I see *nothing* wrong with placing (say) a $5 mil (adjusted for inflation) cap on incomes and taxing everything after that at 90%.
Indicating that you are an economic illiterate. The problem is that some people do more than $5 million worth of work. If they cannot be properly paid for that work, they don't do it--and their work is precisely that which is most important.
Yeah, there are people with lots of money. That's cool with me: they'll spend it on something one way or the other. A rising tide lifts all boats...
Why would anyone pay for television service? I gave it up six years ago and haven't looked back. Get a subscription to Netflix or something similar, then watch TV shows on DVD. Watch when you want, pause to take a leak or get some work done, never see another ad again. Television is for rubes.
Interestingly, given our electoral college and Senate, this doesn't matter that much. Sure, the Republicans in Iowa can manufacture votes (as can the Democrats in New York)--but it doesn't matter, as even an extra 10 million popular votes mean absolutely nothing in a presidential election: the Republican candidate gets Indiana's electors and the Democrat gets New York's.
They are embryos that would have been destroyed, yes. Whether that makes them waste or not is of course a matter of some contention. The pro-life movement has stepped up to the challenge to be logically consistent, and is working on such things as embryo adoption in order to ensure that every human gets at least a chance to be born.
Our environment contains more substances today which cause cells to mutate: estrogen-like chemicals, fine soot particles, innumerous medicines, radioactive decay, socially acceptable behaviors like smoking.
Ummm...we've been surrounded by soot since the invention of fire. And as for smoking being socially acceptable, what country do you live in? Here in the US of A, we're about two steps from smokers being branded with an 'S' on their foreheads. I'm stockpiling a 60-year supply of pipe tobacco just in case it's banned.
Actually, 'plutoid' would make the most sense. The -oid ending means 'like but not really' and is Greek in origin (like the name Pluto)--thus an android is like a man, but not a man, an asteroid is like a star but not a star and so forth (yes, this means that a factoid is not a fact--a better word is 'factlet' for a little fact). Anyway, since these plutons are like Pluto but not Pluto, 'plutoid' is the best term.
Bah, American craft brewers make the best beer (seriously--our megabrewers produce utter swill, but the microbrewers are insanely great), followed by the English, followed by the Belgians. German and Czech beers are almost all lagers. Bleah.
You might complain that not everyone is familiar with Hawaaian words, but then not everyone is familiar with baseball terminology from which you derived "BullPen".
Call it a hunch, but I daresay that more folks understand baseball references than Hawaiian words. And in fact more folks understand 'bullpen' even without knowing that it's a baseball reference.
If federal government didn't regulate the safety of food and water, who would do it?
The states, perhaps? Where is it written that the federal government is concerned with food safety? I can tell you where it's not written--it's not in the Constitution. The federal Congress does have the power to regulate food which crosses state lines, of course, and so I imagine that even in a more federalist republic the national food standards would tend to hold.
Many have wisely chosen to go the BSD or MIT license route.
Wisely? Wisely?!? That's more than a little begging the question: how praytell is a BSD-style license wise? It means that one's code can be incorporated into proprietary software, and that one will not necessarily receive bug fixes or improvements. How is that wise?
One wonders if this AC is a Microsoft astroturfer...
I didn't realise that anyone still used real units to do engineering work--it's nice to know that there's still some sanity left in the world. Any suggestions for engineering references using English units?
...for the Seattle Mariners - there's pretty much only one way to type that.
You grossly over-estimate the intelligence of the average sports fan. No doubt that's the least common spelling. I daresay the most common is something along the lines of 'Seeaddle Mayrnurs.'
We've gained a huge number of advances in science and technology from NASA. If you consider materials science alone, the cost is worth it. They conduct research on a monumentous scale.
One needs to examine both the cost and the benefit. It'd be absurd to deny that the space program has had some massive benefits--but it'd also be absurd to deny that its cost has been staggering. Now, is that cost worth it? Are Tang and zero-G pens worth several trillion dollars in R&D? I'm being more than a little facetious, but I think you see my point.
Even the materials science that you mention: how useful has it actually been? Certainly the heat-resistant tiles on the shuttle are neat, but are they useful outside of the space programme?
I don't doubt that there might be many benefits of the space program that I don't know of, but I do know that it has been one of the largest expenditures of money ever. It'd be cool someday to see a final accounting by an unbiased party.
A big benefit I can think of: satellite program, thus satcom, thus GPS.
That's one of the great things about slide rules--they give one an excellent feel for the continuous nature of most mathematical & engineering work. Calculators give you an excellent answer, but they give just the answer--they don't have any indication what effect a small difference in the input parameters would have on the answer.
A fellow I know has created a set of brewing slide rules which illustrate this very well. You can, for instance, fiddle with your starting gravity and hop additions to get a particular final amount of IBUs (International BIttering Units--the standard measure of hop bitterness in beer); you can easily see what slight changes in hop amounts, boil times, starting gravity and so forth wil have. Or you can start with the desired IBUs, and see what ranges of additions make sense for your beer.
If all one can do is get the right answer, one's ability to think outside the box, to come up with new answers to new questions is reduced.
We should be out there like real men, pro-actively fighting the terrorist threat... by educating people, improving their quality of life, allowing them self-determination and treating them fairly - that's how you stop terrorism, by taking away its recruits.
Well, that's one of the more ignorant things I've read today. The bulk fo the majro terrorists have been well-educated and well-off; we have been giving Middle Easterners self-determination as part of Bush's massively wrong-headed 'everyone wants to be free' scheme.
Unfortunately, not everyone is a Western libertarian; indeed, the Islamists hate such things as freedom of religion and speech, and equality between men & women--and they believe that through terror they can expand the Dar al-Islam. They are not stupid (indeed, many are quite intelligent); rather, they are evil: their ideals are diametrically opposed to our own.
The sooner the West realises that we are in a struggle for survival, the sooner we can deal with this seriously.
Not that I think banning liquids on flights is serious.
I wouldn't ordinarily throw names like that around, but what else do you call some who's voting record deviates from the President's wishes in less than 1 percent of his votes?
Source? From what I can tell Lieberman is only with Bush on the war issue.
Yes, Colorado is ugly square and flat. Citizens of the other 49 states: please don't bother coming here! Also, we get 6 feet of snow a day, even in the summer. Our winters see lows in the negative 80s and our summers highs in the 120s. Also, wild Indians roam the plains, scalping tourists. So you might as well stay in California.
Not thinking, which you advocate above, is the main cause of problems in human history.
Dude, you don't think about everything; most of us don't. Did you ensure that every router between you and Slashdot works? No, of course not--you relied on experts to do that for you. And note that I'm not advocating that one not think at all--merely that one hire an expert to do the heavy lifting, and maintain enough of a grasp of the subject to spot BS.
What common ground does free software have with the proprietary software vendors? We all breathe oxygen, yes, but I think it stops pretty soon after that. Free software is about freedom, about having the ability to see, modify and distribute the source to the software one uses. The will never be compatible with the proprietary software model of user enslavement.
That's pretty much it: I went to school in Texas about an hour north of Dallas, and all my friends live down there--what you wrote is why I haven't moved down there. The people are extremely nice; Texans are the friendliest people on the planet. The culture down there is pretty non-existent, though. At least when I was there, Dallas had no real downtown: it had several different areas, one for live music, one for bars, one for arts and so forth. At the time public transportation was horrid, although I'm told that the new light rail has improved things a lot. You have to own a car to get just about anywhere, and people see nothing wrong with spending money on toll roads.
The weather is absolutely horrible: miserably hot in the summer and biting cold in the winter. With icestorms. OTOH fall in Texas is splendid, much better than most places I've been.
As you noted, Texans are big fans of big box stores and zoned areas. With cheap gas maybe it all made sense and was worth it, but I just don't see it anymore.
I'd love to return, as I miss my college friends. But I don't think I could forsake Denver for Dallas.
The same thing has happened here in Colorado. Will someone please explain why you'd move to a new state ebcause you like it better than your old one, then immediately turn around and make the new state just like the old one? And blame the idiot Supreme Court which decided that state senators cannot be chosen like federal senators--thus in Colorado what Denver wants, Denver gets, and screw the rest of the state.
We'd never have had the state smoking ban without Californians; we'd never have screwed with TABOR; we'd never have half the idiot boondoggles without 'em. I miss my state!
Most are more concerned with what their priest tells them every week on how to act, than actually thinking about things for themselves.
Did you design & build your own car? Did you design & mix the allows to create it? Did you explore, drill for & refine the oil to make its fuel?
If not, why do you expect people to do the same with morality or philosophy? Get a basic understanding of the field, then hire an expert to do the heavy lifting for you; know just enough to keep a sanity check on him. It's called delegation.
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Indicating that you are an economic illiterate. The problem is that some people do more than $5 million worth of work. If they cannot be properly paid for that work, they don't do it--and their work is precisely that which is most important.
Yeah, there are people with lots of money. That's cool with me: they'll spend it on something one way or the other. A rising tide lifts all boats...
Why would anyone pay for television service? I gave it up six years ago and haven't looked back. Get a subscription to Netflix or something similar, then watch TV shows on DVD. Watch when you want, pause to take a leak or get some work done, never see another ad again. Television is for rubes.
Interestingly, given our electoral college and Senate, this doesn't matter that much. Sure, the Republicans in Iowa can manufacture votes (as can the Democrats in New York)--but it doesn't matter, as even an extra 10 million popular votes mean absolutely nothing in a presidential election: the Republican candidate gets Indiana's electors and the Democrat gets New York's.
They are embryos that would have been destroyed, yes. Whether that makes them waste or not is of course a matter of some contention. The pro-life movement has stepped up to the challenge to be logically consistent, and is working on such things as embryo adoption in order to ensure that every human gets at least a chance to be born.
Actually, 'plutoid' would make the most sense. The -oid ending means 'like but not really' and is Greek in origin (like the name Pluto)--thus an android is like a man, but not a man, an asteroid is like a star but not a star and so forth (yes, this means that a factoid is not a fact--a better word is 'factlet' for a little fact). Anyway, since these plutons are like Pluto but not Pluto, 'plutoid' is the best term.
Bah, American craft brewers make the best beer (seriously--our megabrewers produce utter swill, but the microbrewers are insanely great), followed by the English, followed by the Belgians. German and Czech beers are almost all lagers. Bleah.
Call it a hunch, but I daresay that more folks understand baseball references than Hawaiian words. And in fact more folks understand 'bullpen' even without knowing that it's a baseball reference.
The states, perhaps? Where is it written that the federal government is concerned with food safety? I can tell you where it's not written--it's not in the Constitution. The federal Congress does have the power to regulate food which crosses state lines, of course, and so I imagine that even in a more federalist republic the national food standards would tend to hold.
Wisely? Wisely?!? That's more than a little begging the question: how praytell is a BSD-style license wise? It means that one's code can be incorporated into proprietary software, and that one will not necessarily receive bug fixes or improvements. How is that wise?
One wonders if this AC is a Microsoft astroturfer...
Yes:-)
I didn't realise that anyone still used real units to do engineering work--it's nice to know that there's still some sanity left in the world. Any suggestions for engineering references using English units?
You grossly over-estimate the intelligence of the average sports fan. No doubt that's the least common spelling. I daresay the most common is something along the lines of 'Seeaddle Mayrnurs.'
One needs to examine both the cost and the benefit. It'd be absurd to deny that the space program has had some massive benefits--but it'd also be absurd to deny that its cost has been staggering. Now, is that cost worth it? Are Tang and zero-G pens worth several trillion dollars in R&D? I'm being more than a little facetious, but I think you see my point.
Even the materials science that you mention: how useful has it actually been? Certainly the heat-resistant tiles on the shuttle are neat, but are they useful outside of the space programme?
I don't doubt that there might be many benefits of the space program that I don't know of, but I do know that it has been one of the largest expenditures of money ever. It'd be cool someday to see a final accounting by an unbiased party.
A big benefit I can think of: satellite program, thus satcom, thus GPS.
A fellow I know has created a set of brewing slide rules which illustrate this very well. You can, for instance, fiddle with your starting gravity and hop additions to get a particular final amount of IBUs (International BIttering Units--the standard measure of hop bitterness in beer); you can easily see what slight changes in hop amounts, boil times, starting gravity and so forth wil have. Or you can start with the desired IBUs, and see what ranges of additions make sense for your beer.
If all one can do is get the right answer, one's ability to think outside the box, to come up with new answers to new questions is reduced.
Don't give the TSA any ideas, dude!
What I said almost five years ago is proving true: eventually we'll fly in hospital gowns, strip-searched and strapped to our seats.
Well, that's one of the more ignorant things I've read today. The bulk fo the majro terrorists have been well-educated and well-off; we have been giving Middle Easterners self-determination as part of Bush's massively wrong-headed 'everyone wants to be free' scheme.
Unfortunately, not everyone is a Western libertarian; indeed, the Islamists hate such things as freedom of religion and speech, and equality between men & women--and they believe that through terror they can expand the Dar al-Islam. They are not stupid (indeed, many are quite intelligent); rather, they are evil: their ideals are diametrically opposed to our own.
The sooner the West realises that we are in a struggle for survival, the sooner we can deal with this seriously.
Not that I think banning liquids on flights is serious.
Source? From what I can tell Lieberman is only with Bush on the war issue.
You think the weather in Denver is worse than that in Boston?!? How?
Please, stay in California.
Dude, you don't think about everything; most of us don't. Did you ensure that every router between you and Slashdot works? No, of course not--you relied on experts to do that for you. And note that I'm not advocating that one not think at all--merely that one hire an expert to do the heavy lifting, and maintain enough of a grasp of the subject to spot BS.
What common ground does free software have with the proprietary software vendors? We all breathe oxygen, yes, but I think it stops pretty soon after that. Free software is about freedom, about having the ability to see, modify and distribute the source to the software one uses. The will never be compatible with the proprietary software model of user enslavement.
The weather is absolutely horrible: miserably hot in the summer and biting cold in the winter. With icestorms. OTOH fall in Texas is splendid, much better than most places I've been.
As you noted, Texans are big fans of big box stores and zoned areas. With cheap gas maybe it all made sense and was worth it, but I just don't see it anymore.
I'd love to return, as I miss my college friends. But I don't think I could forsake Denver for Dallas.
We'd never have had the state smoking ban without Californians; we'd never have screwed with TABOR; we'd never have half the idiot boondoggles without 'em. I miss my state!
Did you design & build your own car? Did you design & mix the allows to create it? Did you explore, drill for & refine the oil to make its fuel?
If not, why do you expect people to do the same with morality or philosophy? Get a basic understanding of the field, then hire an expert to do the heavy lifting for you; know just enough to keep a sanity check on him. It's called delegation.