If you don't fit the centrist-yet-slightly-right-white-Christians-are-n ot-terrorists politics that is crystalizing out of the "war on terrorism", then you are a terrorist and must be punished.
Racial, economic, and religious profiling is an undeniable fact that our nation is treading down a very very dangerous path.
How do you fix a bug cheaply when the contract has ended and all the people working on it are gone? Enter training costs for new staff.
How about needing a whole new contract just for the bugs? Enter the immoble bureaucracy.
How about a year later, when, even if someone from the project is still around, it takes them a few days just to remember what they did 14 months ago? Enter seemingly wasted time.
Anecdotal evidence is viable evidence for the undeniable fact that late bug fixes are very expensive.
It probably won't be long before land fills are mined for steel and copper. It wouldn't be extremely hard to devise a basic chemical/mechanical process to separate out various metals and then burn the rest for energy.
And after all that, we find that we can't even deploy a reliable, accurate computer system that can count. That's just... disturbing.
Welcome to working within the US government, where politics renders rational thought and good engineering design into a mystery dish at a Chinese buffet that only the bravest souls will try.
Be careful to account for your operating system's file system caching. On Solaris, for example, loading a big CAD package the first time might take a minute, but the second time takes seconds. Caching can make performance figures very misleading if not dealt with carefully.
Freedom for that 0.5% is freedom for everyone, even though the remaining 99.5% will take it for granted entirely and still find a way to blame Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush for their DSL connection breaking for ten minutes.
The best attributes of a "good" tax are: anonymity, equality, and simplicity. The federal income tax, for example, is literally a government interrogation under threat of imprisonment and probably the most imbalanced and downright bigoted legislation the US currently has.
I'm generally in favor of a sales tax that excempts most food and clothing (whatever exemption rules there are should be very short, plain, and simple to understand). Property tax is fairly anonymous and is based more on property values than personal attributes, so it is certainly better than income tax. Unfortunately, property tax has proven to be ripe for abuse, especially in areas where assessment rates are different for people in different economic categories (disproportionately low taxation for the wealthy is common).
Other very specific taxes, such as a (milage X weight) tax for vehicles can be applied to road maintenance and construction. Specific taxes for specific things, where costs are transparent to the tax payer are generally good, as it is harder in these cases for the government to artificially inflate one tax to cover something unrelated (i.e., income tax subsidizing everything from the arts to farming). These sorts of specific taxes, where cross-subsidizing does not occur simply makes using those aspects of government-provided infrastructure a known business expense for that business model. Of course, there should not be too many of these taxes, as the accounting becomes a burden.
Probably the simplest thing to do is mostly sales with limited property taxes. Disseminating the per-county and per-state rates could be done in with regular state publications or websites, so people that do accounting have no confusion about how to proceed with their jobs. The routing numbers for each county's or state's treasury bank accounts can be published, also, so submitting payments can be highly automated. Sales tax is highly anonymous, where only aggregate statistics are collected by the government, which is entirely adequate for large-scale planning.
When people respond that repealing the federal income tax will require cutting the government down to match the reduced income, my response is "yes, that's exactly what needs to be done."
Free trade is basically a means by which corrupt elites are propped up via borrowing from foreign interests.
No, free trade is where global markets compete. It is totally fair and automatically encourages growth in developing countries in a way that makes giving aid money blindly to corrupt governments obselete. Countries that do not engage in free trade are punished by the world markets with reduced trade and slower growth. Non-free trade begets poverty, unemployment, and stagnation in the long term. It's really pretty simple.
Why not give everyone a knife, take away with all those laws that try to prevent that we kill each other and let the strongest one win?
Repealing the anti-murder laws is arguably a violation of the First Amendment. Neither extreme of anarchy or socialism is the foundation of the USA; rather the Constitution protects rights essential to allowing people to live free from tyranny and to pursue whatever path they choose.
The current state of capitalism is enough to "make the founders of the USA to spin in their graves".
Why? The USA is still the most prosperous and inventive country on the planet, largely due to the delay between invention and regulation. When the regulation occurs, so does stagnation.
Corruption is temporary as it is unsustainable in a free market, because it has no financial basis (only so much money can be extorted from a community or market before it collapses and everyone flees). Finanical justice is justice nontheless. The government also has a nominal policing role to ferret out what corruption it can, but, ultimately, the government cannot catch every bad guy, no matter how hard they try.
The point is one of simplicity and robustness. Writing single-purpose tools each with limited scope shrinks the debugging burden when problems occur. Using 'find' to handle the recursion is a no-brainer.
Pure UNIX is good software engineering. Feature bloat in the name of convenience is Microsoft engineering. You might as well use Windows.
the FTA, NAFTA, and FTAA has little to do with trade, and everything to do with making governments subservient to trans-national corporations.
Then, dump all trade "treaties" in favor of real free trade that even my neighbor's dog would understand. Real free trade does not play favorites, nor does it need to be overly complicated nor ratified by nations. Free trade just happens ("Do you want to trade widget X with us?" "No? Well, okay" OR "Yes? Great, thanks for the P.O.; we'll ship 'em out tomorrow.")
Kudos to our corporate overlords for their foresight and wisdom.
The irony is even thicker considering the number of libraries. I remember an author saying that if every library bought just one copy of his book, it would be a bestseller just from that volume. Given the vast number of books published each year and the competition that ensues, authors and publishers should be grateful for any book sold, regardless whether it is to a library.
A right to privacy from the federal government is necessary for free speech, so there goes the First Amendment. If your health care history is already in the hands of government, then how can the Fourth Amendment be preserved? Think of nationalized health care as Total Information Awareness on steroids. They've already got the "infallible" data, so you are automatically at a permanent disatvantage in any dispute or claim.
Also, imagine the social security and medicare deductions on your paycheck doubling and tripling as the federal government takes on the burden of paying for it all. Also, with only the federal government collecting the money for your healthcare, there will be no effective cost controls nor upper limits on taxation.
Even further, as the politicians flail about in their frothy political nitpicking, the nationalized system will grind to a halt under its own regulatory obesity and people will suffer as a result.
In a genuine free trade environment any of the transgression you cite will be temporary. Free trade levels the playing field to the extent that China, India, and Mexico won't be cheaper forever. It seems Mexico is already seeing these effects as their wages are pricing them above the SE Asian job markets. Eventually, the global markets sort themsleves out, as radical international differences can not be maintained forever.
Of course, these mixed-up half-ass protectionist "free trade" agreements are the real crime, where the benefits of free trade are artificially retarded in favor of short-term gain.
Okay, I'll agree with this. The underlying theme is one of corruption for short-term political and financial gain along with a long-term goal of consolodating power until the transition from a free state into a de facto oligarchy is complete.
This is why I can no longer vote for Republicans nor Democrats in any federal race. It's harder to do in local races, but I'll try.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't fit the centrist-yet-slightly-right-white-Christians-are-
Racial, economic, and religious profiling is an undeniable fact that our nation is treading down a very very dangerous path.
How do you fix a bug cheaply when the contract has ended and all the people working on it are gone? Enter training costs for new staff.
How about needing a whole new contract just for the bugs? Enter the immoble bureaucracy.
How about a year later, when, even if someone from the project is still around, it takes them a few days just to remember what they did 14 months ago? Enter seemingly wasted time.
Anecdotal evidence is viable evidence for the undeniable fact that late bug fixes are very expensive.
It probably won't be long before land fills are mined for steel and copper. It wouldn't be extremely hard to devise a basic chemical/mechanical process to separate out various metals and then burn the rest for energy.
A voting receipt is the same as abolishing the right to a confidential vote.
After displaying the receipt, it can get dumped into a bin, where randomness protects anonymity.
And after all that, we find that we can't even deploy a reliable, accurate computer system that can count. That's just ... disturbing.
Welcome to working within the US government, where politics renders rational thought and good engineering design into a mystery dish at a Chinese buffet that only the bravest souls will try.
Be careful to account for your operating system's file system caching. On Solaris, for example, loading a big CAD package the first time might take a minute, but the second time takes seconds. Caching can make performance figures very misleading if not dealt with carefully.
Which is regularly used as a mouth wash
At 3% concentration it is an antiseptic for basic infections.
At 98% concentration you'd probably need dentures and plastic surgery to replace your jaw.
As with all things: use in moderation.
Why is Jared from Subway a celebrity and this kid [jedimaster.net] isn't?
Because Jared was brave enough to consume several hundred pounds of lunch meat in his quest for fame.
As for missiles, if the missle is shiney the laser will be reflected. I think.
Holy shit, you just ended the anti-missle laser arms race in one sentence!
"So, boss, what do we do to defend against a $1,000,000,000 anti-missle laser?"
"Polish the metal of the missle body into a mirror finish. It'll cost $5,000 in labor."
The notion that we can have zero collateral damage assumes that we can distinguish between combatants vs. innocents and allies with high accuracy.
Well, at a minimum, the right type of laser could be humane. Innocent or not, a quickly-vaporised head doesn't have time to realize what's going on.
What could I do?
Use all those CD-Rs to build a bridge to the moon to escape the collection agencies.
Freedom for that 0.5% is freedom for everyone, even though the remaining 99.5% will take it for granted entirely and still find a way to blame Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush for their DSL connection breaking for ten minutes.
Well, $300,000 in revenue per day still ain't bad. I'd take it without hesitating
the least bad tax?
The best attributes of a "good" tax are: anonymity, equality, and simplicity. The federal income tax, for example, is literally a government interrogation under threat of imprisonment and probably the most imbalanced and downright bigoted legislation the US currently has.
I'm generally in favor of a sales tax that excempts most food and clothing (whatever exemption rules there are should be very short, plain, and simple to understand). Property tax is fairly anonymous and is based more on property values than personal attributes, so it is certainly better than income tax. Unfortunately, property tax has proven to be ripe for abuse, especially in areas where assessment rates are different for people in different economic categories (disproportionately low taxation for the wealthy is common).
Other very specific taxes, such as a (milage X weight) tax for vehicles can be applied to road maintenance and construction. Specific taxes for specific things, where costs are transparent to the tax payer are generally good, as it is harder in these cases for the government to artificially inflate one tax to cover something unrelated (i.e., income tax subsidizing everything from the arts to farming). These sorts of specific taxes, where cross-subsidizing does not occur simply makes using those aspects of government-provided infrastructure a known business expense for that business model. Of course, there should not be too many of these taxes, as the accounting becomes a burden.
Probably the simplest thing to do is mostly sales with limited property taxes. Disseminating the per-county and per-state rates could be done in with regular state publications or websites, so people that do accounting have no confusion about how to proceed with their jobs. The routing numbers for each county's or state's treasury bank accounts can be published, also, so submitting payments can be highly automated. Sales tax is highly anonymous, where only aggregate statistics are collected by the government, which is entirely adequate for large-scale planning.
When people respond that repealing the federal income tax will require cutting the government down to match the reduced income, my response is "yes, that's exactly what needs to be done."
Free trade is basically a means by which corrupt elites are propped up via borrowing from foreign interests.
No, free trade is where global markets compete. It is totally fair and automatically encourages growth in developing countries in a way that makes giving aid money blindly to corrupt governments obselete. Countries that do not engage in free trade are punished by the world markets with reduced trade and slower growth. Non-free trade begets poverty, unemployment, and stagnation in the long term. It's really pretty simple.
Why not give everyone a knife, take away with all those laws that try to prevent that we kill each other and let the strongest one win?
Repealing the anti-murder laws is arguably a violation of the First Amendment. Neither extreme of anarchy or socialism is the foundation of the USA; rather the Constitution protects rights essential to allowing people to live free from tyranny and to pursue whatever path they choose.
The current state of capitalism is enough to "make the founders of the USA to spin in their graves".
Why? The USA is still the most prosperous and inventive country on the planet, largely due to the delay between invention and regulation. When the regulation occurs, so does stagnation.
Corruption is temporary as it is unsustainable in a free market, because it has no financial basis (only so much money can be extorted from a community or market before it collapses and everyone flees). Finanical justice is justice nontheless. The government also has a nominal policing role to ferret out what corruption it can, but, ultimately, the government cannot catch every bad guy, no matter how hard they try.
The point is one of simplicity and robustness. Writing single-purpose tools each with limited scope shrinks the debugging burden when problems occur. Using 'find' to handle the recursion is a no-brainer.
Pure UNIX is good software engineering. Feature bloat in the name of convenience is Microsoft engineering. You might as well use Windows.
the FTA, NAFTA, and FTAA has little to do with trade, and everything to do with making governments subservient to trans-national corporations.
Then, dump all trade "treaties" in favor of real free trade that even my neighbor's dog would understand. Real free trade does not play favorites, nor does it need to be overly complicated nor ratified by nations. Free trade just happens ("Do you want to trade widget X with us?" "No? Well, okay" OR "Yes? Great, thanks for the P.O.; we'll ship 'em out tomorrow.")
Kudos to our corporate overlords for their foresight and wisdom.
The irony is even thicker considering the number of libraries. I remember an author saying that if every library bought just one copy of his book, it would be a bestseller just from that volume. Given the vast number of books published each year and the competition that ensues, authors and publishers should be grateful for any book sold, regardless whether it is to a library.
To quote from the CBO's analysis of NAFTA's effects...
Yes, free trade is good. The problem is that of special interests trying to pervert it into something impure and downright corrupt.
A right to privacy from the federal government is necessary for free speech, so there goes the First Amendment. If your health care history is already in the hands of government, then how can the Fourth Amendment be preserved? Think of nationalized health care as Total Information Awareness on steroids. They've already got the "infallible" data, so you are automatically at a permanent disatvantage in any dispute or claim.
Also, imagine the social security and medicare deductions on your paycheck doubling and tripling as the federal government takes on the burden of paying for it all. Also, with only the federal government collecting the money for your healthcare, there will be no effective cost controls nor upper limits on taxation.
Even further, as the politicians flail about in their frothy political nitpicking, the nationalized system will grind to a halt under its own regulatory obesity and people will suffer as a result.
In a genuine free trade environment any of the transgression you cite will be temporary. Free trade levels the playing field to the extent that China, India, and Mexico won't be cheaper forever. It seems Mexico is already seeing these effects as their wages are pricing them above the SE Asian job markets. Eventually, the global markets sort themsleves out, as radical international differences can not be maintained forever.
Of course, these mixed-up half-ass protectionist "free trade" agreements are the real crime, where the benefits of free trade are artificially retarded in favor of short-term gain.
You are correct. But so am I.
Okay, I'll agree with this. The underlying theme is one of corruption for short-term political and financial gain along with a long-term goal of consolodating power until the transition from a free state into a de facto oligarchy is complete.
This is why I can no longer vote for Republicans nor Democrats in any federal race. It's harder to do in local races, but I'll try.
Fuck you and your anti-freedom socialist bullkshit...
LOL. If you look at my posting history, I'm the probably the least socialistic person in Slashdot history.
bi-lateral trade
agreements between the U.S. and Australia, Singapore, and presumably
anyone else that will sign that pushes the same agenda.
Another word for this is "corruption." Free trade should not come with strings attached.