So realistically, the cost due to the tax is a lot smaller than you suggest even if it is all passed on to customers.
Employees are also customers of corporations. Corporations make almost everything. If the cost of "almost everything" (from Heinz Ketchup to Chevy trucks) goes up 30%, you're going to have to increase the wages of your employees significantly to make up the cost of living difference.
So add that to increased "parts overhead". Office chairs, desks, computers... all roughly 30% more expensive.
I'm not sure how increasing taxes increases competition; history shows it decreases competition by deterring investment in future products (and generally making the cost of operation higher). Due to the desire to maintain the 'bottom line', costs will be cut - namely, employees and their percentage of income from the whole. The economics are similar to what caused companies to see cheap labor overseas and outsource it there.
Inflation would go up; the cost of living would go up significantly - and wages and employment would go down. We're seeing a similar thing right now with the mandated healthcare funding and the costs that's introducing, albeit to a much smaller degree.
Good reasons to not do anything in Silicon Valley, nevermind California:
1) Taxes. California is expensive. 2) Employee wages. Because of taxes, they must be higher to be competitive. 3) Energy costs and grid instability. I'm continually amazed by how crappy things are there. 4) Uppity liberal engineers. No, seriously: these people make poor engineers. Good software developers, sure. Reasoning ability isn't in question; their ability to acknowledge the realities of the world around them for what it is, is. 5) Culture. This ties into #4, but the "I'm due" attitude makes for lazy workers who think they're entitled. Sometimes, hard and unpleasant work is required to get the job done; unless its personally interesting, this type of worker isn't going to get it done. (Check out where industrial machinery tends to be engineered. Hint: it's far from the beaches.) 6) Lost work hours due to environment. SUre, your workers might be there from 9-5 but if it takes an hour on either side of their work day to transit in heavy traffic to do so, they're not going to be on their game. 7) They need automotive engineers who understand what has been tried, why it should not be tried again, and so on. These people are likely to be located elsewhere, giving no incentive to move to California over any other state.
An electric car would be no different from an iPod in this respect.
Yet an iPod is significantly different than, say, a Nokia n8100 or a Microsoft Zune. Why? It may have to do with the culture and location in which they were designed, and what kind of engineers were working on it.
I'd sooner want John Deere or CAT engineers designing my EV than iPod engineers. JD or CAT engineers would be concerned with purely quantifiable things: input to output ratios, handling, suspension, etc. The iPod engineers might do some EC stuff, but for the most part, they're going to be focused on the design of the end result. I'd rather have an efficient EV built by experienced mechanical/electrical engineers that looks like a brick than I would a car that looks awesome but can't corner quickly without a wheel flying off, or an electrical short in cold weather that causes the thing to stall.
I'm not sure on your last two; I moved the day after the election.
I was there overseeing when the calls were called in to the state. Unless I was not actually speaking with the state officials, it'd have been them who fucked it up.
Could you afford a vehicle if it cost 30% more? Because that would be the result (if not higher) of every corporation paying "exactly" 35% (or whatever) of their income.
Could Google afford the level and breadth of services if their cost was 30% higher? What about the cost for an OEM PC - does $800ish instead of $600ish sound good to you (for the same thing)? In all likelihood, it'd be higher still, on account of cascading taxes and the need to raise revenue at each level appropriately, so as to not lose out in stock prices and the like.
Assuming no costs:
Now: A corp sells widget X for $100. After taxes and loopholes, they make $95. B corp buys the widget, adds some modifications, and sells it for $150. They make $47.50.
With 30% tax: A corp sells widget X for $100. After taxes and loopholes, they make $70. B corp buys the widget, adds some modifications, and sells it for $150. They make $35.
But A corp and B corp can't do that; they've got to maintain revenue. A sells for $118.75 and B corp sells for $178.15.
This is also called inflation.
Just as this tax evasion is stupid, a 35% corporate tax is stupid. Incredibly stupid. In fact, it helps the established corporations: it hurts the domestic economy and slows growth and stifles competition at the higher levels (ie the developing corporations which don't have the capital to float off-seas operations).
* Not a property/asset owner? * Unable to feed and house self month to month? * Unable to meet all financial obligations with excess?
You can stretch it to mean whatever you want, but instead of saying "poor" saying "the upper 60% of income earners pay all taxes, with the lower 50% of that high end paying approximately 1/7th per capita as the upper 10%" is slightly more honest (even if slightly mathematically incorrect).
By your statement, one would think that people working minimum wage and not making enough through their efforts were not poor. Because that's how the numbers work out.
No need, as I don't believe the money is wholly wasted. What makes me angry is the 4-7 trillion dollars we've spent and have accrued liability for with pointless boondoggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the people who blindly support those "wars". But that's beside the point.
Quite right - it is besides the point. It's also wrong, but that's besides the point too, I suppose?
Since 2001, there have been expenditures less than $1.1 trillion. This information is readily accessible for anyone to examine.
Where exactly are you getting 4-7 trillion? The only thing I can figure is you're taking the entire DoD budget and aggregating them. And even then, you're off your rocker: as a percentage of the GDP (and not even considering inflation!), the DoD has received roughly.5-4% less in the last decade, per year, than under "the peaceful President", Bill Clinton (per year).
In fact, DoD funding receipts in 2004 were the lowest (as percentage of GDP) since 1959. So kindly shut the fuck up.
Really? Last I checked, "poor" people didn't pay taxes. Poor people:
* qualify for free food * get more money back when they 'pay' their taxes than they put in (a 'refund' they call it) * qualify for subsidized housing
The people who are getting fucked by taxes are the middle class - IE, the people who are contributing to the social and economic prosperity of the country directly, instead of just filling a shift. They're the ones with degrees, families, and responsibilities within their communities as the result of both.
What world do you live in where the poor actually pay taxes? I understand if you're talking abotu things like sales, liquor and tobacco taxes having a disproportionate impact on the poor; this much is true - but the same can be said for every other purchase or economic decision they make. Having less money means it takes less to impact the bottom line.
I feel for the people who are making just above the "impoverished"/"government assistance" income line. They're likely worse off, economically, than people making 20-30% less than they are due to the tax differences and lack of "free" government help. (For a family of 4 or 5, this is right around $54k/year. So if you're a professional bread winner, so your spouse can stay home with the kids, chances are you're getting hit in the pants the hardest. Interestingly, this demographic is fairly likely to vote Republican/conservatively.)
If they're using loopholes and not actually paying those taxes, what exactly is it that they're complaining about? Complaining when you're not paying does tend to bring such things to light.
* Having to pay for accountants and lawyers to make such things possible * Having to 'outsource' part of their operations to tax havens to make such things possible
Those are the two things I see. Since the corporations aren't going to be paying the taxes anyway, why not just get rid of them and level the playing field? Make it a sliding 5-10% (lower percentages for higher-income corporations). Since the corporations obviously want to stay in the US, paying that premium would likely be low enough to make the offshoring operational costs redundant, while at the same time resulting in higher corporate tax income for the government.
It's called an opportunity cost. You make them every day, constantly: you lose 5 minutes checking facebook or 10 posting to slashdot, in exchange for what you receive (unquantifiable, in this case, unless we're talking about social oneness and/or a feeling of superiority). It's only reasonable that a corporation would do the same to save a mere couple billion.
I lived in a small district where I was involved in the election. I was one of 3 people who verified the votes for the 2008 Republican primary; one of which was the county commissioner. I was there when the votes were counted, tallied, and recounted.
The county numbers were different than the state-level reporting of the county. Ron Paul won the primaries by a significant margin (as a percentage, but not #s - there were fewer than 80 or so voters, as it's a small county). State numbers showed Ron Paul getting 2 votes, with Romney (IIRC?) winning the county with something like 60% of the vote (he came in third by our tally).
No. You just unionized voting, which pretty much means you corrupted it.
Even if voting payolla were not made illegal, it'd at least be more honest than the current buying of votes. Make no mistake, votes are bought today - it's just clandestine and deceptive.
Morse code was invented for this, or similar, reasons. There is no reason to stick to binary when your mechanisms are complex enough to use something else.
Per your example, the "Internet" was not invented. A similar network was invented, yes. But the Internet is based on IP, which is impractical with line-of-sight carrier with this kind of manual bit transfer. It's too prone to error.
Due to the complexity involved in making a transmission, more complex, less specific, and information dense encodings (eg. morse, or something similar to "one by land, two by sea") become much more reasonable.
People with technical know-how and technology and machinery are spread out all over the planet.
Know-how, sure. But the level of competence in many parts of the world is not sufficient to actually accomplish anything.
There's a reason why maintenance in Mecca has to be done by outside contractors. The local talent breaks things. Thus, "hajji engineering" or "The Inshallah School of Maintenance" have become part of our vernacular.
This is not the only example of a world view holding people back from success and accomplishment. I'm reminded of the people groups in Western Africa, who think of human and animal shit as a medicinally applicable substance - and as such, smear it on their children (and adults) when they get sick. (Guess how well that turns out, short term.) The long-term result is a society which is perpetually fighting for their very existence due to constant illness and a high level of disease.
Do you have any idea how difficult a mirror is to make? Or any decent, relatively consistent, reflective surface, for that matter. There is a reason why there were people specially trained in the art for probably somewhere around a thousand years, and why only the very rich had mirrors.
It is not a trivial task, despite being able to pick up a handheld mirror for $1 at Walmart. First, what are you going to use for your reflector? Aluminum? Silver? Copper? You're going to have to smelt for any of those, and Aluminum is likely impossible/too difficult to approach.
Then you're going to have to pour it, for which you're going to have to create a perfectly smooth surface. You'll need a very large quantity of ore to get this done.
Then you'll need to polish the hell out of the surface. Hopefully you've got a very stiff, firm backing: any deviations in your surface will result in not one, but multiple mirrors due to to each surface (separated only by a fraction of a degree from each other) will diffuse light instead of casting it in the same direction.
Even making a small 'pocket' mirror would have similar implications and requirements. Ultimately, you're still bound by the 'line of sight' issue, which in a non-agrarian society on the East Coast likely means hill-top to hill-top communication is the only realistic means, with either set intervals for communication or people monitoring comms all day.
You'd be better off making a shortwave radio. Due to time involved, I suspect it'd be a more efficient use of time than a telegraph, too.
Hell, "smoke signals" seem a better approach than that; range will be similar, and covert communication is similarly possible due to the requisite encoding. As an added bonus over your mirror idea, you can do it at any point when it is not cloudy. Shortwave only has marginal benefit over this in that it is largely immediate, can be operated at any time of the day in any weather, and the like.
I'm not sure why the guy didn't use a flint to start the fire. It's not exactly an uncommon material to be found, simply laying on the ground in raw and finished form, in many parts of the country (including NJ). This is largely due to it being a very, very common trade item for all of North America, going back quite a long time (going back to the stone age). I imagine it's similar elsewhere in the world due to how useful it was. Red River flint (from ND) made it's way to Europe, for instance.
(You can walk the shores of the Hudson river in NY and come across knappings and finished/broken flint points - which have been sitting there so long that their sharper edges have eroded. People lived in that region of the world for a long, long time doing essentially the exact same thing; a good rain storm comes along and there'll be another layer of soil with points to discover with flints from all around the country.)
As for making fires in the East... it's difficult in general due to the year-round humidity. I'd say it's significantly less difficult than forging steel, though.
So, it's pretty much just like a Lenovo Thinkpad X series laptop from 2 or so years ago - screen size
Biggest quantifiable differences appear to be:
* price (after two years of market change, you'd think the same thing would be cheaper) * no repairable/replaceable parts (battery, etc.) as is easily done on a Thinkpad * Ergonomics of the device itself * White instead of black * negligible external interface ports * thin enough it can tentatively be used to cut veggies in the kitchen or sever one's penis in an accident (intentional? design flaw? you decide.)
Actually, they can be audited if you want your vote as part of a public record. In that case, the parents/employer/mafia/dictator will demand you vote in a certain pattern.
There's always a double-blind vote audit, with independent parties.
Except, there is a way (a VERY GOOD way) to do this electronically, with open systems.
A person goes to vote. They vote, and a receipt is printed for them with their vote, their location, and a unique PIN. They can later go and reference said PIN and verify that the voting record is correct.
You could even have independent groups which would try to gather this information. "go to verifyvote.org and enter your vote information!" There would be no need for a 'recount'. Either the vote is valid (quickly tallied at the end of the day), or it is not.
The actual logic code required for a 'voting system' is likely only several hundred lines at most. The communication methods, probably a couple thousand more at worst. This would be easily audited if it were open; the results, even more so.
And so far, no believable evidence that any errors actually changed the outcome of any election other than in those cases where it was so close that even human error could tip the balance.
Yet, there is sufficient evidence to support a conspiracy to deceive and disenfranchise the public:
* the voting systems are closed source * the vendors and states have resisted accreditation * the audit trails are so weak as to be useless * it has been shown repeatedly that they are vulnerable to trivial attacks, yet no attempts have been made to remedy the situation * the body of politicians has shown itself not only satisfied but pleased with the development of e-voting (odd, due to their general distrust of technology in general)
Additionally, it has been shown, repeatedly, that voting fraud is occurring. I have noticed it myself, though I think in my case it can be chalked up to nepotism and the like. Ten votes here, and ten votes there, go missing... it adds up quite a lot at the lower levels, where your votes actually count towards the total.
I don't know what you're on about. I've been using Chromium exclusively for over a year now (2 years? time goes by quickly) - since beta versions of 5.
Sure, the versioning is marketing. That doesn't change the fact that Chrome/Chromium actually is fairly mature software, at this point. It's at least on par with Firefox and Opera (being superior and deficient in different areas, but mostly - IMO - superior), and miles above Safari.
I heard about Japan in the 70s and early 80s: they just copy, they don't innovate, and have a mediocre directed economy. And then they ate our lunch.
Have you looked at the Japanese economy in the past decade? How about the last couple years?
Everything manual labor related is done by immigrants. They still have a fairly strict class system. The economy is in the pit, and many people are out of work (reports around 5%, which is huge for Japan due to the identity of a person with their career). Japan itself produces almost nothing at this point, with the vast, vast majority of its population living in Tokyo. They have gone from an economically expansive country to one looking largely inward in the last couple years alone. Because they based their economy on mimicry and improvement of our's, they're foundering due to not having anything much more to innovate and improve upon aside from their own dead-end designs. (Hint: 'innovative' vehicle designs coming out of China were designed largely in the US; see: Toyota Prius.)
1. Huge tariffs on cane sugar
2. Huge subsidies on corn
3. Dumping agriculture surplus to 3rd world, killing their local production
4. Subsidies on wheat, cotton and tons of other stuff
While cane sugar is a historic protection racket to protect the domestic corn and beet syrup production, the others have largely been the result of feel-good globalist bullshit.
Dumping ag to the third world started off as an aid thing. "Help the poor oppressed people of the world!" Politicians got the limelight for these efforts, despite that it did not improve the regional food problems. (Do remember that cheap and/or free food to these impoverished nations didn't supplant anything. It's not like they had thriving local agriculture; mostly they've been in a state of civil war since forever.)
Subsidies on wheat, etc. are due to "what will the farmers do!" reactionaryism. Unfortunately, the problem was a bit of a chicken/egg, and instead of breaking the cycle, the government chose to suppliment it. Instead of breaking up the trade rackets which gave below-production purchase prices for grains (or helping farmers do something else with their land) when production yields became so high as to make large yields worth almost nothing due to economies of scale, they just decided to help pay farmers more for their (essentially worthless) corn, etc.
Largely, these things are the symptom of efficient industrial farming and the application of machinery and the resulting jobs that were lost (or would have been lost, had there not been gov't interaction). There would be no subsidies or dumping to the third world if there wasn't so damn much overproduction (on account of us not knowing what to do with all of it, and the gov'ts need to maintain prices despite the purchasing conglomerate low price setting).
Could it (and can it) be fixed? Maybe, but not without a complete market restructure and the abandonment of stupid initiatives, like ethanol production.
Also, we've got a huge food trade surplus with China (11 billion or so). (Is it really dumping if you can do something much, much cheaper than the competition? It'd still be cheaper, if not even more so, if there was no gov't intervention.) We're selling them debt and food, apparently. Increased Chinese demand for things like meat and corn are, I suppose, a large part of why grain prices have been sky rocketing.
Want to wager what would happen to the world if the US stopped 'dumping' its food products? I suspect there'd be famine throughout most of the world, including in places like Europe and Canada.
SOrry for the lack of a topically unified post. One of those days.
They were never elected, and the Heavens aren't smiling like they used to in the olden days when claiming a Heavenly mandate was all that was needed.
Believe it or not, most Chinese residents don't seem to hold such a critical belief of their government. They're Government; they're not illegitimate just because they weren't elected. They have no love for democracy over there.
This will force the U.S. and the West in general to get smarter about what materials are necessary for modern life and find substitutes for the ones China controls. It will have the effect of shifting the West's economy further away from China's.
Really, it will? I was under the historically-influenced opinion that it would result in higher prices, black market goods, and likely a war or three. (Unfortunately for the West, we have things that China still wants: maintained and largely healthy forests, clean water, and lots of arable land. I'm not sure we'd be the ones to initiate warfare hostilities if it came down to unilateral trade wars.)
There's not much that can be done right now for an absence of rare-earth materials, such as magnets. There is no technological substitute for many of the minerals used for optics, either.
Expect the optics markets to suffer first. I think I'll pick up a Trijicon scope or two ASAP.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. There goes the neighborhood. And here we were hoping for some up-scale development.
So realistically, the cost due to the tax is a lot smaller than you suggest even if it is all passed on to customers.
Employees are also customers of corporations. Corporations make almost everything. If the cost of "almost everything" (from Heinz Ketchup to Chevy trucks) goes up 30%, you're going to have to increase the wages of your employees significantly to make up the cost of living difference.
So add that to increased "parts overhead". Office chairs, desks, computers... all roughly 30% more expensive.
I'm not sure how increasing taxes increases competition; history shows it decreases competition by deterring investment in future products (and generally making the cost of operation higher). Due to the desire to maintain the 'bottom line', costs will be cut - namely, employees and their percentage of income from the whole. The economics are similar to what caused companies to see cheap labor overseas and outsource it there.
Inflation would go up; the cost of living would go up significantly - and wages and employment would go down. We're seeing a similar thing right now with the mandated healthcare funding and the costs that's introducing, albeit to a much smaller degree.
Is a Lexus or Mercedes tax-exempt?
Good reasons to not do anything in Silicon Valley, nevermind California:
1) Taxes. California is expensive.
2) Employee wages. Because of taxes, they must be higher to be competitive.
3) Energy costs and grid instability. I'm continually amazed by how crappy things are there.
4) Uppity liberal engineers. No, seriously: these people make poor engineers. Good software developers, sure. Reasoning ability isn't in question; their ability to acknowledge the realities of the world around them for what it is, is.
5) Culture. This ties into #4, but the "I'm due" attitude makes for lazy workers who think they're entitled. Sometimes, hard and unpleasant work is required to get the job done; unless its personally interesting, this type of worker isn't going to get it done. (Check out where industrial machinery tends to be engineered. Hint: it's far from the beaches.)
6) Lost work hours due to environment. SUre, your workers might be there from 9-5 but if it takes an hour on either side of their work day to transit in heavy traffic to do so, they're not going to be on their game.
7) They need automotive engineers who understand what has been tried, why it should not be tried again, and so on. These people are likely to be located elsewhere, giving no incentive to move to California over any other state.
An electric car would be no different from an iPod in this respect.
Yet an iPod is significantly different than, say, a Nokia n8100 or a Microsoft Zune. Why? It may have to do with the culture and location in which they were designed, and what kind of engineers were working on it.
I'd sooner want John Deere or CAT engineers designing my EV than iPod engineers. JD or CAT engineers would be concerned with purely quantifiable things: input to output ratios, handling, suspension, etc. The iPod engineers might do some EC stuff, but for the most part, they're going to be focused on the design of the end result. I'd rather have an efficient EV built by experienced mechanical/electrical engineers that looks like a brick than I would a car that looks awesome but can't corner quickly without a wheel flying off, or an electrical short in cold weather that causes the thing to stall.
I'm not sure on your last two; I moved the day after the election.
I was there overseeing when the calls were called in to the state. Unless I was not actually speaking with the state officials, it'd have been them who fucked it up.
Yes, I am.
They loan - with interest - money to the federal government.
Could you afford a vehicle if it cost 30% more? Because that would be the result (if not higher) of every corporation paying "exactly" 35% (or whatever) of their income.
Could Google afford the level and breadth of services if their cost was 30% higher? What about the cost for an OEM PC - does $800ish instead of $600ish sound good to you (for the same thing)? In all likelihood, it'd be higher still, on account of cascading taxes and the need to raise revenue at each level appropriately, so as to not lose out in stock prices and the like.
Assuming no costs:
Now: A corp sells widget X for $100. After taxes and loopholes, they make $95. B corp buys the widget, adds some modifications, and sells it for $150. They make $47.50.
With 30% tax: A corp sells widget X for $100. After taxes and loopholes, they make $70. B corp buys the widget, adds some modifications, and sells it for $150. They make $35.
But A corp and B corp can't do that; they've got to maintain revenue. A sells for $118.75 and B corp sells for $178.15.
This is also called inflation.
Just as this tax evasion is stupid, a 35% corporate tax is stupid. Incredibly stupid. In fact, it helps the established corporations: it hurts the domestic economy and slows growth and stifles competition at the higher levels (ie the developing corporations which don't have the capital to float off-seas operations).
What is your definition of "poor"?
* Not a property/asset owner?
* Unable to feed and house self month to month?
* Unable to meet all financial obligations with excess?
You can stretch it to mean whatever you want, but instead of saying "poor" saying "the upper 60% of income earners pay all taxes, with the lower 50% of that high end paying approximately 1/7th per capita as the upper 10%" is slightly more honest (even if slightly mathematically incorrect).
By your statement, one would think that people working minimum wage and not making enough through their efforts were not poor. Because that's how the numbers work out.
No need, as I don't believe the money is wholly wasted. What makes me angry is the 4-7 trillion dollars we've spent and have accrued liability for with pointless boondoggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the people who blindly support those "wars". But that's beside the point.
Quite right - it is besides the point. It's also wrong, but that's besides the point too, I suppose?
Since 2001, there have been expenditures less than $1.1 trillion. This information is readily accessible for anyone to examine.
Where exactly are you getting 4-7 trillion? The only thing I can figure is you're taking the entire DoD budget and aggregating them. And even then, you're off your rocker: as a percentage of the GDP (and not even considering inflation!), the DoD has received roughly .5-4% less in the last decade, per year, than under "the peaceful President", Bill Clinton (per year).
In fact, DoD funding receipts in 2004 were the lowest (as percentage of GDP) since 1959. So kindly shut the fuck up.
Really? Last I checked, "poor" people didn't pay taxes. Poor people:
* qualify for free food
* get more money back when they 'pay' their taxes than they put in (a 'refund' they call it)
* qualify for subsidized housing
The people who are getting fucked by taxes are the middle class - IE, the people who are contributing to the social and economic prosperity of the country directly, instead of just filling a shift. They're the ones with degrees, families, and responsibilities within their communities as the result of both.
What world do you live in where the poor actually pay taxes? I understand if you're talking abotu things like sales, liquor and tobacco taxes having a disproportionate impact on the poor; this much is true - but the same can be said for every other purchase or economic decision they make. Having less money means it takes less to impact the bottom line.
I feel for the people who are making just above the "impoverished"/"government assistance" income line. They're likely worse off, economically, than people making 20-30% less than they are due to the tax differences and lack of "free" government help. (For a family of 4 or 5, this is right around $54k/year. So if you're a professional bread winner, so your spouse can stay home with the kids, chances are you're getting hit in the pants the hardest. Interestingly, this demographic is fairly likely to vote Republican/conservatively.)
If they're using loopholes and not actually paying those taxes, what exactly is it that they're complaining about? Complaining when you're not paying does tend to bring such things to light.
* Having to pay for accountants and lawyers to make such things possible
* Having to 'outsource' part of their operations to tax havens to make such things possible
Those are the two things I see. Since the corporations aren't going to be paying the taxes anyway, why not just get rid of them and level the playing field? Make it a sliding 5-10% (lower percentages for higher-income corporations). Since the corporations obviously want to stay in the US, paying that premium would likely be low enough to make the offshoring operational costs redundant, while at the same time resulting in higher corporate tax income for the government.
It's called an opportunity cost. You make them every day, constantly: you lose 5 minutes checking facebook or 10 posting to slashdot, in exchange for what you receive (unquantifiable, in this case, unless we're talking about social oneness and/or a feeling of superiority). It's only reasonable that a corporation would do the same to save a mere couple billion.
I lived in a small district where I was involved in the election. I was one of 3 people who verified the votes for the 2008 Republican primary; one of which was the county commissioner. I was there when the votes were counted, tallied, and recounted.
The county numbers were different than the state-level reporting of the county. Ron Paul won the primaries by a significant margin (as a percentage, but not #s - there were fewer than 80 or so voters, as it's a small county). State numbers showed Ron Paul getting 2 votes, with Romney (IIRC?) winning the county with something like 60% of the vote (he came in third by our tally).
No. You just unionized voting, which pretty much means you corrupted it.
Even if voting payolla were not made illegal, it'd at least be more honest than the current buying of votes. Make no mistake, votes are bought today - it's just clandestine and deceptive.
Morse code was invented for this, or similar, reasons. There is no reason to stick to binary when your mechanisms are complex enough to use something else.
Per your example, the "Internet" was not invented. A similar network was invented, yes. But the Internet is based on IP, which is impractical with line-of-sight carrier with this kind of manual bit transfer. It's too prone to error.
Due to the complexity involved in making a transmission, more complex, less specific, and information dense encodings (eg. morse, or something similar to "one by land, two by sea") become much more reasonable.
People with technical know-how and technology and machinery are spread out all over the planet.
Know-how, sure. But the level of competence in many parts of the world is not sufficient to actually accomplish anything.
There's a reason why maintenance in Mecca has to be done by outside contractors. The local talent breaks things. Thus, "hajji engineering" or "The Inshallah School of Maintenance" have become part of our vernacular.
This is not the only example of a world view holding people back from success and accomplishment. I'm reminded of the people groups in Western Africa, who think of human and animal shit as a medicinally applicable substance - and as such, smear it on their children (and adults) when they get sick. (Guess how well that turns out, short term.) The long-term result is a society which is perpetually fighting for their very existence due to constant illness and a high level of disease.
Do you have any idea how difficult a mirror is to make? Or any decent, relatively consistent, reflective surface, for that matter. There is a reason why there were people specially trained in the art for probably somewhere around a thousand years, and why only the very rich had mirrors.
It is not a trivial task, despite being able to pick up a handheld mirror for $1 at Walmart. First, what are you going to use for your reflector? Aluminum? Silver? Copper? You're going to have to smelt for any of those, and Aluminum is likely impossible/too difficult to approach.
Then you're going to have to pour it, for which you're going to have to create a perfectly smooth surface. You'll need a very large quantity of ore to get this done.
Then you'll need to polish the hell out of the surface. Hopefully you've got a very stiff, firm backing: any deviations in your surface will result in not one, but multiple mirrors due to to each surface (separated only by a fraction of a degree from each other) will diffuse light instead of casting it in the same direction.
Even making a small 'pocket' mirror would have similar implications and requirements. Ultimately, you're still bound by the 'line of sight' issue, which in a non-agrarian society on the East Coast likely means hill-top to hill-top communication is the only realistic means, with either set intervals for communication or people monitoring comms all day.
You'd be better off making a shortwave radio. Due to time involved, I suspect it'd be a more efficient use of time than a telegraph, too.
Hell, "smoke signals" seem a better approach than that; range will be similar, and covert communication is similarly possible due to the requisite encoding. As an added bonus over your mirror idea, you can do it at any point when it is not cloudy. Shortwave only has marginal benefit over this in that it is largely immediate, can be operated at any time of the day in any weather, and the like.
I'm not sure why the guy didn't use a flint to start the fire. It's not exactly an uncommon material to be found, simply laying on the ground in raw and finished form, in many parts of the country (including NJ). This is largely due to it being a very, very common trade item for all of North America, going back quite a long time (going back to the stone age). I imagine it's similar elsewhere in the world due to how useful it was. Red River flint (from ND) made it's way to Europe, for instance.
(You can walk the shores of the Hudson river in NY and come across knappings and finished/broken flint points - which have been sitting there so long that their sharper edges have eroded. People lived in that region of the world for a long, long time doing essentially the exact same thing; a good rain storm comes along and there'll be another layer of soil with points to discover with flints from all around the country.)
As for making fires in the East... it's difficult in general due to the year-round humidity. I'd say it's significantly less difficult than forging steel, though.
So, it's pretty much just like a Lenovo Thinkpad X series laptop from 2 or so years ago - screen size
Biggest quantifiable differences appear to be:
* price (after two years of market change, you'd think the same thing would be cheaper)
* no repairable/replaceable parts (battery, etc.) as is easily done on a Thinkpad
* Ergonomics of the device itself
* White instead of black
* negligible external interface ports
* thin enough it can tentatively be used to cut veggies in the kitchen or sever one's penis in an accident (intentional? design flaw? you decide.)
Actually, they can be audited if you want your vote as part of a public record. In that case, the parents/employer/mafia/dictator will demand you vote in a certain pattern.
There's always a double-blind vote audit, with independent parties.
Except, there is a way (a VERY GOOD way) to do this electronically, with open systems.
A person goes to vote. They vote, and a receipt is printed for them with their vote, their location, and a unique PIN. They can later go and reference said PIN and verify that the voting record is correct.
You could even have independent groups which would try to gather this information. "go to verifyvote.org and enter your vote information!" There would be no need for a 'recount'. Either the vote is valid (quickly tallied at the end of the day), or it is not.
The actual logic code required for a 'voting system' is likely only several hundred lines at most. The communication methods, probably a couple thousand more at worst. This would be easily audited if it were open; the results, even more so.
And so far, no believable evidence that any errors actually changed the outcome of any election other than in those cases where it was so close that even human error could tip the balance.
Yet, there is sufficient evidence to support a conspiracy to deceive and disenfranchise the public:
* the voting systems are closed source
* the vendors and states have resisted accreditation
* the audit trails are so weak as to be useless
* it has been shown repeatedly that they are vulnerable to trivial attacks, yet no attempts have been made to remedy the situation
* the body of politicians has shown itself not only satisfied but pleased with the development of e-voting (odd, due to their general distrust of technology in general)
Additionally, it has been shown, repeatedly, that voting fraud is occurring. I have noticed it myself, though I think in my case it can be chalked up to nepotism and the like. Ten votes here, and ten votes there, go missing... it adds up quite a lot at the lower levels, where your votes actually count towards the total.
I don't know what you're on about. I've been using Chromium exclusively for over a year now (2 years? time goes by quickly) - since beta versions of 5.
Sure, the versioning is marketing. That doesn't change the fact that Chrome/Chromium actually is fairly mature software, at this point. It's at least on par with Firefox and Opera (being superior and deficient in different areas, but mostly - IMO - superior), and miles above Safari.
I heard about Japan in the 70s and early 80s: they just copy, they don't innovate, and have a mediocre directed economy. And then they ate our lunch.
Have you looked at the Japanese economy in the past decade? How about the last couple years?
Everything manual labor related is done by immigrants. They still have a fairly strict class system. The economy is in the pit, and many people are out of work (reports around 5%, which is huge for Japan due to the identity of a person with their career). Japan itself produces almost nothing at this point, with the vast, vast majority of its population living in Tokyo. They have gone from an economically expansive country to one looking largely inward in the last couple years alone. Because they based their economy on mimicry and improvement of our's, they're foundering due to not having anything much more to innovate and improve upon aside from their own dead-end designs. (Hint: 'innovative' vehicle designs coming out of China were designed largely in the US; see: Toyota Prius.)
The same will likely happen to China.
1. Huge tariffs on cane sugar
2. Huge subsidies on corn
3. Dumping agriculture surplus to 3rd world, killing their local production
4. Subsidies on wheat, cotton and tons of other stuff
While cane sugar is a historic protection racket to protect the domestic corn and beet syrup production, the others have largely been the result of feel-good globalist bullshit.
Dumping ag to the third world started off as an aid thing. "Help the poor oppressed people of the world!" Politicians got the limelight for these efforts, despite that it did not improve the regional food problems. (Do remember that cheap and/or free food to these impoverished nations didn't supplant anything. It's not like they had thriving local agriculture; mostly they've been in a state of civil war since forever.)
Subsidies on wheat, etc. are due to "what will the farmers do!" reactionaryism. Unfortunately, the problem was a bit of a chicken/egg, and instead of breaking the cycle, the government chose to suppliment it. Instead of breaking up the trade rackets which gave below-production purchase prices for grains (or helping farmers do something else with their land) when production yields became so high as to make large yields worth almost nothing due to economies of scale, they just decided to help pay farmers more for their (essentially worthless) corn, etc.
Largely, these things are the symptom of efficient industrial farming and the application of machinery and the resulting jobs that were lost (or would have been lost, had there not been gov't interaction). There would be no subsidies or dumping to the third world if there wasn't so damn much overproduction (on account of us not knowing what to do with all of it, and the gov'ts need to maintain prices despite the purchasing conglomerate low price setting).
Could it (and can it) be fixed? Maybe, but not without a complete market restructure and the abandonment of stupid initiatives, like ethanol production.
Also, we've got a huge food trade surplus with China (11 billion or so). (Is it really dumping if you can do something much, much cheaper than the competition? It'd still be cheaper, if not even more so, if there was no gov't intervention.) We're selling them debt and food, apparently. Increased Chinese demand for things like meat and corn are, I suppose, a large part of why grain prices have been sky rocketing.
Want to wager what would happen to the world if the US stopped 'dumping' its food products? I suspect there'd be famine throughout most of the world, including in places like Europe and Canada.
SOrry for the lack of a topically unified post. One of those days.
They were never elected, and the Heavens aren't smiling like they used to in the olden days when claiming a Heavenly mandate was all that was needed.
Believe it or not, most Chinese residents don't seem to hold such a critical belief of their government. They're Government; they're not illegitimate just because they weren't elected. They have no love for democracy over there.
This will force the U.S. and the West in general to get smarter about what materials are necessary for modern life and find substitutes for the ones China controls. It will have the effect of shifting the West's economy further away from China's.
Really, it will? I was under the historically-influenced opinion that it would result in higher prices, black market goods, and likely a war or three. (Unfortunately for the West, we have things that China still wants: maintained and largely healthy forests, clean water, and lots of arable land. I'm not sure we'd be the ones to initiate warfare hostilities if it came down to unilateral trade wars.)
There's not much that can be done right now for an absence of rare-earth materials, such as magnets. There is no technological substitute for many of the minerals used for optics, either.
Expect the optics markets to suffer first. I think I'll pick up a Trijicon scope or two ASAP.