It was owned and operated by Tennessee Valley Authority, http://www.tva.gov/
Until the early 1960s, there was plenty of private coal activity in the area. The problem happened after the government tried to do something other than govern. (Government does the best job of governing, running courts, etc. Their track record in industry isn't good.)
Where I work, we have several divisions. One division trains firefighters and EMS. We have an incredible training facility, so not only do we teach Firefighter I, we also train veteran firefighters on extra-hazardous stuff like oil refinery fires. They also teach search and rescue in our rubble piles and collapsing buildings.
Another division trains cops, tactical drivers, etc. That division includes an on-staff sniper.
A third trains people to work on high voltage electric lines.
Then there is my division, "administration". We're the IT people, bookkeepers, etc who keep the agency running. Guess which division had the worst safety record last year. Yep, us nerds. For my employer, the people clicking a mouse had more injuries than the people putting out big fires, crawling under collapsed structures, or performing dynamic entries (seat raids).
Yes, we nerds are suitably embarrased by this fact.
The UN council on human rights consists of 18 countries including Cuba, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. Do you really think an internet council is going to protect free speech? With Iran, China, or North Korea as the chair?
That's certainly true. Alot of the old school republican seats did get taken over by the tea party candidates. They also lost the white house after Bush, so there were SOME consequences for the party.
Will the democrats have consequences for putting up Obama and Pelosi? We shall see. They do have the advantage that Bush's last year or two were bad, so Obama's suckage doesn't contrast as much. Had Obama followed Reagan, the sudden drop in effectiveness would have been far more visible.
Have you noticed all the T shirts and other gear with NFL logos on them? Those are made and sold by other companies with the permission of the NFL.
What a trademark holder is not allowed to do is sit silently, allowing infringement, implying that it's okay while other people build businesses around the mark, then suddenly sue five years later. If you want to allow someone to use your mark in a certain way, you have to explicitly grant permission for a specific use for a specific period of time. That way no-one is confused as to what you're allowing.
A) The internet isn't the only avenue of attack. So no, unplugging from the internet doesn't ensure security. Google "stuxnet" some time for a fun example.
B) Unplugging the POWER cord would greatly decrease the chance of a system getting hacked. However, that still leaves the system perfectly insecure because a secure system is defined as one that is assured to continue to provide correct functionally in the face of adverse conditions. When you remove functionality, you're performing a DOS attack against yourself.
The other day I was shopping for a safe. For $13,000 you can buy a safe made of steel and concrete several inches thick. For $39, you can rent a demolition saw, which will cut through several inches of steel in 80 seconds. Tell me again how simple it is to make things secure.
> people being highly informed and engaged in the political process. This is irrespective of the economic/political ideology - this is not a left/right thing.
That brings up another interesting topic. I'm reminded of Ross Perot taking out 30 minute television spots in which he displayed various graphs trying to educate voters about economics. Contrast that with the left in America "All these people don't have health insurance. We should pass this 1,000 page bill without even reading it because... Hope and change!"
In the US, it seems to me that in the US, the fight is often between the left saying "wouldn't it be great to give everyone free _____. Let's do it!", followed by the right interjecting "well you see, nothing is really free. To pay for that would cost $XX billion, and the budget forecast...". From where I sit, it appears that the left does a great job politically selling the headline, the five second pitch for something that sounds great. The conservatives have done a relatively poor job explaining the implications of the proposals, informing voters why "fuck those rich people" isn't actually a solution to anything. Therefore, the evidence suggests that informed voters are precisely what the left doesn't want. Many on the right have tried to educate voters, but the voters are more interested in watching American Idol.
The system includes the first amendment and the diligent journalists it encourages. If the NSA chief had his way, we'd know nothing. A system includes all of the interacting parts.
If the voters interact with the policy making, they are by definition part of the system. If we abdicate our responsibility and don't take any action, we are definitionally not part of the system anymore.
Your comment got me reading his work. As a time geek who has been going around bitching about wildly out-of-sync clocks in clusters and other tightly coupled networks, his ideas interest me.
For anyone else who is mildly curious, here's a very short summary of his key idea, as I understand it from a brief reading:
In a cluster, you sometimes need to know which of two events should be considered "first". For example, if one process writes some state data and another process reads it, you need to know whether the read comes first and should get the old value, or if the write comes first, so the read gets the new value.
System clocks aren't perfectly synchronized. With multi-Ghz processors, events can happen so fast that the system timestamp isn't accurate or precise enough to identify which request was sent first.
To solve the problem of knowing which request is considered first, you can use a counter. Each request includes it's counter value - request #1, request #2, etc. If the receiving system keeps track of the highest counter and overwrites any "past" values with its own current "now" counter, it can put requests into a defined order.
Cities and states screw things up too, of course. If your city, day Chicago, gets completely infested with dirty politicians for years and they royally score things up, or start tapping your phone, you can get the hell out of Chicago.
You can also directly affect local politics in a way you can't affect Washington so easily. It's much easier to keep on eye on the guy down the street than some guy thousands of miles away in Washington. I even considered running for an office in my county, and I probably would have won. There's no way I'll ever win the presidency. I can damn sure win a seat on the school board, though. Since I can be on the school board, but I can't run the department of education, local control is inherently more democratic.
> A good system of governance should transparently expose, prevent, stop, and/or negate criminality.
We're talking about it. It's exposed. We have no fear of talking about. The politicians in Washington are worried that we're talking about it.
Is there any other system that exposes problems to the extent that the US system does? It's damn sure not perfect, obviously. This crap does get exposed and published on the front page, though.
Another important consideration after exposure is ACCEPTANCE (or lack thereof). In many countries, rampant bribery is exposed. Everyone knows about it, and everyone participates. It's accepted as normal. The US wasn't that way. When our leaders were busted, their career was over. Then there was Marion Berry, Ray Nagen, etc. They got caught and then re-elected. That, I think, is a big problem. Exposing this stuff is half of it. The other half is for the electorate to not put up with it.
The other day Obama said he would veto a bill declaring that the president must _obey_the_law. Putting aside minor arguments, his official position is more or less that he doesn't have to follow the law, that he's above the law. Is this nation to be ruled by properly passed laws, or ruled by a personality? Are we going to put up with this?
You end up with a lot less "publicity driven voting driven by funding from biased sources" when no amount of money can buy win. So long as people contribute $X, enough to get your message out, the person with ten times as much money has little or no advantage - both names go into the hat. Campaign finance has extremely diminishing returns. If, in a given race, it takes $1 million in publicity to get 20% of the voters, two million will get you to 25%. Three million will get 27%. Ten million will get 35%. A hundred million will get 45%. One major reason for the ridiculous amount of money spent in elections is that candidates are chasing that last half of a percent. If you say that a 1% lead doesn't matter, that means 20% of the money doesn't matter.
* numbers are not accurate, but illustrate a point that is correct.
> Even so, to me it looks as if the system that you have proposed will act so as to maintain and increase the concentration of wealth and power among those that already have it, and squeeze out those on the edges of power.
In fact, it has not, precisely because "those on the edges of power" have an equal chance of getting elected - if they are truly on the edge.
Indeed, instead of using a plugin, author it in OpenFL and "compile" it as JavaScript. You get the nice Flash API and can use the Flashdevelop IDE if you want, without needing the Flash plugin.
The CS major can calculate the time complexity of the rollback algorithm. The SE thinks that allowing for rollback might be a good idea. The IS person cusses the PM who didn't allow for rollback because OF COURSE you should plan for contingencies.
Wow, that's great. Windows ran a few months without a blue screen of death. Meanwhile over here where we use reliable operating systems, a contractor hotswapped a CPU in one of my machines. It kept running fine. That machine has had two replacements of the boot drive in the last few years. No reboots needed for those either.
Analog vs. digital, fully connected vs less connected - all can fail in similar ways. If it's really critical, like nuclear power plant critical, use simple, basic physics. The simpler the better.
You need to protect against excessive pressure rupturing a tank. Do you use a digital pressure sensor or an analog one? Use either, but how also add a blowout disc made of metal 1/4th as thick as the rest of the tank. An analog sensor may fail. A digital sensor may fail. A piece of thin, weak material is guaranteed to rupture when the pressure gets to high.
Monitoring temperature in a life safety application? Pick analog or digital sensors, ei ther one, but you better have something simple like the vials used in fire sprinklers, or a wax piece that melts, something simple as hell based on physics. Ethanol WILL boil and wax WILL melt before it gets to be 300 F. That's guaranteed, everytime.
New nuclear reactor designs do that. If the core gets to hot, something melts and it falls into a big pool of water. Gravity is going to keep working when all of the sophisticated electronics doesn't work because "you're not holding it right".
Motorola Mobility was losing a billion dollars a year before Google came in. To claim Google screwed the company up is ridiculous.
However, as the inventor of the cell phone and a major market leader in earlier years with billions in R&D investment, Motorola had something Google wanted. Google bought MM for about $7.5B net of cash and accrued losses, then sold the parts they didn't want for about $6B. Bottom line, they paid $1.5B for a patent portfolio with a book value of $5.5B. That's a $4B gain for Google, by flipping a company that was headed toward bankruptcy. Why did Google flip it so quickly? Remember Moto was losing a billion dollars a year. By moving quickly, Google limited the time they were paying Moto's operating expenses. After ssubtracting the continued operating expenses, Google walks with a bottom line gain of $2 billion.
How did YOU make $2 billion in two years? Yeah, me neither.
Less than half of Google's revenue is from search. Youtube is a big part and Hulu. They make money alot of ways - the AOL home page, CBS pay-per-view, many ways. They in fact have dozens of highly successful products and services. See https://investor.google.com/ea...
In all, they are about thirty three billion dollars smarter than me or you. You're pretty good at saying stuff that _sounds_ smart, so clearly you have some real intelligence. The one thing where I see you consistently make yourself sound and act stupid, even though you're not stupid, is your absurd ego where you think you're so much smarter than Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, and everyone else who has proven they know what the heck they're doing. Your writing makes it clear that you've got some brains, but your brains are completely wasted when you refuse to learn from others' success.
The million dollar exemption in IRC 2057 was last effective for tax year 2003. This is why we don't start our posts with "Wrong..." - feet taste bad.
If you research it, and research stuff from the past ten years, you can of course find some ways to pass some assets before death and pay other taxes instead of the estate tax. Certain types of property are exempt. I posted the simple version because there are hundreds of pages of applicable law and regulations and this is Slashdot, not CPAnet. In some cases, some portion may be exempt, so if you had a business worth $500K and of that $200K was exempt, you'd have $300K taxable. You'd need $135K in cash or insurance to pay the tax without selling or liquidating the business.
I can relate to what you're saying. However, if by "the ruling class" you mean people in leadership positions - people who have built a successful business, people who have successfully organized large events like the Olympics, etc., you end up attacking anyone who has proven they can do a good job on big things - precisely the people we need to have leading.
Another option takes more work, but gets better results: Identify the bad leaders, the morally corrupt and the incompetent. That would include Bush II, Obama, Ray Nagen, etc. Get rid of the bad ones and find good leaders. Good leaders might include Colin Powell and Robert Gates.
Third, along with identifying and eliminating bad leaders, we need structural changes. Other countries have better election systems we should consider, where you have to build a broad coalition to get elected. We need to look at ways to move away from the "American Idol" style popularity contest. There's some truth to calling Obama "President Kardashian" - many of his voters had no idea why they were voting for him, zero knowledge of the issues. We need to try to fix that.
In one organization, unless someone wins 2/3rds of the vote, they draw straws from among the finalists. It works quite well, achieving what campaign finance reform is intended to achieve, without the free speech issues involved such as potentially making it illegal for a blogger to speak their opinion.
It makes a lot of dog-eat-dog campaigning unnecessary because the candidates aren't fighting tooth and nail for that extra 0.1% of the vote - just put up a pretty good candidate, who can get at least 20%-35% of the vote to get their name in the hat. Primaries, and therefore pandering to the extremes, aren't critical when someone can get elected without being chosen by either major party.
On the other hand, if JFK came back to life he'd win 2/3rds and win, as he should.
He wasn't lying, we all just heard him wrong. He made us hope for change. I'm sure hoping for a change right now. Right now I'm just hoping for a GOOD president next time, liberal or conservative hardly matters. Either Kennedy or Reagan would be a thousand times better than our last few presidents.
The whole point of the insurance is so that the taxes WILL be paid.
Suppose a dude has a business. It's worth $1 million. Maybe it's a well-run McDonald's., or a family farm. When the dude dies, his estate is taxed $450,000. Without insurance, his wife and kids have to sell the McDonald's in order to pay the tax. That sucks, so what the guy does is spend $20,000 / year to buy $500,000 in life insurance. When he croaks, the wife and kids use that insurance money to pay the taxes. That way, the taxes are paid and they don't have to sell the business.
It's better for the government too, because whose knows if the business will actually sell for a million now that the guy leading it is dead.
You say some of the students in your district can attend the #1 school in country. Did it occur to you that "#1 in the country" by definition means that yours is the ONLY district in the country that offers that opportunity? No other district anywhere in the country offers that, by definition.
Slashdot Mirror
It was owned and operated by Tennessee Valley Authority, http://www.tva.gov/
Until the early 1960s, there was plenty of private coal activity in the area. The problem happened after the government tried to do something other than govern. (Government does the best job of governing, running courts, etc. Their track record in industry isn't good.)
Where I work, we have several divisions.
One division trains firefighters and EMS. We have an incredible training facility, so not only do we teach Firefighter I, we also train veteran firefighters on extra-hazardous stuff like oil refinery fires. They also teach search and rescue in our rubble piles and collapsing buildings.
Another division trains cops, tactical drivers, etc. That division includes an on-staff sniper.
A third trains people to work on high voltage electric lines.
Then there is my division, "administration". We're the IT people, bookkeepers, etc who keep the agency running. Guess which division had the worst safety record last year. Yep, us nerds. For my employer, the people clicking a mouse had more injuries than the people putting out big fires, crawling under collapsed structures, or performing dynamic entries (seat raids).
Yes, we nerds are suitably embarrased by this fact.
The UN council on human rights consists of 18 countries including Cuba, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. Do you really think an internet council is going to protect free speech? With Iran, China, or North Korea as the chair?
That's certainly true. Alot of the old school republican seats did get taken over by the tea party candidates. They also lost the white house after Bush, so there were SOME consequences for the party.
Will the democrats have consequences for putting up Obama and Pelosi? We shall see. They do have the advantage that Bush's last year or two were bad, so Obama's suckage doesn't contrast as much. Had Obama followed Reagan, the sudden drop in effectiveness would have been far more visible.
Have you noticed all the T shirts and other gear with NFL logos on them? Those are made and sold by other companies with the permission of the NFL.
What a trademark holder is not allowed to do is sit silently, allowing infringement, implying that it's okay while other people build businesses around the mark, then suddenly sue five years later. If you want to allow someone to use your mark in a certain way, you have to explicitly grant permission for a specific use for a specific period of time. That way no-one is confused as to what you're allowing.
What are you talking about? It was a government operated power plant, run by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
A) The internet isn't the only avenue of attack. So no, unplugging from the internet doesn't ensure security. Google "stuxnet" some time for a fun example.
B) Unplugging the POWER cord would greatly decrease the chance of a system getting hacked. However, that still leaves the system perfectly insecure because a secure system is defined as one that is assured to continue to provide correct functionally in the face of adverse conditions. When you remove functionality, you're performing a DOS attack against yourself.
The other day I was shopping for a safe. For $13,000 you can buy a safe made of steel and concrete several inches thick. For $39, you can rent a demolition saw, which will cut through several inches of steel in 80 seconds. Tell me again how simple it is to make things secure.
> people being highly informed and engaged in the political process. This is irrespective of the economic/political ideology - this is not a left/right thing.
That brings up another interesting topic. I'm reminded of Ross Perot taking out 30 minute television spots in which he displayed various graphs trying to educate voters about economics. Contrast that with the left in America "All these people don't have health insurance. We should pass this 1,000 page bill without even reading it because ... Hope and change!"
In the US, it seems to me that in the US, the fight is often between the left saying "wouldn't it be great to give everyone free _____. Let's do it!", followed by the right interjecting "well you see, nothing is really free. To pay for that would cost $XX billion, and the budget forecast ...". From where I sit, it appears that the left does a great job politically selling the headline, the five second pitch for something that sounds great. The conservatives have done a relatively poor job explaining the implications of the proposals, informing voters why "fuck those rich people" isn't actually a solution to anything. Therefore, the evidence suggests that informed voters are precisely what the left doesn't want. Many on the right have tried to educate voters, but the voters are more interested in watching American Idol.
The system includes the first amendment and the diligent journalists it encourages. If the NSA chief had his way, we'd know nothing. A system includes all of the interacting parts.
If the voters interact with the policy making, they are by definition part of the system. If we abdicate our responsibility and don't take any action, we are definitionally not part of the system anymore.
Your comment got me reading his work. As a time geek who has been going around bitching about wildly out-of-sync clocks in clusters and other tightly coupled networks, his ideas interest me.
For anyone else who is mildly curious, here's a very short summary of his key idea, as I understand it from a brief reading:
In a cluster, you sometimes need to know which of two events should be considered "first". For example, if one process writes some state data and another process reads it, you need to know whether the read comes first and should get the old value, or if the write comes first, so the read gets the new value.
System clocks aren't perfectly synchronized. With multi-Ghz processors, events can happen so fast that the system timestamp isn't accurate or precise enough to identify which request was sent first.
To solve the problem of knowing which request is considered first, you can use a counter. Each request includes it's counter value - request #1, request #2, etc. If the receiving system keeps track of the highest counter and overwrites any "past" values with its own current "now" counter, it can put requests into a defined order.
Cities and states screw things up too, of course.
If your city, day Chicago, gets completely infested with dirty politicians for years and they royally score things up, or start tapping your phone, you can get the hell out of Chicago.
You can also directly affect local politics in a way you can't affect Washington so easily. It's much easier to keep on eye on the guy down the street than some guy thousands of miles away in Washington. I even considered running for an office in my county, and I probably would have won. There's no way I'll ever win the presidency. I can damn sure win a seat on the school board, though. Since I can be on the school board, but I can't run the department of education, local control is inherently more democratic.
> A good system of governance should transparently expose, prevent, stop, and/or negate criminality.
We're talking about it. It's exposed. We have no fear of talking about. The politicians in Washington are worried that we're talking about it.
Is there any other system that exposes problems to the extent that the US system does? It's damn sure not perfect, obviously. This crap does get exposed and published on the front page, though.
Another important consideration after exposure is ACCEPTANCE (or lack thereof). In many countries, rampant bribery is exposed. Everyone knows about it, and everyone participates. It's accepted as normal. The US wasn't that way. When our leaders were busted, their career was over. Then there was Marion Berry, Ray Nagen, etc. They got caught and then re-elected. That, I think, is a big problem. Exposing this stuff is half of it. The other half is for the electorate to not put up with it.
The other day Obama said he would veto a bill declaring that the president must _obey_the_law. Putting aside minor arguments, his official position is more or less that he doesn't have to follow the law, that he's above the law. Is this nation to be ruled by properly passed laws, or ruled by a personality? Are we going to put up with this?
You end up with a lot less "publicity driven voting driven by funding from biased sources" when no amount of money can buy win. So long as people contribute $X, enough to get your message out, the person with ten times as much money has little or no advantage - both names go into the hat. Campaign finance has extremely diminishing returns. If, in a given race, it takes $1 million in publicity to get 20% of the voters, two million will get you to 25%. Three million will get 27%. Ten million will get 35%. A hundred million will get 45%. One major reason for the ridiculous amount of money spent in elections is that candidates are chasing that last half of a percent. If you say that a 1% lead doesn't matter, that means 20% of the money doesn't matter.
* numbers are not accurate, but illustrate a point that is correct.
> Even so, to me it looks as if the system that you have proposed will act so as to maintain and increase the concentration of wealth and power among those that already have it, and squeeze out those on the edges of power.
In fact, it has not, precisely because "those on the edges of power" have an equal chance of getting elected - if they are truly on the edge.
Indeed, instead of using a plugin, author it in OpenFL and "compile" it as JavaScript. You get the nice Flash API and can use the Flashdevelop IDE if you want, without needing the Flash plugin.
The CS major can calculate the time complexity of the rollback algorithm.
The SE thinks that allowing for rollback might be a good idea.
The IS person cusses the PM who didn't allow for rollback because OF COURSE you should plan for contingencies.
Wow, that's great. Windows ran a few months without a blue screen of death. Meanwhile over here where we use reliable operating systems, a contractor hotswapped a CPU in one of my machines. It kept running fine. That machine has had two replacements of the boot drive in the last few years. No reboots needed for those either.
Analog vs. digital, fully connected vs less connected - all can fail in similar ways. If it's really critical, like nuclear power plant critical, use simple, basic physics. The simpler the better.
You need to protect against excessive pressure rupturing a tank. Do you use a digital pressure sensor or an analog one? Use either, but how also add a blowout disc made of metal 1/4th as thick as the rest of the tank. An analog sensor may fail. A digital sensor may fail. A piece of thin, weak material is guaranteed to rupture when the pressure gets to high.
Monitoring temperature in a life safety application? Pick analog or digital sensors, ei ther one, but you better have something simple like the vials used in fire sprinklers, or a wax piece that melts, something simple as hell based on physics. Ethanol WILL boil and wax WILL melt before it gets to be 300 F. That's guaranteed, everytime.
New nuclear reactor designs do that. If the core gets to hot, something melts and it falls into a big pool of water. Gravity is going to keep working when all of the sophisticated electronics doesn't work because "you're not holding it right".
Motorola Mobility was losing a billion dollars a year before Google came in. To claim Google screwed the company up is ridiculous.
However, as the inventor of the cell phone and a major market leader in earlier years with billions in R&D investment, Motorola had something Google wanted.
Google bought MM for about $7.5B net of cash and accrued losses, then sold the parts they didn't want for about $6B. Bottom line, they paid $1.5B for a patent portfolio with a book value of $5.5B. That's a $4B gain for Google, by flipping a company that was headed toward bankruptcy. Why did Google flip it so quickly? Remember Moto was losing a billion dollars a year. By moving quickly, Google limited the time they were paying Moto's operating expenses.
After ssubtracting the continued operating expenses, Google walks with a bottom line gain of $2 billion.
How did YOU make $2 billion in two years? Yeah, me neither.
Less than half of Google's revenue is from search. Youtube is a big part and Hulu. They make money alot of ways - the AOL home page, CBS pay-per-view, many ways. They in fact have dozens of highly successful products and services. See https://investor.google.com/ea...
In all, they are about thirty three billion dollars smarter than me or you. You're pretty good at saying stuff that _sounds_ smart, so clearly you have some real intelligence. The one thing where I see you consistently make yourself sound and act stupid, even though you're not stupid, is your absurd ego where you think you're so much smarter than Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, and everyone else who has proven they know what the heck they're doing. Your writing makes it clear that you've got some brains, but your brains are completely wasted when you refuse to learn from others' success.
The million dollar exemption in IRC 2057 was last effective for tax year 2003. ..." - feet taste bad.
This is why we don't start our posts with "Wrong
If you research it, and research stuff from the past ten years, you can of course find some ways to pass some assets before death and pay other taxes instead of the estate tax. Certain types of property are exempt. I posted the simple version because there are hundreds of pages of applicable law and regulations and this is Slashdot, not CPAnet. In some cases, some portion may be exempt, so if you had a business worth $500K and of that $200K was exempt, you'd have $300K taxable. You'd need $135K in cash or insurance to pay the tax without selling or liquidating the business.
I can relate to what you're saying. However, if by "the ruling class" you mean people in leadership positions - people who have built a successful business, people who have successfully organized large events like the Olympics, etc., you end up attacking anyone who has proven they can do a good job on big things - precisely the people we need to have leading.
Another option takes more work, but gets better results:
Identify the bad leaders, the morally corrupt and the incompetent. That would include Bush II, Obama, Ray Nagen, etc. Get rid of the bad ones and find good leaders. Good leaders might include Colin Powell and Robert Gates.
Third, along with identifying and eliminating bad leaders, we need structural changes. Other countries have better election systems we should consider, where you have to build a broad coalition to get elected. We need to look at ways to move away from the "American Idol" style popularity contest. There's some truth to calling Obama "President Kardashian" - many of his voters had no idea why they were voting for him, zero knowledge of the issues. We need to try to fix that.
In one organization, unless someone wins 2/3rds of the vote, they draw straws from among the finalists. It works quite well, achieving what campaign finance reform is intended to achieve, without the free speech issues involved such as potentially making it illegal for a blogger to speak their opinion.
It makes a lot of dog-eat-dog campaigning unnecessary because the candidates aren't fighting tooth and nail for that extra 0.1% of the vote - just put up a pretty good candidate, who can get at least 20%-35% of the vote to get their name in the hat. Primaries, and therefore pandering to the extremes, aren't critical when someone can get elected without being chosen by either major party.
On the other hand, if JFK came back to life he'd win 2/3rds and win, as he should.
He wasn't lying, we all just heard him wrong. He made us hope for change. I'm sure hoping for a change right now. Right now I'm just hoping for a GOOD president next time, liberal or conservative hardly matters. Either Kennedy or Reagan would be a thousand times better than our last few presidents.
The whole point of the insurance is so that the taxes WILL be paid.
Suppose a dude has a business. It's worth $1 million. Maybe it's a well-run McDonald's., or a family farm. When the dude dies, his estate is taxed $450,000. Without insurance, his wife and kids have to sell the McDonald's in order to pay the tax. That sucks, so what the guy does is spend $20,000 / year to buy $500,000 in life insurance. When he croaks, the wife and kids use that insurance money to pay the taxes. That way, the taxes are paid and they don't have to sell the business.
It's better for the government too, because whose knows if the business will actually sell for a million now that the guy leading it is dead.
You say some of the students in your district can attend the #1 school in country. Did it occur to you that "#1 in the country" by definition means that yours is the ONLY district in the country that offers that opportunity? No other district anywhere in the country offers that, by definition.