Their [Apple's] obstinance prevents you from having this great software on Apple devices—not the GPL or the people enforcing it.
I have karma to burn, so I'm just going to say it: how is Apple expecting software distributed via their App Store to comply with App Store terms and conditions any more obstinate than expecting software distributed under the GPL to be distributed according to GPL conditions? Apple are under no obligation to carry software with what they consider inappropriate licensing on their store, any more than we are under any obligation to buy Apple hardware and apps from their store if we value the provisions of the GPL.
But endings are impossible. You try to tie up every loose end, but you never can.
And yet, despite all the issues around season 4/5 production, JMS still managed to tie up almost every loose end in Babylon 5 (even if you didn't realise it, because he tied some of them up several series earlier).
Most of the Star Trek series finished with some sort of decent final story arc.
Both SG1 and SGA finished quite neatly (and wrapped up the loose ends of the main story arc with an actually decent TV movie in the former case).
It can be done. Not all TV shows have to be BSG (or Lost, or FlashForward, or...), meandering aimlessly through forever in the hope that the writers will come up with something eventually.
I agree with you that the network itself is not the only problem here, and things like using unencrypted channels or running hosts with exposed vulnerabilities also deserve a share of the blame.
Nevertheless, selling wifi devices that are open by default to a market who mostly want to use them in closed systems violates the basic engineering principle of failing to safe. The default should be the safe option, and action (and therefore awareness) should be required if you want to do something else, not the other way around.
Likewise, the wifi user, not knowing what WPA2 vs WEP is, knows that if he didn't do anything to limit which devices his laptop's radio is talking to, then such devices may include things other than his router.
This is where we disagree. You are just assuming that the above is fact. However, I suspect that if you actually did a survey, across a representative sample of the entire wifi-using population, you would find that a lot of people do assume that a home network is limited to their home, wireless or not.
Given how these services are marketed to non-technical folks, I really don't think that's an unreasonable assumption on their part. After all, despite your implications to the contrary, there are numerous off-the-shelf products that come with robust security preconfigured and no user action required to protect the communications. Chances are, you have at least a couple of such devices on your person right now.
I don't believe you're that dumb. Really, I don't.
That's very decent of you. It's also quite fortunate: you won't get very far in life if you assume that anyone who takes a different view to your own is stupid and/or ill-informed, particularly when the person you're speaking to works on (among other things) network security devices for a living, and probably has access to much more empirical data about how real users behave than you do.
In any case, it is not me that you have to educate. It's not my wifi data that Google would have been capturing, at least not in any form that's likely to be worth their effort to decrypt. It's all the people who don't know about the things we're discussing that the law needs to be looking out for, just as (for example) the law in most places gives certain basic rights to consumers or employees to prevent abuse by much more powerful traders and employers.
Respectfully, you're completely missing the point. You and I might know what WEP is. Probably 99.something% of people do not. To them, the minimum is understanding which connectors go where to get power into the device, and how to run some Windows wizard on their PC to find to the wireless network, assuming they even did that themselves instead of getting the store or the guys from their telco/ISP who provided the wireless hardware to do it for them. Intimate knowledge of the relative security of different wireless protocols and encryption standards is waaaaay beyond minimum, and the fact that you don't realise that shows just how coloured your perception of the world is in this particular area.
It is not reasonable to allow one technically knowledgeable commercial organisation to sell a mass market product that comes with a massive security hole by default, and then allow another technically knowledgeable commercial organisation to exploit that hole, and then to blame the innocent user who was just trying to get on with their life for the consequences. This is why we impose rules on the commercial organisations via legislation: so that the little guy doesn't have to be an expert on everything just to get a fair deal.
It's the same reason we still call a thief a thief if they take your car, even though you left it unlocked (or, to give a fairer analogy, you did lock it, but you didn't know, because the manufacturer didn't tell you, that you also had to pop the hood and flick a special combination of hidden levers to make the lock actually secure the vehicle).
If you don't know how to encrypt your wireless data - even with easily-cracked encryptions, that at least require some deliberate effort to crack - then you shouldn't it be broadcasting it into people's face.
The fact that you find this a reasonable position to take shows exactly why laws are necessary.
Complaining about this is like complaining that a vehicle equipped with an audio recorder picked up your shouted argument from the street. If you weren't screaming at the top of your damn lungs, nobody would have heard anything.
It's nothing like that at all, mainly because the average person would be well aware that they were screaming at the top of their lungs in the street, while the average person doesn't have a clue about WEP, WPA, etc. because they just bought some kit from their ISP and plugged it in, trusting that it would just work and not do crazy things like broadcasting all your private stuff to the world.
If you really think it is reasonable to expect everyone to be an expert on everything that could possibly affect them and never to make mistakes, then I hope your car gets stolen tomorrow, because you had the wrong security system fitted and a thief just took your vehicle from right outside your home, even though you'd done everything you were supposed to to keep it secure. And then I hope you can't afford to buy a replacement because you get sued into insolvency for all the casual infringements of Copyright Law you make every week without even realising because you're not a $400/hour IP lawyer. And then I hope you get the bill from the Tax Man for back taxes on every little thing you should ever have admitted to and paid tax on even though you didn't realise you had incurred any liability because you're not a $400/hour accountant. And then since you won't be able to pay that, you can go to jail, and spare the rest of us living in the horrible world you apparently want to create.
The British data protection act is a model of privacy protection that we should have emulated.
Actually, the DPA offers fairly poor privacy protection. It doesn't require opt-in before tracking personal data, for example, nor does it give you any right to demand that personal data held about you be removed from a system as long as that data is actually correct. In fact, it doesn't really offer any privacy guarantee at all in the traditional sense; we rely more on the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights for such privacy protection as we do have.
The real problem we have today is that in a world with massive databases, fast and cheap communications via the Internet, etc., traditional privacy standards don't actually protect the things they used to in any meaningful way. We need to consider why privacy is important, and establish social and legal norms that protect what matters, instead of trying to somehow adapt ideas that are decades out of date as if they are still going to protect individuals from abuse by larger and more powerful organisations today.
Fortunately, since the Lisbon Treaty came into effect, circumvention of (elected) MEPs by (unelected) Commissioners is not so easy. The European Parliament handed the Commission its ass on a couple of major points very quickly to educate them about the changed situation. If memory serves, ACTA is up this coming week, so it will be interesting to see whether it happens again (though it sounds like most of the really bad parts of that have effectively already been dropped as the by-the-back-door politics failed).
As for software patents, the situation is not as straightforward in Europe as some people describe. There is no Europe-wide formal recognition of "software patents" as some sort of category, but numerous patents have been granted by European nations that you or I might describe as "software patents", and as with most such things, whether they are deemed enforceable isn't something we'll know until the court case comes up, and the potential chilling effects are there anyway.
You do realise that what you described there is pretty much what the UK government actually did, right?
The government did take majority ownership of some of the organisations it bailed out, Lloyds for instance. A lot of the former senior execs have been forced to resign, though mostly in quiet handovers a few months after the mess rather than in a high-profile publicity stunt at the time. Investors did lose most of the value of their shares, as the bank stocks sank like a (northern) rock. And a lot of those high profile Bank of England loans to the less damaged banks did get paid back within a few weeks.
I am far from convinced that the government did the right thing, or that they shouldn't have protected the banks' customers but let the banks themselves fail outright instead of taking on all that high-risk debt. Their public information management was terrible in terms of educating the population about what they were actually doing and why. But let's at least talk about what really happened, and not some arbitrary distortion just because banker-bashing is our new national hobby.
However, this does not mean the planet is habitable, or even very Earthlike. It may not even have any water on it at all. For now, we can't know these things, so beware of any media breathlessly talking about life on this planet, or how we could live there.
You have misrepresented my position: I do not claim that there should be no taxation. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere in this discussion that a sensible level of taxation seems to be the least of evils based on humanity's experience so far. I argue only that there should not be excessive taxation, where the government is taking people's money through a compulsory system but spending it on things that are clearly not essential or generally in the interests of society.
Your characterisation of me personally is way off as well, but like any other ad hominem it is also irrelevant, so I won't bother debunking that.
The highest marginal rate anyone in the UK pays is 50%, not 60%.
No, I'm afraid it isn't. You are reading the headline figures, which is of course what the government would like you to read. You are not calculating the actual marginal tax rate, taking into account the horribly complicated set of taxes, allowances, credits, etc. You might like to google "UK 60% tax rate" and read what the accountants and professional bodies have worked out.
*I'd* certainly describe anyone over that income as rich, and they can certainly afford 50% income tax on that proportion of their earnings above £150K.
I guess we just have very different views on this. I'm not in that tax band, so I have no axe to grind here, but I find the idea that the government should automatically be entitled to claim as much of the money that someone has earned as the person themselves abhorrent. I don't see whether that person already has a substantial income or not as particularly relevant; in most cases, that extra money did not appear by magic, but because in some way the person receiving it did something to earn it that most people do not do.
Such a high tax rate is also practically rather ineffective at generating tax revenue for the government: since you do seem to care about actual data, let me point you to the Lawson budget of 1988 that I mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. Short version: he dramatically dropped income tax levels, including for the rich, and immediately afterwards the proportion of income tax coming from the higher earners jumped way up and the proportion coming from the less well-off fell sharply to match, as more income from the rich was declared in the UK and therefore subject to UK taxation.
Incidentally, a recent study found that the happiest people in society are those earning around £50K.
Careful: this is a correlation vs. causation thing. A lot of people who have a high income also work long hours in stressful jobs, sacrificing family life, social interaction, etc. It is not hard to imagine how someone choosing such a lifestyle could wind up with all the money they ever wished for yet nothing worthwhile to spend it on, but that does not mean that everyone with a high income will feel that way.
Perhaps taxing those high earners more is doing them a favour. Certainly it does society good.
Not necessarily, for the reason I mentioned above.
The most cohesive, low crime societies are those with the smallest earning gaps.
What exactly does that mean, though?
If we consider those at the other end of the spectrum, I personally don't believe anyone living in a supposedly civilised society in the 21st century should have to live below the poverty line, without shelter, a nutritious diet, decent healthcare and education, etc. I have no problem with the idea of a social security safety net, which I consider to be both the "right" thing to do and, as you point out, also worth doing as a matter of "enlightened self-interest" to avoid forcing people into criminal behaviour just to get the basics.
But I also think that our current benefits culture here in the UK, where choosing to live off the state can be (as one government minister called it recently) a lifestyle choice, is far too generous. If you do too much for everyone, you remove the incentive for them to do things for themselves. Again, if we look at the facts, people with a job tend to do better in nearly all respects than those who do not, but we now have a situation where multiple generations of families have lived off benefits. Infamously, many of them actually get nicer houses and better cars and bigger TVs than those who do work for a living. That is just wrong to me, and hardly reflects the "earnings gap" between someone who has no income from work at all and someone who is working as, say, a nurse or teacher.
I don't understand. What "beliefs" of mine do you think the facts do not support? I don't see that anything you've posted actually contradicts anything I have written so far in this discussion, and I don't see why your apparent obsession with the mess that Thatcher's government made of various things five administrations ago is particularly relevant to anything.
I don't want to get sidetracked into what seem to be a few personal sore points of yours, so I will simply point out that in many first world countries, higher income brackets do pay a disproportionate proportion of the tax burden relative to their incomes.
For example, in the UK, the top 1% of earners pay around 1/4 of the income tax burden, the top 10% pay more than half, and the top 50% of earners pay around 90% of the total income tax take. These figures do correspond closely with the proportion of total wealth owned by each group, and the top 1% actual receive about 1/8 of the total national income. By the time you're at the 50% mark, you're only looking at an annual salary in the low-mid £20K region.
As an interesting aside, the very top earners rarely pay UK income tax at all because of their multinational financial arrangements and accounting tricks, so they aren't the ones contributing the 20-something% of income tax on behalf of the top 1% bracket. It's the rich but not super-rich who really prop up the economy.
As another interesting aside, the biggest step change in income tax receipts from the rich in recent memory came when Lawson dropped the higher income tax rate significantly, which actually resulted in more income being generated/declared in the UK and therefore more UK tax paid on it. Naturally, this also dramatically reduced the proportion of the overall income tax burden paid by the poorest members of our society.
The trouble I have with ideas like Tax Freedom Day is that they oversimplify by trying to reduce the entire economic complexity of the country to a single figure. Maybe the average tax paid today isn't as bad as under Thatcher's economic restructuring etc., but I'll bet the distribution of who is paying what is radically different. If the average is broadly similar but we now have many more people staying in education for longer, an ageing population, and all the stealth unemployed who are on one kind of benefit or another and not contributing in the same way, how much tax does a person in full time employment in various jobs pay now compared to someone doing the same jobs in the past?
I appreciate what you're saying, and I'm sure there is some truth to it. Perhaps I just prefer to look more charitably on people until I have reason to doubt them, while you are more naturally cautious/conservative.
There certainly are people meeting the particular stereotypes you described, I agree. I think we have a general problem in society today with people growing up and assuming adult roles without learning the kind of independence and sense of responsibility that should go with that.
I attribute much of that to the nanny state and all that comes with it: hand-holding throughout education to ever greater ages, an overly generous benefits system that can become a lifestyle choice instead of the social security safety net it was meant to be, and so on.
I suspect, though of course I can't be sure from nothing but a thought experiment, that we would be in a far better state if we didn't encourage people to drink themselves stupid or breed children as a source of income, by not clearing up after such people every time they make a mistake in life. I believe in second chances and people's ability to change, but sometimes they need a catalyst to do that and the support system means they never find one, so a lot of people get into a mess just because they can.
I'm not seeing how that is worse than not being covered for anything at all.
It's not, but you imply a false dichotomy. Absence of compulsory state-funded medical insurance does not imply absence of any form of medical cover at all. This isn't really the point I was trying to make, however, and it's obviously a far more complex issue than we're getting into here, as the various problems with medical care in places like the US demonstrate.
our misconception is that such a misconception exists. Nobody thinks public health care can cure incurable diseases.
And yet the post I replied to wished a "rare and painful disease" on someone, the assumption being that such a disease would be covered by the national health provision even though it would not be covered by expired insurance.
However numerous studies have shown that the US system is considerably less efficient than what you'd no doubt refer to as "cawmyerniss" systems like in the UK or France when it comes to quality versus cost.
Cite, please. For one thing, why is the US policy the only non-national one you consider relevant, and for another, by what metrics is it considerably less efficient than the UK's NHS?
Please save your ad hominem attacks for someone who is going to appreciate them. I am from the UK, and well aware of how our political system works, thank you.
Realistically, the PM does control the administration. The PM chooses the Cabinet, who in turn have executive authority for almost everything central government does. The PM is also normally the leader of the party in power in Parliament, which means they set the legislative agenda. Finally, it is abundantly clear by now that No 10 can intervene to call any shots it wants to in practice, other than possibly a direct confrontation with No 11 over financial matters.
Labour having more MPs than everyone else put together at the previous election was a joke on several levels, not least that they didn't even win the popular vote in England, and is a prime example of how messed up our current FPTP system is. A majority of MPs most certainly does not imply a popular mandate under such a system. Oh, and all those Labour MPs who were elected at the previous election, which you use as some sort of moral basis to justify enthroning Gordon Brown as the worst PM in recent memory, were of course elected on repeated, explicit, unambiguous statements that Tony Blair would serve a full third term and voting Labour did not mean they were voting for what actually happened.
Finally, on the statistics, you aren't quoting the figures that match what I wrote, as someone else already pointed out to you.
You're talking about the so-called super-rich: the ones who earn millions a year through highly-rewarded jobs in banking, executive positions, or media/sports deals. Sure, there are a few such people around, and perhaps they won't miss another few thousands here and there.
The problem is that higher tax rates no longer affect only those people. Here in the UK, we have introduced new super-high-rate taxes that start to hit people with six-figure incomes, while the "traditional" higher rate tax band now hits a lot of skilled professionals with somewhat above average incomes but who are hardly off the chart in the way the super-rich are. We're talking about some school heads of department, experienced tradesmen who run their own businesses, experienced technical people like software developers, mid-high level police officers, etc.
Notice that all of these people have in common that their jobs are genuinely valuable in one way or another, and that they required a lot of training and/or experience to develop their skills (and probably spent several years studying and/or working very low-paid jobs or unpaid internships to get there). And yet today, they are deemed "rich" by our tax system, and hit with a 40% marginal tax rate. I guess they're "lucky" compared to those who make it into six figures, whose marginal rate is actually more like 60% for a while.
The problem is that under an excessively punitive tax regime, those with the most wealth (businesses and rich people) may very well do exactly that. The consequence is that instead of getting some tax revenue from those people, the nation gets none, and to continue the metaphor, it goes out of business because there are no longer enough patrons willing to pay the excessively high prices it charges.
If you want that dangerous pothole down the road fixed, you can pay for it, and on that note no we will not be building a second bridge just because the traffic is bad because you guys haven't paid for it yet.
I live in Cambridge, UK. We had potholes for months after the winter freeze last year, because our local council didn't have the ability to get them fixed fast enough and in many cases cheap, low quality road maintenance in the past had led to increased damage during the chill. I don't know how much damage was caused to vehicles, not to mention the various injuries, during those months, but I imagine it was significant. Did I mention that many places in this country also ran out of material to grit the roads during the freeze, leading to dangerous driving conditions and more than a few accidents for cyclists and pedestrians?
As for building new infrastructure, another one of our many local authorities here is responsible for pushing through a guided bus service at public expense over the past few years. It was never going to do what it was supposed to (as anyone with basic education in physics who looked at the plans could tell you). It was never going to be done on the original timetable or for the original budget. It has caused vast disruption across much of our city for months at a time in order to get the infrastructure in place. And right now, we still don't have the busway, our local authorities are in an extended legal battle with the contractors, but we've suffered from heavy disruption to our local road network and the associated costs to our local economy and quality of life for several years. It turns out that the planners who assess the value of various "improvements" to the road network don't even consider the costs of disruption to existing services in their cost/benefit calculations. Oh, and our local authorities are maliciously anti-car, but because of electoral technicalities they manage to retain power anyway. See my earlier post about the dangers of electing a single political representative with whom you might agree about many but not all things. Did I mention that the woman responsible for pushing through the guided bus plans, in the face of thousands of statements of opposition from local residents and almost no public support, was promoted?
Public schools? Yeah we got those, $10000 per year please.
You are ignoring the fact that without the state artificially propping things up, competition would rapidly drive down the cost of private education. If all children were educated privately, the fees would in most cases be far less than what the small number of prestige private schools charge today.
In any case, if you don't think paying a substantial chunk of your income to ensure highly skilled teachers for your child is one of the best investments you can ever make, we are never going to agree on this one. The state pays a terrible wage for a job as important as teaching, and while some very good people do accept that and work for state schools anyway, all too often you get what you pay for.
What do you mean garbage collection? You haven't paid us the $10 monthly fee to do it.
Our local authorities reduced our bin collections to biweekly, and since that time have still missed several collections per year, leaving us with unhygienic, odorous, waste eyesores sticking around for weeks at a time.
I would pay what you ask in a heartbeat if I could fire the local refuse collection people (and keep the tax that pays them) and hire a private firm who would actually provide an acceptable level of service instead.
Oh what you just got unfairly dismissed from your work because your boss didn't like that you wouldn't sleep with him? Tough, take it to the courts, we've shut down our fair work tribunal. Turns out they wanted to get paid too.
Given that literally hundreds of courts are likely to be closed across our country over the comin
You're right, twisting words doesn't change the underlying point. Your argument, for example, is fundamentally flawed because you assume the "bill" from government is justified. As it happens, I do not support a lot of government spending that has been done in my country until recently, and I do support the strong moves by the new administration to dramatically reduce that spending. Sending me a bill for the spending before, which I did not ask for and which I do not believe was ever beneficial (neither to me personally nor to society more generally), is like a hotel sending me a bill for a stay I never booked. I am under no obligation to pay the hotel; why do you think I should have an obligation to pay the government?
I hope you die from some really rare and painful disease after your medical coverage is terminated because it hit its lifetime maximum.
You do realise that in places with socialised medical care, you are typically still not covered for treatment of rarer/more expensive conditions, right? Here in the UK, we have the infamous "postcode lottery" for NHS treatment, where even in some parts of the same country, the same nationalised healthcare system, funded from the same central taxation pot, will not provide treatments that you could get if you lived in a different part of the country. And of course, if you do have something rare and unfortunate, you have far less of your own money left to pay for specialist private treatment if the Powers That Be have taken a huge chunk of it in taxation to pay for the treatments they deem socially worthy on the NHS. This is the great misconception of public service provision: just because the government operates a service, this does not magically mean that money grows on trees and the service will provide all things to all citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
Their [Apple's] obstinance prevents you from having this great software on Apple devices—not the GPL or the people enforcing it.
I have karma to burn, so I'm just going to say it: how is Apple expecting software distributed via their App Store to comply with App Store terms and conditions any more obstinate than expecting software distributed under the GPL to be distributed according to GPL conditions? Apple are under no obligation to carry software with what they consider inappropriate licensing on their store, any more than we are under any obligation to buy Apple hardware and apps from their store if we value the provisions of the GPL.
But endings are impossible. You try to tie up every loose end, but you never can.
And yet, despite all the issues around season 4/5 production, JMS still managed to tie up almost every loose end in Babylon 5 (even if you didn't realise it, because he tied some of them up several series earlier).
Most of the Star Trek series finished with some sort of decent final story arc.
Both SG1 and SGA finished quite neatly (and wrapped up the loose ends of the main story arc with an actually decent TV movie in the former case).
It can be done. Not all TV shows have to be BSG (or Lost, or FlashForward, or...), meandering aimlessly through forever in the hope that the writers will come up with something eventually.
I agree with you that the network itself is not the only problem here, and things like using unencrypted channels or running hosts with exposed vulnerabilities also deserve a share of the blame.
Nevertheless, selling wifi devices that are open by default to a market who mostly want to use them in closed systems violates the basic engineering principle of failing to safe. The default should be the safe option, and action (and therefore awareness) should be required if you want to do something else, not the other way around.
Likewise, the wifi user, not knowing what WPA2 vs WEP is, knows that if he didn't do anything to limit which devices his laptop's radio is talking to, then such devices may include things other than his router.
This is where we disagree. You are just assuming that the above is fact. However, I suspect that if you actually did a survey, across a representative sample of the entire wifi-using population, you would find that a lot of people do assume that a home network is limited to their home, wireless or not.
Given how these services are marketed to non-technical folks, I really don't think that's an unreasonable assumption on their part. After all, despite your implications to the contrary, there are numerous off-the-shelf products that come with robust security preconfigured and no user action required to protect the communications. Chances are, you have at least a couple of such devices on your person right now.
I don't believe you're that dumb. Really, I don't.
That's very decent of you. It's also quite fortunate: you won't get very far in life if you assume that anyone who takes a different view to your own is stupid and/or ill-informed, particularly when the person you're speaking to works on (among other things) network security devices for a living, and probably has access to much more empirical data about how real users behave than you do.
In any case, it is not me that you have to educate. It's not my wifi data that Google would have been capturing, at least not in any form that's likely to be worth their effort to decrypt. It's all the people who don't know about the things we're discussing that the law needs to be looking out for, just as (for example) the law in most places gives certain basic rights to consumers or employees to prevent abuse by much more powerful traders and employers.
Respectfully, you're completely missing the point. You and I might know what WEP is. Probably 99.something% of people do not. To them, the minimum is understanding which connectors go where to get power into the device, and how to run some Windows wizard on their PC to find to the wireless network, assuming they even did that themselves instead of getting the store or the guys from their telco/ISP who provided the wireless hardware to do it for them. Intimate knowledge of the relative security of different wireless protocols and encryption standards is waaaaay beyond minimum, and the fact that you don't realise that shows just how coloured your perception of the world is in this particular area.
It is not reasonable to allow one technically knowledgeable commercial organisation to sell a mass market product that comes with a massive security hole by default, and then allow another technically knowledgeable commercial organisation to exploit that hole, and then to blame the innocent user who was just trying to get on with their life for the consequences. This is why we impose rules on the commercial organisations via legislation: so that the little guy doesn't have to be an expert on everything just to get a fair deal.
It's the same reason we still call a thief a thief if they take your car, even though you left it unlocked (or, to give a fairer analogy, you did lock it, but you didn't know, because the manufacturer didn't tell you, that you also had to pop the hood and flick a special combination of hidden levers to make the lock actually secure the vehicle).
If you don't know how to encrypt your wireless data - even with easily-cracked encryptions, that at least require some deliberate effort to crack - then you shouldn't it be broadcasting it into people's face.
The fact that you find this a reasonable position to take shows exactly why laws are necessary.
Complaining about this is like complaining that a vehicle equipped with an audio recorder picked up your shouted argument from the street. If you weren't screaming at the top of your damn lungs, nobody would have heard anything.
It's nothing like that at all, mainly because the average person would be well aware that they were screaming at the top of their lungs in the street, while the average person doesn't have a clue about WEP, WPA, etc. because they just bought some kit from their ISP and plugged it in, trusting that it would just work and not do crazy things like broadcasting all your private stuff to the world.
If you really think it is reasonable to expect everyone to be an expert on everything that could possibly affect them and never to make mistakes, then I hope your car gets stolen tomorrow, because you had the wrong security system fitted and a thief just took your vehicle from right outside your home, even though you'd done everything you were supposed to to keep it secure. And then I hope you can't afford to buy a replacement because you get sued into insolvency for all the casual infringements of Copyright Law you make every week without even realising because you're not a $400/hour IP lawyer. And then I hope you get the bill from the Tax Man for back taxes on every little thing you should ever have admitted to and paid tax on even though you didn't realise you had incurred any liability because you're not a $400/hour accountant. And then since you won't be able to pay that, you can go to jail, and spare the rest of us living in the horrible world you apparently want to create.
The British data protection act is a model of privacy protection that we should have emulated.
Actually, the DPA offers fairly poor privacy protection. It doesn't require opt-in before tracking personal data, for example, nor does it give you any right to demand that personal data held about you be removed from a system as long as that data is actually correct. In fact, it doesn't really offer any privacy guarantee at all in the traditional sense; we rely more on the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights for such privacy protection as we do have.
The real problem we have today is that in a world with massive databases, fast and cheap communications via the Internet, etc., traditional privacy standards don't actually protect the things they used to in any meaningful way. We need to consider why privacy is important, and establish social and legal norms that protect what matters, instead of trying to somehow adapt ideas that are decades out of date as if they are still going to protect individuals from abuse by larger and more powerful organisations today.
Fortunately, since the Lisbon Treaty came into effect, circumvention of (elected) MEPs by (unelected) Commissioners is not so easy. The European Parliament handed the Commission its ass on a couple of major points very quickly to educate them about the changed situation. If memory serves, ACTA is up this coming week, so it will be interesting to see whether it happens again (though it sounds like most of the really bad parts of that have effectively already been dropped as the by-the-back-door politics failed).
As for software patents, the situation is not as straightforward in Europe as some people describe. There is no Europe-wide formal recognition of "software patents" as some sort of category, but numerous patents have been granted by European nations that you or I might describe as "software patents", and as with most such things, whether they are deemed enforceable isn't something we'll know until the court case comes up, and the potential chilling effects are there anyway.
You do realise that what you described there is pretty much what the UK government actually did, right?
The government did take majority ownership of some of the organisations it bailed out, Lloyds for instance. A lot of the former senior execs have been forced to resign, though mostly in quiet handovers a few months after the mess rather than in a high-profile publicity stunt at the time. Investors did lose most of the value of their shares, as the bank stocks sank like a (northern) rock. And a lot of those high profile Bank of England loans to the less damaged banks did get paid back within a few weeks.
I am far from convinced that the government did the right thing, or that they shouldn't have protected the banks' customers but let the banks themselves fail outright instead of taking on all that high-risk debt. Their public information management was terrible in terms of educating the population about what they were actually doing and why. But let's at least talk about what really happened, and not some arbitrary distortion just because banker-bashing is our new national hobby.
I'd say it doesn't hold water because... well, he simply doesn't have enough information at this point.
Indeed. From the Bad Astronomy blog:
However, this does not mean the planet is habitable, or even very Earthlike. It may not even have any water on it at all. For now, we can't know these things, so beware of any media breathlessly talking about life on this planet, or how we could live there.
Sorry, I'll go crawl back under my rock, taking my empirical data and logical argument with me. :-)
You have misrepresented my position: I do not claim that there should be no taxation. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere in this discussion that a sensible level of taxation seems to be the least of evils based on humanity's experience so far. I argue only that there should not be excessive taxation, where the government is taking people's money through a compulsory system but spending it on things that are clearly not essential or generally in the interests of society.
Your characterisation of me personally is way off as well, but like any other ad hominem it is also irrelevant, so I won't bother debunking that.
The highest marginal rate anyone in the UK pays is 50%, not 60%.
No, I'm afraid it isn't. You are reading the headline figures, which is of course what the government would like you to read. You are not calculating the actual marginal tax rate, taking into account the horribly complicated set of taxes, allowances, credits, etc. You might like to google "UK 60% tax rate" and read what the accountants and professional bodies have worked out.
*I'd* certainly describe anyone over that income as rich, and they can certainly afford 50% income tax on that proportion of their earnings above £150K.
I guess we just have very different views on this. I'm not in that tax band, so I have no axe to grind here, but I find the idea that the government should automatically be entitled to claim as much of the money that someone has earned as the person themselves abhorrent. I don't see whether that person already has a substantial income or not as particularly relevant; in most cases, that extra money did not appear by magic, but because in some way the person receiving it did something to earn it that most people do not do.
Such a high tax rate is also practically rather ineffective at generating tax revenue for the government: since you do seem to care about actual data, let me point you to the Lawson budget of 1988 that I mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. Short version: he dramatically dropped income tax levels, including for the rich, and immediately afterwards the proportion of income tax coming from the higher earners jumped way up and the proportion coming from the less well-off fell sharply to match, as more income from the rich was declared in the UK and therefore subject to UK taxation.
Incidentally, a recent study found that the happiest people in society are those earning around £50K.
Careful: this is a correlation vs. causation thing. A lot of people who have a high income also work long hours in stressful jobs, sacrificing family life, social interaction, etc. It is not hard to imagine how someone choosing such a lifestyle could wind up with all the money they ever wished for yet nothing worthwhile to spend it on, but that does not mean that everyone with a high income will feel that way.
Perhaps taxing those high earners more is doing them a favour. Certainly it does society good.
Not necessarily, for the reason I mentioned above.
The most cohesive, low crime societies are those with the smallest earning gaps.
What exactly does that mean, though?
If we consider those at the other end of the spectrum, I personally don't believe anyone living in a supposedly civilised society in the 21st century should have to live below the poverty line, without shelter, a nutritious diet, decent healthcare and education, etc. I have no problem with the idea of a social security safety net, which I consider to be both the "right" thing to do and, as you point out, also worth doing as a matter of "enlightened self-interest" to avoid forcing people into criminal behaviour just to get the basics.
But I also think that our current benefits culture here in the UK, where choosing to live off the state can be (as one government minister called it recently) a lifestyle choice, is far too generous. If you do too much for everyone, you remove the incentive for them to do things for themselves. Again, if we look at the facts, people with a job tend to do better in nearly all respects than those who do not, but we now have a situation where multiple generations of families have lived off benefits. Infamously, many of them actually get nicer houses and better cars and bigger TVs than those who do work for a living. That is just wrong to me, and hardly reflects the "earnings gap" between someone who has no income from work at all and someone who is working as, say, a nurse or teacher.
The facts just don't reflect your beliefs.
I don't understand. What "beliefs" of mine do you think the facts do not support? I don't see that anything you've posted actually contradicts anything I have written so far in this discussion, and I don't see why your apparent obsession with the mess that Thatcher's government made of various things five administrations ago is particularly relevant to anything.
I don't want to get sidetracked into what seem to be a few personal sore points of yours, so I will simply point out that in many first world countries, higher income brackets do pay a disproportionate proportion of the tax burden relative to their incomes.
For example, in the UK, the top 1% of earners pay around 1/4 of the income tax burden, the top 10% pay more than half, and the top 50% of earners pay around 90% of the total income tax take. These figures do correspond closely with the proportion of total wealth owned by each group, and the top 1% actual receive about 1/8 of the total national income. By the time you're at the 50% mark, you're only looking at an annual salary in the low-mid £20K region.
As an interesting aside, the very top earners rarely pay UK income tax at all because of their multinational financial arrangements and accounting tricks, so they aren't the ones contributing the 20-something% of income tax on behalf of the top 1% bracket. It's the rich but not super-rich who really prop up the economy.
As another interesting aside, the biggest step change in income tax receipts from the rich in recent memory came when Lawson dropped the higher income tax rate significantly, which actually resulted in more income being generated/declared in the UK and therefore more UK tax paid on it. Naturally, this also dramatically reduced the proportion of the overall income tax burden paid by the poorest members of our society.
The trouble I have with ideas like Tax Freedom Day is that they oversimplify by trying to reduce the entire economic complexity of the country to a single figure. Maybe the average tax paid today isn't as bad as under Thatcher's economic restructuring etc., but I'll bet the distribution of who is paying what is radically different. If the average is broadly similar but we now have many more people staying in education for longer, an ageing population, and all the stealth unemployed who are on one kind of benefit or another and not contributing in the same way, how much tax does a person in full time employment in various jobs pay now compared to someone doing the same jobs in the past?
This story is about the UK, not the US. Our tax situation is rather different.
I appreciate what you're saying, and I'm sure there is some truth to it. Perhaps I just prefer to look more charitably on people until I have reason to doubt them, while you are more naturally cautious/conservative.
There certainly are people meeting the particular stereotypes you described, I agree. I think we have a general problem in society today with people growing up and assuming adult roles without learning the kind of independence and sense of responsibility that should go with that.
I attribute much of that to the nanny state and all that comes with it: hand-holding throughout education to ever greater ages, an overly generous benefits system that can become a lifestyle choice instead of the social security safety net it was meant to be, and so on.
I suspect, though of course I can't be sure from nothing but a thought experiment, that we would be in a far better state if we didn't encourage people to drink themselves stupid or breed children as a source of income, by not clearing up after such people every time they make a mistake in life. I believe in second chances and people's ability to change, but sometimes they need a catalyst to do that and the support system means they never find one, so a lot of people get into a mess just because they can.
I'm not seeing how that is worse than not being covered for anything at all.
It's not, but you imply a false dichotomy. Absence of compulsory state-funded medical insurance does not imply absence of any form of medical cover at all. This isn't really the point I was trying to make, however, and it's obviously a far more complex issue than we're getting into here, as the various problems with medical care in places like the US demonstrate.
our misconception is that such a misconception exists. Nobody thinks public health care can cure incurable diseases.
And yet the post I replied to wished a "rare and painful disease" on someone, the assumption being that such a disease would be covered by the national health provision even though it would not be covered by expired insurance.
However numerous studies have shown that the US system is considerably less efficient than what you'd no doubt refer to as "cawmyerniss" systems like in the UK or France when it comes to quality versus cost.
Cite, please. For one thing, why is the US policy the only non-national one you consider relevant, and for another, by what metrics is it considerably less efficient than the UK's NHS?
Please save your ad hominem attacks for someone who is going to appreciate them. I am from the UK, and well aware of how our political system works, thank you.
Realistically, the PM does control the administration. The PM chooses the Cabinet, who in turn have executive authority for almost everything central government does. The PM is also normally the leader of the party in power in Parliament, which means they set the legislative agenda. Finally, it is abundantly clear by now that No 10 can intervene to call any shots it wants to in practice, other than possibly a direct confrontation with No 11 over financial matters.
Labour having more MPs than everyone else put together at the previous election was a joke on several levels, not least that they didn't even win the popular vote in England, and is a prime example of how messed up our current FPTP system is. A majority of MPs most certainly does not imply a popular mandate under such a system. Oh, and all those Labour MPs who were elected at the previous election, which you use as some sort of moral basis to justify enthroning Gordon Brown as the worst PM in recent memory, were of course elected on repeated, explicit, unambiguous statements that Tony Blair would serve a full third term and voting Labour did not mean they were voting for what actually happened.
Finally, on the statistics, you aren't quoting the figures that match what I wrote, as someone else already pointed out to you.
You're talking about the so-called super-rich: the ones who earn millions a year through highly-rewarded jobs in banking, executive positions, or media/sports deals. Sure, there are a few such people around, and perhaps they won't miss another few thousands here and there.
The problem is that higher tax rates no longer affect only those people. Here in the UK, we have introduced new super-high-rate taxes that start to hit people with six-figure incomes, while the "traditional" higher rate tax band now hits a lot of skilled professionals with somewhat above average incomes but who are hardly off the chart in the way the super-rich are. We're talking about some school heads of department, experienced tradesmen who run their own businesses, experienced technical people like software developers, mid-high level police officers, etc.
Notice that all of these people have in common that their jobs are genuinely valuable in one way or another, and that they required a lot of training and/or experience to develop their skills (and probably spent several years studying and/or working very low-paid jobs or unpaid internships to get there). And yet today, they are deemed "rich" by our tax system, and hit with a 40% marginal tax rate. I guess they're "lucky" compared to those who make it into six figures, whose marginal rate is actually more like 60% for a while.
The problem is that under an excessively punitive tax regime, those with the most wealth (businesses and rich people) may very well do exactly that. The consequence is that instead of getting some tax revenue from those people, the nation gets none, and to continue the metaphor, it goes out of business because there are no longer enough patrons willing to pay the excessively high prices it charges.
If you want that dangerous pothole down the road fixed, you can pay for it, and on that note no we will not be building a second bridge just because the traffic is bad because you guys haven't paid for it yet.
I live in Cambridge, UK. We had potholes for months after the winter freeze last year, because our local council didn't have the ability to get them fixed fast enough and in many cases cheap, low quality road maintenance in the past had led to increased damage during the chill. I don't know how much damage was caused to vehicles, not to mention the various injuries, during those months, but I imagine it was significant. Did I mention that many places in this country also ran out of material to grit the roads during the freeze, leading to dangerous driving conditions and more than a few accidents for cyclists and pedestrians?
As for building new infrastructure, another one of our many local authorities here is responsible for pushing through a guided bus service at public expense over the past few years. It was never going to do what it was supposed to (as anyone with basic education in physics who looked at the plans could tell you). It was never going to be done on the original timetable or for the original budget. It has caused vast disruption across much of our city for months at a time in order to get the infrastructure in place. And right now, we still don't have the busway, our local authorities are in an extended legal battle with the contractors, but we've suffered from heavy disruption to our local road network and the associated costs to our local economy and quality of life for several years. It turns out that the planners who assess the value of various "improvements" to the road network don't even consider the costs of disruption to existing services in their cost/benefit calculations. Oh, and our local authorities are maliciously anti-car, but because of electoral technicalities they manage to retain power anyway. See my earlier post about the dangers of electing a single political representative with whom you might agree about many but not all things. Did I mention that the woman responsible for pushing through the guided bus plans, in the face of thousands of statements of opposition from local residents and almost no public support, was promoted?
Public schools? Yeah we got those, $10000 per year please.
You are ignoring the fact that without the state artificially propping things up, competition would rapidly drive down the cost of private education. If all children were educated privately, the fees would in most cases be far less than what the small number of prestige private schools charge today.
In any case, if you don't think paying a substantial chunk of your income to ensure highly skilled teachers for your child is one of the best investments you can ever make, we are never going to agree on this one. The state pays a terrible wage for a job as important as teaching, and while some very good people do accept that and work for state schools anyway, all too often you get what you pay for.
What do you mean garbage collection? You haven't paid us the $10 monthly fee to do it.
Our local authorities reduced our bin collections to biweekly, and since that time have still missed several collections per year, leaving us with unhygienic, odorous, waste eyesores sticking around for weeks at a time.
I would pay what you ask in a heartbeat if I could fire the local refuse collection people (and keep the tax that pays them) and hire a private firm who would actually provide an acceptable level of service instead.
Oh what you just got unfairly dismissed from your work because your boss didn't like that you wouldn't sleep with him? Tough, take it to the courts, we've shut down our fair work tribunal. Turns out they wanted to get paid too.
Given that literally hundreds of courts are likely to be closed across our country over the comin
You're right, twisting words doesn't change the underlying point. Your argument, for example, is fundamentally flawed because you assume the "bill" from government is justified. As it happens, I do not support a lot of government spending that has been done in my country until recently, and I do support the strong moves by the new administration to dramatically reduce that spending. Sending me a bill for the spending before, which I did not ask for and which I do not believe was ever beneficial (neither to me personally nor to society more generally), is like a hotel sending me a bill for a stay I never booked. I am under no obligation to pay the hotel; why do you think I should have an obligation to pay the government?
I hope you die from some really rare and painful disease after your medical coverage is terminated because it hit its lifetime maximum.
You do realise that in places with socialised medical care, you are typically still not covered for treatment of rarer/more expensive conditions, right? Here in the UK, we have the infamous "postcode lottery" for NHS treatment, where even in some parts of the same country, the same nationalised healthcare system, funded from the same central taxation pot, will not provide treatments that you could get if you lived in a different part of the country. And of course, if you do have something rare and unfortunate, you have far less of your own money left to pay for specialist private treatment if the Powers That Be have taken a huge chunk of it in taxation to pay for the treatments they deem socially worthy on the NHS. This is the great misconception of public service provision: just because the government operates a service, this does not magically mean that money grows on trees and the service will provide all things to all citizens.