burgers, I've been a programmer at the bottom of the totem pole, I've been the CEO of several different companies. I've been hired, I've been fired, and for 20 years I've been hiring and occasionally firing other people.
Most of my big mistakes through all of it were when I was thinking about what I want now, rather than the results I want five years bfrom nowm
It occurred to me my post could come across as arrogant. I screw that up plenty. I make a ton of mistakes. MOST of my dumbest mistakes involve trying to get what I want right now, rather than what will make me happy in the long term . All of the examples I listed are things I've screwed up and had to fix.
>. If the trap captures the first ant, it won't be able to capture many more ants later.
I wish all people were as smart as this plant.
Give up some free time now to do your school work, get paid $800,000 more later.
Give up the opportunity to cuss your boss out today, end up with a raise next month, after discussing the issue calmly and professionally.
Give up the girl offering easy sex now, have a self-respecting partner for the rest of your life.
Give up the Starbuck's and iPhone 6 today, retire 10 years earlier.
SO much of wisdom, and of success, comes down to this one thing, to delayed gratification.
So Uber decided to trade a small fine for operating an unlawful taxi for criminal charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Smart.
That article expresses one theory. Of course it doesn't mention the fact that the economy in Texas has been besting the national average since long before the shale boom. Since right about time we started electing Republican governors, of turns out. Before shale, it was tech - tons of tech companies leaving California and coming to Texas.
We'll see what the future holds. I do indeed check my intuition against the facts, and I came across a really nest way of doing so. I wanted to know which is better FOR THE ECONOMY - Democrats or Republicans. There are a like lot of ways to measure that and you can devise statistics to match any conclusion you want. I decided to choose the best, most objective statistic I could of, WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT THE RESULT WOULD BE before I chose the measurement. I decided a reasonable, objective measurement would be economic growth. The president has about as much power as all of the house reps put together, and presidents stick around long enough for their efforts to have some effect, while the house and senate can switch every two years. So decided I'd compare Republican presidents vs democrat presidents. I was a bit nervous to chart the results - it might prove me wrong, very wrong.
I made one other decision before plotting the data. A new president's first budget is for the year AFTER they take office, and generally it takes that year for new policies to be formulated and go into effect, etc., so I decided to assign blame or creditcredit for that first year to the outgoing President. For example, Obama took office in 2009, but his first budget wasn't until 2010, so the 2009 economy wss under the Bush budget and Bush policies. (I actually did this in 2007, so 2009 wasn't on the chart, but 1989 was blamed on / credited to Reagan, etc.
I charted the data and like looked anxiously to see which party had better economic growth. It turned out that both parties had years of high growth and low, all over the place. The chart made one thing very obvious, though. Economic growth had ALWAYS improved under every Republican administration, and always got worse under every Democrat administration's budgets. No exceptions.
Of course after that we had the mortgage crash in 2008, making Bush Jr the only Republican president to have slowing economic growth.
It turns out the data confirmed what I had suspected - Bush was indeed the worst Republican President ever, in terms of the economy, and Republican presidents consistently improve the economy.
You can argue about which party is better for fairness or whatever, I don't know how to measure that objectively.
In a similar fashion, I reversed my position on abortion when I realized the editorials I used to write were wrong. I love learning new things and gaining a fuller understanding.
Ah, you're talking about way back then. Let's be honest about what went down, okay?
The population (a few thousand people) voted for about 25% communists.
The communists struck a deal with the socialists (who also had about 25%) to share power.
Note that most voters didn't vote communist or socialist, but the two parties successfully made a deal.
The communists and socialists ruled together for a few years.
The communists declared it illegal for six people to meet as a committee to remove them. - civil rights?
The communists deployed soldiers who pointed rifles at elected representatives showing up to vote against them. - civil rights?
When communists were unable to fend off the majority of the population who opposed them, they eventually left town.
So in your mind, making it illegal to meet as a committee to oppose the party currently in power is not a violation of civil rights.
It's also okay for the head of state to deploy armed units against the people trying to vote them out.
I'm just curious, did someone lie to you about what happened, or did you make that up yourself? If the latter, this is something a I never quite understood. If you know you have to make up lies to support a position, that means you know that the truth doesn't support that position. Why would you advocate a position that you KNOW to be wrong, to be unsupported by the facts? Is it THAT hard to change your mind, that you have to lie to yourself and others rather than simply say "gee, it looks like that idea isn't right after all. I wonder which idea actually is right"?
Yes, you can do that. A year or two ago the court ruled in a case where someone was doing that with textbooks. Doctrine of first sale, your fine legally.
Chinese DVDs might require a Chinese DVD player. That's a technical issue, not a legal restriction.
>. I am leaving this fucking country finally
Thank you. I do think you'll find France, Greece, or Canada better suited to your political tastes. Really. I hope you enjoy it, wherever you go.
If by chance you find that France or Greece sucks , you cant get a job there and stuff is generally screwed up, and you decide to come back here, please understand what that means. It would mean that you've seen the actual results of the policies you espoused and decided that you DON'T like the results. If that happens, if you don't like the results of welfare state liberalism, leave your old ideas behind when you come back. Here in Texas we have a booming economy with lots of jobs. You're welcome to come here, but understand our economy is doing well because of the way we do things here. If you don't like how we do things in Texas, you're free to not move here.
He said:
NSA should have ceased supporting the dual EC_DRBG algorithm immediately after security researchers discovered the potential for a trapdoor.
> Communism is not having people like stockholders own the means of production
What does "own the means of production" mean?
It means, in this context, "own a business".
What does it mean to "own" a business? To "own" a business means to get the profits from it. Stockholders get a share of the profits.
Therefore, "government owns the means of production" means "government gets the profit from businesses". That's what "owning" a business means.
If government gets 90% of the profit, for all practical purposes government is 90% owner of the business. Government essentially owns the business is called communism.
In San Marino, businesses are privately owned - stockholders (investors) elect the board of directors and get the profit. Investors get MORE of the profit than they do in the US.
You might like the second sentence of the article:
things that were new to x86 were old hat to supercomputing, mainframe, and workstation folks.
Just curious, did you read one sentence of the article before commenting on it? :rolleyes Obama voters
WTH are you talking about. San marino isn't communist - nowhere near.
In a capitalist system, businesses are owned by private investors (in modern times, mostly people saving for retirement), and those private owners therefore get any profit the business produces.
In a communist system, the collective (government) owns the businesses and therefore gets any profit made by an enterprise.
Capitalist: private owners get the profit.
Communist: government is the owner, gets the profit.
All real-world countries fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. In the United States, for example, private investors are nominally the owners, but the government takes 39% of the profit, then takes 15% the remainder when it's distributed to the owners. In San Marino, the government takes 17% of the profit.
United States: government has 39% stake, private owners have 61%
San Marino: Government has 17%, private owners have 83%
The United States can therefore be said to be "twice as communist" as San Marino.
> (Note: I do not use the word "government" for a reason) owns the means of production.
And that reason is, if you were to admit that the method by which an entire country is forced to do something all together is called "government", you'd be admitting that full government control of people's lives is a precondition to communism.
"The whole of society does ____" means, in practice, "government does ____". To pretend otherwise is to lie to yourself, to _choose_ to believe falsely.
>> Further, there is no one in a position to seriously question the government.
> This is definitely not true, sometimes it happens in communism, but it doesn't need to be (and shouldn't be, freedom of speech is extremely important).
ALWAYS. Look at the USSR, communist China, Coba, Cambodia under communism - anywhere and everywhere that communism has gained a foothold in government. Care to name a counter-example? You can't, because there is none.
In THEORY, some being other than humans could have communism and human rights, on some planet other than earth. When you actually try to implement communism with humans, you ALWAYS end up with gulags. You have to, because that's the only way to impose communism upon the human spirit.
>. Civil rights are orthogonal to the economic system. You can have civil rights in a communist country. You can have private property. You just can't have private ownership of the production facilities
You can have private property, you say. Can an individual own a cordless drill? Well, a cordless drill can be used to produce a table, so it's a means of production. In pure communism, that wouldn't be allowed.
Suppose I own a drill, and enjoy making tables. My neighbor enjoys working on cars. Can he buy one of the tables I made? No, that would be a private business. Can he help me work on my car, and I give him a table. We'd both be exchanging items of value - doing business. I'd be producing tables, and only the government may produce anything. So double no, that would be two private businesses. See where this starts to be incompatible with human rights? But it gets worse:
You're not allowed to make money by building tables, or otherwise using the productive capacity of whatever is around, right, so you must work for the government. Everybody gets a government check, with the amount decided by the government. Given that all jobs are working for the government, guess who decides what job you spend your life doing? That's right, the government. That doesn't tend to produce a booming economy, so people struggle - they are poor. (See any communist country in all of history for confirmation.). What does a father struggling to provide for his kids do when a neighbor offers to buy a table from him, if he'll build it? He builds the damn thing, of course. All up and down the block mothers and fathers are working their illegal side jobs to try to provide something more for their family than the meager existence offered by the government check. The communist government can't have EVERYONE running black market businesses. If everyone is permitted to run their own little business, that's a free market, the opposite of communism. So the government has to crack down on all of these people building tables, fixing cars, and baking bread for their neighbors. When the government feels the need to keep a close eye on what each person is baking in their own kitchen do you see where this is incompatible with freedom and liberty?
By definition, communism is government control of productive capacity - the ability to create anything. That means a lot of tight control by government. When the government is in control of everything, they can get things done. Not necessarily the right thing, but they can get things done.
Further, there is noone in a position to seriously question the government. Consider if Obama ran MSNBC, CNN, and Fox, and the newspapers. Would his policies and decisions be debated in a meaningful way? Communism means the government controls all businesses, so no business is going to question the political leader.
Their patent covers unlocking the device by moving the and up at least 20cm (7.5 inches), then back down again. Moving your hand up and down a few inches while sitting in front of your computer - something many Slashdot readers have a lot of practice doing.
>. All of that is irrelevant to the point that my thought experiment was responding to, which is how much would BI cost relative to current expenditures.
Current expenditures IN ABSOLUTE TERMS is irrelevant. Here's a thought experiment for you. In the 1950s, the median income was $25k in today's dollars. Suppose EVERYONE decided that they didn't need a bigger house than their parents - not if they could get that same $25k by sitting on their butt and expecting someone else take care of them. So everyone is sitting at home, nobody is working. The taxpayer is paying for everyone. Problem - there ARE no taxpayers, because everyone is sitting home expecting the other guy to pay his bills. No taxpayers, no revenue, no payments. No payments, no food. You've just created a situation where Americans are literally starving to death. See how people's response to policies kind of matters a little bit?
There actually is a limit to how many people can sit on their butt vs how many need to be working. It's a little over 50%. One guy working can't provide for ten parasites (and wouldn't if he could). You can have have, at max, about three parasites for every two productive people. And the US is almost at that ratio now.
Having said all that, since you think it's such a good idea, I wonder why you're in the US. Greece, Cuba, France, and Iran all have economic systems that suit your preferences much better.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, when I used a cheesy mass-market OS from Microsoft, nonags.com was the place to go for good, free software with no bullshit. Is that still a good source for grandma to get software for Windows?
Just a friendly reminder - test your backups TODAY.
The MAJORITY of home and small business backups don't actually work when you try to restore. Often, it quit backing up 18 months ago and nobody noticed.
Disaster recovery is part of security, so that's one security drill. To handle an intrusion, often the best course of action is to unplug the network cable and call your expert. Do not power down the machine. Do not delete anything. Do not try to fix it. Just unplug the network and call the guy. That shouldn't be hard, but it is hard if you don't know who to call. If you're shopping for somebody during a panic, you'll likely pay too much for somebody who isn't as expert as you'd like. So find your expert ahead of time and you're most of the way there.
My first two accountants were referred by my friends who had businesses, saying these CPAs were good. Both were grossly incompetent. The didn't know about basic things any small business needs to do like section 179 deduction and gave me an absolutely wrong answer when I asked how to account for home office expenses. Their errors would have cost me a few thousand dollars, had I not caught them.
The second one couldn't even get the right social security numbers on the W2s, filed late and didn't tell me, etc.
If I'm going to have to study all of this tax law and understand it, then go over everything in detail to see where they screwed up, why wouldn't I just do it myself to start with? What am I paying them for?
If you do get a CPA for a small business ask them about section 179. If they don't explain it in a way that indicates they thoroughly understand it, find another CPA.
> I'm waiting for other nations to start sending us foreign aid.
You can stop waiting. Foreign aid is most commonly in the form of loans. We've been borrowing from China for decades. As Slash would say, "First we did a little, but a little wouldn't do, so the little got more and more."