Also the government almost forces people into the stock market through tax laws. If the government didn't continually devaluate the dollar you could just save your money in a bank and you wouldn't lose purchasing power.
That is an excellent observation and one that many who demonize investing and free markets here on Slashdot would do well to remember. Indeed, one does not have to go very far back into the economic history of the United States to arrive at a time when saved money actually bought more goods and services as time went on (the supply of gold and other precious metals being relatively less elastic compared to the rapidly expanding economy) and was a true store of value. This "deflation" did not in any way harm the economy, even though wages went down and money was harder to come by it bought MORE goods and services as time went on so people's standard of living rose despite of the deflating money. The only people who were hurt by this were those who had borrowed imprudently at high rates of interest (but then again these are exactly the people who NEED to be punished in a healthy economy for diverting valuable resources to wasteful uses). This is in sharp contrast to the massive inflation of fiat dollars which has occurred relentlessly since 1972 when President Nixon closed the gold window, severing the last link between our money and any tangible commodity backing and effectively ending its ability to act as a "store of value" (one of the classic features of any viable money). Ever since that time, the dollars in your pocket are backed by nothing but the, "full faith and credit" of the United States government to repay you with...dollars backed by nothing! Today your dollar is worth only ~2% of what it was worth before the gold window closed; a 98% LOSS of value! Prices have increased rapidly ever since then to account for the ballooning quantities of new money entering the economy all of the time (sometimes slowing or even reversing briefly, but always with a clear long term upward trend).
This is why, as the parent points out, people are forced into the stock market and other forms of investment, above and beyond what they might otherwise choose to invest, simply because the money itself has become such a poor store of value. Nobody in their right mind saves for retirement by hoarding stacks of Federal Reserve Notes. Of course, to even mention that there is something inherently flawed in our present monetary system, the unholy trinity of fiat currency, fractional reserves and a government central bank, is to be branded a reactionary or a crank, but it is nice to see that not everyone is fooled by the "emperor's new clothes".
All so their powerful friends can leech off the hard work of millions of people.
EXACTLY! The politicians don't want honest money, because it would eliminate or at least severely restrict their ability to transfer wealth from the economy at large to politically favored groups with monetary slight of hand. They would be forced instead to use the obvious mechanisms of increasing taxes and borrowing, as they do now, but with much less ability to hide the results of their profligacy by inflating the money supply to compensate (the supply of gold being much more limited than that of computer memory or paper and ink). This would make it more difficult to give money to political favorites who spend it first, before the inflation kicks in, and rob the rest of us of our savings. This is essentially why progressives and others on the Left are almost without exception, vehemently opposed to honest commodity-backed (and especially gold) money.
IMHO the reason why eBay has NOT implemented the various anti-sniping features as auction options, as the parents have mentioned (i.e. time extend with higher bid increments), is due primarily to two factors: First, eBay earns more money if the auction closes with a successful sale and allowing auctions to drag out, even though eBay would earn a few more cents or even dollars, is not as profitable as closing more auctions quickly in the same period of time. After all, there are only so many similar items that can successfully compete for attention at any given time. No point in crowding out the good candidates with lots of older junk. Second, there are many more buyers on eBay than sellers and because snipping benefits buyers at the expense of sellers it makes more of their customers happier when they don't limit the practice. There could be other reasons too that I haven't thought of, but as both parents have said: eBay has had a long time to do something about sniping and they haven't. It's hard to accept that nothing has happened due to lack of technical competence or misunderstanding on eBay's part.
The value of a share of stock is derived from it being a share, albeit a small one in practice, of ownership in a business. The price of that share, in the long run, will reflect the proportional value of the benefits that would ordinarily accrue to the owner of that business. It is very easy to see why shares in a viable business, however small individually, are NOT worthless. Suppose, for example that the "worthless" shares of a viable and profitable business were selling for $0.01 per share. Don't you think that someone would come along and buy up all of the shares at that price? Even if the buyer's only intent was to liquidate the company and pocket the resulting profits he would still be interested in buying the outstanding shares at that price because if he acquired control of the company, perhaps by becoming the 51% owner, then he could force that kind of liquidation. This is why the long term share price in the marketplace tends to reflect the true present value of the underlying business. A share of something is worth something; It is not worthless. Now in the short run people can and do play psychological games in the marketplace which is why the moment to moment price of a stock is essentially random. However one must not confuse the result of individual games (i.e. I buy and you sell; game finished) with the iterated version which is played continuously for years, decades and even centuries. The individual stock investor does best by doing his homework, looking at the qualities of the business that cannot be feed into a short term computer trading algorithm, and then investing for the long run. This practice has very little to do with gambling.
Gamble all you want, but try to avoid spreading the lie.
This one gets thrown around a lot here on Slashdot, where the investing (particularly stock market investing) == gambling meme is often taken for granted. However, this analogy, like most, is a rather crude approximation of what is actually happening when one invests. If you are interested in a more in-depth treatment of this subject, there is an excellent essay on investorguide.com which covers this very topic, investing vs gambling.
The billion dollars are there to drive research for better technology, which hopefully will drive down prices.
If the government is doling out the money then the most likely result is that it most of it will be squandered on useless pilots and demo projects and the remainder will be pocketed by the shareholders in the form of dividends. The government has to get that money from somewhere (it doesn't grow on trees after all) and they are taking it out of your pocket. I don't particularly want to own or drive an electric car, so why should I be forced to contribute money to someone else who does? Let them buy their own damn electric car and pay the full price out of their own damn pocket.
And when compared to subsidies that other industries get (e.g. the big oils), that few billion dollars is just a drop in the bucket.
Multiple wrongs don't make one more right.
Look, a few $B may be a lot of money for an individual, but when talking about a whole industry, it's not a lot at all. If anything, it's underfunded.
You do realize that your personal share of the national debt (at the time of writing) is now $42,903.67 and counting. I don't know about you, but I would rather keep more of my hard earned money in my own pocket instead of having the government take it and hand it over to some limousine liberal suffering from "green guilt" due to climate change (certainly not guilt over taxing me more to subsidize their go-kart purchase). A few billion here and there really adds up after a while. It has to stop somewhere.
In the business world, the vendor is not required to inform you of what deals they may have closed with other clients and whether those customers got a better deal than you did. Why should the government expect that firms act against their own self interest merely because they government tells them that they should? If government agencies feel that they haven't gotten a good enough deal then maybe the people in charge of negotiating in those agencies need to be a bit more assertive and demand a better price next time; the squeaky wheel gets the grease after all. Laws like this just enable government negotiators to be lazy because they can alter the deal, "darth vader" style, after the fact when they realize that someone else just got a better deal than they did. The government should quit whining and negotiate better next time. It seems that Oracle delivered exactly what they said they would at the agreed upon price. If the government didn't like that price, why did they agree to the purchase in the first place?
The AC has a point. There may be some value in knowing enough about technology to have a cogent discussion with the professionals who are doing the actual work and understand generally what they are talking about when they mention certain technologies and how they are going to be used in the project. However, the field of professional software development is a complex and knowledge intensive undertaking that does not lend itself well to dabblers. The business owner or entrepreneur specializes in running and starting businesses, not writing software or designing websites. His efforts are best spent within his own area of expertise, not cobbling together an amateurish website that a professional has already completed with much higher quality and is ready to sell for much less than the price of a single day of the business owner's time. So my advice is learn enough to know what is being pitched, manage those doing the work and judge final product quality, but leave the details to the professionals.
and yet it is still superior to the fucking joke of a broken health care system that the usa operates under.
It is not exactly a revelation to say that the present United States health care system is flawed. In fact it's just about the only thing that most people can agree on when it comes to health care and public policy in this country.
in terms of bureaucracy (yes, bureaucracy: the government is the only one who can bury you in paperwork?), access to preventative care, quality, cost, both on a national level and a personal level
I believe that you have misunderstood my line of argument. There are indeed private components to the present system, such as health insurance companies, hospitals, drug companies, etc and it is true that these private firms have accumulated a byzantine system of paperwork and bureaucracy in their roles as providers of health care in the United States. HOWEVER (and this is important), these large and inefficient corporations are just the sort that one should expect in a system so heavily regulated by the government. The government interferes directly with all sorts of laws governing just about every step of health care delivery and indirectly through tax policies which incentivize consumers to make inefficient choices when purchasing health care. Now listen up because this is important: most of the inefficiencies in the present US system are the result of over-regulation, restriction of competition and poor tax policy...by the government. The government sets the rules of the game and they have set the rules in such a way, knowingly or not, so as to create the most cost inefficient possible health care system (i.e. the one we have today). The Milton Friedman article, which I also linked previously in this thread, discusses both the history and the effects of these inefficiencies over the decades leading up to 2001 (the date of publication and the issues are still timely, even after the "reforms" written into law but as yet not implemented by the Obama administration). The case is well documented with sources cited in that article. So don't blame the private sector for playing the game the government designed, blame the government for setting up such an inane game in the first place.
dude just look at obvious healthcare measures like longevity, newborn survival, cost (YES COST!), etc: comparing the usa to other industrial countries with universal healthcare. its a no brainer,
The comparison is meaningless because you are ignoring many other factors which influence newborn survival, longevity and even costs. What about different cultural and lifestyle preferences? For example, many Americans enjoy eating high calorie and high fat diets while exercising little. It is likely that such people will have poor health outcomes no matter what the health care system looks like. Even with costs the issue is muddled. There are many ways to assess costs other than direct costs paid out of pocket. What about the high taxes which are necessary in every country which implements universal health care? Aren't those also a cost? You seem to believe that if you don't pay the tax directly, but instead tax the wealthy, you as a participant in that economy will not be effected. Even a cursory look at the high cost of living and the persistently high unemployment in Europe demonstrates the fallacy of that presumption. Permanently high taxes, of the sort required to pay for universal health care and other expansive government programs, severely distort the economy; preventing scarce resources from being allocated to their most efficient uses. This makes everyone poorer in the end and reduces average standards of living in general. Health care is important, but surely it is not the only thing in life that is important. As with any good or service, what we gain from additional resources spent must be weighed against what we g
I am certainly no idealist, but I am not stupid either. I still maintain that involving the government in health care, whether by some mandatory insurance scheme or direct payments, is ill-advised and unlikely to end well. Either the care will not be as good or it will be more costly or both. If you were a government bureaucrat deciding how money is spent on strangers, as in a single-payer system, would you really make your best effort to see that money is well spent on high quality care for strangers whom you will likely never meet? If you answer yes, then it is you who are the idealist. It is much easier to do better with the free market without the need for a complex and centralized bureaucracy to plan, coordinate and run the system. It is human nature to look out for number one first. Collectivism, whether socialism or communism, goes against that nature when the collective unit is larger than the family or tribe. Is it less idealistic to expect that government, composed of thousands of strangers who don't know you personally and don't care about you individually, will do a better job managing your health care than free market? I remain incredulous.
California can't afford to pay government employees, but can afford to give money to people who buy electric cars?
What is truly puzzling is why investors continue to buy California's bonds when each subsequent budget resorts to ever more inventive accounting tricks to "balance" spending with actual revenue. It may surprise some of you to learn that the credit rating of California bonds is so low that institutional investors in this state, which includes many local governments and government employee pension funds, cannot purchase them for their investment pools. What does that tell you about the credit worthiness of California?
I am going to take some time to respond carefully because it appears that you might now be willing to listen to what I have to say, so here it is:
why don't we pay, as a society, for a pool of cash to educate our youth, and pay for our health issues, and then just not have to worry about that? do you understand the notion of quality of life?
Well, first of all you are bundling several unrelated goods and services into a generic "quality of life" category. Tell me, what sorts of goods and services that people want or need should not be included as part of the public pool to improve the quality of life? If education and health care are necessary then surely basic food and shelter are no less necessary. How about a car? Doesn't that improve quality of life too? Of course, all of this has been tried before. Indeed, one need look no further than Cuba or Venezuela for the most current examples. All things considered, would you prefer to be an average citizen in Cuba or Venezuela, where health care, education and much more are provided from a "pool" of common property, or the United States? The things that you want: quality health care, good education, affordable housing, etc are not best achieved through limitless application of government force, but rather through voluntary participation in the free market; history has demonstrated this time and time again.
why exactly is the idea of sharing health care and educational costs such a horrible idea to you? do you not see the benefits of that idea? why aren't those benefits attractive to you?
I will answer separately for health care and education because I consider them to be separate issues:
I have no problem with private groups of individuals purchasing group insurance in the free marketplace whether that be through an insurance company or forming a co-op or some other means as long as each individual in the group participates voluntarily and was not coerced. An individual should have the right to refuse participation and other individuals should respect that right, even if we believe that the other individual is making the "wrong" choice. Now, many of us do choose to purchase insurance, either individually or through our employers (although I maintain my previous positions on how the government distorts these choices), because we see the value in pooling some risks. The difference is that we were all free to opt-out and nobody forced us to participate and that is very important in a free society. The insurance deductible transmits important signals, via the price mechanism, on the costs of certain behaviors that is absent or indirect in a non-free system. For example, smoking or consuming large quanties of junk food or other unhealthy choices. You can try to tax these activities in a single-payer system, but that too has limited effectiveness and is yet another curb on individual freedom. Indeed, the government will be sorely tempted to lower costs by adopting other punative measures. How about periodic weigh-ins or taxing obese people for being obese? You may laugh, but other countries where the government pays for health care have done and are doing these things.
The issue of education is a bit different. Clearly a certain minimum level of education is necessary to produce citizens capable of discharging their duties as responsible citizens in a free and democratic society. So I do support government funding of this necessary level of education, generally agreed to be high school level or equivalent. I have a different opinion on higher education. The benefits of college and graduate education acrue primarily to the individual receiving them and less clearly so to society as a whole (although society does benefit, up to a point, from additional doctors, scientists and other well educated citizens). It makes sense that the individual recieving the most benefit from this additional education, namely the one upon whom the degree is confered, should be asked to pay for
Well, only if it was you...ha! In seriousness though, hospitals are required to set broken bones, resuscitate and generally do what they can for somebody who is brought to them in eminent danger of death or serious infection. So your broken arm gets set, they perform open heart surgery to bypass your blocked artery and when you are able to be discharged you are given a prescription for pain or antibiotics and sent on your way. At some point after that you are presented with the bill. Should there be no debt to those who worked to save your life? Do you work for free? It is right that there should be a debt and it is right that it should be paid. We merely disagree about who should pay it and under what circumstances. There is no question of whether or not emergency care will be rendered or at least offered (you can refuse some or all emergency care if you wish).
If you are able then you should pay and the bar for "unable to pay", at least for 20 year olds, should be very high indeed, IMHO. There will always be some percentage that falls into the charitable category; these are edge cases, not the norm, and your hypothetical 20 year old is likely not among them. After he recovers, he can either pay what he owes or work until he is able to pay off the debt over time. That is how it works out here in the real world. In fact, I myself once made payments on a medical debt arising out of a mountain bike accident shortly after I graduated from college. It took me six months, but I made payments until the full amount, several thousand dollars, was paid. Just because there is an epidemic of irresponsible youth today, walking away from their student loans and medical bills , doesn't make it right and it isn't selfish to call them out on it.
the hospital bills the state, because we can't afford our hospitals to go bankrupt. this goes on ALL THE TIME IN THE USA
Don't know which state you live in, but generally speaking the state will only pay if the patient qualifies under certain circumstances. The average non-disabled single 20 year old, with substantial life expectancy remaining and reasonable prospects for future employment, is not going to get the tab picked up by the state. The hospital will sell the debt into collection, at a loss but not a complete loss, and the 20 year old will either have to pay it or face the consequences (i.e. wage garnishment OR bankruptcy). If you don't want to declare bankruptcy or have your wages garnished then be responsible and work off the debt or save something for emergencies. I cannot tell you how many times I hear, "I cannot afford it" from somebody texting on their $400 "smart" phone. The 20 year old who cannot afford to have his broken arm set most likely has his priorities out of whack.
i want BETTER healthcare for LESS money, and thats what healthcare reform is you ignorant useless motherfucker
Or in other words, you want to take what I have worked hard for, by force, and spend it on yourself. I don't suppose the words "ungrateful" or "lazy" mean anything to you? No, I don't suppose that they do. As for who the fool is, well, lets just say the matter speaks for itself or more to the point: you have already spoken. Keep up the bad attitude and see how far that gets you in life buddy. Nobody likes an ungrateful whiner.
the europeans have better healthcare and pay less for it
The Europeans pay for their healthcare with more than just their taxes. In Europe the cost of every day living is very high compared to most places in the United States. The health care may cost them less at the point of sale, but it certainly doesn't cost them less overall. One must consider the total picture in such things not just "this good or service costs more than this one".
why?...because its MANDATORY
That's interesting. If we can lower the price of health care simply by making it a mandatory purchase what else can we lower the price on by making it mandatory? Perhaps we should make it mandatory for everyone to buy an iPhone, because then the price will be lower. Why stop there? Why not make the purchase of every good and service in the whole economy mandatory, because clearly that would lower the price, right? How can adding more overhead to a market transaction, which is what we do when we involve the government, possibly lower the price at the point of sale? In fact it cannot. The sources of high cost in the United States health care system, for example, are well known, but due to a variety of special interests, nothing much ever changes. I will not cite the numerous sources here, because this has already been discussed ad-nauseam both here on Slashdot and elsewhere, but suffice it to say that there are 3 primary reasons why health care costs in the United States are high:
Third Party Payer: In effect most Americans, those with health insurance anyway, are paying someone else to pay the bill for them, a bill where the true costs are hidden behind layers of bureaucracy. They view whatever premiums they have paid as a "sunk cost" and proceed to get as much health care, whether they need it or not, as possible to "get their money's worth". This is further exacerbated by the fact that health insurance in the United States is peculiar among all other forms of insurance in that it pays something on just about everything. The auto insurance company doesn't split the cost of gasoline or oil changes with you, but your health insurance company pays part of your regular prescriptions, doctor visits, long term care and many other regular, non-emergency and recurring expenses. So in effect we have a system where the consumer is insulated from the true cost, pays essentially a single entrance fee for "all you can eat" and gets co-payments on just about everything that isn't part of the regular "buffet".
The Tax Code: The present US tax code incentives people to receive their health care through their employer which is both inefficient and overall more expensive. The tax code has distorted the rational choice of the individual, by providing a special income tax deduction for health care, to purchase that care in the manner that results in the greatest collective inefficiency to society. Again we see how government interference in the market for health care has had many far reaching consequences, both foreseen and unforeseen. Either the deduction needs to be eliminated OR it needs to be extended to all health care, whether purchased through the employer or not.
Attorneys: The lawyers and their medical malpractice lawsuits, class action and otherwise, touch all aspects of the health care system and drive up prices with each settlement. All of us pay more for health care because of the attorneys and the tort bar.
Of course, this barely scratches the surface on a topic as complex as health care, but might I suggest the following article, written by the late Milton Friedman, on How to Cure Healthcare? It's really too bad that Obama's health care bill doesn't meaningfully address any of these core problems. I suspect that we will be revisiting the issue again under a new president sometime before 2020.
in the united states, you have people who will vociferously fight even legislation that is good for them and increases their rights
Translation: In the United States you have people who will vociferously fight even legislation that is bad for them personally and increases their neighbor's "right" to "spread their wealth around".
because they would rather believe demagogues on the radio and propaganda outlets on the television that report "the news"
I suppose you believe that anyone who takes a different position from you, regardless of personal circumstances, is either a fool or an idiot? I mean, how could it be that someone might <gasp> actually know what's best for themselves! I mean, those of us who live in "fly over country" need smart people to tell us that bear shit is better than the buckwheat, right? Please.
all they know is "socialism is a bad word." well, what does socialism mean?
I would define it as being mostly in favor of the following statement as a general matter of economic principal: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", especially when this principle conflicts with personal liberty. Or in other words, given a choice between increasing economic equality OR personal liberty; the socialist will tend to favor the choice which maximizes economic equality, even if personal liberty must be sacrificed to do it. Speaking from my own experience, having lived in the United States my whole life, I would say that most Americans (substantially more than 50% IMHO) are NOT in favor of this philosophy. Although, there is a substantial minority who are.
americans: go to europe. ask a european about socialism. you will find out the word is boring and just common sense. europeans have a much higher standard of living then you, dear propagandized low iq americans. they also have much higher taxes... but they DON'T PAY FOR SERVICES YOU PAY A LOT MORE FOR
Has it occurred to you that many of us might not want these services or, if we do want them, we prefer NOT to pay as much for them as the Europeans do? Different economic preferences are neither irrational nor illegitimate. If I prefer to do without because I don't want something, perhaps because I believe that the price is too high, why should I be taxed so that you can have it at a better price? Now I will concede that there are some public goods, national defense for example, from which it is difficult or impossible to exclude those who don't pay and whose function is essential to the preservation of an organized society. However, there are very few such goods IMHO and certainly much fewer than those who agree with "socialism" would place in that category.
truth, idiots: you're still taxed, whether for health care or oil or broadband, but by corporate boardrooms instead of uncle sam, and you are taxed a heck of a lot more! idiots: you are being manipulated by trolls in the employ of big business to think things against your own self-interest, and you are too stupid to see it. wake the fuck up
Or maybe we are just used to making do with what we have, instead of whining that we don't have more good things falling from the sky, and don't believe that our needs and wants are so important that our "rich and greedy" neighbors must be forced to buy them for us. Living within your means and being thankful for what you have...what a concept! If you want health care or broadband you can darn well pay for them yourself and even if you have some rare and expensive disease which is life threatening, why should I be required to pay whatever it costs to save your life? The world doesn't owe you an "equal outcome" simply because your mother brought you kicking and screaming into this world. I didn't have any say in that so why should I be responsible
Your argument is true for some applications, and completely false on others.
Yes, but that does not make it a 50/50 proposition here in the real world. The vast majority of us who are paid to do software development work use languages and write programs where the hardware, especially with all of the virtualization these days, really doesn't matter. Most of us are engaged in writing business applications, not avionics, device drivers, or embedded controllers. The largest segment of the market where hardware performance optimization is still important is probably the games market, which is still a minority of working programmers. So what I said was mostly true for the clear majority of real world software development jobs.
Now, does this mean that your programs should not concern themselves with efficiency at all? Of course not. One should still try to avoid nested loops, using bad sorts and other well known software faux pas that sap performance no matter what hardware one is using. My point was that most of the efficiency gains that are worth seeking should be sought in the more abstract realm of the software itself, at least at first, before jumping into hardware optimizations. Could bubble sort with optimized hardware be faster than quicksort? I suppose it could, but most programmers would consider it 'ugly' that the more obvious software optimizations, such as a better sorting algorithm, were not pursued first before time was spent optimizing for specialized or specific hardware.
Most programmers can't even write single-threaded assembly code any more.
The reason that we don't is that modern optimizing compilers have made doing so almost a complete waste of time except in very highly specialized or niche applications. I would liken it to chess playing AIs: the greatest human grand masters can still defeat them with effort but the rest of us will get our butts handed to us by the AI every time. To quote one fictional AI, "the only winning move is not to play".
As far as whether all programming will head this direction eventually, I don't think so.
I don't think so either. If anything programming is becoming abstract and virtual to the point where the underlying hardware is a meaningless detail handled by the JITs (just in time compilers) and HALs (hardware abstraction layers). The hardware is so ridiculously cheap now that programmer time is far better spent writing elegant and abstract code that will run on anything that supports the VM rather than hand-optimizing for a particular piece of hardware. In fact, I would argue that unless you are writing a device driver, concerning oneself with hardware directly in software is a good indication of code smell.
Expecting that the whole world can do it is crazy thinking.
If the libertarian belief system - and yes, it's a matter of faith - yielded better results, then Somalia should be paradise on earth.
Except for the fact that Somalia has no functioning government or at least not one that anyone takes seriously. Remember that libertarians are in favor of the least government that can be effective (the 'government' in Somolia currently controls about 12 square blocks of downtown Mogadishu) and the Somali 'government' is anything but right now. The situation in Mogadishu, never mind Somalia in general, is most accurately characterized as anarchy, NOT "libertarian paradise". In order for a government to be effective it must have enough power to do at least the following:
Prevent the initiation of violence by private parties against other private parties (i.e. keep the peace).
Protect the country from external aggressors (i.e. keep out foreign armies, terrorists, pirates etc).
Posses a functioning court system which can enforce contracts and guarantee freedoms at least roughly approximating those found in the more decent parts of this world.
You will note that the Somali 'government' currently possess NONE of these capabilities. In other words: the present situation is Somolia is F.U.B.A.R. To suggest that this somehow represents a "libertarian paradise" is a strawman of the worst order.
As for the United States, the big problem here is the aforementioned big government and although we are not quite so socialist as our European friends, our government is perhaps 40-50% socialist even so (and that is being conservative IMHO). "From each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs" sounds great in theory, but in practice the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Finally, with regard to the "happiest citizens on earth" (i.e. your merry Europeans) you might try living over there for a while where unemployment is frequently above 10% (even during "good" times), the cost of living is high and the taxes are downright punitive (those social safety nets don't come cheap after all). Everyone at the party is happy until the party ends and everyone has to help clean up and the Eurozone is about to be handed the bill for a decade of profligacy (and cover-ups of same) by their less scrupulous members, particularly the so called P.I.I.G.S (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain). The situation in Greece is but a taste of things to come in Europe if spending, and eventually taxes too, are not both severely cut (i.e. a double helping of austerity, would you like fries with that order?). Of course, the US is heading down that same path, albeit with a bit more rope to hang ourselves, but our financial day of reckoning will come soon enough (you might consider the present recession to be a "Preview of Coming Attractions" of sorts). When our children are old enough to fully understand the economic implications of the debt that we have saddled them with, they won't be thanking us for how well we managed their future financial affairs.
Why single out defense? government in all of its forms is inherently wasteful. The libertarians amongst us have been arguing this for as long as we have been speaking and yet people are still shocked and surprised whenever they hear of how the government has wasted their money. Remember what Milton Friedman often said, "No man spends another man's money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own". This is true both for children spending their weekly allowance and governments. Is government necessary? Yes, but we would do well to guard against the notion that if some government is necessary, even beneficial, then more must surely be even better. In this the government could learn a lesson from private industry where more is often done with less (productivity has gone through the roof during the current recession) and creative people find ways to make do on limited budgets.
You could have just hired a developer or a firm to design and build it for you using the framework or language of your choice. You say that you come from a print background and learned HTML and CSS to get into web design. Fair enough, but why also spend your time learning a CMS framework like Joomla? Are you going to move into the programming side of web development? I cannot tell you how much crappy software I have encountered over the years that was cobbled together by dabblers with "almost no coding experience". Finally, just because it works doesn't mean that it was done right or that it will scale. Sometimes you really are better off hiring professionals unless you want to devote serious time, on the order of years, to becoming one yourself.
I think now I understand why you cannot get the answers you want from those who support the fair tax. I was actually trying to explain things to you, but you keep acting like a liberal jerk. I figure that you are either doing this on purpose to bait me or you are just not capable of understanding. Either way I'm through trying to explain it to you. Perhaps someday, when your income is high enough and you start paying serious taxes, you will finally understand.
You might try the following video on YouTube for a basic overview of FairTax.
As for SS, I would like to see us move towards a private pension system, as they have right now in Chile, where people contribute their own money to a private account which is managed according to their wishes by a private firm with a fiduciary duty to their account holders. Naturally, this would have to be done as part of a program which continues paying present retirees and transitions younger workers into the private pension system with the eventual goal of phasing out SS as we know it now. This scares the hell out of some people, but anyone who really stops to consider the present system and understands inflation and fiat currency understands that the current Ponzi scheme operated by the Federal Government as SS is not only unsustainable, it is also unfair; a mean trick played by the old against the young and by the government against its people. Let me say this: if I was allowed to opt-out of SS, stop paying SS taxes and instead fund a private pension, I would do it in a New York Minute and so would most other young people with more than a few rocks rolling around upstairs.
What I'll grant is that it's difficult to measure exactly how strong that effect is. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to approximate.
Fair enough, but I still maintain that it is better to let people sort themselves by a national consumption tax rather than the government deciding before any spending decisions are made via the income tax. With the national sales tax, each person can decide for themselves how much tax they are able and willing to pay by adjusting their own levels of non-essential consumption. The prebate feature of the fair tax is designed to help people exempt some portion of their income from tax for purchases which they consider to be "essential". The fair tax lets each person decide for themselves both how much taxable consumption is enough for them (i.e. how much that last dollar was really worth to them) AND which purchases are "essential" and thus not subject to tax (i.e. the prebates up to some minimum level of expenditure: presumably for basic food, clothing and shelter). IMHO, this is the way it ought to be. Personal choice and personal responsibility through expressed consumption preference in the market.
why it is acceptable for the government to spend money to promote policy goals, but not acceptable to achieve the same policy goal by simply not collecting the money in the first place?
In general a dollar which makes a round trip through the government and back into the economy loses a substantial fraction of its value during the round trip. I tend to favor the government NOT redistributing income via the tax system for this reason because it is generally more economically efficient to leave the money in private hands. This is especially true if the government is NOT going to spend the money on something that only the government has the power to do, like national defense, environmental regulation, or law enforcement. I tend to think more often in terms of desirable and undesirable from the standpoint of efficiency, when I think about tax policy, rather than the more absolute acceptable or unacceptable dichotomy.
The poverty level being chosen, as far as I could tell, was because that was the most regressive the makers of it could come up with and think they'd get away for it.
How can you be sure? If we shouldn't use the Federal Government's estimation of poverty level spending then what definition should we use? You say that you know who sets the Federal Poverty level (the Census Bureau) and how, but then fault the Fair Tax for using that level? Perhaps you have some disagreement with the Census Bureau's assessment? Fine, but just because the Fair Tax picked the government's own number that is somehow evidence of an "agenda"? Picking the Federal Poverty level as the minimum level of reimbursement seems reasonable enough to me. The exact number is open for discussion anyway. The important idea to take away is that the Fair Tax requires reimbursement of some reasonable level of expenditure, subject to what everyone agrees is "reasonable", to every US taxpayer.
You seem to be very dissatisfied with every person who tries to explain Fair Tax to you. Tax policy is inherently a complex subject, which is why the Fair Tax ideas were written down in book form, and even more formally in the text of the Fair Tax bills that have been referred to committee in Congress. Perhaps you can read the book and the committee bills thoroughly to fully satisfy your desire for the niggling details? As for adding or subtracting features from the Fair Tax bill, I would have to agree with the Fair Tax people that that is a more thorny issue. For example, removing the "prebate" concept from the bill removes the progressive features entirely (a tactic which might be used by those looking to kill the entire proposal for other reasons) or failing to abolish the income tax may lead to the income tax being phased back in at some future date on top of the Fair Tax. The amounts and magnitudes are generally up for discussion, but as I said previously tax policy is complex and pulling threads out of the tapestry very quickly unravels the entire proposal. That is probably why most Fair Tax supporters take major additions or deletions so seriously.
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Also the government almost forces people into the stock market through tax laws. If the government didn't continually devaluate the dollar you could just save your money in a bank and you wouldn't lose purchasing power.
That is an excellent observation and one that many who demonize investing and free markets here on Slashdot would do well to remember. Indeed, one does not have to go very far back into the economic history of the United States to arrive at a time when saved money actually bought more goods and services as time went on (the supply of gold and other precious metals being relatively less elastic compared to the rapidly expanding economy) and was a true store of value. This "deflation" did not in any way harm the economy, even though wages went down and money was harder to come by it bought MORE goods and services as time went on so people's standard of living rose despite of the deflating money. The only people who were hurt by this were those who had borrowed imprudently at high rates of interest (but then again these are exactly the people who NEED to be punished in a healthy economy for diverting valuable resources to wasteful uses). This is in sharp contrast to the massive inflation of fiat dollars which has occurred relentlessly since 1972 when President Nixon closed the gold window, severing the last link between our money and any tangible commodity backing and effectively ending its ability to act as a "store of value" (one of the classic features of any viable money). Ever since that time, the dollars in your pocket are backed by nothing but the, "full faith and credit" of the United States government to repay you with...dollars backed by nothing! Today your dollar is worth only ~2% of what it was worth before the gold window closed; a 98% LOSS of value! Prices have increased rapidly ever since then to account for the ballooning quantities of new money entering the economy all of the time (sometimes slowing or even reversing briefly, but always with a clear long term upward trend).
This is why, as the parent points out, people are forced into the stock market and other forms of investment, above and beyond what they might otherwise choose to invest, simply because the money itself has become such a poor store of value. Nobody in their right mind saves for retirement by hoarding stacks of Federal Reserve Notes. Of course, to even mention that there is something inherently flawed in our present monetary system, the unholy trinity of fiat currency, fractional reserves and a government central bank, is to be branded a reactionary or a crank, but it is nice to see that not everyone is fooled by the "emperor's new clothes".
All so their powerful friends can leech off the hard work of millions of people.
EXACTLY! The politicians don't want honest money, because it would eliminate or at least severely restrict their ability to transfer wealth from the economy at large to politically favored groups with monetary slight of hand. They would be forced instead to use the obvious mechanisms of increasing taxes and borrowing, as they do now, but with much less ability to hide the results of their profligacy by inflating the money supply to compensate (the supply of gold being much more limited than that of computer memory or paper and ink). This would make it more difficult to give money to political favorites who spend it first, before the inflation kicks in, and rob the rest of us of our savings. This is essentially why progressives and others on the Left are almost without exception, vehemently opposed to honest commodity-backed (and especially gold) money.
IMHO the reason why eBay has NOT implemented the various anti-sniping features as auction options, as the parents have mentioned (i.e. time extend with higher bid increments), is due primarily to two factors: First, eBay earns more money if the auction closes with a successful sale and allowing auctions to drag out, even though eBay would earn a few more cents or even dollars, is not as profitable as closing more auctions quickly in the same period of time. After all, there are only so many similar items that can successfully compete for attention at any given time. No point in crowding out the good candidates with lots of older junk. Second, there are many more buyers on eBay than sellers and because snipping benefits buyers at the expense of sellers it makes more of their customers happier when they don't limit the practice. There could be other reasons too that I haven't thought of, but as both parents have said: eBay has had a long time to do something about sniping and they haven't. It's hard to accept that nothing has happened due to lack of technical competence or misunderstanding on eBay's part.
The value of a share of stock is derived from it being a share, albeit a small one in practice, of ownership in a business. The price of that share, in the long run, will reflect the proportional value of the benefits that would ordinarily accrue to the owner of that business. It is very easy to see why shares in a viable business, however small individually, are NOT worthless. Suppose, for example that the "worthless" shares of a viable and profitable business were selling for $0.01 per share. Don't you think that someone would come along and buy up all of the shares at that price? Even if the buyer's only intent was to liquidate the company and pocket the resulting profits he would still be interested in buying the outstanding shares at that price because if he acquired control of the company, perhaps by becoming the 51% owner, then he could force that kind of liquidation. This is why the long term share price in the marketplace tends to reflect the true present value of the underlying business. A share of something is worth something; It is not worthless. Now in the short run people can and do play psychological games in the marketplace which is why the moment to moment price of a stock is essentially random. However one must not confuse the result of individual games (i.e. I buy and you sell; game finished) with the iterated version which is played continuously for years, decades and even centuries. The individual stock investor does best by doing his homework, looking at the qualities of the business that cannot be feed into a short term computer trading algorithm, and then investing for the long run. This practice has very little to do with gambling.
Gamble all you want, but try to avoid spreading the lie.
This one gets thrown around a lot here on Slashdot, where the investing (particularly stock market investing) == gambling meme is often taken for granted. However, this analogy, like most, is a rather crude approximation of what is actually happening when one invests. If you are interested in a more in-depth treatment of this subject, there is an excellent essay on investorguide.com which covers this very topic, investing vs gambling.
You first, got an extra 30 grand to spare?
The billion dollars are there to drive research for better technology, which hopefully will drive down prices.
If the government is doling out the money then the most likely result is that it most of it will be squandered on useless pilots and demo projects and the remainder will be pocketed by the shareholders in the form of dividends. The government has to get that money from somewhere (it doesn't grow on trees after all) and they are taking it out of your pocket. I don't particularly want to own or drive an electric car, so why should I be forced to contribute money to someone else who does? Let them buy their own damn electric car and pay the full price out of their own damn pocket.
And when compared to subsidies that other industries get (e.g. the big oils), that few billion dollars is just a drop in the bucket.
Multiple wrongs don't make one more right.
Look, a few $B may be a lot of money for an individual, but when talking about a whole industry, it's not a lot at all. If anything, it's underfunded.
You do realize that your personal share of the national debt (at the time of writing) is now $42,903.67 and counting. I don't know about you, but I would rather keep more of my hard earned money in my own pocket instead of having the government take it and hand it over to some limousine liberal suffering from "green guilt" due to climate change (certainly not guilt over taxing me more to subsidize their go-kart purchase). A few billion here and there really adds up after a while. It has to stop somewhere.
In the business world, the vendor is not required to inform you of what deals they may have closed with other clients and whether those customers got a better deal than you did. Why should the government expect that firms act against their own self interest merely because they government tells them that they should? If government agencies feel that they haven't gotten a good enough deal then maybe the people in charge of negotiating in those agencies need to be a bit more assertive and demand a better price next time; the squeaky wheel gets the grease after all. Laws like this just enable government negotiators to be lazy because they can alter the deal, "darth vader" style, after the fact when they realize that someone else just got a better deal than they did. The government should quit whining and negotiate better next time. It seems that Oracle delivered exactly what they said they would at the agreed upon price. If the government didn't like that price, why did they agree to the purchase in the first place?
The AC has a point. There may be some value in knowing enough about technology to have a cogent discussion with the professionals who are doing the actual work and understand generally what they are talking about when they mention certain technologies and how they are going to be used in the project. However, the field of professional software development is a complex and knowledge intensive undertaking that does not lend itself well to dabblers. The business owner or entrepreneur specializes in running and starting businesses, not writing software or designing websites. His efforts are best spent within his own area of expertise, not cobbling together an amateurish website that a professional has already completed with much higher quality and is ready to sell for much less than the price of a single day of the business owner's time. So my advice is learn enough to know what is being pitched, manage those doing the work and judge final product quality, but leave the details to the professionals.
and yet it is still superior to the fucking joke of a broken health care system that the usa operates under.
It is not exactly a revelation to say that the present United States health care system is flawed. In fact it's just about the only thing that most people can agree on when it comes to health care and public policy in this country.
in terms of bureaucracy (yes, bureaucracy: the government is the only one who can bury you in paperwork?), access to preventative care, quality, cost, both on a national level and a personal level
I believe that you have misunderstood my line of argument. There are indeed private components to the present system, such as health insurance companies, hospitals, drug companies, etc and it is true that these private firms have accumulated a byzantine system of paperwork and bureaucracy in their roles as providers of health care in the United States. HOWEVER (and this is important), these large and inefficient corporations are just the sort that one should expect in a system so heavily regulated by the government. The government interferes directly with all sorts of laws governing just about every step of health care delivery and indirectly through tax policies which incentivize consumers to make inefficient choices when purchasing health care. Now listen up because this is important: most of the inefficiencies in the present US system are the result of over-regulation, restriction of competition and poor tax policy...by the government. The government sets the rules of the game and they have set the rules in such a way, knowingly or not, so as to create the most cost inefficient possible health care system (i.e. the one we have today). The Milton Friedman article, which I also linked previously in this thread, discusses both the history and the effects of these inefficiencies over the decades leading up to 2001 (the date of publication and the issues are still timely, even after the "reforms" written into law but as yet not implemented by the Obama administration). The case is well documented with sources cited in that article. So don't blame the private sector for playing the game the government designed, blame the government for setting up such an inane game in the first place.
dude just look at obvious healthcare measures like longevity, newborn survival, cost (YES COST!), etc: comparing the usa to other industrial countries with universal healthcare. its a no brainer,
The comparison is meaningless because you are ignoring many other factors which influence newborn survival, longevity and even costs. What about different cultural and lifestyle preferences? For example, many Americans enjoy eating high calorie and high fat diets while exercising little. It is likely that such people will have poor health outcomes no matter what the health care system looks like. Even with costs the issue is muddled. There are many ways to assess costs other than direct costs paid out of pocket. What about the high taxes which are necessary in every country which implements universal health care? Aren't those also a cost? You seem to believe that if you don't pay the tax directly, but instead tax the wealthy, you as a participant in that economy will not be effected. Even a cursory look at the high cost of living and the persistently high unemployment in Europe demonstrates the fallacy of that presumption. Permanently high taxes, of the sort required to pay for universal health care and other expansive government programs, severely distort the economy; preventing scarce resources from being allocated to their most efficient uses. This makes everyone poorer in the end and reduces average standards of living in general. Health care is important, but surely it is not the only thing in life that is important. As with any good or service, what we gain from additional resources spent must be weighed against what we g
I am certainly no idealist, but I am not stupid either. I still maintain that involving the government in health care, whether by some mandatory insurance scheme or direct payments, is ill-advised and unlikely to end well. Either the care will not be as good or it will be more costly or both. If you were a government bureaucrat deciding how money is spent on strangers, as in a single-payer system, would you really make your best effort to see that money is well spent on high quality care for strangers whom you will likely never meet? If you answer yes, then it is you who are the idealist. It is much easier to do better with the free market without the need for a complex and centralized bureaucracy to plan, coordinate and run the system. It is human nature to look out for number one first. Collectivism, whether socialism or communism, goes against that nature when the collective unit is larger than the family or tribe. Is it less idealistic to expect that government, composed of thousands of strangers who don't know you personally and don't care about you individually, will do a better job managing your health care than free market? I remain incredulous.
California can't afford to pay government employees, but can afford to give money to people who buy electric cars?
What is truly puzzling is why investors continue to buy California's bonds when each subsequent budget resorts to ever more inventive accounting tricks to "balance" spending with actual revenue. It may surprise some of you to learn that the credit rating of California bonds is so low that institutional investors in this state, which includes many local governments and government employee pension funds, cannot purchase them for their investment pools. What does that tell you about the credit worthiness of California?
I am going to take some time to respond carefully because it appears that you might now be willing to listen to what I have to say, so here it is:
why don't we pay, as a society, for a pool of cash to educate our youth, and pay for our health issues, and then just not have to worry about that? do you understand the notion of quality of life?
Well, first of all you are bundling several unrelated goods and services into a generic "quality of life" category. Tell me, what sorts of goods and services that people want or need should not be included as part of the public pool to improve the quality of life? If education and health care are necessary then surely basic food and shelter are no less necessary. How about a car? Doesn't that improve quality of life too? Of course, all of this has been tried before. Indeed, one need look no further than Cuba or Venezuela for the most current examples. All things considered, would you prefer to be an average citizen in Cuba or Venezuela, where health care, education and much more are provided from a "pool" of common property, or the United States? The things that you want: quality health care, good education, affordable housing, etc are not best achieved through limitless application of government force, but rather through voluntary participation in the free market; history has demonstrated this time and time again.
why exactly is the idea of sharing health care and educational costs such a horrible idea to you? do you not see the benefits of that idea? why aren't those benefits attractive to you?
I will answer separately for health care and education because I consider them to be separate issues:
I have no problem with private groups of individuals purchasing group insurance in the free marketplace whether that be through an insurance company or forming a co-op or some other means as long as each individual in the group participates voluntarily and was not coerced. An individual should have the right to refuse participation and other individuals should respect that right, even if we believe that the other individual is making the "wrong" choice. Now, many of us do choose to purchase insurance, either individually or through our employers (although I maintain my previous positions on how the government distorts these choices), because we see the value in pooling some risks. The difference is that we were all free to opt-out and nobody forced us to participate and that is very important in a free society. The insurance deductible transmits important signals, via the price mechanism, on the costs of certain behaviors that is absent or indirect in a non-free system. For example, smoking or consuming large quanties of junk food or other unhealthy choices. You can try to tax these activities in a single-payer system, but that too has limited effectiveness and is yet another curb on individual freedom. Indeed, the government will be sorely tempted to lower costs by adopting other punative measures. How about periodic weigh-ins or taxing obese people for being obese? You may laugh, but other countries where the government pays for health care have done and are doing these things.
The issue of education is a bit different. Clearly a certain minimum level of education is necessary to produce citizens capable of discharging their duties as responsible citizens in a free and democratic society. So I do support government funding of this necessary level of education, generally agreed to be high school level or equivalent. I have a different opinion on higher education. The benefits of college and graduate education acrue primarily to the individual receiving them and less clearly so to society as a whole (although society does benefit, up to a point, from additional doctors, scientists and other well educated citizens). It makes sense that the individual recieving the most benefit from this additional education, namely the one upon whom the degree is confered, should be asked to pay for
You look at our history pre WWII and we pretty much tried to stay out of everyone else's business for the most part.
Don't be so sure. Ever heard of Maj. Gen Smedley Butler?
do you leave him there with a broken arm?
Well, only if it was you...ha! In seriousness though, hospitals are required to set broken bones, resuscitate and generally do what they can for somebody who is brought to them in eminent danger of death or serious infection. So your broken arm gets set, they perform open heart surgery to bypass your blocked artery and when you are able to be discharged you are given a prescription for pain or antibiotics and sent on your way. At some point after that you are presented with the bill. Should there be no debt to those who worked to save your life? Do you work for free? It is right that there should be a debt and it is right that it should be paid. We merely disagree about who should pay it and under what circumstances. There is no question of whether or not emergency care will be rendered or at least offered (you can refuse some or all emergency care if you wish).
If you are able then you should pay and the bar for "unable to pay", at least for 20 year olds, should be very high indeed, IMHO. There will always be some percentage that falls into the charitable category; these are edge cases, not the norm, and your hypothetical 20 year old is likely not among them. After he recovers, he can either pay what he owes or work until he is able to pay off the debt over time. That is how it works out here in the real world. In fact, I myself once made payments on a medical debt arising out of a mountain bike accident shortly after I graduated from college. It took me six months, but I made payments until the full amount, several thousand dollars, was paid. Just because there is an epidemic of irresponsible youth today, walking away from their student loans and medical bills , doesn't make it right and it isn't selfish to call them out on it.
the hospital bills the state, because we can't afford our hospitals to go bankrupt. this goes on ALL THE TIME IN THE USA
Don't know which state you live in, but generally speaking the state will only pay if the patient qualifies under certain circumstances. The average non-disabled single 20 year old, with substantial life expectancy remaining and reasonable prospects for future employment, is not going to get the tab picked up by the state. The hospital will sell the debt into collection, at a loss but not a complete loss, and the 20 year old will either have to pay it or face the consequences (i.e. wage garnishment OR bankruptcy). If you don't want to declare bankruptcy or have your wages garnished then be responsible and work off the debt or save something for emergencies. I cannot tell you how many times I hear, "I cannot afford it" from somebody texting on their $400 "smart" phone. The 20 year old who cannot afford to have his broken arm set most likely has his priorities out of whack.
i want BETTER healthcare for LESS money, and thats what healthcare reform is you ignorant useless motherfucker
Or in other words, you want to take what I have worked hard for, by force, and spend it on yourself. I don't suppose the words "ungrateful" or "lazy" mean anything to you? No, I don't suppose that they do. As for who the fool is, well, lets just say the matter speaks for itself or more to the point: you have already spoken. Keep up the bad attitude and see how far that gets you in life buddy. Nobody likes an ungrateful whiner.
the europeans have better healthcare and pay less for it
The Europeans pay for their healthcare with more than just their taxes. In Europe the cost of every day living is very high compared to most places in the United States. The health care may cost them less at the point of sale, but it certainly doesn't cost them less overall. One must consider the total picture in such things not just "this good or service costs more than this one".
why?...because its MANDATORY
That's interesting. If we can lower the price of health care simply by making it a mandatory purchase what else can we lower the price on by making it mandatory? Perhaps we should make it mandatory for everyone to buy an iPhone, because then the price will be lower. Why stop there? Why not make the purchase of every good and service in the whole economy mandatory, because clearly that would lower the price, right? How can adding more overhead to a market transaction, which is what we do when we involve the government, possibly lower the price at the point of sale? In fact it cannot. The sources of high cost in the United States health care system, for example, are well known, but due to a variety of special interests, nothing much ever changes. I will not cite the numerous sources here, because this has already been discussed ad-nauseam both here on Slashdot and elsewhere, but suffice it to say that there are 3 primary reasons why health care costs in the United States are high:
Of course, this barely scratches the surface on a topic as complex as health care, but might I suggest the following article, written by the late Milton Friedman, on How to Cure Healthcare? It's really too bad that Obama's health care bill doesn't meaningfully address any of these core problems. I suspect that we will be revisiting the issue again under a new president sometime before 2020.
do you support the idea of a driver without driv
in the united states, you have people who will vociferously fight even legislation that is good for them and increases their rights
Translation: In the United States you have people who will vociferously fight even legislation that is bad for them personally and increases their neighbor's "right" to "spread their wealth around".
because they would rather believe demagogues on the radio and propaganda outlets on the television that report "the news"
I suppose you believe that anyone who takes a different position from you, regardless of personal circumstances, is either a fool or an idiot? I mean, how could it be that someone might <gasp> actually know what's best for themselves! I mean, those of us who live in "fly over country" need smart people to tell us that bear shit is better than the buckwheat, right? Please.
all they know is "socialism is a bad word." well, what does socialism mean?
I would define it as being mostly in favor of the following statement as a general matter of economic principal: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", especially when this principle conflicts with personal liberty. Or in other words, given a choice between increasing economic equality OR personal liberty; the socialist will tend to favor the choice which maximizes economic equality, even if personal liberty must be sacrificed to do it. Speaking from my own experience, having lived in the United States my whole life, I would say that most Americans (substantially more than 50% IMHO) are NOT in favor of this philosophy. Although, there is a substantial minority who are.
americans: go to europe. ask a european about socialism. you will find out the word is boring and just common sense. europeans have a much higher standard of living then you, dear propagandized low iq americans. they also have much higher taxes... but they DON'T PAY FOR SERVICES YOU PAY A LOT MORE FOR
Has it occurred to you that many of us might not want these services or, if we do want them, we prefer NOT to pay as much for them as the Europeans do? Different economic preferences are neither irrational nor illegitimate. If I prefer to do without because I don't want something, perhaps because I believe that the price is too high, why should I be taxed so that you can have it at a better price? Now I will concede that there are some public goods, national defense for example, from which it is difficult or impossible to exclude those who don't pay and whose function is essential to the preservation of an organized society. However, there are very few such goods IMHO and certainly much fewer than those who agree with "socialism" would place in that category.
truth, idiots: you're still taxed, whether for health care or oil or broadband, but by corporate boardrooms instead of uncle sam, and you are taxed a heck of a lot more! idiots: you are being manipulated by trolls in the employ of big business to think things against your own self-interest, and you are too stupid to see it. wake the fuck up
Or maybe we are just used to making do with what we have, instead of whining that we don't have more good things falling from the sky, and don't believe that our needs and wants are so important that our "rich and greedy" neighbors must be forced to buy them for us. Living within your means and being thankful for what you have...what a concept! If you want health care or broadband you can darn well pay for them yourself and even if you have some rare and expensive disease which is life threatening, why should I be required to pay whatever it costs to save your life? The world doesn't owe you an "equal outcome" simply because your mother brought you kicking and screaming into this world. I didn't have any say in that so why should I be responsible
Your argument is true for some applications, and completely false on others.
Yes, but that does not make it a 50/50 proposition here in the real world. The vast majority of us who are paid to do software development work use languages and write programs where the hardware, especially with all of the virtualization these days, really doesn't matter. Most of us are engaged in writing business applications, not avionics, device drivers, or embedded controllers. The largest segment of the market where hardware performance optimization is still important is probably the games market, which is still a minority of working programmers. So what I said was mostly true for the clear majority of real world software development jobs.
Now, does this mean that your programs should not concern themselves with efficiency at all? Of course not. One should still try to avoid nested loops, using bad sorts and other well known software faux pas that sap performance no matter what hardware one is using. My point was that most of the efficiency gains that are worth seeking should be sought in the more abstract realm of the software itself, at least at first, before jumping into hardware optimizations. Could bubble sort with optimized hardware be faster than quicksort? I suppose it could, but most programmers would consider it 'ugly' that the more obvious software optimizations, such as a better sorting algorithm, were not pursued first before time was spent optimizing for specialized or specific hardware.
Most programmers can't even write single-threaded assembly code any more.
The reason that we don't is that modern optimizing compilers have made doing so almost a complete waste of time except in very highly specialized or niche applications. I would liken it to chess playing AIs: the greatest human grand masters can still defeat them with effort but the rest of us will get our butts handed to us by the AI every time. To quote one fictional AI, "the only winning move is not to play".
As far as whether all programming will head this direction eventually, I don't think so.
I don't think so either. If anything programming is becoming abstract and virtual to the point where the underlying hardware is a meaningless detail handled by the JITs (just in time compilers) and HALs (hardware abstraction layers). The hardware is so ridiculously cheap now that programmer time is far better spent writing elegant and abstract code that will run on anything that supports the VM rather than hand-optimizing for a particular piece of hardware. In fact, I would argue that unless you are writing a device driver, concerning oneself with hardware directly in software is a good indication of code smell.
Expecting that the whole world can do it is crazy thinking.
Indeed it is.
If the libertarian belief system - and yes, it's a matter of faith - yielded better results, then Somalia should be paradise on earth.
Except for the fact that Somalia has no functioning government or at least not one that anyone takes seriously. Remember that libertarians are in favor of the least government that can be effective (the 'government' in Somolia currently controls about 12 square blocks of downtown Mogadishu) and the Somali 'government' is anything but right now. The situation in Mogadishu, never mind Somalia in general, is most accurately characterized as anarchy, NOT "libertarian paradise". In order for a government to be effective it must have enough power to do at least the following:
You will note that the Somali 'government' currently possess NONE of these capabilities. In other words: the present situation is Somolia is F.U.B.A.R. To suggest that this somehow represents a "libertarian paradise" is a strawman of the worst order.
As for the United States, the big problem here is the aforementioned big government and although we are not quite so socialist as our European friends, our government is perhaps 40-50% socialist even so (and that is being conservative IMHO). "From each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs" sounds great in theory, but in practice the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Finally, with regard to the "happiest citizens on earth" (i.e. your merry Europeans) you might try living over there for a while where unemployment is frequently above 10% (even during "good" times), the cost of living is high and the taxes are downright punitive (those social safety nets don't come cheap after all). Everyone at the party is happy until the party ends and everyone has to help clean up and the Eurozone is about to be handed the bill for a decade of profligacy (and cover-ups of same) by their less scrupulous members, particularly the so called P.I.I.G.S (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain). The situation in Greece is but a taste of things to come in Europe if spending, and eventually taxes too, are not both severely cut (i.e. a double helping of austerity, would you like fries with that order?). Of course, the US is heading down that same path, albeit with a bit more rope to hang ourselves, but our financial day of reckoning will come soon enough (you might consider the present recession to be a "Preview of Coming Attractions" of sorts). When our children are old enough to fully understand the economic implications of the debt that we have saddled them with, they won't be thanking us for how well we managed their future financial affairs.
Why single out defense? government in all of its forms is inherently wasteful. The libertarians amongst us have been arguing this for as long as we have been speaking and yet people are still shocked and surprised whenever they hear of how the government has wasted their money. Remember what Milton Friedman often said, "No man spends another man's money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own". This is true both for children spending their weekly allowance and governments. Is government necessary? Yes, but we would do well to guard against the notion that if some government is necessary, even beneficial, then more must surely be even better. In this the government could learn a lesson from private industry where more is often done with less (productivity has gone through the roof during the current recession) and creative people find ways to make do on limited budgets.
You could have just hired a developer or a firm to design and build it for you using the framework or language of your choice. You say that you come from a print background and learned HTML and CSS to get into web design. Fair enough, but why also spend your time learning a CMS framework like Joomla? Are you going to move into the programming side of web development? I cannot tell you how much crappy software I have encountered over the years that was cobbled together by dabblers with "almost no coding experience". Finally, just because it works doesn't mean that it was done right or that it will scale. Sometimes you really are better off hiring professionals unless you want to devote serious time, on the order of years, to becoming one yourself.
I think now I understand why you cannot get the answers you want from those who support the fair tax. I was actually trying to explain things to you, but you keep acting like a liberal jerk. I figure that you are either doing this on purpose to bait me or you are just not capable of understanding. Either way I'm through trying to explain it to you. Perhaps someday, when your income is high enough and you start paying serious taxes, you will finally understand.
You might try the following video on YouTube for a basic overview of FairTax.
As for SS, I would like to see us move towards a private pension system, as they have right now in Chile, where people contribute their own money to a private account which is managed according to their wishes by a private firm with a fiduciary duty to their account holders. Naturally, this would have to be done as part of a program which continues paying present retirees and transitions younger workers into the private pension system with the eventual goal of phasing out SS as we know it now. This scares the hell out of some people, but anyone who really stops to consider the present system and understands inflation and fiat currency understands that the current Ponzi scheme operated by the Federal Government as SS is not only unsustainable, it is also unfair; a mean trick played by the old against the young and by the government against its people. Let me say this: if I was allowed to opt-out of SS, stop paying SS taxes and instead fund a private pension, I would do it in a New York Minute and so would most other young people with more than a few rocks rolling around upstairs.
What I'll grant is that it's difficult to measure exactly how strong that effect is. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to approximate.
Fair enough, but I still maintain that it is better to let people sort themselves by a national consumption tax rather than the government deciding before any spending decisions are made via the income tax. With the national sales tax, each person can decide for themselves how much tax they are able and willing to pay by adjusting their own levels of non-essential consumption. The prebate feature of the fair tax is designed to help people exempt some portion of their income from tax for purchases which they consider to be "essential". The fair tax lets each person decide for themselves both how much taxable consumption is enough for them (i.e. how much that last dollar was really worth to them) AND which purchases are "essential" and thus not subject to tax (i.e. the prebates up to some minimum level of expenditure: presumably for basic food, clothing and shelter). IMHO, this is the way it ought to be. Personal choice and personal responsibility through expressed consumption preference in the market.
why it is acceptable for the government to spend money to promote policy goals, but not acceptable to achieve the same policy goal by simply not collecting the money in the first place?
In general a dollar which makes a round trip through the government and back into the economy loses a substantial fraction of its value during the round trip. I tend to favor the government NOT redistributing income via the tax system for this reason because it is generally more economically efficient to leave the money in private hands. This is especially true if the government is NOT going to spend the money on something that only the government has the power to do, like national defense, environmental regulation, or law enforcement. I tend to think more often in terms of desirable and undesirable from the standpoint of efficiency, when I think about tax policy, rather than the more absolute acceptable or unacceptable dichotomy.
The poverty level being chosen, as far as I could tell, was because that was the most regressive the makers of it could come up with and think they'd get away for it.
How can you be sure? If we shouldn't use the Federal Government's estimation of poverty level spending then what definition should we use? You say that you know who sets the Federal Poverty level (the Census Bureau) and how, but then fault the Fair Tax for using that level? Perhaps you have some disagreement with the Census Bureau's assessment? Fine, but just because the Fair Tax picked the government's own number that is somehow evidence of an "agenda"? Picking the Federal Poverty level as the minimum level of reimbursement seems reasonable enough to me. The exact number is open for discussion anyway. The important idea to take away is that the Fair Tax requires reimbursement of some reasonable level of expenditure, subject to what everyone agrees is "reasonable", to every US taxpayer.
You seem to be very dissatisfied with every person who tries to explain Fair Tax to you. Tax policy is inherently a complex subject, which is why the Fair Tax ideas were written down in book form, and even more formally in the text of the Fair Tax bills that have been referred to committee in Congress. Perhaps you can read the book and the committee bills thoroughly to fully satisfy your desire for the niggling details? As for adding or subtracting features from the Fair Tax bill, I would have to agree with the Fair Tax people that that is a more thorny issue. For example, removing the "prebate" concept from the bill removes the progressive features entirely (a tactic which might be used by those looking to kill the entire proposal for other reasons) or failing to abolish the income tax may lead to the income tax being phased back in at some future date on top of the Fair Tax. The amounts and magnitudes are generally up for discussion, but as I said previously tax policy is complex and pulling threads out of the tapestry very quickly unravels the entire proposal. That is probably why most Fair Tax supporters take major additions or deletions so seriously.