Try what again? Money to pay for items in the federal budget such as government employee salaries, upkeep on the buildings, defense, etc. comes from the US Treasury. Payroll taxes do not go into the treasury, they go into items like the social security trust fund. The only way payroll taxes get into the treasury is if the administrator of that program buys treasury bonds. And those will be repaid with interest. To suggest that payroll taxes fund the government is disingenuous and mendacious.
Since the point is specifically FEDERAL INCOME TAX those don't count. And yes the social security trust fund buys treasury bonds, which will be repaid with interest.
The portion of payroll taxes that are paid by the employee, and the reason they are distinguished from income taxes, are dedicated to specific programs. They are not put in the general fund and cannot be used for anything except the specific program they were collected for. Additionally people who fit into the 47% of household that are not paying federal income taxes will draw more from these programs during their life than they contribute. For some programs most everyone draws more than they contribute, for example from the wikipedia article on medicare:
For example, we see in Figure 170 that the married worker earning $95,000 is estimated to get net benefits of $393,000, while the single worker earning $5,000 is estimated to get $277,000. In either case, the benefits paid to the worker greatly exceed the taxes paid by the worker (and pose a financial burden on the system); however, the high-earning married worker gets a better "return," so to speak, on each tax dollar paid into the system.
Here's another little fact that is rarely mentioned (from item #1):
The bottom 40 percent, on average, make a profit from the federal income tax, meaning they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes. For those people, the government sends them a payment.
Awesome, no?
Even #2, which is trying to cloud the issue, flat out says:
The 47 percent number is not wrong. The stimulus programs of the last two years — the first one signed by President George W. Bush, the second and larger one by President Obama — have increased the number of households that receive enough of a tax credit to wipe out their federal income tax liability.
He goes on to talk about payroll taxes, etc. But the thing about payroll taxes is that they are dedicated to specific programs. Payments into social security aren't available to be used for running the government and funding non-entitlement services. When you hear about the government spending the money in the social security trust fund, what is happening is that the trust fund is buying treasury bonds, i.e. it's a loan that will be paid back. The other point that people should be aware of is that for all the payroll taxes items (medicare, medicaid, social security) the "poor" will draw more out than they ever put in.
If it were only a matter of money you'd be right, but it's often a matter of opportunity cost as well. People have to trade time away from their families for additional income. If you reduce the amount they can earn through higher tax rates they may choose not to make that trade.
No, it only has that effect on very stupid people. Tax rates only apply to the portion of taxable income within the corresponding tax bracket. For example, of we tax 10% of taxable income in the bracket from $0 to $100, and 20% in the bracket from $100.01 up, a person making $100 (and thus paying $10 in tax) would be wise to try to make more; if he managed to make $200 in taxable income, he would only pay $30 in tax: $10 for the first hundred and $20 for the second hundred. This means that instead of having only $90 left, he has $170 -- if he ever cared about money, the higher tax would not have discouraged him. You seem to think that the higher rate would apply to all income, rather than only the income in the higher bracket, but if we refer back to the top of the paragraph, I guess we know where that leaves you.
You are over simplifying the situation. All through the income range of $0 - $60,000 (may go higher) there are a number of programs that kick in and phase out as your income changes. While it's not entirely taxes, earning an extra $1 certainly can cost you more than a dollar because you will become ineligible for certain programs and deductions.
States do have the right to collect that tax, that's what this whole discussion is about. It's about whether amazon is required to collect it for them. Pretty much every state has a use tax that people should be paying for all their untaxed items purchased from out of state. If that's not happening, you can hardly blame amazon that a whole bunch of whiners who are demanding government services aren't paying they legally required taxes that fund those services.
What myth? The "poor" don't pay federal income taxes. The federal budget is funded by federal income taxes. The fact that "poor" people pay sales taxes, state taxes, etc. doesn't change the fact that 47% of American households do not contribute to the federal budget. Hell, a good chunk of the "poor" get more back on their irs refund than they paid in.
Dear Larry, Sergey, Eric, Mark, Jerry, and friends:
If the brightest idea all your super-smart people can come up with is to interpose yourselves into every interaction a human being is involved in on the internet, then we don't need your kind of economic engine. Be glad all that's being suggested is that people be able to opt out. Consider these alternatives before you start crying into your gold plated mugs of artisenal beer:
a) In order to maintain a level of equality we implant a camera, call it a "third-eye", into your foreheads and stream it live to the internet along with a GPS tracker allowing anyone who gives a shit to know where you are and what you are doing at all times. b) We allow you to collect any data you want about people but we strip you of the corporate protections and make you personally liable for any leaks of any data you collected regardless of how many times it's been sold and resold.
So stop with the whining and use those big brains to do something beyond implying that you can improving marketing tactics. You wankers.
I tend to get annoyed at LCD lights on Christmas trees, LCD lights inside of cars and brake lights, monitors, movies, CRT monitor refresh at low rates, and so forth.
Huh? Do you mean LED? Also LED powered by a DC source (automobile instrument panels, brake lights, etc.) have zero flicker.
Just because whatever you are leveraging to advance your business is open source doesn't mean you aren't committing anti-trust violations. In this case they are using youtube to push webm to drive up their browser and cellphone OS market share.
What you don't seem to understand, and the original reason in identifying that developers don't seem to grasp the difference between enterprise storage and consumer storage, is that the random ideas people have to use things that make sense to them but end up getting rejected by the IT depart, there are actual reasons for that rejection. The whole question isn't about 0 IOPS or 100 IOPS. It's whether the business wants to expend resources building a solution that is going to fail in multiple fashions That is going to end up costing more in support than just doing it right the first time. When someone comes up to the IT department and asks for 2 TB of storage and IT responds by requesting a capex in the amount of $20,000 - $40,000 it's not because they are being dicks. They have a reason for it and that reason is that the data needs to be available and accessible.
As far as the 10 years, 3 days guy goes, I'd say that yes his answer of three days backup is all you need is correct. If it wasn't then either he'd be gone from the company or the policy would be different. If for some reason you think the policy should be different then you need to write up your rational, provide supporting evidence and present it to the appropriate people. If the message comes back down that your proposal has been rejected, then that's how it goes. Don't be a crybaby and don't expect that every idea you have is obvious and right. Sometimes even your strongly held beliefs are not shared by your supervisors and you won't always get what you want.
Hey! That's a hard feature to implement. Those things move around all the time, chasing sticks, cars, squirrels, and what not! You try keeping your map updated.
No, getting a job as an administrator doesn't make one competent, keeping a job as an administrator makes you competent. Having been there for several years means you know something about the environment. Being responsible for a slice of IT operations and dealing with all the different applications and services utilizing your slice of responsibility day after day makes you competent.
It doesn't I understand that the enterprise hard drive might have a better mtbf than a consumer drive, but I can tell you that the cheapest crappiest consumer drive is still more a more reliable backup device than the absolute best enterprise drive that you don't have.
And this is my point. It's not a matter of mtbf, it's a matter of gigabytes:IOPS ratios. Having 2 TB on one spindle is like having a 500,000 square foot warehouse with one loading dock. You just can't get to your stuff. We spread your data across sixty drives because 7500 IOPS is way more than 100 IOPS. We'll backup your data in an hour instead of fourteen. When a drive fails the rebuild time won't be twenty hours.
The IT guy is not being an asshole, developers are not dumb, and that users are not reasonable. It's that people are not grasping the fact that the business is large enough that it requires specialized disciplines in order to support the infrastructure necessary for the business to function. The different groups in the IT department just cannot support hundreds of one off solutions. It is not feasible.
You're right that most people are not at 1,500 seat shops. Sure most will be in smaller shops, but their budgets will be correspondingly smaller, their staffing will be correspondingly smaller, they'll have less access to premium support contracts and lower quality data centers. And they still won't be able to support one off solutions.
You know that your job as a consultant is to understand your customer's needs? That you should be asking them questions and figuring out why they do things the way they do it and then fit your solutions to their environment, not the other way around? You should be in there listening, not in there lecturing.
And knowledge transfer? That's a must. And merely chatting with someone desk side isn't sufficient. You need to write it down in full detail.
Fake phone number? Real professional of you. Kind of puts the rest of your comment in context.
Being a server admin in a medium/large environment I find that developers often don't get it. Yes there are some very smart developers who have a lot of experience, but there are also very smart developers who, for whatever reason, don't know the details of enterprise computing. They think things like a single 2 TB hard drive purchased at the local office supply store is the same thing as 2 TB of space sliced out of a storage pool on our Hitachi array. They think that the 16 port d-link gigabyte switch from radio shack is the same as our managed core switches. They think that their six node home network is the same as our fifteen hundred seat downtown campus spread across two buildings, twenty floors plus two data centers. They think that dragging files to a burnable dvd or usb stick is the same as our separate backup infrastructure (in-system replication, fourteen lto4 tape drives, three thousand tape slots, two hundred terabytes of VTL.) It's not that they are dumb, they're really not, it's just that when your computing environment scales up the solutions are not trivial. It takes specialists with a lot of experience to construct solutions that scale and meet budgets and meet regulatory requirements. Your local IT department spends a lot of time dealing with vendors, consultants, and architects. They have specialist training in enterprise computing. They know about storage, network protocols, operating systems, and the applicable regulations. It's the worst kind of egotism to think that being an expert on front end application development makes you an expert at all IT operations.
And while we are service, it's not service to the employees, it's service to the business. Keeping data processing is what we are here for. Denying Joe Random developer the ability to randomly change the default locale on one of the shared application servers is providing customer service.
Don't forget the other wrench: "I am a minority investor in this $30 million company, and your whatever I say goes has led to my losing my investment. My lawyers will be in touch. We'll be asking for punitive and compensatory damages."
Obviously you don't care for all the very valid reasons that have been provided as to why IT has processes in place. So here's another one that I've not yet seen:
This guy is the head of his department in a medical teaching hospital. He probably has an MD, he probably has a PhD, he likely clears $200,000/year in salary. Do you think the hospital wants to this employee who is probably costing them $500,000/year in total compensation doing the job of a $60,000 year IT person? If this guy was my employee I'd certainly be expecting that he has better things to do than bling up his iPhone.
What the IT department should have done was say "Sure thing. In addition to documenting that all these standards, requirements, and procedures are in place, have your boss request that the dean of medicine provide confirmation that dr. head-of-the-not-quite-radiology department is responsible for IT work and provide his cell phone number is so we can forward the middle of the night tech support calls to him."
So why do you assume that the position of people who don't want total socialized health care is zero health care? It doesn't have to be all or nothing. As a public policy issue mandating vaccinations (which we do not do, fyi) makes good sense because high levels of vaccination help everyone. On the other hand spending a million dollars on cancer treatments for an 80 year-old, beloved grandmother just doesn't make sense. I'm sorry, it sucks, but it's the truth.
Most of the time good fortune isn't just random, it's being positioned to fit the needs of the situation. You might say I have the good fortune to have a well paying job, but the reality is is that the opportunity opened up for everyone, but most people didn't have the skill set. Or someone has the good fortune to have purchased a particular stock when it was at a low value, no it's more like they had saved up their money so that when they recognized a good value they were able to create mutual benefit by funding the startup via a stock purchase. Luck is winning the lottery or being hit by lightning (bad luck in that case.) Being prepared and making good choices when opportunities arise isn't good fortune, as opportunities arise for everyone all the time.
It seems like there is an underlying argument here and that is that you think people shouldn't be responsible for the choices they make. None of those situations are unknown. Humans are human and if you get old you're going to get sick, you'll get cancer or have heart disease, or develop dementia. Given how probability works, everyone will at some point be involved in a car accident. Those are just the realities of life. So the question really is is whether people should be planning for these eventualities or whether they should be able to ignore the future. Wear a seat belt, buy insurance, save for your retirement. I have a really hard time accepting the fact that Fred and Wilma Johnson took their family to Europe every summer instead of building a nest egg, now Fred has prostate cancer and they don't have the means to pay for his cancer treatments. The question is always framed as my greed vs. Fred's cancer treatment. But that's completely false. The real question is Fred's summers in Europe vs. my daughter's college tuition. Or Fred's smoking habit vs. my being able to afford living in a safe neighborhood. Or Fred's refusal to wear a seat belt vs. my having to work until I'm seventy.
People are generally not assholes, even those who don't want to pay others' medical bills. They have real, valid reasons why they are incensed at being seen as a resource to be tapped by those who show complete disregard for their own future well being.
I am paying attention, you said keep the money in local open source support. On the other hand if you're saying you want to get other people's work for free, how is that not greed?
Comparative advantage, learn it, love it. It's stupid for every community to try and be specialists in every single field of human endeavour. There really is a very small need for people who know how to build heavy lift rockets.
And, btw, none of your neighbors think that economically supporting your linux based mod tracker is worthwhile in the least.
What does that even mean, "scale" and "numbers"? Do you figure using more words makes your position stronger?
You haven't actually provided any argument for your assertions. My experience over the last decade working at a technology company, a bank and now in logistics, is that web servers are not big part of the equation. It doesn't take that many web servers to handle a shitload of traffic, but you need a lot of database, application, caching, messaging, monitoring, searching, reporting and storage capability to keep the website up. Consider Twitter, mainly not web servers. How about Blizzard, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and all their gaming servers. Or AT&T, Sprint, Verizon with all their infrastructure necessary to support SMS, voicemail, billing, etc. NYSE, NASDAQ, Tokyo, London, Shanghai -- the other hundred stock exchanges -- not web servers. Goldman Sachs, UBS, Credit Suisse, BoA, etc. data centers full of non-web servers. How about the Navy, Air Force and the Army? The entire US Civil Service? The entire UK NHS? Airline, train and subway ticketing systems all over the world? The cable companies on demand systems?
Slashdot Mirror
Try what again? Money to pay for items in the federal budget such as government employee salaries, upkeep on the buildings, defense, etc. comes from the US Treasury. Payroll taxes do not go into the treasury, they go into items like the social security trust fund. The only way payroll taxes get into the treasury is if the administrator of that program buys treasury bonds. And those will be repaid with interest. To suggest that payroll taxes fund the government is disingenuous and mendacious.
Since the point is specifically FEDERAL INCOME TAX those don't count. And yes the social security trust fund buys treasury bonds, which will be repaid with interest.
Thank you for clarifying my points.
The portion of payroll taxes that are paid by the employee, and the reason they are distinguished from income taxes, are dedicated to specific programs. They are not put in the general fund and cannot be used for anything except the specific program they were collected for. Additionally people who fit into the 47% of household that are not paying federal income taxes will draw more from these programs during their life than they contribute. For some programs most everyone draws more than they contribute, for example from the wikipedia article on medicare:
The same holds true for social security.
Here's a couple of links:
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0&.v=1
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/business/economy/14leonhardt.html
[3] http://www.google.com/search?q=47%25+households
Here's another little fact that is rarely mentioned (from item #1):
Awesome, no?
Even #2, which is trying to cloud the issue, flat out says:
He goes on to talk about payroll taxes, etc. But the thing about payroll taxes is that they are dedicated to specific programs. Payments into social security aren't available to be used for running the government and funding non-entitlement services. When you hear about the government spending the money in the social security trust fund, what is happening is that the trust fund is buying treasury bonds, i.e. it's a loan that will be paid back. The other point that people should be aware of is that for all the payroll taxes items (medicare, medicaid, social security) the "poor" will draw more out than they ever put in.
If it were only a matter of money you'd be right, but it's often a matter of opportunity cost as well. People have to trade time away from their families for additional income. If you reduce the amount they can earn through higher tax rates they may choose not to make that trade.
You are over simplifying the situation. All through the income range of $0 - $60,000 (may go higher) there are a number of programs that kick in and phase out as your income changes. While it's not entirely taxes, earning an extra $1 certainly can cost you more than a dollar because you will become ineligible for certain programs and deductions.
States do have the right to collect that tax, that's what this whole discussion is about. It's about whether amazon is required to collect it for them. Pretty much every state has a use tax that people should be paying for all their untaxed items purchased from out of state. If that's not happening, you can hardly blame amazon that a whole bunch of whiners who are demanding government services aren't paying they legally required taxes that fund those services.
What myth? The "poor" don't pay federal income taxes. The federal budget is funded by federal income taxes. The fact that "poor" people pay sales taxes, state taxes, etc. doesn't change the fact that 47% of American households do not contribute to the federal budget. Hell, a good chunk of the "poor" get more back on their irs refund than they paid in.
Are you sure they haven't? From the last couple of change lists I see nothing regarding Safari.
Dear Larry, Sergey, Eric, Mark, Jerry, and friends:
If the brightest idea all your super-smart people can come up with is to interpose yourselves into every interaction a human being is involved in on the internet, then we don't need your kind of economic engine. Be glad all that's being suggested is that people be able to opt out. Consider these alternatives before you start crying into your gold plated mugs of artisenal beer:
a) In order to maintain a level of equality we implant a camera, call it a "third-eye", into your foreheads and stream it live to the internet along with a GPS tracker allowing anyone who gives a shit to know where you are and what you are doing at all times.
b) We allow you to collect any data you want about people but we strip you of the corporate protections and make you personally liable for any leaks of any data you collected regardless of how many times it's been sold and resold.
So stop with the whining and use those big brains to do something beyond implying that you can improving marketing tactics. You wankers.
Doesn't it drive you nuts to have the two twenty inchers rotated 90 degrees? It sure does me.
Huh? Do you mean LED? Also LED powered by a DC source (automobile instrument panels, brake lights, etc.) have zero flicker.
Just because whatever you are leveraging to advance your business is open source doesn't mean you aren't committing anti-trust violations. In this case they are using youtube to push webm to drive up their browser and cellphone OS market share.
What you don't seem to understand, and the original reason in identifying that developers don't seem to grasp the difference between enterprise storage and consumer storage, is that the random ideas people have to use things that make sense to them but end up getting rejected by the IT depart, there are actual reasons for that rejection. The whole question isn't about 0 IOPS or 100 IOPS. It's whether the business wants to expend resources building a solution that is going to fail in multiple fashions That is going to end up costing more in support than just doing it right the first time. When someone comes up to the IT department and asks for 2 TB of storage and IT responds by requesting a capex in the amount of $20,000 - $40,000 it's not because they are being dicks. They have a reason for it and that reason is that the data needs to be available and accessible.
As far as the 10 years, 3 days guy goes, I'd say that yes his answer of three days backup is all you need is correct. If it wasn't then either he'd be gone from the company or the policy would be different. If for some reason you think the policy should be different then you need to write up your rational, provide supporting evidence and present it to the appropriate people. If the message comes back down that your proposal has been rejected, then that's how it goes. Don't be a crybaby and don't expect that every idea you have is obvious and right. Sometimes even your strongly held beliefs are not shared by your supervisors and you won't always get what you want.
Hey! That's a hard feature to implement. Those things move around all the time, chasing sticks, cars, squirrels, and what not! You try keeping your map updated.
No, getting a job as an administrator doesn't make one competent, keeping a job as an administrator makes you competent. Having been there for several years means you know something about the environment. Being responsible for a slice of IT operations and dealing with all the different applications and services utilizing your slice of responsibility day after day makes you competent.
And this is my point. It's not a matter of mtbf, it's a matter of gigabytes:IOPS ratios. Having 2 TB on one spindle is like having a 500,000 square foot warehouse with one loading dock. You just can't get to your stuff. We spread your data across sixty drives because 7500 IOPS is way more than 100 IOPS. We'll backup your data in an hour instead of fourteen. When a drive fails the rebuild time won't be twenty hours.
The IT guy is not being an asshole, developers are not dumb, and that users are not reasonable. It's that people are not grasping the fact that the business is large enough that it requires specialized disciplines in order to support the infrastructure necessary for the business to function. The different groups in the IT department just cannot support hundreds of one off solutions. It is not feasible.
You're right that most people are not at 1,500 seat shops. Sure most will be in smaller shops, but their budgets will be correspondingly smaller, their staffing will be correspondingly smaller, they'll have less access to premium support contracts and lower quality data centers. And they still won't be able to support one off solutions.
You know that your job as a consultant is to understand your customer's needs? That you should be asking them questions and figuring out why they do things the way they do it and then fit your solutions to their environment, not the other way around? You should be in there listening, not in there lecturing.
And knowledge transfer? That's a must. And merely chatting with someone desk side isn't sufficient. You need to write it down in full detail.
Fake phone number? Real professional of you. Kind of puts the rest of your comment in context.
Being a server admin in a medium/large environment I find that developers often don't get it. Yes there are some very smart developers who have a lot of experience, but there are also very smart developers who, for whatever reason, don't know the details of enterprise computing. They think things like a single 2 TB hard drive purchased at the local office supply store is the same thing as 2 TB of space sliced out of a storage pool on our Hitachi array. They think that the 16 port d-link gigabyte switch from radio shack is the same as our managed core switches. They think that their six node home network is the same as our fifteen hundred seat downtown campus spread across two buildings, twenty floors plus two data centers. They think that dragging files to a burnable dvd or usb stick is the same as our separate backup infrastructure (in-system replication, fourteen lto4 tape drives, three thousand tape slots, two hundred terabytes of VTL.) It's not that they are dumb, they're really not, it's just that when your computing environment scales up the solutions are not trivial. It takes specialists with a lot of experience to construct solutions that scale and meet budgets and meet regulatory requirements. Your local IT department spends a lot of time dealing with vendors, consultants, and architects. They have specialist training in enterprise computing. They know about storage, network protocols, operating systems, and the applicable regulations. It's the worst kind of egotism to think that being an expert on front end application development makes you an expert at all IT operations.
And while we are service, it's not service to the employees, it's service to the business. Keeping data processing is what we are here for. Denying Joe Random developer the ability to randomly change the default locale on one of the shared application servers is providing customer service.
Don't forget the other wrench: "I am a minority investor in this $30 million company, and your whatever I say goes has led to my losing my investment. My lawyers will be in touch. We'll be asking for punitive and compensatory damages."
Obviously you don't care for all the very valid reasons that have been provided as to why IT has processes in place. So here's another one that I've not yet seen:
This guy is the head of his department in a medical teaching hospital. He probably has an MD, he probably has a PhD, he likely clears $200,000/year in salary. Do you think the hospital wants to this employee who is probably costing them $500,000/year in total compensation doing the job of a $60,000 year IT person? If this guy was my employee I'd certainly be expecting that he has better things to do than bling up his iPhone.
What the IT department should have done was say "Sure thing. In addition to documenting that all these standards, requirements, and procedures are in place, have your boss request that the dean of medicine provide confirmation that dr. head-of-the-not-quite-radiology department is responsible for IT work and provide his cell phone number is so we can forward the middle of the night tech support calls to him."
So why do you assume that the position of people who don't want total socialized health care is zero health care? It doesn't have to be all or nothing. As a public policy issue mandating vaccinations (which we do not do, fyi) makes good sense because high levels of vaccination help everyone. On the other hand spending a million dollars on cancer treatments for an 80 year-old, beloved grandmother just doesn't make sense. I'm sorry, it sucks, but it's the truth.
Most of the time good fortune isn't just random, it's being positioned to fit the needs of the situation. You might say I have the good fortune to have a well paying job, but the reality is is that the opportunity opened up for everyone, but most people didn't have the skill set. Or someone has the good fortune to have purchased a particular stock when it was at a low value, no it's more like they had saved up their money so that when they recognized a good value they were able to create mutual benefit by funding the startup via a stock purchase. Luck is winning the lottery or being hit by lightning (bad luck in that case.) Being prepared and making good choices when opportunities arise isn't good fortune, as opportunities arise for everyone all the time.
It seems like there is an underlying argument here and that is that you think people shouldn't be responsible for the choices they make. None of those situations are unknown. Humans are human and if you get old you're going to get sick, you'll get cancer or have heart disease, or develop dementia. Given how probability works, everyone will at some point be involved in a car accident. Those are just the realities of life. So the question really is is whether people should be planning for these eventualities or whether they should be able to ignore the future. Wear a seat belt, buy insurance, save for your retirement. I have a really hard time accepting the fact that Fred and Wilma Johnson took their family to Europe every summer instead of building a nest egg, now Fred has prostate cancer and they don't have the means to pay for his cancer treatments. The question is always framed as my greed vs. Fred's cancer treatment. But that's completely false. The real question is Fred's summers in Europe vs. my daughter's college tuition. Or Fred's smoking habit vs. my being able to afford living in a safe neighborhood. Or Fred's refusal to wear a seat belt vs. my having to work until I'm seventy.
People are generally not assholes, even those who don't want to pay others' medical bills. They have real, valid reasons why they are incensed at being seen as a resource to be tapped by those who show complete disregard for their own future well being.
I am paying attention, you said keep the money in local open source support. On the other hand if you're saying you want to get other people's work for free, how is that not greed?
Comparative advantage, learn it, love it. It's stupid for every community to try and be specialists in every single field of human endeavour. There really is a very small need for people who know how to build heavy lift rockets.
And, btw, none of your neighbors think that economically supporting your linux based mod tracker is worthwhile in the least.
What does that even mean, "scale" and "numbers"? Do you figure using more words makes your position stronger?
You haven't actually provided any argument for your assertions. My experience over the last decade working at a technology company, a bank and now in logistics, is that web servers are not big part of the equation. It doesn't take that many web servers to handle a shitload of traffic, but you need a lot of database, application, caching, messaging, monitoring, searching, reporting and storage capability to keep the website up. Consider Twitter, mainly not web servers. How about Blizzard, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and all their gaming servers. Or AT&T, Sprint, Verizon with all their infrastructure necessary to support SMS, voicemail, billing, etc. NYSE, NASDAQ, Tokyo, London, Shanghai -- the other hundred stock exchanges -- not web servers. Goldman Sachs, UBS, Credit Suisse, BoA, etc. data centers full of non-web servers. How about the Navy, Air Force and the Army? The entire US Civil Service? The entire UK NHS? Airline, train and subway ticketing systems all over the world? The cable companies on demand systems?