In a democracy, you get the government you pay for, vote for, or create.
No, I get the government that those who control the money pay for, and that those who can sway the ignorant and gullible convince them to vote for.
Yes, I write my congresscritters, donate money to various political groups, have taken part in demostrations and marches. That doesn't change that I'm stuck with what those who can manipulate the majority of the money and the voters want.
When I tell them they called the day before they tell me they did not and promptly hang up. The number they call from does not show up on caller id.
My suggestion: treat it like an obscene phone call. Contact your phone company, tell them you're receiving illegal and harassing telemarketing calls, ask about using *57 (Call Trace) so you can get their number to report them to the FTC. (If your phone company won't help, try contacting the FTC directly and complaining about your phone company.)
Maybe not 50% of total income, but certainly 50% of taxable income is pretty easy to hit.
But we're not talking about just taxable income. A big part of the way our tax burden gets increased or decreased is by changing what's taxable. (I'm not saying it should be that way, but it is.) Standard deductions become very significant if you're talking about someone making as little as $18k.
And I find it hard to believe that someone making $18k is living in a $200k home...I think they'd end up with a lower taxable income from the mortage interest deduction, too. (If the income is that low compared to the assessment on the house, there might be homestead tax credits available.)
Look, no one likes taxes. But the fact is that overall the U.S. pays low taxes compared to other industrialized nations. Given the bizarre nature of the tax code there might be the odd degenerate case (the AMT has certainly screwed some people lately), but the allegations that typical middle-income taxpayers are paying 40-50% of their income in taxes are simply not true.
No, the majority of welfare recipients are second- and beyond-generation welfare recipients.
A little thought will show that it's quite possible for a welfare recipients to be a productive citizen temporarily fallen on hard times and also a second-generation recipient.
My own parents, were on food stamps for a few months when my mother was injured (on the job) and unable to work as a nurse and my father was laid off from his programming job due to downsizing. If at some point I had a spell of bad luck and had to do the same, I'd be a second generation food stamp recipient, never mind that both I and my parents would have paid much more into taxes than we took out in benefits.
Social security is *not* a retirement pension plan
Uh, yes it is. Retired people get paid money, that's pretty much the definition of a retirement pension. I'm not saying it's a good one, but it is one.
In fact, I bet a majority of armed robberies are drug related -- as in the perpetrator uses illegal drugs, most often marijuana.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, so...the fact that someone who uses cannabis commits a crime doesn't make that crime drug-related, any more than if I get caught speeding it's "alcohol related" since I like an occasional beer.
Certainly someone who's willing to commit armed robbery isn't going to be intimidated by drug prohibition laws. But I doubt many of them are bothering to grow their own.
And in sales tax, and assorted other taxes I pay, and the rate is close to 40%.
Uh, you live in an area with a 20% sales tax? I doubt it. I could see sales tax adding on a few percent, maybe 5-7%. Since you make less than
$20k a year I'm assuming you don't own your own home, if you did property tax might add a few more percent.
So what exactly are these "other assorted taxes" chewing up so much of your income?
I don't think so. According to the Treasury Department, Federal taxes hit "a postwar high of 20.8 percent [of GDP] in 2000," and I don't see state taxes being at a magnitude of three-quarters of federal ones.
Please give a source for your figure of 35.7%, I'd like to check it out.
It seems that most citizens are content to let the government provide the services of a wet-nurse, under the guise of "helping those that are less fortunate". This bullshit goes against my right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
Welfare makes up a small part of government expenditures, and most recipients are not "non-productive parasites", but productive citizens temporarily fallen on hard times. (The bromide you hear about the high cost of "entitlement programs" comes from including Social Security, but a retirement pension plan is not a welfare program.)
If we want smaller government and lower taxes, we should start by trying to run a nation instead of an empire. And stop locking up more people than any other country in the world.
(I'm all for lower taxes, once we've cut spending. Start with cutting the expenses of running an empire rather than a country, and the costs of locking people up for consenual acts. We can eliminate social and regulatory spending just as soon as we stop the government policies and actions that make such governors on capitalism necessary - eliminate corporate charters, reserve banking, absentee ownership of land and resources...)
Imagine a police force based on capitalism.. what would be it's return on investment.... oh, wait...
We've had it in some parts of the U.S. It's called "civil forfeiture", where the government takes your stuff on the theory that your stuff (not you, who are in theory entitled to a trail, but your stuff, which isn't) has commited a crime. In some places the cops get to keep the money and property confiscated.
"Ok, guys, today we can go after that street gang knocking over liquor stores...or we can go after the guy growing pot in his basement. And we'll get to take his money and his house to help fund the department...and your salaries. Whom shall we go after?"
This madness is fortunately being reigned in a little bit now.
(The irony, of course, is that libertarian capitalists fight this strongly as an infringement of not just civil liberties but "property rights", while it really is largely a result of the tax cuts and capitalist thinking that said libertarian capitalists so admire.)
emacs, for example, is largely written in elisp -- hardly a mainstream language.
Do CS programs no longer at least touch on LISP?
I've been teaching C and Java to second-year undergraduates this year -- having seen some of their code, I can safely say that if I were starting an OSS project, I'd rather have one seasoned Haskell hacker on board than the entire lot of 'em:-).
Sure. It's easier for a good hacker to pick up a new language, that for someone who knows a language to become a good hacker.
Why on earth would the users of a piece of software care about the language it's written in?
If your users are FOSS developers, they quite likely care about the ability to modify the tool, which includes caring about the languate in which it is written.
american coins are perhaps not best because they are made of a sandwich metal
Unless the metal composition of U.S. coins has changed since the early 80s. you can get a voltage off of a penny and a nickel (i.e., 1 cent and 5 cent pieces) separated by a saliva-soaked piece of paper. Great fun.
And let's not be fooled into thinking you have a stable job by being "permanently" employed.
Yep. When I was young and naive, I said I didn't want to contract because a full-time "permanent" position was so much more stable. Then two full-time "permanent" jobs evaporated on me in the span of a year.
What ever happened to reading "real" books, you know, the ones that don't require an artist to draw every scene out for you?
Yeah! And what's up with those lazy people who go see Shakespeare's plays performed instead of reading the scripts? Jeez, you need someone to act it out for you?
Really, what's with this reading stuff anyay? My great-great-great-great-great-...great-grandpappy told real stories, epics you had to listen too, none of this nambly-pambly going back to re-read!
If it is indeed "the greatest" comicbook, then anything else in the genre won't be as good and you'll probably tire of the genre pretty fast
See also Alan Moore's work on Swamp Thing, Gaiman's Sandman and Black Orchid, and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. With Moore's Watchmen, these are the works that blew the comics/graphic novel field wide open.
Of course there were other great more conventionally "artistic" works before that, such as Maus, but the work of Moore, Miller, and Gaiman was more genre busting, taking not just the medium of stories-with-pictures but the superhero and horror comics genre itself to a whole new plane.
There is a reason why Linux is licensed under the GPL v2 only.
Perhaps because only v1 and v2 exist, and v2 is better than v1 (since it deals with patents)? I mean, were you expecting part of the kernel to be under GPL v12 or something?
Let's just face the facts that some people are more prone to addictive behaviors
Sometimes I yearn for the good old days, when "addiction" was a meaningful concept.
Used to be addiction was a definite syndrome of drug use marked by tolerance, withdrawl, continued use in the face of health problems, and repeated failed attempts to quit.
Then the drug warriors noticed that this pattern doesn't occur with some of the drugs they wanted to demonize and ban. So the concept of "psychological addiction" - i.e., you really like to do something we don't want you to do - was born.
Then the pseudo-moralists and control freaks (a group with a larger overlap with the drug warriors) noticed that this vague new definition of addiction could also be applied to gambling, porn, and other behaviors they called "sinful". Bam! Now we all get to be addicts.
Yes, there are people who engage in stupid and unhealthy patterns of behavior involving porn, gambling, love, sex, TV, music, friendships, religion, computers, the net, fandom, and pretty much anything else. But lumping these all under the label "addiction" is not helpful, except to authoritarians, the burgeoning "treatment" industry, and "twelve step" cults.
Our society was smarter and stronger than theres so they were wiped out. It's natural. Don't you hippies love nature?
So if I kill you and take your stuff, it's proof that I am smarter and stronger than you, it's "natural", and you've got no problem with it? Cool. Be seeing you soon.
Anyway, they weren't "wiped out". This isn't just an issue of the past. Native nations still exist, and there are living today persons of Native ancestry who have suffered from rascist, even genocidal, actions of state and federal governments.
What's you're solution?
("Your", not "you're.")
First, the United States must honor its treaty obigations to the Native nations, and make reparations to extant nations with whom it has broken treaties. Second, reparations to those citizens of Native ancestry who have been victims of rascist government policies. Third, a general cultural acknowledgement that genocide was a bad thing. Get Andrew Jackson - who brought history the "Trail of Tears" - off the $20 bill for starters.
i will also go as far as saying that the whites only did what the indians were doing but wew better at it.
Certainly the Native nations made war against each other, and myth of the "noble red man" holds no more water than other sterotypes.
However, AFIAK Native nations never performed the sort of wholesale treaty-breaking or genocidal practices that the U.S. governement did. It took American ingenuity to come up with the Trail of Tears.
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No, I get the government that those who control the money pay for, and that those who can sway the ignorant and gullible convince them to vote for.
Yes, I write my congresscritters, donate money to various political groups, have taken part in demostrations and marches. That doesn't change that I'm stuck with what those who can manipulate the majority of the money and the voters want.
My suggestion: treat it like an obscene phone call. Contact your phone company, tell them you're receiving illegal and harassing telemarketing calls, ask about using *57 (Call Trace) so you can get their number to report them to the FTC. (If your phone company won't help, try contacting the FTC directly and complaining about your phone company.)
But we're not talking about just taxable income. A big part of the way our tax burden gets increased or decreased is by changing what's taxable. (I'm not saying it should be that way, but it is.) Standard deductions become very significant if you're talking about someone making as little as $18k.
And I find it hard to believe that someone making $18k is living in a $200k home...I think they'd end up with a lower taxable income from the mortage interest deduction, too. (If the income is that low compared to the assessment on the house, there might be homestead tax credits available.)
Look, no one likes taxes. But the fact is that overall the U.S. pays low taxes compared to other industrialized nations. Given the bizarre nature of the tax code there might be the odd degenerate case (the AMT has certainly screwed some people lately), but the allegations that typical middle-income taxpayers are paying 40-50% of their income in taxes are simply not true.
A little thought will show that it's quite possible for a welfare recipients to be a productive citizen temporarily fallen on hard times and also a second-generation recipient.
My own parents, were on food stamps for a few months when my mother was injured (on the job) and unable to work as a nurse and my father was laid off from his programming job due to downsizing. If at some point I had a spell of bad luck and had to do the same, I'd be a second generation food stamp recipient, never mind that both I and my parents would have paid much more into taxes than we took out in benefits.
The average welfare recipient spends about four years on the rolls, not a lifetime.
Uh, yes it is. Retired people get paid money, that's pretty much the definition of a retirement pension. I'm not saying it's a good one, but it is one.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, so...the fact that someone who uses cannabis commits a crime doesn't make that crime drug-related, any more than if I get caught speeding it's "alcohol related" since I like an occasional beer.
Certainly someone who's willing to commit armed robbery isn't going to be intimidated by drug prohibition laws. But I doubt many of them are bothering to grow their own.
Uh, you live in an area with a 20% sales tax? I doubt it. I could see sales tax adding on a few percent, maybe 5-7%. Since you make less than $20k a year I'm assuming you don't own your own home, if you did property tax might add a few more percent.
So what exactly are these "other assorted taxes" chewing up so much of your income?
I don't think so. According to the Treasury Department, Federal taxes hit "a postwar high of 20.8 percent [of GDP] in 2000," and I don't see state taxes being at a magnitude of three-quarters of federal ones.
Please give a source for your figure of 35.7%, I'd like to check it out.
Welfare makes up a small part of government expenditures, and most recipients are not "non-productive parasites", but productive citizens temporarily fallen on hard times. (The bromide you hear about the high cost of "entitlement programs" comes from including Social Security, but a retirement pension plan is not a welfare program.)
If we want smaller government and lower taxes, we should start by trying to run a nation instead of an empire. And stop locking up more people than any other country in the world.
Unless you're quite wealthy, no, you don't.
That's a false bromide from the "starve-the-beasters" who want to eliminate social programs and government regulation.. A typical middle income household pays about 15% in federal taxes; combined with state and local taxes about 25-30% total.
(I'm all for lower taxes, once we've cut spending. Start with cutting the expenses of running an empire rather than a country, and the costs of locking people up for consenual acts. We can eliminate social and regulatory spending just as soon as we stop the government policies and actions that make such governors on capitalism necessary - eliminate corporate charters, reserve banking, absentee ownership of land and resources...)
We've had it in some parts of the U.S. It's called "civil forfeiture", where the government takes your stuff on the theory that your stuff (not you, who are in theory entitled to a trail, but your stuff, which isn't) has commited a crime. In some places the cops get to keep the money and property confiscated.
"Ok, guys, today we can go after that street gang knocking over liquor stores...or we can go after the guy growing pot in his basement. And we'll get to take his money and his house to help fund the department...and your salaries. Whom shall we go after?"
This madness is fortunately being reigned in a little bit now.
(The irony, of course, is that libertarian capitalists fight this strongly as an infringement of not just civil liberties but "property rights", while it really is largely a result of the tax cuts and capitalist thinking that said libertarian capitalists so admire.)
Sure. It's easier for a good hacker to pick up a new language, that for someone who knows a language to become a good hacker.
If your users are FOSS developers, they quite likely care about the ability to modify the tool, which includes caring about the languate in which it is written.
Ah! Thanks for the clarification.
Unless the metal composition of U.S. coins has changed since the early 80s. you can get a voltage off of a penny and a nickel (i.e., 1 cent and 5 cent pieces) separated by a saliva-soaked piece of paper. Great fun.
Yep. When I was young and naive, I said I didn't want to contract because a full-time "permanent" position was so much more stable. Then two full-time "permanent" jobs evaporated on me in the span of a year.
Harlan Ellison wrote the correct screenplay for I, Robot . It's the story of Susan Calvin.
More info here. The making of the recent action flick rather than Ellison's script is a crime against art and against the human soul.
Yeah! And what's up with those lazy people who go see Shakespeare's plays performed instead of reading the scripts? Jeez, you need someone to act it out for you?
Really, what's with this reading stuff anyay? My great-great-great-great-great-...great-grandpappy told real stories, epics you had to listen too, none of this nambly-pambly going back to re-read!
See also Alan Moore's work on Swamp Thing, Gaiman's Sandman and Black Orchid, and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. With Moore's Watchmen, these are the works that blew the comics/graphic novel field wide open.
Of course there were other great more conventionally "artistic" works before that, such as Maus, but the work of Moore, Miller, and Gaiman was more genre busting, taking not just the medium of stories-with-pictures but the superhero and horror comics genre itself to a whole new plane.
Unfortunately being stupid seems only to hurt those around the stupid person, not the stupid person themselves...
Perhaps because only v1 and v2 exist, and v2 is better than v1 (since it deals with patents)? I mean, were you expecting part of the kernel to be under GPL v12 or something?
Yes, but in the bizzare world of copyright, there are those who allege that loading a program into memory constitutes making a copy.
I'm waiting for them to claim that looking at an image or piece of text creates a copy on my retina or in the neurons of my occipital lobe.
Sometimes I yearn for the good old days, when "addiction" was a meaningful concept.
Used to be addiction was a definite syndrome of drug use marked by tolerance, withdrawl, continued use in the face of health problems, and repeated failed attempts to quit.
Then the drug warriors noticed that this pattern doesn't occur with some of the drugs they wanted to demonize and ban. So the concept of "psychological addiction" - i.e., you really like to do something we don't want you to do - was born.
Then the pseudo-moralists and control freaks (a group with a larger overlap with the drug warriors) noticed that this vague new definition of addiction could also be applied to gambling, porn, and other behaviors they called "sinful". Bam! Now we all get to be addicts.
Yes, there are people who engage in stupid and unhealthy patterns of behavior involving porn, gambling, love, sex, TV, music, friendships, religion, computers, the net, fandom, and pretty much anything else. But lumping these all under the label "addiction" is not helpful, except to authoritarians, the burgeoning "treatment" industry, and "twelve step" cults.
BDSM is not killing, maiming, or torturing. A pro football game is closer to killing, maiming, and torturing than what goes on in most BDSM scenes.
So if I kill you and take your stuff, it's proof that I am smarter and stronger than you, it's "natural", and you've got no problem with it? Cool. Be seeing you soon.
Anyway, they weren't "wiped out". This isn't just an issue of the past. Native nations still exist, and there are living today persons of Native ancestry who have suffered from rascist, even genocidal, actions of state and federal governments.
("Your", not "you're.")
First, the United States must honor its treaty obigations to the Native nations, and make reparations to extant nations with whom it has broken treaties. Second, reparations to those citizens of Native ancestry who have been victims of rascist government policies. Third, a general cultural acknowledgement that genocide was a bad thing. Get Andrew Jackson - who brought history the "Trail of Tears" - off the $20 bill for starters.
Certainly the Native nations made war against each other, and myth of the "noble red man" holds no more water than other sterotypes.
However, AFIAK Native nations never performed the sort of wholesale treaty-breaking or genocidal practices that the U.S. governement did. It took American ingenuity to come up with the Trail of Tears.