Universal health care looks to me like it would make it easier to advance economically.
Really? How does government forcing people to pay for healthcare (universal healthcare) help people advance economically? Got any support for that? Perhaps you are confusing "universal healthcare" with "healthcare financed through taxes", but even then, that's a dubious proposition.
Saving a million or two by retirement is no longer being rich.
Given that the mean retirement savings of people near retirement age is $163k, it is. It is also a lot of money in absolute terms, in particular given that it is in addition to Social Security.
It's not a difficult feat for an upper-middle-class household
So you agree then that getting rich isn't difficult.
Yes there are. There are plenty of reasons. Was there a airport near? Police helicopters providing support or on the ground operations. Military, Police, and Civilian helicopters involved in search and rescue operations. There are plenty of reasons for this
That argument is b.s. since military and police operations already are exempted from normal private property limitations. On the other hand, Joe's Millionaire Air Taxi does not need to fly over my property at 500 ft: commercial flights should be restricted to above 1000 ft, except when approaching airports.
We should tackle the worst offenders first. A global shift to zero emission transportation would be a game changer.
Except, of course, that transportation isn't "the worst offender"; globally it's about 14% of total GHG emissions, and only a fraction of that can reasonably be switched to "zero emission". The "worst offenders" are industry, heating, electricity, and agriculture.
There is absolutely no reason for commercial or military helicopters to fly above private property or beaches at 500 ft. Instead of focusing on drones, we should to raise the lower limit for commercial and military flights to, say, 1000 ft, except near airports.
And yes some languages do have strong typing but some also have type inference. C++, Go, Swift, Rust et al. The compiler infers a type upon assignment and enforces it thereafter without cluttering the code with type declarations.
And there is a price to pay for that, namely that those variables actually have a static type,
If a language sees merit in supporting ad hoc objects it can declare an any or variant type and make allowances for it in the parser without compromising other checks.
If only it were that simple.
But not enough to argue that we should toss out strong compile time checks for the sake of those.
You assume that there is a one-size-fits-all answer, "we" have something in common. People and organizations differ greatly in the kinds of projects they build, how they build them, how they test them, and what markets they sell to. There are apparently people who are so ignorant that they think that C++, Go, Swift, and Rust are good examples of languages with type inference. There are successful companies with no testing strategies. There are successful companies that let college CS majors loose on their corporate code base. Etc.
Type systems are tradeoffs between lots of factors, many of which you haven't even listed. You only list (and apparently only understand) only one side of those tradeoffs, a side that may work for your needs. Believe it or not, but other people have different needs. Personally, I use both statically and dynamically typed languages, as the problem domain requires.
That "catching at compile time" doesn't come for free: you need to add type declarations to your code, and a lot of problems become much more complex to solve in a statically typed language. So it is, in fact, far from clear that this is "cheaper in terms of development effort".
As for bugs, static typing only finds a subset of them; you need good software testing. Once you have good software testing in place, it finds type errors just as easily as other errors, and the benefits of compile-time type checking, such as they are, are much reduced.
The article talks about static typing, not strong typing; the two are different concepts. Strong typing means that type errors are always caught, static typing means that if type errors are caught, they are caught at compile time. JavaScript is both weakly typed and dynamically typed; weak typing is probably a bigger problem than dynamic typing. In any case, whatever conclusions you derive about type systems from experimenting on particular languages really only apply to that language. TypeScript is nice for JavaScript; that doesn't mean that adding static typing to Python would be as useful.
In addition, there is a price to pay for static typing: software becomes more complex, people tend to implement their own "dynamic type light" libraries, etc. So, even when static typing reduces bugs, it's not clear that it results in a better product at a lower cost, which is what you ultimately care about.
Saw a study a while back (a year?) that showed that Canada had something like a couple of times the social mobility of America.
We were talking about No, you don't need "luck" to get rich. You need "luck" only to get super-rich.. Someone then morphed that into "social mobility", and now you morphed it into "relative social mobility". You are a dishonest debater.
They defined social mobility as moving from the bottom quintuple to the top quintuple of income.
Which necessarily is balanced by equal downward mobility: when talking about relative mobility, you can't have one without the other.
This makes sense as it is a lot easier to change jobs or start a business when you're not in fear of losing your healthcare and have other social support.
The reason for Canada's economic success isn't its healthcare system, it's its greater economic liberties.
Last I checked, more progressive and socialist countries had more social mobility than we have.
There are many forms of social mobility. We were talking about "absolute upward mobility" (getting rich). Absolute upward mobility is very high in the US, and low in progressive and socialist countries.
You're absolutely right that progressive and socialist countries have high rates of relative social mobility: that's easy, you just have lots of people fall down (or pushed down) the social ladder to balance out lots of people moving up, with society as a whole stagnating. That's the bad kind of social mobility.
Being in the right place at the right time isn't luck, it's planning, education, and hard work.
If that were the case, people with planning, education, and hard work would find the right place at the right time and get rich. It doesn't happen often.
It happens all the time: the number of millionaires (not including primary residence) is growing rapidly in the US; if you include the primary residence, it's even more.
Becoming a millionaire in the US is so straightforward that it's almost boring: pick a profession like accounting, lawyer, doctor, contractor, be responsible with your money, and work hard.
You need the luck to be in a society that allows social mobility. Perhaps the majority of the worlds population doesn't have that luck.
Well, the majority of the world's population lives in Islamic, progressive, or socialist states; of course, they don't allow social mobility. Which is why we need to keep that crap out of the US.
But here, we're talking about whether American nerds can emulate Bill Gates, not whether some goat herder from the middle of Sudan or Congo can overcome the self-created limitations of their society.
Sure, hard work is part of it, but as this article points out it is only part of it.
Correct.
Coming from the correct womb
Correct again. But "the right womb" isn't the womb of a millionaire or billionaire woman, it's the womb of a woman in a stable marriage with a good husband, the womb of a woman who values education, and instills the right values in her kids.
and happening to be in the right place at the right time seems to have a lot more to do with it.
Being in the right place at the right time isn't luck, it's planning, education, and hard work.
Who needs Uber if you are a wealthy and privileged upper class Brit? You ought to have your own private chauffeur! If you can't afford that, you should be crammed into the Tube, as it befits commoners and the riff raff!
How about being like Steve Jobs? Or like Larry Ellison? Or like Sergey Brin? How about the millions of tech millionaires that came to the US as immigrants, often growing up poor? The real "privilege" that Bill Gates had was that he came from an intact, high IQ, two parent family that valued education and hard work. It probably also helped that he got out of the soul crushing US public education system early.
The real reason that you shouldn't try to be like Bill Gates is simply that trying to become a billionaire requires taking lots of risky bets. But becoming a multimillionaire is something pretty much any family can prepare their children for, provided the parents make the right choices early on.
Gross Company Profits are what is left over after paying expenses, salaries, etc... Those can and are increased and decreased by giving out bonuses, raising or lowering wages, paying stock dividends, etc.
Dividends are paid from profits, so they can't be used to decrease profits. As for salaries, that means that companies might try to cut salaries in response to taxes. As I was saying at the beginning: "Companies usually can't lower profits (they lose investors) or lower bonuses/salaries (they lose workers). But if they happen to be in a position to do either of those things, it means that groups like retirees or employees make less money,"
Non-profits in the US are notorios for this, paying high salaries to execs and often covering many dubious expenses.
Well, yes: that's because they are not allowed to make profits and instead turn into a scam by which rich people avoid taxes and gullible people transfer their money to executives. That's the kind of nonsense that happens when organizations are not subject to market forces.
This also doesn't go into the intellectual IP that is often used to siphon profit from one company to another, which is again, what this article is talking about and what all my comments are referencing.
Shifting around profits between companies does not change the average profit.
I'm no economist and don't purport to be, but I know a bullshitter.
Yes, you do: yourself. You have been bullshitting again and again throughout this thread, looking up crappy articles on biased news sites written by non-experts to support your silly contention that increased taxes on corporations just gets taken out of their supposedly large profit margins. In actual fact, you're just the typical uneducated fool who overestimates the profit margins of corporations five-fold, and you simply can't admit that you're wrong.
Google uses advertising to finance their AI research and uses AI in some of their products, but that doesn't make Google "an AI company": AI software or hardware isn't a significant product for Google, at least not yet.
Second of all racism is hardly merely a "political opinion".
No, it's instead the long-standing ideology and policy of Democrats and progressives. Democratic/progressive ideology used to be "all black individuals are genetically inferior and therefore we need to keep them down". These days the Democratic/progressive ideology is "all black individuals have been damaged by a history of slavery, and all white individuals have benefited from slavery, therefore we need to classify everybody by race and then transfer massive amounts of money from white individuals to black individuals".
So, you are right: racism is hardly merely a "political opinion", it has been a miserable reality of American political life for more than two centuries, and it has always been the Democrats who have been, and continue to be, responsible for it.
Decent, non-racist people believe that race simply shouldn't matter and that people should be treated equally, regardless of race, a concept that Democrats simply do not seem to be able to grasp.
Profit is basic accounting, carefully examined by both investors and the IRS. Furthermore, if anything, companies have a strong motivation to overstate profits. You contend that companies across the board systematically and massively understate profit somehow in order to make your paranoid belief that they have massive secret stashes of money to draw on to finance new taxes you want to impose, but that the profit then still shows up in their cash balance. I'm sorry, but your contention is as ludicrous as if you claimed that the earth is flat and that the sky is black cloth with little holes in it. Your beliefs about elasticity are even more bizarre and unreal. You're an economic flat earther.
I claim that corporations have an average profit margin of around 5%. Do you have trouble grasping what that means?
As for the $2 trillion in cash that corporations hold, that was accumulated over many years and in global markets; there is no "logical disconnect" there with a 5% profit margin.
A coalition of activists, consumer groups and writers are calling on supporters to attend the next meeting of the Federal Communications Commission on September 26 in Washington DC.
Saying "Americans plan" misrepresents these groups as being representative of "Americans". No, "Americans" are not planning massive Net Neutrality protests next week, a bunch of special interest groups are.
Congress has to answer to us, their constituents," said Evan Greer, campaign director for Fight for the Future
If Evan Greer ("a trans / genderqueer femme activist, singer/songwriter, and troublemaker based in Boston" in his own words) thinks he represents the "constituents" of most of America's representatives, he needs to look at some recent Congressional and state-level election results.
Usually because of enormous profit margins with plenty of room to carve some tax out of the profits.
The average profit margin of industry is around 5% (about 6% if you include finance).
And you keep making the mistake of thinking that whether companies carve taxes out of their profits or not is something you can determine by looking at prices. As I explained to you repeatedly: companies have many other ways of passing on taxes to consumers aside from raising prices.
No, my original argument hinged on the fact that price is inelastic
Well, then your argument fails on that count as well, since elasticity varies widely.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you just go on believing that.
Depending on your retirement plan, you probably are rich, you simply can't access the money.
Plenty, e.g., here.
Really? How does government forcing people to pay for healthcare (universal healthcare) help people advance economically? Got any support for that? Perhaps you are confusing "universal healthcare" with "healthcare financed through taxes", but even then, that's a dubious proposition.
Given that the mean retirement savings of people near retirement age is $163k, it is. It is also a lot of money in absolute terms, in particular given that it is in addition to Social Security.
So you agree then that getting rich isn't difficult.
That argument is b.s. since military and police operations already are exempted from normal private property limitations. On the other hand, Joe's Millionaire Air Taxi does not need to fly over my property at 500 ft: commercial flights should be restricted to above 1000 ft, except when approaching airports.
Except, of course, that transportation isn't "the worst offender"; globally it's about 14% of total GHG emissions, and only a fraction of that can reasonably be switched to "zero emission". The "worst offenders" are industry, heating, electricity, and agriculture.
There is absolutely no reason for commercial or military helicopters to fly above private property or beaches at 500 ft. Instead of focusing on drones, we should to raise the lower limit for commercial and military flights to, say, 1000 ft, except near airports.
And there is a price to pay for that, namely that those variables actually have a static type,
If only it were that simple.
You assume that there is a one-size-fits-all answer, "we" have something in common. People and organizations differ greatly in the kinds of projects they build, how they build them, how they test them, and what markets they sell to. There are apparently people who are so ignorant that they think that C++, Go, Swift, and Rust are good examples of languages with type inference. There are successful companies with no testing strategies. There are successful companies that let college CS majors loose on their corporate code base. Etc.
Type systems are tradeoffs between lots of factors, many of which you haven't even listed. You only list (and apparently only understand) only one side of those tradeoffs, a side that may work for your needs. Believe it or not, but other people have different needs. Personally, I use both statically and dynamically typed languages, as the problem domain requires.
That "catching at compile time" doesn't come for free: you need to add type declarations to your code, and a lot of problems become much more complex to solve in a statically typed language. So it is, in fact, far from clear that this is "cheaper in terms of development effort".
As for bugs, static typing only finds a subset of them; you need good software testing. Once you have good software testing in place, it finds type errors just as easily as other errors, and the benefits of compile-time type checking, such as they are, are much reduced.
The article talks about static typing, not strong typing; the two are different concepts. Strong typing means that type errors are always caught, static typing means that if type errors are caught, they are caught at compile time. JavaScript is both weakly typed and dynamically typed; weak typing is probably a bigger problem than dynamic typing. In any case, whatever conclusions you derive about type systems from experimenting on particular languages really only apply to that language. TypeScript is nice for JavaScript; that doesn't mean that adding static typing to Python would be as useful.
In addition, there is a price to pay for static typing: software becomes more complex, people tend to implement their own "dynamic type light" libraries, etc. So, even when static typing reduces bugs, it's not clear that it results in a better product at a lower cost, which is what you ultimately care about.
We were talking about No, you don't need "luck" to get rich. You need "luck" only to get super-rich.. Someone then morphed that into "social mobility", and now you morphed it into "relative social mobility". You are a dishonest debater.
Which necessarily is balanced by equal downward mobility: when talking about relative mobility, you can't have one without the other.
The reason for Canada's economic success isn't its healthcare system, it's its greater economic liberties.
There are many forms of social mobility. We were talking about "absolute upward mobility" (getting rich). Absolute upward mobility is very high in the US, and low in progressive and socialist countries.
You're absolutely right that progressive and socialist countries have high rates of relative social mobility: that's easy, you just have lots of people fall down (or pushed down) the social ladder to balance out lots of people moving up, with society as a whole stagnating. That's the bad kind of social mobility.
It happens all the time: the number of millionaires (not including primary residence) is growing rapidly in the US; if you include the primary residence, it's even more.
Becoming a millionaire in the US is so straightforward that it's almost boring: pick a profession like accounting, lawyer, doctor, contractor, be responsible with your money, and work hard.
Well, the majority of the world's population lives in Islamic, progressive, or socialist states; of course, they don't allow social mobility. Which is why we need to keep that crap out of the US.
But here, we're talking about whether American nerds can emulate Bill Gates, not whether some goat herder from the middle of Sudan or Congo can overcome the self-created limitations of their society.
Correct.
Correct again. But "the right womb" isn't the womb of a millionaire or billionaire woman, it's the womb of a woman in a stable marriage with a good husband, the womb of a woman who values education, and instills the right values in her kids.
Being in the right place at the right time isn't luck, it's planning, education, and hard work.
Who needs Uber if you are a wealthy and privileged upper class Brit? You ought to have your own private chauffeur! If you can't afford that, you should be crammed into the Tube, as it befits commoners and the riff raff!
-- Your Betters
No, you don't need "luck" to get rich. You need "luck" only to get super-rich.
How about being like Steve Jobs? Or like Larry Ellison? Or like Sergey Brin? How about the millions of tech millionaires that came to the US as immigrants, often growing up poor? The real "privilege" that Bill Gates had was that he came from an intact, high IQ, two parent family that valued education and hard work. It probably also helped that he got out of the soul crushing US public education system early.
The real reason that you shouldn't try to be like Bill Gates is simply that trying to become a billionaire requires taking lots of risky bets. But becoming a multimillionaire is something pretty much any family can prepare their children for, provided the parents make the right choices early on.
Dividends are paid from profits, so they can't be used to decrease profits. As for salaries, that means that companies might try to cut salaries in response to taxes. As I was saying at the beginning: "Companies usually can't lower profits (they lose investors) or lower bonuses/salaries (they lose workers). But if they happen to be in a position to do either of those things, it means that groups like retirees or employees make less money,"
Well, yes: that's because they are not allowed to make profits and instead turn into a scam by which rich people avoid taxes and gullible people transfer their money to executives. That's the kind of nonsense that happens when organizations are not subject to market forces.
Shifting around profits between companies does not change the average profit.
Yes, you do: yourself. You have been bullshitting again and again throughout this thread, looking up crappy articles on biased news sites written by non-experts to support your silly contention that increased taxes on corporations just gets taken out of their supposedly large profit margins. In actual fact, you're just the typical uneducated fool who overestimates the profit margins of corporations five-fold, and you simply can't admit that you're wrong.
Google uses advertising to finance their AI research and uses AI in some of their products, but that doesn't make Google "an AI company": AI software or hardware isn't a significant product for Google, at least not yet.
No, it's instead the long-standing ideology and policy of Democrats and progressives. Democratic/progressive ideology used to be "all black individuals are genetically inferior and therefore we need to keep them down". These days the Democratic/progressive ideology is "all black individuals have been damaged by a history of slavery, and all white individuals have benefited from slavery, therefore we need to classify everybody by race and then transfer massive amounts of money from white individuals to black individuals".
So, you are right: racism is hardly merely a "political opinion", it has been a miserable reality of American political life for more than two centuries, and it has always been the Democrats who have been, and continue to be, responsible for it.
Decent, non-racist people believe that race simply shouldn't matter and that people should be treated equally, regardless of race, a concept that Democrats simply do not seem to be able to grasp.
Profit is basic accounting, carefully examined by both investors and the IRS. Furthermore, if anything, companies have a strong motivation to overstate profits. You contend that companies across the board systematically and massively understate profit somehow in order to make your paranoid belief that they have massive secret stashes of money to draw on to finance new taxes you want to impose, but that the profit then still shows up in their cash balance. I'm sorry, but your contention is as ludicrous as if you claimed that the earth is flat and that the sky is black cloth with little holes in it. Your beliefs about elasticity are even more bizarre and unreal. You're an economic flat earther.
Let's recognize simply that you reject facts, data, reality, and reason.
I claim that corporations have an average profit margin of around 5%. Do you have trouble grasping what that means?
As for the $2 trillion in cash that corporations hold, that was accumulated over many years and in global markets; there is no "logical disconnect" there with a 5% profit margin.
Saying "Americans plan" misrepresents these groups as being representative of "Americans". No, "Americans" are not planning massive Net Neutrality protests next week, a bunch of special interest groups are.
If Evan Greer ("a trans / genderqueer femme activist, singer/songwriter, and troublemaker based in Boston" in his own words) thinks he represents the "constituents" of most of America's representatives, he needs to look at some recent Congressional and state-level election results.
The average profit margin of industry is around 5% (about 6% if you include finance).
And you keep making the mistake of thinking that whether companies carve taxes out of their profits or not is something you can determine by looking at prices. As I explained to you repeatedly: companies have many other ways of passing on taxes to consumers aside from raising prices.
Well, then your argument fails on that count as well, since elasticity varies widely.