I once read that the amount of resources expended to simply comply with the IRS is equal to the gross state product of Iowa.
Think about it -- the entire output of a fairly prosperous state, wiped out by the overly-complex tax code!
(And that was about 20 years ago, when the tax code was less complex than it is now.)
Sure, tax simplification would be disruptive to Intuit (and also to firms that act less like vampires, like H&R Block). But no more disruptive than any other awesome efficiency-boosting development, like the invention of the LED.
Think about this: thanks to incomes growing faster than the rate of inflation, basic commodities, like a gallon of milk, consume a significantly smaller fraction of a family's income than they did a generation ago. And that effect is orders-of-magnitude larger for technological commodities, like a gigaflop of computing power.
Government services, too, ought to be costing a smaller fraction of a family's income. (Especially because government uses technology to provide its services. Most government workers sit in front of a computer all day.) But government services are about the only thing that is bucking the trend, and consuming a larger fraction of a family's income!
The laws can be for sale, only to the extent that the lawmakers are selling!
Every special interest should be free to lobby. The real trick is electing representatives who understand that catering to a special interest is, by definition, detrimental to the general interest. (If something is in the general interest, it's by definition not a special interest.)
The fix has the sum 1 + 2 + 16 hardcoded into it. Twice. Why not speed things up by replacing that with a hardcoded 19? (If the sum has significance to a human reading the code, that could be explained in a comment.)
we have many millions of people with NO useful skills. They are also mostly untrainable, or they wouldn't have ended up skillless in the first place. In the past, our economy had a place for these people. The future is likely to be different.
Fact: There are more unskilled humans employed today than at any other time in history.
Why? Because, as you pointed out, everyone has benefited from productivity improvements; those improvements increase the demand for all types of labor, even unskilled labor.
Fortunately, the vast majority of jobs do not require coding ability. So, while it may be true that you can't teach 'X' to code, there's really no need to teach 'X' to code.
I never shy away from casting moral judgement on past events using modern standards and I think nobody should. Slavery was wrong then. is wrong now.
Are you 100% committed to that view? I think Thomas Jefferson was a pretty great guy, despite the fact that he was a slaveowner. In 2014, he'd be arrested for that. In 1770, the feedback he was getting from most of his peers was, "you're doing it right." Do you cut T.J. any slack at all for being "a product of his times"?
We all know the Dijkstra quote... "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Enough bashing then... what is an *excellent* choice of language to teach to beginners?
these processes don't really transition us away from fossil fuels
Whether a hydrocarbon fuel is a fossil fuel depends on where you source it.
This process is a carbon-neutral source of hydrocarbon fuels. To the extent that you pull CO2 out of seawater, you increase seawater's ability to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
If you run out of fuel, just refuel the damn thing. At sea refueling is trivially easy
During wartime, you worry about whether your refuling ship -- which is known as an "oiler," by the way -- will be able to make it through a gauntlet of enemy subs and other anti-ship forces targeting that vulnerable part of your logistics infrastructure. It would truly be a force multiplier to eliminate that vulnerability.
Maintaining a global fleet of oilers isn't cheap, either.
If Dr. Wendy Xiao is running an experiment with 30,000 fruit flies, and she notices that two of the fruit flies are acting listless, and she fails to extract them from the apparatus and take them to a veterinarian, is Wendy malevolent? Nope.
Suppose we could measure the IQ of this entity that knew how to kick off the Big Bang. The ratio of God's IQ to yours and mine -- if we're lucky -- is comparable to the ratio of Wendy's IQ to a fruit fly's IQ.
You sound much like a creationist. You want people to seriously consider entertaining narratives as a plausible truth. As if there were a higher, better power, that however can't be bothered to make itself unambiguously clear to us idiots. And then you hijack physics.
I don't believe the Hebrew creation myth, not for a nanosecond, so I'm guessing I don't meet your definition of "creationist." If you think the possiblity that the laws of physics didn't simply write themselves is "entertaining," so much the better, I suppose. That hadn't ocurred to me.
I have as much right as anyone to put forth theories about the origin of the laws of physics, so I respectfully reject your use of the word "hijack."
By the age of 8 I realized that I was jerked around by all religious people I met until then. And that, based on simple logic, god simply could not exist.
So having been jerked around by religious people has something to do with this. I'm sorry you were jerked around. My belief about the nature of God is probably quite different from that of the jerkers.
May I suggest that no one should make ironclad commitments to conclusions they reached when they were 8. My adult mind, after extensive studies of university physics, has reached a different conclusion than your 8-year-old mind reached.
Her answer, "God always was", did not sound at all convincing to me.
Her answer was problematic, to be sure, but the alternative -- "the universe just created itself, and the sublimely elegant laws of physics just wrote themselves" -- is even less convincing.
religion has caused so much more suffering in the world than it has ever managed to prevent
If you truly want to minimize suffering, and had to choose between an occasional Sept-11-style attack with 3000 deaths perpetrated by religious fanatics, and a Mao-style genocide with 45 million deaths perpetrated by atheists, you'd choose the religious fanatics every time.
One wonders how history would be different if Mao, Stalin, or Hitler had believed there to be a whit of genuine authority behind the commandment, "You shall not murder."
Nobody is qualified to deduce whether there is a god until they've developed a profound appreciation for the laws of physics, and their elegance. (In other words, even most Doctors of Theology aren't qualified.) And then, each individual should confront themselves with this question: did the laws of physics just write themselves, or does their sublime cleverness indicate that they were authored by some highly intelligent entity?
How was your knowledge of the laws of physics at age 8?
I shouldn't be surprised at the number of people who don't think critically about the so-called "Epicurean paradox" -- after all, it's in the interests of atheists not to think critically about it.
The paradox is resolved thusly: God is an experimentalist and the Universe is his experiment. He rarely interferes because he wants to see how things play out on their own. This does not make him malevolent; it merely makes him a good experimentalist.
I suppose since he is unable to completely foresee the outcome of the experiment, this shows that he's not omnipotent. (But that's fortunate for us, because he wouldn't have bothered with the experiment at all if he could completely foresee its outcome.) While not omnipotent, any entity that can create a buttload of matter and energy, as well as the laws of physics that govern their interactions, is still pretty damn powerful.
My point zoomed over your head like one of Musk's rockets.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) needs to significantly reduce its prices if it hopes to compete with SpaceX. SpaceX rose from nothing to become a powerhouse. ULA has failed to "make sure there is no competition," despite the formidable barriers to entry in the launch services industry. If ULA can't do that which you accuse companies "in real capitalism" of doing, other companies stand even less of a chance of making sure they have no competition.
Musk is in no way out to screw his customers. And he is the finest example of a "real capitalist" that I can think of.
In real capitalism, you make sure there is no competition left before you screw over your customers.
And how, exactly, do you do that?
Space launch probably has the highest barriers-to-entry of any industry. But by building a family of space launch vehicles from scratch, and making them reliable and profitable, all while greatly undercutting his competition, Elon Musk has proven that it's possible to overcome even those barriers. We can conclude that your jab at "real capitalism" is unfounded.
For a long time, scientists thought that this retrovirus DNA was just junk sitting around in the cells.
I have always said, "Junk DNA isn't." From time to time, articles like this prove me correct.
Having said that, stem cells must specialize in order for an embryo to develop into an adult. The "human endogenous retrovirus" can't be responsible for the specilization of stem cells, because at some point in history, there was a first time that a human was infected by this retrovirus; and somehow, that human's parents managed to develop normally.
Also, my cat was once an embryo, and stem cell specilization took place and allowed him to become a normal adult cat. Presumably, every nonhuman species is able to develop without the aid of the "human endogenous retrovirus." Why would humans be the only species dependent on this particular retrovirus for stem cell specialization?
Slashdot Mirror
I once read that the amount of resources expended to simply comply with the IRS is equal to the gross state product of Iowa.
Think about it -- the entire output of a fairly prosperous state, wiped out by the overly-complex tax code!
(And that was about 20 years ago, when the tax code was less complex than it is now.)
Sure, tax simplification would be disruptive to Intuit (and also to firms that act less like vampires, like H&R Block). But no more disruptive than any other awesome efficiency-boosting development, like the invention of the LED.
Joe Public: Yay, Ima gonna get a big check from the IRS!
Me: Wouldn't you have rather gotten that money sooner, rather than later, by reducing the amount withheld from your pay?
Joe: Huh?
Go to Taxact.com. You can e-file your federal return for free, no strings attached.
The e-filing of state returns is where they attempt to make revenue, but you're under no obligation to buy that service.
Think about this: thanks to incomes growing faster than the rate of inflation, basic commodities, like a gallon of milk, consume a significantly smaller fraction of a family's income than they did a generation ago. And that effect is orders-of-magnitude larger for technological commodities, like a gigaflop of computing power.
Government services, too, ought to be costing a smaller fraction of a family's income. (Especially because government uses technology to provide its services. Most government workers sit in front of a computer all day.) But government services are about the only thing that is bucking the trend, and consuming a larger fraction of a family's income!
The laws can be for sale, only to the extent that the lawmakers are selling!
Every special interest should be free to lobby. The real trick is electing representatives who understand that catering to a special interest is, by definition, detrimental to the general interest. (If something is in the general interest, it's by definition not a special interest.)
The proper place of colonial trials was so important to the founding generation that it was listed as a grievance in the Declaration of Independence.
weev is fortunate that, for once, a court gives a damn about what was important to the founding generation.
Programmers make these kinds of mistakes all the time.
Do you think that one of these days, a mistake like this will have catastrophic consequences?
If yes, should I lay in a supply of freeze-dried food and shotgun shells?
The fix has the sum 1 + 2 + 16 hardcoded into it. Twice. Why not speed things up by replacing that with a hardcoded 19? (If the sum has significance to a human reading the code, that could be explained in a comment.)
we have many millions of people with NO useful skills. They are also mostly untrainable, or they wouldn't have ended up skillless in the first place. In the past, our economy had a place for these people. The future is likely to be different.
Fact: There are more unskilled humans employed today than at any other time in history.
Why? Because, as you pointed out, everyone has benefited from productivity improvements; those improvements increase the demand for all types of labor, even unskilled labor.
Fortunately, the vast majority of jobs do not require coding ability. So, while it may be true that you can't teach 'X' to code, there's really no need to teach 'X' to code.
I never shy away from casting moral judgement on past events using modern standards and I think nobody should. Slavery was wrong then. is wrong now.
Are you 100% committed to that view? I think Thomas Jefferson was a pretty great guy, despite the fact that he was a slaveowner. In 2014, he'd be arrested for that. In 1770, the feedback he was getting from most of his peers was, "you're doing it right." Do you cut T.J. any slack at all for being "a product of his times"?
Resources are finite. If the availability of resources is increased a million-fold, they will still be finite.
We all know the Dijkstra quote... "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Enough bashing then... what is an *excellent* choice of language to teach to beginners?
Ethanol is a hydrocarbon that people, especially sailors, like to ingest. :)
these processes don't really transition us away from fossil fuels
Whether a hydrocarbon fuel is a fossil fuel depends on where you source it.
This process is a carbon-neutral source of hydrocarbon fuels. To the extent that you pull CO2 out of seawater, you increase seawater's ability to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
If you run out of fuel, just refuel the damn thing. At sea refueling is trivially easy
During wartime, you worry about whether your refuling ship -- which is known as an "oiler," by the way -- will be able to make it through a gauntlet of enemy subs and other anti-ship forces targeting that vulnerable part of your logistics infrastructure. It would truly be a force multiplier to eliminate that vulnerability.
Maintaining a global fleet of oilers isn't cheap, either.
If Dr. Wendy Xiao is running an experiment with 30,000 fruit flies, and she notices that two of the fruit flies are acting listless, and she fails to extract them from the apparatus and take them to a veterinarian, is Wendy malevolent? Nope.
Suppose we could measure the IQ of this entity that knew how to kick off the Big Bang. The ratio of God's IQ to yours and mine -- if we're lucky -- is comparable to the ratio of Wendy's IQ to a fruit fly's IQ.
You sound much like a creationist. You want people to seriously consider entertaining narratives as a plausible truth. As if there were a higher, better power, that however can't be bothered to make itself unambiguously clear to us idiots. And then you hijack physics.
I don't believe the Hebrew creation myth, not for a nanosecond, so I'm guessing I don't meet your definition of "creationist." If you think the possiblity that the laws of physics didn't simply write themselves is "entertaining," so much the better, I suppose. That hadn't ocurred to me.
I have as much right as anyone to put forth theories about the origin of the laws of physics, so I respectfully reject your use of the word "hijack."
By the age of 8 I realized that I was jerked around by all religious people I met until then. And that, based on simple logic, god simply could not exist.
So having been jerked around by religious people has something to do with this. I'm sorry you were jerked around. My belief about the nature of God is probably quite different from that of the jerkers.
May I suggest that no one should make ironclad commitments to conclusions they reached when they were 8. My adult mind, after extensive studies of university physics, has reached a different conclusion than your 8-year-old mind reached.
Her answer, "God always was", did not sound at all convincing to me.
Her answer was problematic, to be sure, but the alternative -- "the universe just created itself, and the sublimely elegant laws of physics just wrote themselves" -- is even less convincing.
religion has caused so much more suffering in the world than it has ever managed to prevent
Now you've become intellectually dishonest, by covering up these facts: Stalin, atheist, caused 43 millions deaths, and Mao, atheist, caused 45 million deaths. (For good measure, it should also be noted that "In adulthood, [Hitler] became disdainful of Christianity... It is generally believed by historians that Hitler's long term aim was the eradication of Christianity in Germany... Hitler repeatedly stated that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on science.")
If you truly want to minimize suffering, and had to choose between an occasional Sept-11-style attack with 3000 deaths perpetrated by religious fanatics, and a Mao-style genocide with 45 million deaths perpetrated by atheists, you'd choose the religious fanatics every time.
One wonders how history would be different if Mao, Stalin, or Hitler had believed there to be a whit of genuine authority behind the commandment, "You shall not murder."
I stepped renounced my religion at the age of 8.
Nobody is qualified to deduce whether there is a god until they've developed a profound appreciation for the laws of physics, and their elegance. (In other words, even most Doctors of Theology aren't qualified.) And then, each individual should confront themselves with this question: did the laws of physics just write themselves, or does their sublime cleverness indicate that they were authored by some highly intelligent entity?
How was your knowledge of the laws of physics at age 8?
I shouldn't be surprised at the number of people who don't think critically about the so-called "Epicurean paradox" -- after all, it's in the interests of atheists not to think critically about it.
The paradox is resolved thusly: God is an experimentalist and the Universe is his experiment. He rarely interferes because he wants to see how things play out on their own. This does not make him malevolent; it merely makes him a good experimentalist.
I suppose since he is unable to completely foresee the outcome of the experiment, this shows that he's not omnipotent. (But that's fortunate for us, because he wouldn't have bothered with the experiment at all if he could completely foresee its outcome.) While not omnipotent, any entity that can create a buttload of matter and energy, as well as the laws of physics that govern their interactions, is still pretty damn powerful.
...a smaller UID than mine?
ERE I AM, JH
Grace was a renowned innovator. And her favorite saying was "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/G...
For aficionados of Grace, Dave Letterman's interview is a must-see.
My point zoomed over your head like one of Musk's rockets.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) needs to significantly reduce its prices if it hopes to compete with SpaceX. SpaceX rose from nothing to become a powerhouse. ULA has failed to "make sure there is no competition," despite the formidable barriers to entry in the launch services industry. If ULA can't do that which you accuse companies "in real capitalism" of doing, other companies stand even less of a chance of making sure they have no competition.
Musk is in no way out to screw his customers. And he is the finest example of a "real capitalist" that I can think of.
In real capitalism, you make sure there is no competition left before you screw over your customers.
And how, exactly, do you do that?
Space launch probably has the highest barriers-to-entry of any industry. But by building a family of space launch vehicles from scratch, and making them reliable and profitable, all while greatly undercutting his competition, Elon Musk has proven that it's possible to overcome even those barriers. We can conclude that your jab at "real capitalism" is unfounded.
For a long time, scientists thought that this retrovirus DNA was just junk sitting around in the cells.
I have always said, "Junk DNA isn't." From time to time, articles like this prove me correct.
Having said that, stem cells must specialize in order for an embryo to develop into an adult. The "human endogenous retrovirus" can't be responsible for the specilization of stem cells, because at some point in history, there was a first time that a human was infected by this retrovirus; and somehow, that human's parents managed to develop normally.
Also, my cat was once an embryo, and stem cell specilization took place and allowed him to become a normal adult cat. Presumably, every nonhuman species is able to develop without the aid of the "human endogenous retrovirus." Why would humans be the only species dependent on this particular retrovirus for stem cell specialization?