The actual numbers are less than half of that: Additional income, sales, and property taxes are assessed at the state and local levels. In the most recent year, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was 26.9 percent. That's from the liberal Heritage foundation ranking page for the US ( http://www.heritage.org/index/Country/UnitedStates )
There is something wrong with your link. But let's say that number is right for the federal government. Add in state spending, which obviously differs by state, but let's say New York. In 2010 New York state spending was $283 B with a state GDP of $1114 B, which means state taxes had to be about 25% to cover the spending. (New York seems to be pretty typical, e.g. Alaska 36%, Mississippi 28%, New Jersey 21%, Oklahoma 21%, Oregon 26%, etc.) For New York, 26.9% and 25% is 51.9%. Alaska would be 62.9%. Admittedly it looks like the typical state is in the neighborhood of 50% and I claimed 60%, but it's hardly "less than half of that" and there do exist states with total taxation in excess of 60% of state GDP between state and federal taxes.
Nope, the 26.9% is inclusive of state and local taxes. Federal taxes last year were about 15% of GDP (they're usually closer to 18% or so:
Even the Scandinavian countries, which have the highest tax rates in the industrialized world aren't as high as what you're asserting for the US. Our effective tax rate is lower than it's been in decades, and is quite low for a modern industrialized country.
Taking a 10% deficit as the baseline also massively overstates the structural problem. Yes, the past 2 years have had those ~10% deficits, but unless you're predicting that the economic slump that we're just now starting to recover from will go on in perpetuity, or get worse, it's not a reasonable baseline.
The 10% deficits are the current reality. Unless your point is to just continue to run those kind of deficits today and for the next few years and then try to pay for them with tax increases five or ten years from now?
Um, yes. First, as the economy recovers, tax receipts increase and social spending for the impacted citizens will drop significantly, both which will significantly improve the deficit. Increasing taxes or decreasing spending when the economy is sucking wind is a recipe for making things worse (which actually serves to make deficits worse and costs more in the long term due to the extra damage to the economy and workforce).
Moreover, there are differences between today and recent history. Right now debt as a percent of GDP is higher than it has been since the end of WWII, and unless we make significant cuts today it's going to get worse before it gets better. It's already about twice what it was when Regan took office. The only reason the interest isn't a present catastrophe is that interest rates are so low, and if the economy starts to recover then interest rates go back up and servicing the debt is going to seriously cut into the tax windfall that economic growth might otherwise produce.
Add to that the baby boomers retiring and removing their productive capacity (and income tax payments) while at the same time putting severe stress on social security and medicare as they start collecting rather than paying in.
Well, again, Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit, so in terms of a discussion about deficits, it's irrelevant. In terms of interest rates, sure, if rates increase it makes interest payments go up. That being said, that only becomes a problem if we either can't pay for it, or we're so politically dysfunctional that we won't. Japan has a much higher debt to GDP ratio (more than twi
Those "IOUs" are Treasury bonds, like all of the others that are in circulation. They're not illusory or false, nor stolen and we're obligated to honor them as we do all of our debts. Social Security's finances are entirely separate from the general fund (well, aside from the perpetual lie that is the "unified budget" topline number), and can't contribute to the deficit.
Nope. Social Security has a dedicated funding stream which isn't mixed with the general fund. Given the baby boom demographic bump, the SS tax has been set at a rate that's been running a significant surplus for the past 20 years or so in order to build up a trust fund for the years where the draw from it will be worst. That trust fund, like many risk-adverse funds, is invested in Treasury bonds. By law, if the SS trust fund runs out (all of the bonds are redeemed) and it can't pay full benefits, then it just can't pay full benefits; it can't contribute to the deficit.
Let's think about that for a minute. Right now, between federal, state and local taxes, governments in the US collect about 60% of GDP as tax revenue.
Bullpucky. The actual numbers are less than half of that:
Additional income, sales, and property taxes are assessed at the state and local levels. In the most recent year, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was 26.9 percent.
That's from the liberal Heritage foundation ranking page for the US ( http://www.heritage.org/index/Country/UnitedStates )
For the last couple of years the federal deficit has been a little over 10% of GDP. So if you want to balance the budget by raising taxes, you have to raise the 60% to 70%.
Taking a 10% deficit as the baseline also massively overstates the structural problem. Yes, the past 2 years have had those ~10% deficits, but unless you're predicting that the economic slump that we're just now starting to recover from will go on in perpetuity, or get worse, it's not a reasonable baseline. In recent history, we average something more akin to 2-3% (though reagan did manage average something around 4% for a good chunk of his cutting and spending spree)
So, given realistic numbers, the structural deficit that we're facing is certainly something that could be addressed by targeted tax increases if that's what we chose to do.
Finally, Social Security is a dedicated funding stream and it can't contribute to the deficit by law. You could cancel the program tomorrow and it'd not change the actual deficit one bit (the reported "unified budget" deficit/surplus numbers are misleading since they include SS income, but that has nothing to do with the actual accounting).
"They really are the underdog here," Zuckerberg said. "They're incentivized to go out and innovate. They have all these smart people and are trying to do all these new things."
...plus the cash, the huge, huge bags of cash...that really helped clarify our decisionmaking...
Wow, we're the enemy now? I thought that one of the more important functions of being a citizen was making sure that the government was accountable to us for it's actions. The guy in question, presuming that he actually was responsible, did certainly violate military regs, but he's hardly a traitor.
The concern isn't that they're weapons as such, but that they're weapons designed to be hidden on merchant vessels. In a tense situation, it would likely make all merchant ships potential threats and would likely end up with a lot of innocent civilians being killed.
Net Neutrality creates the level playing field that fosters competition. That's how jobs, and new industries, are created. A robust, dynamic net ecosystem helps all of us. The telcos just want to set themselves up to extort a portion of the profits from successful net companies ("that's a nice search engine that you have there, it'd be a shame if no one could get to it...") and control who and how you're able to interact.
I guess that might match some minimum wage manufacturing jobs, if those even exist any more, but given that most minimum wage jobs are service sector, I don't think that outsourcing is so much an issue. It's not like they'd ship my burger patty off to India to be flipped or anything; there are many jobs that are essentially inherently local.
"The minimum wage laws have little if any effect on the number of jobs or the standard of living."
So then why not just make the minimum wage 30$ an hour? After all, if min wage has little, if any effect on the number of jobs then it should just work right?
Heck, lets make it 100$ an hour.
1000$
Because that would be stupid?
Given the realistic levels of minimum wage that anyone is speaking of, employment effects are indeed minimal (It's been studied in states when there was an increase, and no notable impact on employment was noted). In terms of the standard of living, for the person going from $5->$7 an hour, it'd be a significant improvement. As most people don't make the minimum wage or close enough to be an issue, inflation from it is similarly minimal. So, the person pulling in $50k a year might notice an extra dime on their big mac, but it's not like that'd be a significant hardship.
HIghways, public health expenditures/disease eradication, public education, basic science research all seem to be investments that ultimately raise our standard of living (better transit, healthier, better educated workforce, etc...). That's not even getting into that whole "system of laws" thing, which is the foundation upon which most of the rest of it rests. Your comment sounds quite like the "the government never created a job" sort of talk, which is similarly silly.
Actually, the structural deficit longer term is indeed driven by entitlement spending, but that spending tracks overall healthcare spending in our system since Medicare buys from the same markets as everyone else (it can do so a somewhat more cheaply due to having a good bit of leverage given it's size, but ultimately that just makes it grow a bit less fast than overall healthcare spending). Thus, controlling healthcare spending and cost inflation becomes critical if we want to head off huge long term issues. That's what should ultimately be driving our healthcare debate, but alas it's not.
Anyway, 0.5% of the federal budget isn't peanuts. I think that it comes back to a lack of vision with regard to what we're trying to accomplish, so the various programs and initiatives just sort of drift on, burning money. The Apollo program was targeted and specific in what it was trying to achieve (a man on the moon) and lavishly funded as it was more to one up the USSR than achieve scientific goals. It succeeded at it's core goal, but seeing as there wasn't really a solid vision beyond that, it just petered out once we'd "been there, done that".
Well, to be fair to Jobs, it's been scientifically proven that something on an Apple product is inherently 70-80% more Awesome (or is that iAwesome?) than the same thing on a competitor's product. So, by only marking iBooks up 50%, it's still more Awesome per dollar than what you're getting on a Kindle!
Care to detail that a bit? I have a Pre, though I'm not a palm fanboy by any means. I've had it more or less since it launched and it seems to be a pretty solid little device so far as my experience has gone. The browser is good, the GPS is handy, Wifi works, 3G data speeds seem to be fine, there are a fair number of apps available for it (and palm seems to be fine with grey-market community apps), it's easily hackable, the UI is great, though the battery life is mediocre at best (though my understanding is that this is hardly unique to the pre wrt smartphones in general). The only issue that I've had is that the little cheapy USB cover fell off, not great, but hardly a huge issue (I've certainly not smashed/shattered it, so perhaps our use cases are a bit different). So, given that, how is this a POS?
Wow, that was quick. Blame "environmentalists" for foiling plans to "release the pressure"? The fact that we don't have anywhere near the technology to impact something of this scale and depth shouldn't matter apparently. Perhaps you need to stop listening to fox"news" so much.
you can't use money you don't have to make more money.
Unless you're the Feds.</p></quote>
Actually, most business investment is done with borrowed money. That, and our financial industry is mostly based on gambling with borrowed/other people's money.
Last I checked, Gore wasn't advocating forced austerity or any such, he's pushing for us to move toward limiting/eliminating the use of carbon based fuels. He does have an older and large house, but spends the extra to be sure that the electricity that he's using is from non-carbon sources. Apparently, his utility gives that option. Heck, he could use solar/wind/geothermal, nuclear, fusion based energy to heat his backyard during winter and that'd not be in conflict with what he's advocating.
Since he's not proposing that we live like monks in hovels, I don't see how him not doing so has any bearing on this. Also, there's quite a bit of money to be made by smart capitalists in renewable energy; it's entirely compatible with capitalism. The problem that we have presently is that the energy market is broken in that it doesn't take the external costs that carbon based fuels add; that's what cap and trade attempts to do. It's intended to harness the ingenuity of the capitalist market to help solve these problems.
So, the "scandal" here is that his wife works for Golman Sachs and that pharma stocks are overpriced? Somehow mandating that healthcare workers get vaccinated against a new flu is somehow a huge conspiracy to profit for them how? I recognize that the tin-foil-hat brigade has kicked onto high alert over H1N1 vaccination, but this is stupid. This is front page material how?
I suspect that we have a fairly large body of data on the creativity and success of those who aren't schooled given that it was the default mode of 'learning' for most of history, and heck probably still is in many poorer places. I'd suspect that we'd have come out of the middle ages much quicker if our supercharged, hypercurious unschooled masses, untainted by school, were 'unschooling' so awesome at harnessing our innate potential.
Also, I suspect that life in general is pretty good at crushing one's innate curiosity given a bit of time, and with school they'll have to tools at least to acquire, understand, and work with knowledge that doesn't have immediate payoff.
Firstly, "they" pay 40% corporation tax - the second highest in the world. What more do you want?
Actually, Microsoft reported last year that they pay more like 25% and that's probably inflated since it's usually noted in the context of Ballmer threatening to move offshore, so this is their "high" number to use as a club. That they don't actually pay anywhere near the statutory rate isn't a surprise as essentially no companies actually do. In fact the effective tax rate of our corporations is a good bit lower than most industrialized nations when exemptions and manipulations to hide profit are factored in.
"Do you really want to see the total collapse of the US economy as corporations buckle under an even heavier tax burden?"
A mentioned and noted earlier, our corporations aren't suffering higher effective taxation rates here than other industrialized nations and in many cases they're lower. Ultimately, if our infrastructure and the quality of our workforce suffer, it doesn't matter what the tax rate is, they won't locate or stay here with the skill jobs that we want. That's what taxes are for. I understand that corporations are amoral by nature and will try to externalize every cost that they're able to since their guiding force is maximizing profit. As such, they're motivated to make sure that paying for the police force, roads, education and the like is "someone else's problem".
What about the 30 second skip? I have a couple of TIVO's currently and beyond having to re-enable it should the power go out (it's a simple code that you hit on the remote) it just works.
Now that doesn't mean that they might make that go away in the future (thus why they keep it an undocumented feature), but as of last night it certainly seemed to work for me.
Wow, that's a interesting way to misread what he's been saying, though awful convenient if one would rather attack the man rather than actually address his message. He didn't say that "We've got 10 years left on the enviroment", he's saying that there's a high probability that we have about a 10 year window available to us to get our global greenhouse emmisions under control before the changes become irrevocable. Since the changes due to warming tend to reinforce one another, once the cycle gets too far along our ability to influence and ameliorate it largely goes away.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual numbers are less than half of that: Additional income, sales, and property taxes are assessed at the state and local levels. In the most recent year, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was 26.9 percent. That's from the liberal Heritage foundation ranking page for the US ( http://www.heritage.org/index/Country/UnitedStates )
There is something wrong with your link. But let's say that number is right for the federal government. Add in state spending, which obviously differs by state, but let's say New York. In 2010 New York state spending was $283 B with a state GDP of $1114 B, which means state taxes had to be about 25% to cover the spending. (New York seems to be pretty typical, e.g. Alaska 36%, Mississippi 28%, New Jersey 21%, Oklahoma 21%, Oregon 26%, etc.) For New York, 26.9% and 25% is 51.9%. Alaska would be 62.9%. Admittedly it looks like the typical state is in the neighborhood of 50% and I claimed 60%, but it's hardly "less than half of that" and there do exist states with total taxation in excess of 60% of state GDP between state and federal taxes.
Nope, the 26.9% is inclusive of state and local taxes. Federal taxes last year were about 15% of GDP (they're usually closer to 18% or so:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/12/06/chart-of-the-day-u-s-taxes/
Even the Scandinavian countries, which have the highest tax rates in the industrialized world aren't as high as what you're asserting for the US. Our effective tax rate is lower than it's been in decades, and is quite low for a modern industrialized country.
Taking a 10% deficit as the baseline also massively overstates the structural problem. Yes, the past 2 years have had those ~10% deficits, but unless you're predicting that the economic slump that we're just now starting to recover from will go on in perpetuity, or get worse, it's not a reasonable baseline.
The 10% deficits are the current reality. Unless your point is to just continue to run those kind of deficits today and for the next few years and then try to pay for them with tax increases five or ten years from now?
Um, yes. First, as the economy recovers, tax receipts increase and social spending for the impacted citizens will drop significantly, both which will significantly improve the deficit. Increasing taxes or decreasing spending when the economy is sucking wind is a recipe for making things worse (which actually serves to make deficits worse and costs more in the long term due to the extra damage to the economy and workforce).
Moreover, there are differences between today and recent history. Right now debt as a percent of GDP is higher than it has been since the end of WWII, and unless we make significant cuts today it's going to get worse before it gets better. It's already about twice what it was when Regan took office. The only reason the interest isn't a present catastrophe is that interest rates are so low, and if the economy starts to recover then interest rates go back up and servicing the debt is going to seriously cut into the tax windfall that economic growth might otherwise produce.
Add to that the baby boomers retiring and removing their productive capacity (and income tax payments) while at the same time putting severe stress on social security and medicare as they start collecting rather than paying in.
Well, again, Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit, so in terms of a discussion about deficits, it's irrelevant. In terms of interest rates, sure, if rates increase it makes interest payments go up. That being said, that only becomes a problem if we either can't pay for it, or we're so politically dysfunctional that we won't. Japan has a much higher debt to GDP ratio (more than twi
Those "IOUs" are Treasury bonds, like all of the others that are in circulation. They're not illusory or false, nor stolen and we're obligated to honor them as we do all of our debts. Social Security's finances are entirely separate from the general fund (well, aside from the perpetual lie that is the "unified budget" topline number), and can't contribute to the deficit.
Nope. Social Security has a dedicated funding stream which isn't mixed with the general fund. Given the baby boom demographic bump, the SS tax has been set at a rate that's been running a significant surplus for the past 20 years or so in order to build up a trust fund for the years where the draw from it will be worst. That trust fund, like many risk-adverse funds, is invested in Treasury bonds. By law, if the SS trust fund runs out (all of the bonds are redeemed) and it can't pay full benefits, then it just can't pay full benefits; it can't contribute to the deficit.
You could increase taxes.
Let's think about that for a minute. Right now, between federal, state and local taxes, governments in the US collect about 60% of GDP as tax revenue.
Bullpucky. The actual numbers are less than half of that: Additional income, sales, and property taxes are assessed at the state and local levels. In the most recent year, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was 26.9 percent. That's from the liberal Heritage foundation ranking page for the US ( http://www.heritage.org/index/Country/UnitedStates )
For the last couple of years the federal deficit has been a little over 10% of GDP. So if you want to balance the budget by raising taxes, you have to raise the 60% to 70%.
Taking a 10% deficit as the baseline also massively overstates the structural problem. Yes, the past 2 years have had those ~10% deficits, but unless you're predicting that the economic slump that we're just now starting to recover from will go on in perpetuity, or get worse, it's not a reasonable baseline. In recent history, we average something more akin to 2-3% (though reagan did manage average something around 4% for a good chunk of his cutting and spending spree)
So, given realistic numbers, the structural deficit that we're facing is certainly something that could be addressed by targeted tax increases if that's what we chose to do.
Finally, Social Security is a dedicated funding stream and it can't contribute to the deficit by law. You could cancel the program tomorrow and it'd not change the actual deficit one bit (the reported "unified budget" deficit/surplus numbers are misleading since they include SS income, but that has nothing to do with the actual accounting).
Wow, we're the enemy now? I thought that one of the more important functions of being a citizen was making sure that the government was accountable to us for it's actions. The guy in question, presuming that he actually was responsible, did certainly violate military regs, but he's hardly a traitor.
The concern isn't that they're weapons as such, but that they're weapons designed to be hidden on merchant vessels. In a tense situation, it would likely make all merchant ships potential threats and would likely end up with a lot of innocent civilians being killed.
Net Neutrality creates the level playing field that fosters competition. That's how jobs, and new industries, are created. A robust, dynamic net ecosystem helps all of us. The telcos just want to set themselves up to extort a portion of the profits from successful net companies ("that's a nice search engine that you have there, it'd be a shame if no one could get to it...") and control who and how you're able to interact.
I guess that might match some minimum wage manufacturing jobs, if those even exist any more, but given that most minimum wage jobs are service sector, I don't think that outsourcing is so much an issue. It's not like they'd ship my burger patty off to India to be flipped or anything; there are many jobs that are essentially inherently local.
"The minimum wage laws have little if any effect on the number of jobs or the standard of living."
So then why not just make the minimum wage 30$ an hour? After all, if min wage has little, if any effect on the number of jobs then it should just work right?
Heck, lets make it 100$ an hour.
1000$
Because that would be stupid?
Given the realistic levels of minimum wage that anyone is speaking of, employment effects are indeed minimal (It's been studied in states when there was an increase, and no notable impact on employment was noted). In terms of the standard of living, for the person going from $5->$7 an hour, it'd be a significant improvement. As most people don't make the minimum wage or close enough to be an issue, inflation from it is similarly minimal. So, the person pulling in $50k a year might notice an extra dime on their big mac, but it's not like that'd be a significant hardship.
HIghways, public health expenditures/disease eradication, public education, basic science research all seem to be investments that ultimately raise our standard of living (better transit, healthier, better educated workforce, etc...). That's not even getting into that whole "system of laws" thing, which is the foundation upon which most of the rest of it rests. Your comment sounds quite like the "the government never created a job" sort of talk, which is similarly silly.
Actually, the structural deficit longer term is indeed driven by entitlement spending, but that spending tracks overall healthcare spending in our system since Medicare buys from the same markets as everyone else (it can do so a somewhat more cheaply due to having a good bit of leverage given it's size, but ultimately that just makes it grow a bit less fast than overall healthcare spending). Thus, controlling healthcare spending and cost inflation becomes critical if we want to head off huge long term issues. That's what should ultimately be driving our healthcare debate, but alas it's not.
Anyway, 0.5% of the federal budget isn't peanuts. I think that it comes back to a lack of vision with regard to what we're trying to accomplish, so the various programs and initiatives just sort of drift on, burning money. The Apollo program was targeted and specific in what it was trying to achieve (a man on the moon) and lavishly funded as it was more to one up the USSR than achieve scientific goals. It succeeded at it's core goal, but seeing as there wasn't really a solid vision beyond that, it just petered out once we'd "been there, done that".
Well, to be fair to Jobs, it's been scientifically proven that something on an Apple product is inherently 70-80% more Awesome (or is that iAwesome?) than the same thing on a competitor's product. So, by only marking iBooks up 50%, it's still more Awesome per dollar than what you're getting on a Kindle!
What's up with the front page troll post? Worldnutdaily and Rawstory as sources? Really?
Care to detail that a bit? I have a Pre, though I'm not a palm fanboy by any means. I've had it more or less since it launched and it seems to be a pretty solid little device so far as my experience has gone. The browser is good, the GPS is handy, Wifi works, 3G data speeds seem to be fine, there are a fair number of apps available for it (and palm seems to be fine with grey-market community apps), it's easily hackable, the UI is great, though the battery life is mediocre at best (though my understanding is that this is hardly unique to the pre wrt smartphones in general). The only issue that I've had is that the little cheapy USB cover fell off, not great, but hardly a huge issue (I've certainly not smashed/shattered it, so perhaps our use cases are a bit different). So, given that, how is this a POS?
Wow, that was quick. Blame "environmentalists" for foiling plans to "release the pressure"? The fact that we don't have anywhere near the technology to impact something of this scale and depth shouldn't matter apparently. Perhaps you need to stop listening to fox"news" so much.
Unless you're the Feds.</p></quote>
Actually, most business investment is done with borrowed money. That, and our financial industry is mostly based on gambling with borrowed/other people's money.
Last I checked, Gore wasn't advocating forced austerity or any such, he's pushing for us to move toward limiting/eliminating the use of carbon based fuels. He does have an older and large house, but spends the extra to be sure that the electricity that he's using is from non-carbon sources. Apparently, his utility gives that option. Heck, he could use solar/wind/geothermal, nuclear, fusion based energy to heat his backyard during winter and that'd not be in conflict with what he's advocating.
Since he's not proposing that we live like monks in hovels, I don't see how him not doing so has any bearing on this. Also, there's quite a bit of money to be made by smart capitalists in renewable energy; it's entirely compatible with capitalism. The problem that we have presently is that the energy market is broken in that it doesn't take the external costs that carbon based fuels add; that's what cap and trade attempts to do. It's intended to harness the ingenuity of the capitalist market to help solve these problems.
So, the "scandal" here is that his wife works for Golman Sachs and that pharma stocks are overpriced? Somehow mandating that healthcare workers get vaccinated against a new flu is somehow a huge conspiracy to profit for them how? I recognize that the tin-foil-hat brigade has kicked onto high alert over H1N1 vaccination, but this is stupid. This is front page material how?
Wow, industry boosterism from the wall st journal, what a shocker.
</sarcasm>
I suspect that we have a fairly large body of data on the creativity and success of those who aren't schooled given that it was the default mode of 'learning' for most of history, and heck probably still is in many poorer places. I'd suspect that we'd have come out of the middle ages much quicker if our supercharged, hypercurious unschooled masses, untainted by school, were 'unschooling' so awesome at harnessing our innate potential. Also, I suspect that life in general is pretty good at crushing one's innate curiosity given a bit of time, and with school they'll have to tools at least to acquire, understand, and work with knowledge that doesn't have immediate payoff.
s/Ob/Os/g
Firstly, "they" pay 40% corporation tax - the second highest in the world. What more do you want?
Actually, Microsoft reported last year that they pay more like 25% and that's probably inflated since it's usually noted in the context of Ballmer threatening to move offshore, so this is their "high" number to use as a club. That they don't actually pay anywhere near the statutory rate isn't a surprise as essentially no companies actually do. In fact the effective tax rate of our corporations is a good bit lower than most industrialized nations when exemptions and manipulations to hide profit are factored in.
A good outline of effective corporate versus statutory tax rates if one is interested
"Do you really want to see the total collapse of the US economy as corporations buckle under an even heavier tax burden?"
A mentioned and noted earlier, our corporations aren't suffering higher effective taxation rates here than other industrialized nations and in many cases they're lower. Ultimately, if our infrastructure and the quality of our workforce suffer, it doesn't matter what the tax rate is, they won't locate or stay here with the skill jobs that we want. That's what taxes are for. I understand that corporations are amoral by nature and will try to externalize every cost that they're able to since their guiding force is maximizing profit. As such, they're motivated to make sure that paying for the police force, roads, education and the like is "someone else's problem".
What about the 30 second skip? I have a couple of TIVO's currently and beyond having to re-enable it should the power go out (it's a simple code that you hit on the remote) it just works.
Now that doesn't mean that they might make that go away in the future (thus why they keep it an undocumented feature), but as of last night it certainly seemed to work for me.
Wow, that's a interesting way to misread what he's been saying, though awful convenient if one would rather attack the man rather than actually address his message.
He didn't say that "We've got 10 years left on the enviroment", he's saying that there's a high probability that we have about a 10 year window available to us to get our global greenhouse emmisions under control before the changes become irrevocable. Since the changes due to warming tend to reinforce one another, once the cycle gets too far along our ability to influence and ameliorate it largely goes away.