That's not that big of a problem. Yes it would be unfair to people who paid income tax their whole life, but you can just cut a check to everyone based on how much income tax they've paid. This would be paid for by the new consumption tax being collected.
For example:
Someone worked from age 18 to age 65 paying income tax. This person saved $500K for retirement, but now there is a 40% consumption tax. As long has he gets a check for $200K, he's fine.
This kind of thing can be calculated as yearly or even monthly payments to people. The extra payments can even be willed to others in case of death. (i.e. what would have happened if the person in question just had the $200k up front, or had simply saved more money for retirement had there been a consumption tax rather than an income tax)
It can also be prorated for people who retire X years after the new consumption tax.
]
These sorts of changes to the financial incentive system should always be Pareto efficient when possible. There is no reason to unnecessarily screw people over unless they deserve it.
Americans who put all their money under their mattress definitely lost out. Americans who invested their money did not. The financial system we have now, while not perfect, is designed to encourage investment rather than just hiding your money and waiting for it to go up in value (like you would do with gold). Having an economy where the investors lose out to the people who can manage to spend the least is a recipe for a depression.
The US government could certainly be more honest about the way it dilutes the USD, and maybe do it in a less manipulative and more stable way, but in the end, it makes a lot of sense to drive growth by encouraging investment. We just maybe need to do it more responsibly.
Except that wealthy people don;t have any wealth. They are just lucky that trusts in the cayment islands buy them nice dinners and their companies give them nice cars to drive and fancy places to live. They don't own any wealth. They just get to consume it.
This is why we shouldn't have an income tax *or* a wealth tax. We should have a consumption tax. Wealthy people can use loopholes to claim they have no wealth and have no income. What they will be less able to do is to consume less wealth. Afterall what is the point of being rich if you can't enjoy it.
There are countless conditions that cause human suffering. To decide to fund one group or another necessarily means that funding can not be used to help a different group. Saying that people who don;t support this don't care about suffering is retarded. It is *as* retarded as saying you don't care about suffering because you'd don't want to spend those $2/year on a campaign to stop "texting while driving" which also saves lives.
You might say ok fine, lets spend $4/year then. The problem is that you could easily come up with 50000 things that we could spend money on, and now our entire GDP is spent on government research.
Yes, sometimes more, sometimes less, that's how prioritization works.
Although learning more about how the brain works is a worthy goal, it is not necessarily the *most* worthy goal, and it may actually be better to have the government spend less on it (so more can be spent on other things).
If we solved all the other problems in the world except demystifying the brain (even if it wasn't that important), then we should absolutely spend all our research money on that. This is an example of having less potential projects causing the best option to be to spend more on brain research.
It's not that you are wrong. You are right about how these words are used today. That you seem completely unaware that these words used to mean (i.e. hacker (before) = tinkerer (today), cracker (before) = hacker (today)), betrays your ignorance.
I don't think google will sue him. But if it was truly evil, it wouldn't just wait until this one artist was rich. It would wait for a whole genre of art to develop before suing whole industry.
you replaced regular 5400 rpm drives with 7200 rpm hybrid drives? Did you ever try comparing power usage of regular 5400 vs. 7200, or hybrid 5400 and hybrid 7200?
I wasn't suggesting that 3000 miles is far enough to get to the continental US. I am suggesting that the probability of NK successfully launching a nuclear strike in the future is getting larger the closer they get,.
Also, I don't worry only for myself. I have family and friends all over the world. Moreover, I feel empathy for people I don't personally know, and see it as a great tragedy when life is needlessly lost.
Even if NK attempts to launch a nuclear strike that turns out to be a dud and lands in the middle of the Pacific ocean killing nobody, the launch could easily lead to an immediate retaliation of the US, which in turn could lead to other countries like China retaliating against us.
This is like a Mexican standoff where most of the people are rational and have assault weapons and one particularly irrational person looking for a fight has a musket. This situation could easily lead to everyone being killed even if the musket doesn't work.
everyone except NK is pretty calm right now, but that could change at a moments notice, once they decide to do something stupid.
Yes, and many of the unsolved physics problems are simple applications of existing formulas, that engineers need to be able to google and plug numbers into.
If you want to build a bridge or send a rocket into space, a bunch of physics needs to be done to make that possible. None of it will include coming up with new formulas describing yet unexplained physical laws.
99.9999% of the physics problems that are solved every day are easy (e.g. how much weight can this bridge support, how much fuel does this rocket need) . Why? Well it's because the hard problems are hard and they take longer (e.g. Resolve quantum mechanics and relativity).
Yes the hard physics is important. The hard physics of today will be the easy physics in 100 years. The ultimate goal of Newtons laws when Newton discovered them was to be able to do all the currently mundane applications of his laws that make rocket launches and massive suspension bridges possible.
It took hundreds of thousands of years of human civilization to get to figure out Newton's laws, and then it was relatively trivial to teach them to every future engineer. While it is exciting to discover the way the universe works, this knowledge is useless until you use it.
It's not about repeating work; it's about understanding the damn formulas.
So when you teach a High schools student about gravity and you give them the formula F = Gm1m2/r^2. What exactly are they supposed to understand beyond being able to apply this formula to determine the gravitational force between to objects?
There really *isn't* currently much of a deeper understanding to be had. The formula itself bestows pretty much all of the understanding humans currently have about gravity.
How would you fundamentally understand this particular formula any better than a kid who can google the formula, plug in the numbers, and get the right answer? I am not saying you can't, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious answer.
Besides, having a kid who can plug numbers into formulas and consistently get the right answer is already pretty good for the American school system. When you get to college you are still essentially doing the same thing, except plugging in numbers becomes mundane and figuring out which formula to use is a bit harder.
Things our legislators don't understand: Economics, Technology, Logic, Math, Biology, Public Policy, Foreign Policy, etc.
I suppose this really shouldn't come as a shock. Look at who elected them.
Even though a senator is a member of a part of Congress they are not called congressman.
Even though they represent people/states they are not called representatives
I am normally in favor of following existing conventions, because they normally make sense. I am in favor of violating conventions that don't make sense as a way of changing them.
Thanks for pointing this out, as now I can violate it intentionally rather than inadvertently.
Preventing mentally ill people from getting guns is probably about as easy as preventing criminals from getting guns.
Criminals don't tend to follow laws, and mentally ill people are not always labelled as such until after they've done something crazy.
Obviously there should be safeguards in place to prevent dangerous people form getting *easy* access to guns, but it is naive to think that a law lone would have definitely stopped Newtown or any other massacre. It is simply too easy to illegally get a gun in this country.
It's not even about the mental healthcare system. Yes, every single mass murderer is crazy, but how many mentally ill people are out there that have never murdered anyone? If we start categorizing all mentally ill people as potential murderers, we are going to have to lock up a huge section of the population.
There are some crazy people. That is a fact that is likely not to change any time soon. We can lock up the ones that have demonstrated that they are dangerous. But that's about all we can do. Some will always slick through the cracks and go on shooting sprees. That's inevitable until we eliminate guns entirely and/or have minority report style prevention. Luckily for us, the number of people killed in mass shootings is actually very low given our population and while tragic, is not a big problem. It is just extremely high profile and people are very emotional. We would save many more people every year by lower regular gun crime by 2% than by stopping 100% of mass shootings. We would save many many more people than that by just making driving 1% safer.
Texting while driving probably kills more people than all the murders combined. The media's job is to scare people (to make money for their owners). The politician's job is to seem useful to voters. Combined with an ignorant and irrational public, this is a recipe for terrible laws that do more harm than good.
Until we somehow get collectively smarter, this is the kind of crap we are gonna have to deal with.
"In a Democracy, The People Get the Government They Deserve" --(commonly misattributed to) Alexis de Toqueville
The people voting for her (and most people in general) don't care about the constitution. Most people eligible to vote, don't even vote. We live in an apathetic society. Things have to get pretty bad before people as a whole actually start caring enough to change things. Until gas is $100/gallon and there is $1 million in debt for every citizen, I think we can keep people on this sinking ship oblivious.
And despite the apparent stupidity, they currently have nuclear weapons and missiles with a range of about 3000 miles. Obviously their science and engineering abilities far exceed their propaganda/photoshop abilities. I fully expect that NK engineers and scientists know about great circle routes in addition to rocket science, albeit maybe not as much as we do.
We shouldn't be scared by any ridiculous threats made by the NK propaganda machine, but we also shouldn't underestimate their actual abilities by assuming that the incompetence of their PR people is indicative of their whole government/military.
Math is about simplification. I never claimed that there is a universal metric of simplicity. In fact I actually said the opposite in my post. There is on objective definition for simplicity that applies in specific cases which is this: If a particular formulation of a problem reveals the answer and another doesn't, then the former is simpler.
For example, doing gaussian elimination on a matrix is just reformulating a problem in different ways. When you have finished, you have a formulation which makes finding the answers to some questions trivial. Different problems have different "most simple" configurations, so there isn't a universal standard for simplicity, but for individual problems it is just a fact that certain configurations have answers that are more readily exploitable, in that they require fewer computations to arrive at a given answer.
Most people who "do physics" are not physicists. Most people who use phsyics are just applying already discovered formulas to specific problems (i.e. engineers), rather than discovering new formulas describing physical laws. In fact most people are using physics that was already discovered more than a century ago (e.g. Newtons laws, thermodynamics, etc).
Yes discovering new physics is important. But this is not what most people who do physics are doing. The person we are talking about is a high school student. Maybe I should have said "High school physics is just applying formulas". Maybe we need better terminology for the kinds of physics physicists "do" and the kind that engineers and high school physics students "do"
That's not the ultimate purpose. The ultimate purpose is to solve problems. Having a useful way to think about problems is a good tool for solving them. Afterall, that is the way we judge whether a particular way of thinking is valid or not, or whether someone really understands something. We judge understanding of a problem by whether someone can solve a similar problem. We judge whether a "way of thinking" is correct by whether it leads to correct solutions to problems.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not that big of a problem. Yes it would be unfair to people who paid income tax their whole life, but you can just cut a check to everyone based on how much income tax they've paid. This would be paid for by the new consumption tax being collected.
For example:
Someone worked from age 18 to age 65 paying income tax. This person saved $500K for retirement, but now there is a 40% consumption tax. As long has he gets a check for $200K, he's fine.
This kind of thing can be calculated as yearly or even monthly payments to people. The extra payments can even be willed to others in case of death. (i.e. what would have happened if the person in question just had the $200k up front, or had simply saved more money for retirement had there been a consumption tax rather than an income tax)
It can also be prorated for people who retire X years after the new consumption tax.
]
These sorts of changes to the financial incentive system should always be Pareto efficient when possible. There is no reason to unnecessarily screw people over unless they deserve it.
Americans who put all their money under their mattress definitely lost out. Americans who invested their money did not. The financial system we have now, while not perfect, is designed to encourage investment rather than just hiding your money and waiting for it to go up in value (like you would do with gold). Having an economy where the investors lose out to the people who can manage to spend the least is a recipe for a depression.
The US government could certainly be more honest about the way it dilutes the USD, and maybe do it in a less manipulative and more stable way, but in the end, it makes a lot of sense to drive growth by encouraging investment. We just maybe need to do it more responsibly.
Except that wealthy people don;t have any wealth. They are just lucky that trusts in the cayment islands buy them nice dinners and their companies give them nice cars to drive and fancy places to live. They don't own any wealth. They just get to consume it.
This is why we shouldn't have an income tax *or* a wealth tax. We should have a consumption tax. Wealthy people can use loopholes to claim they have no wealth and have no income. What they will be less able to do is to consume less wealth. Afterall what is the point of being rich if you can't enjoy it.
There are countless conditions that cause human suffering. To decide to fund one group or another necessarily means that funding can not be used to help a different group. Saying that people who don;t support this don't care about suffering is retarded. It is *as* retarded as saying you don't care about suffering because you'd don't want to spend those $2/year on a campaign to stop "texting while driving" which also saves lives.
You might say ok fine, lets spend $4/year then. The problem is that you could easily come up with 50000 things that we could spend money on, and now our entire GDP is spent on government research.
Yes, sometimes more, sometimes less, that's how prioritization works.
Although learning more about how the brain works is a worthy goal, it is not necessarily the *most* worthy goal, and it may actually be better to have the government spend less on it (so more can be spent on other things).
If we solved all the other problems in the world except demystifying the brain (even if it wasn't that important), then we should absolutely spend all our research money on that. This is an example of having less potential projects causing the best option to be to spend more on brain research.
It's not that you are wrong. You are right about how these words are used today. That you seem completely unaware that these words used to mean (i.e. hacker (before) = tinkerer (today), cracker (before) = hacker (today)), betrays your ignorance.
I don't think google will sue him. But if it was truly evil, it wouldn't just wait until this one artist was rich. It would wait for a whole genre of art to develop before suing whole industry.
you replaced regular 5400 rpm drives with 7200 rpm hybrid drives? Did you ever try comparing power usage of regular 5400 vs. 7200, or hybrid 5400 and hybrid 7200?
why would 7200 rpm drives be better quality?
If having a mentally ill person with access to one's guns were a disqualifier to have guns, then Newtown would have not happened.
So how can you say this?
I wasn't suggesting that 3000 miles is far enough to get to the continental US. I am suggesting that the probability of NK successfully launching a nuclear strike in the future is getting larger the closer they get,.
Also, I don't worry only for myself. I have family and friends all over the world. Moreover, I feel empathy for people I don't personally know, and see it as a great tragedy when life is needlessly lost.
Even if NK attempts to launch a nuclear strike that turns out to be a dud and lands in the middle of the Pacific ocean killing nobody, the launch could easily lead to an immediate retaliation of the US, which in turn could lead to other countries like China retaliating against us.
This is like a Mexican standoff where most of the people are rational and have assault weapons and one particularly irrational person looking for a fight has a musket. This situation could easily lead to everyone being killed even if the musket doesn't work.
everyone except NK is pretty calm right now, but that could change at a moments notice, once they decide to do something stupid.
Yes, and many of the unsolved physics problems are simple applications of existing formulas, that engineers need to be able to google and plug numbers into.
If you want to build a bridge or send a rocket into space, a bunch of physics needs to be done to make that possible. None of it will include coming up with new formulas describing yet unexplained physical laws.
99.9999% of the physics problems that are solved every day are easy (e.g. how much weight can this bridge support, how much fuel does this rocket need) . Why? Well it's because the hard problems are hard and they take longer (e.g. Resolve quantum mechanics and relativity).
Yes the hard physics is important. The hard physics of today will be the easy physics in 100 years. The ultimate goal of Newtons laws when Newton discovered them was to be able to do all the currently mundane applications of his laws that make rocket launches and massive suspension bridges possible.
It took hundreds of thousands of years of human civilization to get to figure out Newton's laws, and then it was relatively trivial to teach them to every future engineer. While it is exciting to discover the way the universe works, this knowledge is useless until you use it.
It's not about repeating work; it's about understanding the damn formulas.
So when you teach a High schools student about gravity and you give them the formula F = Gm1m2/r^2. What exactly are they supposed to understand beyond being able to apply this formula to determine the gravitational force between to objects?
There really *isn't* currently much of a deeper understanding to be had. The formula itself bestows pretty much all of the understanding humans currently have about gravity.
How would you fundamentally understand this particular formula any better than a kid who can google the formula, plug in the numbers, and get the right answer? I am not saying you can't, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious answer.
Besides, having a kid who can plug numbers into formulas and consistently get the right answer is already pretty good for the American school system. When you get to college you are still essentially doing the same thing, except plugging in numbers becomes mundane and figuring out which formula to use is a bit harder.
So we can create more jobs for lawyers? We still want jobs right?
Things our legislators don't understand: Economics, Technology, Logic, Math, Biology, Public Policy, Foreign Policy, etc. I suppose this really shouldn't come as a shock. Look at who elected them.
Even though a senator is a member of a part of Congress they are not called congressman. Even though they represent people/states they are not called representatives
I am normally in favor of following existing conventions, because they normally make sense. I am in favor of violating conventions that don't make sense as a way of changing them.
Thanks for pointing this out, as now I can violate it intentionally rather than inadvertently.
She is already old. She might die before she loses a primary due to shifting public opinion. There is no reason for her to change anything.
Preventing mentally ill people from getting guns is probably about as easy as preventing criminals from getting guns.
Criminals don't tend to follow laws, and mentally ill people are not always labelled as such until after they've done something crazy.
Obviously there should be safeguards in place to prevent dangerous people form getting *easy* access to guns, but it is naive to think that a law lone would have definitely stopped Newtown or any other massacre. It is simply too easy to illegally get a gun in this country.
It's not even about the mental healthcare system. Yes, every single mass murderer is crazy, but how many mentally ill people are out there that have never murdered anyone? If we start categorizing all mentally ill people as potential murderers, we are going to have to lock up a huge section of the population.
There are some crazy people. That is a fact that is likely not to change any time soon. We can lock up the ones that have demonstrated that they are dangerous. But that's about all we can do. Some will always slick through the cracks and go on shooting sprees. That's inevitable until we eliminate guns entirely and/or have minority report style prevention. Luckily for us, the number of people killed in mass shootings is actually very low given our population and while tragic, is not a big problem. It is just extremely high profile and people are very emotional. We would save many more people every year by lower regular gun crime by 2% than by stopping 100% of mass shootings. We would save many many more people than that by just making driving 1% safer.
Texting while driving probably kills more people than all the murders combined. The media's job is to scare people (to make money for their owners). The politician's job is to seem useful to voters. Combined with an ignorant and irrational public, this is a recipe for terrible laws that do more harm than good.
Until we somehow get collectively smarter, this is the kind of crap we are gonna have to deal with.
"In a Democracy, The People Get the Government They Deserve" --(commonly misattributed to) Alexis de Toqueville
The people voting for her (and most people in general) don't care about the constitution. Most people eligible to vote, don't even vote. We live in an apathetic society. Things have to get pretty bad before people as a whole actually start caring enough to change things. Until gas is $100/gallon and there is $1 million in debt for every citizen, I think we can keep people on this sinking ship oblivious.
Isn't the amendment process *the* thing that makes the constitution living?
Right to bear arms: As long as *some* guns are legal, then your right to bear arms is preserved.
Right to freedom of speech: As long as *some* speech is legal, then your right to freedom of speech is preserved.
And despite the apparent stupidity, they currently have nuclear weapons and missiles with a range of about 3000 miles. Obviously their science and engineering abilities far exceed their propaganda/photoshop abilities. I fully expect that NK engineers and scientists know about great circle routes in addition to rocket science, albeit maybe not as much as we do.
We shouldn't be scared by any ridiculous threats made by the NK propaganda machine, but we also shouldn't underestimate their actual abilities by assuming that the incompetence of their PR people is indicative of their whole government/military.
Math is about simplification. I never claimed that there is a universal metric of simplicity. In fact I actually said the opposite in my post. There is on objective definition for simplicity that applies in specific cases which is this: If a particular formulation of a problem reveals the answer and another doesn't, then the former is simpler.
For example, doing gaussian elimination on a matrix is just reformulating a problem in different ways. When you have finished, you have a formulation which makes finding the answers to some questions trivial. Different problems have different "most simple" configurations, so there isn't a universal standard for simplicity, but for individual problems it is just a fact that certain configurations have answers that are more readily exploitable, in that they require fewer computations to arrive at a given answer.
Most people who "do physics" are not physicists. Most people who use phsyics are just applying already discovered formulas to specific problems (i.e. engineers), rather than discovering new formulas describing physical laws. In fact most people are using physics that was already discovered more than a century ago (e.g. Newtons laws, thermodynamics, etc).
Yes discovering new physics is important. But this is not what most people who do physics are doing. The person we are talking about is a high school student. Maybe I should have said "High school physics is just applying formulas". Maybe we need better terminology for the kinds of physics physicists "do" and the kind that engineers and high school physics students "do"
That's not the ultimate purpose. The ultimate purpose is to solve problems. Having a useful way to think about problems is a good tool for solving them. Afterall, that is the way we judge whether a particular way of thinking is valid or not, or whether someone really understands something. We judge understanding of a problem by whether someone can solve a similar problem. We judge whether a "way of thinking" is correct by whether it leads to correct solutions to problems.