So you want a metal detector and at least one security officer stationed at every entrance of every building in the country? Why not just provide all adult citizens with basic armed and unarmed combat training, and ensure that all have access to a weapon? When Charles Whitman was shooting from the University of Texas belltower, citizens helped the police, deputies and Rangers by bringing their own firearms and trying to pick him off. If just a few--maybe just one--person in the building had had training, he might have been able to stop the shooter. If just one had had a gun, he might have been able to kill the shooter.
Less guns doesn't work--there are still other weapons. Banning all weapons makes us into the UK, where it's illegal to defend yourself with a stick!
Ummm, that's exactly what Virginia Tech tried to do. It forbade all students to carry weapons, and then when one broke the rules, the rest were like sheep led unto the slaughter. Weapons bans are not obeyed by criminals; that's part of what makes them criminals.
Arming private citizens is the only way to effectively limit the damage caused in these situations. We can't keep weapons out of the hands of criminals--our experience in Washington, DC has shown that (so have the British & Australian experiences)--so we must have more weapons in the hands of trained, law-abiding citizens. The police can't protect us; all they can do is mop up the blood and draw chalk outlines afterwards.
Actually, most folks who carry concealed say that after a few times you start to regard it as a duty to be armed, simply in order to stop incidents like this. Yeah, they're few and far between, but they can be stopped.
We have three alternatives: ban weapons (it never stops at guns--eventually it trickles down to knives, swords, bats and so forth) for everyone except the police & military; allow weapons to those who want them; mandate guns for all except those who explicitly don't want them. Britain chose the first option; it doesn't appear to work very well there. We've chosen the second, although we used to follow the third. Switzerland follows the third option, and has an extremely low crime rate (of course, it's also a very small country with a very different social spirit).
If just a few--maybe just one--person had had military training, he might have made a difference. If just one other person had had a weapon, he might have made a difference. I think that we can see that our experiment in limited weapon-carrying has been a failure; we also see from the areas of the United States with the harshest gun laws (guns are banned in many areas) that weapons bans don't work.
Might it be time to revive the Founders' militia ideal? They passed laws requiring every adult male to register in the militia and to outfit himself with a basic infantryman's kit (knapsack, rifle, ammunition, boots, belt and so forth). I'd add an opt-out provision for pacifists, but other than that would it perhaps be a good idea for folks to spend three weeks getting basic military training after high school? We could shrink the size of our Army (making it essentially a cadre of officers, NCOs & specialists to seed an activated militia) while at the same time making foreign adventures far less likely (militiamen, unlike soldiers, have the right not to fight).
And it would help reduce the death toll in incidents like this.
Had Clinton been the one to do such an environmentally beneficial act we'd still see it in newspapers every week for 4 yrs afterwards.
Heck, if George W. Bush's name were William J. Clinton, he'd be the most popular president ever, at least with the media (and if he's popular with the media, he'd be popular with the people; where one leads, the other follows). From the prescription drug plan, to No Child Left Behind, to his expansion of the federal government into places it has no business being (e.g. higher education), to his war for democracy, he makes a perfect centrist Democrat.
Those of us who are libertarian Republicans, OTOH, can't stand him. He's been the lesser of two evils twice, but he's still evil.
Compare Google Maps to Google Earth, which is more responsive and flexible?
Considering that I use Linux, Google Maps is both more responsive and more flexible. Responsive, because Google Earth is a Windows binary which does nothing for me; flexible, because Google Maps actually displays maps.
As for QuickTime and Windows Media, depending on the codec sometimes I can watch 'em, and sometimes I can hear 'em, and rarely I can both watch and hear 'em. YouTube, OTOH, just works.
All that said, I actually like local client apps. Not desktop apps, really, but CLI apps and Emacs modes. There's something about getting one's work done through an SSH connexion that is just nice.
A provision which you mention would be good for those citizens of the parent country who work in the company's industry; it would be bad for those citizens of the parent country who consume that industry's products.
If you're not willing to help support your neighbor's standard of living, why should he support YOUR standard of living?
First of all, the job of the State is not to support anyone's standard of living; it is to prevent and punish murder, rape, theft and fraud. Everything else is commentary.
Cheaper labour for computer companies is bad for IT folks; it is, however, good for anyone who uses IT products (everyone else). Expensive labour for computer companies is good for IT folks and bad for everyone else.
Or it could be good for everybody, as the additional salary for IT folks will make them more able to be consumers of other people's goods. This is why inflation supports a growing economy.
That's the broken windows fallacy, from a little economic parable. A kid breaks a shopkeeper's window and a crowd gathers. As he's being arrested, a wit in the crowd points out that the kid has created a job for the glazier, who can now buy a new suit from the tailor, who cna buy bread from the baker and so forth. The kid is then hailed as the savior of the town.
What you don't see is what that money could have been used for instead: the shopkeeper might have bought a much nicer suit. Or he may have invested in a new set of goods to offer for sale.
Likewise with the real-life example. You can see that IT folks are making more than they otherwise would, and spending more than they otherwise would. What you don't see is what could have been done with that money instead. Bankers might have been able to offer lower interest rates by spending less money on IT, as just one example. Or restaurants could have offered cheaper food by spending less on POS systems.
The situation is a lot like farm subsidies: a few hundred people make milions extra a year while the population at large pays an extra fifty cents. The payees profit immensely, the payers lose only a little, and everyone's happy. Except for the fact that the market becomes screwy and inefficient.
Except for the fact that [Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage] has pretty much been proven to be false by the last 40 years of American trade deficits.
That is the single most ignorant thing I have ever read on Slashdot. The Law of Comparative Advantage is like that of gravity, or one and one summing to two--it's a mathematical principal and, quite simply, cannot be wrong.
As for trade deficits, who cares? We send the Japanese little pieces of paper, and they send us automobiles. Would you rather have a stack of paper, or a car?
It's also a complete lie when it comes to economies with a huge differnce in cost of labor- for China is actually better at producing *BOTH* maize and wheat than we are, and the only reason the export is flowing the other direction at all is because of government subsidies interfering in the marketplace.
Dude, it was an example. The really interesting thing is that even if China is better at producing both maize and wheat, it's better for it to focus on the one it does best, leaving the rest for everyone else in the world. Besides, even if China did end up producing both wheat and maize more cheaply than us, how are we harmed? We'd have more wheat and maize for less money. Paying less for the essentials of life is generally considered a good thing. And of course folks paying less for food means that they've more to pay for other things.
That's kinda the point of economic efficiency: everyone has more goods than they would otherwise. And that's the problem with economic inefficiency: (on average) everyone ends up poorer than they would otherwise.
A provision which you mention would be good for those citizens of the parent country who work in the company's industry; it would be bad for those citizens of the parent country who consume that industry's products.
Cheaper labour for computer companies is bad for IT folks; it is, however, good for anyone who uses IT products (everyone else). Expensive labour for computer companies is good for IT folks and bad for everyone else.
Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage is pretty much the only thing proven to be true in all of economics; what's remarkable is how many folks are still ignorant of it. If we're better at producing maize than wheat and China's better at producing wheat than maize, it's better for us to focus on maize and for China to focus on wheat; we sell them some of our maize in return for some of their wheat, and there's actually more maize & wheat to go around. This is true even if we're better at producing wheat than China--pretty counter-intuitive, but true nonetheless.
That said, I don't at all approve of the way that Microsoft and other tech companies abuse the H1-B system. It's not a good system, but the rules are the rules, and the game should be played in accordance with them.
Plan 9 did a lot of stuff well & smartly, generally out-Unixing Unix. Unfortunately, it came along too late--and was proprietary for too long--making its market impact pretty much nil. Which once again proves that if one wants to change the world, one really ought to free one's code.
They'd need to either use a different cast (which would suck) or come up with an excuse to reunite everyone (which would most likely seem ridiculously contrived), which makes a DS9 movie relatively unlikely.
Because everyone knows that the Star Trek franchise has scrupulously avoided 'suck' and 'ridiculously contrived' up until now...
I'd like to see a statistically valid double blind test that shows any difference in perception.
Better than a simple double-blind test: a (double-blind, of course) triangle test. In a triangle test, each subject is given three samples of two substances and is asked which two are the same, and which he prefers. Answers to the second question are only counted if the first question is correct.
This is used a lot of in beer tastings, in order to help eliminate a little bit of untrustworthiness from the results.
So by that logic, every garage sale should be sure to send 30% of it's earnings to the government?
Yup. And why shouldn't it? After all, the income from that garage sale is income, and we have an income tax in this country. Now, the simple fact is that's it's exceedingly difficult for the IRS to know how much income one has made on a garage sale, but it's still income, and is still taxed, and if you don't report it (and pay the appropriate taxes), then it's still tax fraud.
Ideally, we'd work to get rid of the federal income tax, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
That fatuous comment gets +4 and mine gets -2? If anyone thinks that the manned space programme will ever enable mankind to leave this solar system, he's a lunatic. Look, I love science fiction and would really, really love to fly to the stars. But it's simply not doable, anymore than wizards & dragons are likely to show up any time soon.
Clearly you're new to the tech industry. Anything good which is at all remotely related to Apple, is attributable to Apple. Anything bad which is directly related to Apple, is not attributable to Apple. E.g.:
Man with iPod in briefcase finds $100 bill: it's all because of Apple
Mac laptops burst into flame while simultaneously playing an audio file 'more souls for our dark master Jobs!': it's the battery manufacturer. Or a worm. Or sunspots. Definitely not Apple, though.
We've not gotten our money's worth out of space, period. Space has been a boondoggle from the beginning. Yes, some neat technologies have come out of the space programme, but they are worth orders of magnitude less than the money poured in. John Derbyshire has written two excellent articles, one in 2005 and one in 2004 about the pointlessness of the space programme.
Sure, space is exciting and romantic, but it's a bloody enormous waste of money.
This has nothing to do with free speech--or at least, not the way the submitter thinks. Google is a corporation, which means that it is a legal person, and hence has a right to free speech, That right includes the right not to speak--and thus it has the right to remove videos which it dislikes. And considering that Mohammedans have a nasty habit of killing people when they're upset, I can understand (although I disagree with) Google's decision not to risk upsetting them.
The right to free speech does not involve the right to be heard. Folks have every right to complain to Amazon; Amazon, another legal person, has every right to hang up the phone.
I do a shopping good turn regularly--by shopping at Wal-Mart. The local mom-and-pops are expensive, which is fine by me but not at all good for poorer folks. Wal-Mart is affordable and offers decent food & produce at a fair price. I wonder sometimes if one were to compare the calories made available by Wal-Mart and various charities, which would win.
If mom-and-pop sell pears for $1 each, and Wal-Mart sells 'em for 10 cents each, then either the pears would have to be pretty damn good or you'd have to be pretty stupid to buy them from mom-and-pop.
Moreover, I have difficulty seeing why exactly we're supposed to prefer the relatively wealthy mom and pop to the shareholders of Wal-Mart. They each do the same job--only Wal-Mart does it more efficiently, using less resources and less energy to deliver more food & goods.
I also shop at the local health food stores, in order to get organic produce (a niche Wal-Mart is currently not interested in) and so forth. But if I'm in the market for what Wal-Mart offers, I generally pick them. I may not be poor, but price matters even to me.
No, the reason we have to put up with "the kinds of onerous security protocols..." is that corporations have lost all sense of loyalty to their employees.
Why should an employer have any more loyalty to his employees than a shopper does to the stores he shops at? You should owe your employer nothing more than your labour; your employer should owe you nothing more than your wages. If someone else can provide the same labour for fewer wages (or more labour for the same wages), your employer should contract with that person instead; if someone else can provide the same wages for less labour (or more wages for the same labour) then you should contract with that employer instead.
I don't owe Safeway my patronage; if I discover a better price at Albertson's then I'll buy there. Why should an employer be any different?
The biggest problem in my eyes is that in America currently, employers want all the benefits of the old system with none of the costs. That is, rather than negotiating a proper contract with each employment, one which spells out exactly what is required from each party and under what terms (e.g. 40 hours a week, time-and-a-half overtime, no more than twenty hours of overtime may be compelled), and under what conditions the contract may be ended (e.g. with two weeks' notice)--instead of doing this, they want every employee to be employed at-will, with even work done on personal time to belong to the employer. This is a relic of the old-fashioned semi-feudal way of doing things.
It's highly advantageous to the employer, but rather negatively so to the employee.
The real solution is for all of us to be under a firm, negotiated contract. When a corporation provides a service to another corporation, there's a contract involved. When you or I provide a service to a corporation, most of the time there's only an implied contract. That's pretty crazy, when you think of it: we're selling a valuable commodity under very vague terms.
We need to make sure that people can vote in more convenient ways consistent with a modern lifestyle. [...] We need to see if we can use this to encourage people even more to participate in the democratic process.
That's begging the question. Why do they 'need' to make sure people can vote in more convenient ways? Isn't that likely to lead to less informed and less able voters overall?
For that matter, why do they 'need' to encourage folks to vote? Voting is a privilege, and if one chooses not to exercise that privilege, that's one's own look-out.
It seems to me that the right thing to do is to discourage voting. Charging $20 (or the equivalent in your local currency--10 pounds over in the UK) to vote; it's not so much that it's unaffordable for anyone (indeed, even the poor spend more than that on beer and cigarettes in a week), but it's enough to make folks think before voting. Even better would be to give a simple test: pick the current holder of the seat for which you're voting; if you don't even know who's currently holding that seat, do you really have any business voting? Ideally, the franchise would be limited: have a slate of perhaps two dozen different qualifications (e.g. college degree; married with three or more children; salary of $50,000/year or more; net worth of $100,000 or more; ownership of 4 or more acres of land; prior or current military service; jury service within the last year; IQ of 95 or greater; prior holder of public office; and so forth), and anyone who meets three of them can vote. Make it a fairly broad slate--my suggestions are from the perspective of a middle-class citizen, but no doubt others could suggest appropriate qualifications (union leadership, maybe?).
The problem is not that too few people vote; it is that too many do. The margin of victory in the popular vote in the recent presidential elections has been less than the number of people with 80 IQs: when the side that can swing the most mental defectives is the victor, that can't be good.
Nope, I didn't bother with computing the lost opportunity cost - mostly because in the long run I considered the lost opportunity of getting solar power installed is much greater.
That's a fair perspective if you believe that the cost of a comparable solar system will increase over time. As an example, let's just say that you pay a constant $3,000/year on electricity, and that a $30,000 solar system would reduce that to $0, and that you could otherwise make 4% on an investment, but that you also have reason to believe that a solar system will get 2% more expensive every year. After a decade, you would have an opportunity cost of $14,407 by going with the solar system and would have spent $30,000 for the system itself, but would have saved $30,000 in electricity bills (you're out a net $14,407); on the other hand, if you'd invested the money you would have spent $30,000 on electricity, saved $30,000 on the system and made $14,407--but the cost of buying a solar system at that point would be $36,570. In other words, as long as the appreciation in the cost of a solar system is less than you could make in another investment, all other things being equal you're better off postponing the purchase.
But of course in real life solar systems, as with most technology, get cheaper over time. You'd have been better off waiting eight years and buying a solar system for a fraction of the cost (maybe 85%, say).
And your 7% return is not correct as it doesn't take into account my marginal rate of taxation which would reduce the ROI to under 4%.
I think you only need to pay capital gains when the investment is sold, although you would need to pay income tax on dividends. But you do raise an important point: one does need to take into account the effects of taxation & inflation, especially over longish periods of time. A 2% annual inflation rate means that $100,000 in 2017 would be worth $82,000 in today's money, and the effects of taxation can make an otherwise sensible investment insane (or an insane one sensible).
As an alternative, I could have paid for my installation without laying out any of my own money by taking out a mortgage loan and repaying the loan out of the savings. This works rather well because this is a home improvement so the interest is tax deductible.
The interest is tax deductible, but that just means it's subtracted from what you earn. That means that for every $100 you pay in interest you save at most $33. Paying $33 to save $100 is brilliant; paying $100 to save $33 is nonsensical. Not that tax advantages can't make a difference at the margins, but in general it is almost always better to pay cash than to borrow money (the exception is when you can generate a greater rate of return with the cash than you'd pay in interest; this is effectively leverage, borrowing money at, say, 4% and making money at %12 can be quite remunerative).
None of this is to say that you shouldn't have gone with a solar system; one also has to factor in the advantages of feeling good about oneself, of being more self-sufficient and of knowing that one is advancing technology. Those are all things upon which you may wish to put a dollar value. I'm jsut pointing out that your decision may not have been the best from a financial perspective. Money's not the only thing in the world, after all!
So the pay-off on $31,000 is eight years? Did you factor into your equations the interest on $31,000 of debt (if you had to borrow money to pay for it), or the opportunity cost of not investing that $31,000 in the market? Since 2003 it's been possible to make well over 10% in the market, but let's just assume a moderate 7% return; that $31,000 would have appreciated to $53,264 (ah, the miracle of compound interest). If you didn't factor that into the equation, that means that your break-even point is almost 14 years away. Except that then there're an additional 6 years of interest to account for, and I'm too lazy to figure the math out.
Its not that the NFL 'prefers' one over the other, its that the NFL is only on one (Sirius), while other sports (baseball, hockey, college sports) are only on the other (XM). Thats where people get upset over having to choose between one or the other, if you are a big sports fan you have to choose between listening to football or baseball on your XM radio.
Big sports fans are logical enough to deduce that if different sports are offered on different satellite networks, then they cannot listen to all sports on a single network? When did that happen?
Somewhat more seriously, it seems to me that in-car radio should be music only: no talk, no commercials, no sports. Why? Because music can be appreciated with a very small amount of brainpower, whereas those other things suck up more cycles--and if there's one thing the standard driver doesn't need, it's having his brain doing anything other than driving.
The fact that I only ever listen ot music has absolutely nothing at all to do with this recommendation, honest:-)
The article didn't mention my favourite probiotic food: real ale. Yup, real, unfiltered, unpasteurised beer contains millions of little tiny living yeast cells. Granted, I don't think that brewer's yeast has any really beneficial effect (the B12 they contain is almost certainly not bioavailable to man), but still, that's pretty cool.
Another common probiotic is cheese. Yup, cheese is made by adding bacteria to milk to sour it, then adding rennet to curdle the soured milk, then straining, pressing & aging the curds. An unpasteurised cheese will contain lots of lactobacilli (and if a blue cheese, penicillium), as well as the other strains responsible for the particular cheese's distinctive flavour.
And then there's keffir, a drink made by fermenting milk. You can buy it in the store these days, where it tastes something like runny yoghurt.
Still, the best use of microbes in food has got to be beer. As the wise man said, beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
Less guns doesn't work--there are still other weapons. Banning all weapons makes us into the UK, where it's illegal to defend yourself with a stick!
Arming private citizens is the only way to effectively limit the damage caused in these situations. We can't keep weapons out of the hands of criminals--our experience in Washington, DC has shown that (so have the British & Australian experiences)--so we must have more weapons in the hands of trained, law-abiding citizens. The police can't protect us; all they can do is mop up the blood and draw chalk outlines afterwards.
We have three alternatives: ban weapons (it never stops at guns--eventually it trickles down to knives, swords, bats and so forth) for everyone except the police & military; allow weapons to those who want them; mandate guns for all except those who explicitly don't want them. Britain chose the first option; it doesn't appear to work very well there. We've chosen the second, although we used to follow the third. Switzerland follows the third option, and has an extremely low crime rate (of course, it's also a very small country with a very different social spirit).
If just a few--maybe just one--person had had military training, he might have made a difference. If just one other person had had a weapon, he might have made a difference. I think that we can see that our experiment in limited weapon-carrying has been a failure; we also see from the areas of the United States with the harshest gun laws (guns are banned in many areas) that weapons bans don't work.
Might it be time to revive the Founders' militia ideal? They passed laws requiring every adult male to register in the militia and to outfit himself with a basic infantryman's kit (knapsack, rifle, ammunition, boots, belt and so forth). I'd add an opt-out provision for pacifists, but other than that would it perhaps be a good idea for folks to spend three weeks getting basic military training after high school? We could shrink the size of our Army (making it essentially a cadre of officers, NCOs & specialists to seed an activated militia) while at the same time making foreign adventures far less likely (militiamen, unlike soldiers, have the right not to fight).
And it would help reduce the death toll in incidents like this.
Heck, if George W. Bush's name were William J. Clinton, he'd be the most popular president ever, at least with the media (and if he's popular with the media, he'd be popular with the people; where one leads, the other follows). From the prescription drug plan, to No Child Left Behind, to his expansion of the federal government into places it has no business being (e.g. higher education), to his war for democracy, he makes a perfect centrist Democrat.
Those of us who are libertarian Republicans, OTOH, can't stand him. He's been the lesser of two evils twice, but he's still evil.
Considering that I use Linux, Google Maps is both more responsive and more flexible. Responsive, because Google Earth is a Windows binary which does nothing for me; flexible, because Google Maps actually displays maps.
As for QuickTime and Windows Media, depending on the codec sometimes I can watch 'em, and sometimes I can hear 'em, and rarely I can both watch and hear 'em. YouTube, OTOH, just works.
All that said, I actually like local client apps. Not desktop apps, really, but CLI apps and Emacs modes. There's something about getting one's work done through an SSH connexion that is just nice.
Ummm, svn is integrated with the shell. It's a nice little command called svn.
Usenet was invented on Unix (well, close to it anyway). Try strn or gnus.
First of all, the job of the State is not to support anyone's standard of living; it is to prevent and punish murder, rape, theft and fraud. Everything else is commentary.
That's the broken windows fallacy, from a little economic parable. A kid breaks a shopkeeper's window and a crowd gathers. As he's being arrested, a wit in the crowd points out that the kid has created a job for the glazier, who can now buy a new suit from the tailor, who cna buy bread from the baker and so forth. The kid is then hailed as the savior of the town.
What you don't see is what that money could have been used for instead: the shopkeeper might have bought a much nicer suit. Or he may have invested in a new set of goods to offer for sale.
Likewise with the real-life example. You can see that IT folks are making more than they otherwise would, and spending more than they otherwise would. What you don't see is what could have been done with that money instead. Bankers might have been able to offer lower interest rates by spending less money on IT, as just one example. Or restaurants could have offered cheaper food by spending less on POS systems.
The situation is a lot like farm subsidies: a few hundred people make milions extra a year while the population at large pays an extra fifty cents. The payees profit immensely, the payers lose only a little, and everyone's happy. Except for the fact that the market becomes screwy and inefficient.
That is the single most ignorant thing I have ever read on Slashdot. The Law of Comparative Advantage is like that of gravity, or one and one summing to two--it's a mathematical principal and, quite simply, cannot be wrong.
As for trade deficits, who cares? We send the Japanese little pieces of paper, and they send us automobiles. Would you rather have a stack of paper, or a car?
Dude, it was an example. The really interesting thing is that even if China is better at producing both maize and wheat, it's better for it to focus on the one it does best, leaving the rest for everyone else in the world. Besides, even if China did end up producing both wheat and maize more cheaply than us, how are we harmed? We'd have more wheat and maize for less money. Paying less for the essentials of life is generally considered a good thing. And of course folks paying less for food means that they've more to pay for other things.
That's kinda the point of economic efficiency: everyone has more goods than they would otherwise. And that's the problem with economic inefficiency: (on average) everyone ends up poorer than they would otherwise.
Cheaper labour for computer companies is bad for IT folks; it is, however, good for anyone who uses IT products (everyone else). Expensive labour for computer companies is good for IT folks and bad for everyone else.
Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage is pretty much the only thing proven to be true in all of economics; what's remarkable is how many folks are still ignorant of it. If we're better at producing maize than wheat and China's better at producing wheat than maize, it's better for us to focus on maize and for China to focus on wheat; we sell them some of our maize in return for some of their wheat, and there's actually more maize & wheat to go around. This is true even if we're better at producing wheat than China--pretty counter-intuitive, but true nonetheless.
That said, I don't at all approve of the way that Microsoft and other tech companies abuse the H1-B system. It's not a good system, but the rules are the rules, and the game should be played in accordance with them.
Plan 9 did a lot of stuff well & smartly, generally out-Unixing Unix. Unfortunately, it came along too late--and was proprietary for too long--making its market impact pretty much nil. Which once again proves that if one wants to change the world, one really ought to free one's code.
Because everyone knows that the Star Trek franchise has scrupulously avoided 'suck' and 'ridiculously contrived' up until now...
Better than a simple double-blind test: a (double-blind, of course) triangle test. In a triangle test, each subject is given three samples of two substances and is asked which two are the same, and which he prefers. Answers to the second question are only counted if the first question is correct.
This is used a lot of in beer tastings, in order to help eliminate a little bit of untrustworthiness from the results.
Yup. And why shouldn't it? After all, the income from that garage sale is income, and we have an income tax in this country. Now, the simple fact is that's it's exceedingly difficult for the IRS to know how much income one has made on a garage sale, but it's still income, and is still taxed, and if you don't report it (and pay the appropriate taxes), then it's still tax fraud.
Ideally, we'd work to get rid of the federal income tax, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
That fatuous comment gets +4 and mine gets -2? If anyone thinks that the manned space programme will ever enable mankind to leave this solar system, he's a lunatic. Look, I love science fiction and would really, really love to fly to the stars. But it's simply not doable, anymore than wizards & dragons are likely to show up any time soon.
Whose fault is Java? Blame Canada!
- Man with iPod in briefcase finds $100 bill: it's all because of Apple
- Mac laptops burst into flame while simultaneously playing an audio file 'more souls for our dark master Jobs!': it's the battery manufacturer. Or a worm. Or sunspots. Definitely not Apple, though.
Hope this has helped.Sure, space is exciting and romantic, but it's a bloody enormous waste of money.
Teenagers don't need a livable wage. And Wal-Mart pays $9.68 on average, which is well above the minimum wage.
The right to free speech does not involve the right to be heard. Folks have every right to complain to Amazon; Amazon, another legal person, has every right to hang up the phone.
If mom-and-pop sell pears for $1 each, and Wal-Mart sells 'em for 10 cents each, then either the pears would have to be pretty damn good or you'd have to be pretty stupid to buy them from mom-and-pop.
Moreover, I have difficulty seeing why exactly we're supposed to prefer the relatively wealthy mom and pop to the shareholders of Wal-Mart. They each do the same job--only Wal-Mart does it more efficiently, using less resources and less energy to deliver more food & goods.
I also shop at the local health food stores, in order to get organic produce (a niche Wal-Mart is currently not interested in) and so forth. But if I'm in the market for what Wal-Mart offers, I generally pick them. I may not be poor, but price matters even to me.
Why should an employer have any more loyalty to his employees than a shopper does to the stores he shops at? You should owe your employer nothing more than your labour; your employer should owe you nothing more than your wages. If someone else can provide the same labour for fewer wages (or more labour for the same wages), your employer should contract with that person instead; if someone else can provide the same wages for less labour (or more wages for the same labour) then you should contract with that employer instead.
I don't owe Safeway my patronage; if I discover a better price at Albertson's then I'll buy there. Why should an employer be any different?
The biggest problem in my eyes is that in America currently, employers want all the benefits of the old system with none of the costs. That is, rather than negotiating a proper contract with each employment, one which spells out exactly what is required from each party and under what terms (e.g. 40 hours a week, time-and-a-half overtime, no more than twenty hours of overtime may be compelled), and under what conditions the contract may be ended (e.g. with two weeks' notice)--instead of doing this, they want every employee to be employed at-will, with even work done on personal time to belong to the employer. This is a relic of the old-fashioned semi-feudal way of doing things.
It's highly advantageous to the employer, but rather negatively so to the employee.
The real solution is for all of us to be under a firm, negotiated contract. When a corporation provides a service to another corporation, there's a contract involved. When you or I provide a service to a corporation, most of the time there's only an implied contract. That's pretty crazy, when you think of it: we're selling a valuable commodity under very vague terms.
That's begging the question. Why do they 'need' to make sure people can vote in more convenient ways? Isn't that likely to lead to less informed and less able voters overall?
For that matter, why do they 'need' to encourage folks to vote? Voting is a privilege, and if one chooses not to exercise that privilege, that's one's own look-out.
It seems to me that the right thing to do is to discourage voting. Charging $20 (or the equivalent in your local currency--10 pounds over in the UK) to vote; it's not so much that it's unaffordable for anyone (indeed, even the poor spend more than that on beer and cigarettes in a week), but it's enough to make folks think before voting. Even better would be to give a simple test: pick the current holder of the seat for which you're voting; if you don't even know who's currently holding that seat, do you really have any business voting? Ideally, the franchise would be limited: have a slate of perhaps two dozen different qualifications (e.g. college degree; married with three or more children; salary of $50,000/year or more; net worth of $100,000 or more; ownership of 4 or more acres of land; prior or current military service; jury service within the last year; IQ of 95 or greater; prior holder of public office; and so forth), and anyone who meets three of them can vote. Make it a fairly broad slate--my suggestions are from the perspective of a middle-class citizen, but no doubt others could suggest appropriate qualifications (union leadership, maybe?).
The problem is not that too few people vote; it is that too many do. The margin of victory in the popular vote in the recent presidential elections has been less than the number of people with 80 IQs: when the side that can swing the most mental defectives is the victor, that can't be good.
But of course in real life solar systems, as with most technology, get cheaper over time. You'd have been better off waiting eight years and buying a solar system for a fraction of the cost (maybe 85%, say).
I think you only need to pay capital gains when the investment is sold, although you would need to pay income tax on dividends. But you do raise an important point: one does need to take into account the effects of taxation & inflation, especially over longish periods of time. A 2% annual inflation rate means that $100,000 in 2017 would be worth $82,000 in today's money, and the effects of taxation can make an otherwise sensible investment insane (or an insane one sensible).
The interest is tax deductible, but that just means it's subtracted from what you earn. That means that for every $100 you pay in interest you save at most $33. Paying $33 to save $100 is brilliant; paying $100 to save $33 is nonsensical. Not that tax advantages can't make a difference at the margins, but in general it is almost always better to pay cash than to borrow money (the exception is when you can generate a greater rate of return with the cash than you'd pay in interest; this is effectively leverage, borrowing money at, say, 4% and making money at %12 can be quite remunerative).
None of this is to say that you shouldn't have gone with a solar system; one also has to factor in the advantages of feeling good about oneself, of being more self-sufficient and of knowing that one is advancing technology. Those are all things upon which you may wish to put a dollar value. I'm jsut pointing out that your decision may not have been the best from a financial perspective. Money's not the only thing in the world, after all!
So the pay-off on $31,000 is eight years? Did you factor into your equations the interest on $31,000 of debt (if you had to borrow money to pay for it), or the opportunity cost of not investing that $31,000 in the market? Since 2003 it's been possible to make well over 10% in the market, but let's just assume a moderate 7% return; that $31,000 would have appreciated to $53,264 (ah, the miracle of compound interest). If you didn't factor that into the equation, that means that your break-even point is almost 14 years away. Except that then there're an additional 6 years of interest to account for, and I'm too lazy to figure the math out.
Big sports fans are logical enough to deduce that if different sports are offered on different satellite networks, then they cannot listen to all sports on a single network? When did that happen?
Somewhat more seriously, it seems to me that in-car radio should be music only: no talk, no commercials, no sports. Why? Because music can be appreciated with a very small amount of brainpower, whereas those other things suck up more cycles--and if there's one thing the standard driver doesn't need, it's having his brain doing anything other than driving.
The fact that I only ever listen ot music has absolutely nothing at all to do with this recommendation, honest:-)
Another common probiotic is cheese. Yup, cheese is made by adding bacteria to milk to sour it, then adding rennet to curdle the soured milk, then straining, pressing & aging the curds. An unpasteurised cheese will contain lots of lactobacilli (and if a blue cheese, penicillium), as well as the other strains responsible for the particular cheese's distinctive flavour.
And then there's keffir, a drink made by fermenting milk. You can buy it in the store these days, where it tastes something like runny yoghurt.
Still, the best use of microbes in food has got to be beer. As the wise man said, beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.