I'm not sure what your issue is, unless you are one of those "all taxes are bad, mmkay?" loons. Some taxes are necessary for a functional government. Any taxes you levy will influence behavior. Why not be intelligent about how you do it?
I'm a firm believer in using the tax code to influence behavior. Tax the snot out of them. Considering that my house is entirely lit by canned lighting on dimmer switches, an incandescent ban means I basically have to rewire my house - fluorescent dimmables just don't work. If they were heavily taxed - to the point of being slightly more expensive that the fluorescents - then I would have an alternative, while the majority of the market will still make the choice you want them to. Everybody wins.
And that was all well and good when a university education could be had for the price of a reasonable car. Today, putting my kid through an average level state school is going to cost me 6 figures, no joke. I've got a 4 year old, and I am being told I need to save A QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS to put him through THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI. Not Harvard, not Yale, Mizzou. If he wants to be an art major, he I wish him all the happiness and success in the world. I'm not paying for it.
That's an awfully rosy view of business. If business was so easy to change, I would have a choice of more than two internet providers. An entrenched business is just as hard to change as government - we are still waiting for Linux on the desktop, aren't we? I realize you are Libertarian, and this is like religion for you, but I state this unequivocally - there are some problems that are best solved by monopoly (government), and there are some that are best solved through competition (business). Health care is the perfect example. In every way, the profit motive in health care works against the patient. This holds true pretty much every place where the same outcome is desired for all "consumers" - where there is no way to compete on the product or service, so the only place to compete is on price. Health care, retirement security (not planning, but security), fire prevention, universal education...all of these functions are more efficiently served by government than business. In the long term, the inherent self interest of business always results in society being worse off, as business seeks to maximize profits regardless of consequence. See how that works? Absolutist positions are lazy thinking. Ideology is only good for getting people killed; it rarely is effective at solving real problems.
I honestly don't know many people who think the 'public sector' is this honorable public service anymore. It's a gang of self-interested mafia members. And businesses aren't? You are delusional. There is not something magic that happens when a person collects a check from one employer versus another. Human organizations take certain shapes. Inefficient bureaucracy develops in any organization of sufficient size, and if you do not believe this, you have not worked for a large company. There are incompetent organizations in both the public and private world, and there are marvels of efficiency in the public and private world. Painting one side or the other with a broad brush is just lazy thinking.
Gabe if you are listening - I am transferring as much business as I can from Steam to Amazon for this very reason. Their flexibility means they are offering a better product. I couldn't care less about friends lists, or achievements, or any of the rest of that crap. I want to be able to LEGALLY play my games without screwing with CDs, or logging in and out of a Steam account because my kid wants to play a game attached to my account. Until you fix this, I'm taking my business elsewhere.
People are flocking to DRM free software not ultimately because of DRM but because of pirates. PIRATES necessitate the need for DRM.
Do I blame the terrorists for the completely unnecessary and useless groping I have to go through by the TSA? Nope. I blame the TSA for its corrupt, knee-jerk, in-elegant, and ineffective response. The Israeli's are under real threat, and have managed to get by without touching anybody's junk.
You are making a false assumption. You are assuming that DRM is the only response a game developer has to piracy. It isn't. They have choices that do not negatively impact their paying customers, but they do not choose to use them - for the life of me I cannot figure out why. DRM certainly doesn't stop pirates.
There is a saying in security - locks only stop honest people. If I really want to get into your house, a lock will barely slow me down. In software, your DRM should be like a door lock - enough to stop someone from saying - "hey, I can just burn a copy of this", but not enough to intrude. License key activation is more than sufficient for this. Anything else is just make it more difficult for the legitimate user, and still failing miserably at stopping anyone else.
Dude, I'm a general studies major. They do not get more "liberal arts" than me. I took 300 level courses in Philosophy, Computer Programming, Anthropology, Psychology, English, Religion, and History. I studied Freud in the German, Plato in the Ancient Greek, and Object Oriented Analysis and Design back when UMD still had diapers. When I went to school, I could get an entire Bachelors degree for what UM-Columbia costs for one semester. What exactly does knowing that I am not rich nor am likely to ever be rich have anything to do with thinking for myself? (Fuck you, btw.) A university education at one time was actually about education. Now a university education is a prerequisite for any job not requiring a name tag. It is the price you pay for the happiness of of your children. If you don't understand that, then perhaps you need to re-evaluate the efficacy of your education.
I've never taken Latin. However, the one time I took a serious IQ test, I was able to manage a perfect score on the vocabulary section because I understood how Latin informs the modern English language. Moreover, you can see how things are connected - the Spanish word for tongue is lengua, which comes from the same root as the English world "language". Thus, without ever have having seen the word, I know that lingual likely means "of language" just by knowing how words are put together.
The University of Missouri at Columbia (not nearly a top tier school - this is a state school, a step above a community college) will run me 80 thousand for a four year degree, IF I get my kid in today and IF he gets it done in four years. For that amount of money, it better be about utility. I am not the idle rich, that can afford to send my child to university to make him a better man. I'm a serf, and I send my child to university so he can feed his family.
I have to take exception with #4. With the way our food regulatory system works, if you are at the lower end of the economic scale, often the only choices you have to feed your children are all bad ones. Vegetables are not cheap compared to pasta. I can feed a family of four for under $10 at McDonalds. In some inner cities, a.k.a. "food deserts", fresh fruits and vegetables are non-existent. When a half gallon of orange juice is equivalent to a half-hour's work for you, you don't buy your kids orange juice. You buy them orange soda, "because it least it has some juice in it". (It doesn't). How is it child abuse when it's all you can afford?
The cause is really easy to understand. No one cooks anymore.
My wife and I are the only people we know who are not related to us that cook five or more nights a week - and by cooking I mean starting with raw ingredients, not opening a bad of noodles and vegetables (which are loaded with extra calories - if you knew how much HFCS goes into a jar of pasta sauce, you'd be floored). I'll eat a pork chop, broccoli, and roasted potatoes for dinner, and consume a few hundred calories. Meanwhile, if I go to a restaurant and order the exact same meal, my calorie count has doubled. If you eat 100 extra calories a day (less than a can of soda, less than a bag of chips, less than half a snickers bar), you'll gain around 10 pounds a year. Do it for a decade, and you're a hundred pounds overweight. We pay for convenience with our waistlines.
You can't compare standards of living around the world. It doesn't fucking work.
Why the hell not?
Someone who's struggling to survive here isn't going to be comforted by the idea that they are still richer than someone working in a factory in China.
So? I couldn't care less about how comfortable they are with the idea. They are both eating. That's what I care about. One of them isn't deciding which of their children they should let go hungry. "Struggling" Americans don't know the meaning of the word.
We've proven as a society we are not willing to do that. Insisting that we do is not dealing with reality. This is why they say "reality has a well known liberal bias", and this is why it is pointless to argue with conservatives - they are too concerned with how things should be, and not the way they are.
If you want to eliminate social security, then yes, this is the plan. It's short term vs long term: employers pay 6% and employees pay 6% (now 4%) into social security per employee wage. That means you free up 12% of the economy by eliminating social security, plus the system is always going to have growing problems due to inflation and population aging. The only way to support those already paying in is to keep taxing the workforce while telling new entrants (say, people under 18) that they must manage their own retirement because they WILL NOT have social security coverage when they get old. If you think there is a definite long term benefit to eliminating social security, then you must realize the cost is taxing people for no benefit.
There is no way - ever - we as a nation will let elderly people who cannot fend for themselves suffer the consequences of poor decisions of their youth. Saying you are going to do this is all well and good, but seventy years from now, a few news stories about grandma freezing to death will be all it takes to bring it right back. We just aren't that cruel. Knowing that, can't we just be smart about it? Ideally, I agree, everyone would manage their own retirement. But just as we are not willing to let the uninsured bleed to death on the street, we won't let our elderly starve. Can't we please be realistic and try to solve the problem intelligently?
It's not, as long as they don't expect me to subsidize their choice. I live in a house about half the size I could afford if I moved 30 miles outside of the city, but as it is now, I live less than 3 miles from work. Meanwhile, all of the douchebags that are moving to the suburbs to live in cookie cutter houses they can't afford are forcing the DOT to build massive highway expansions that I have to pay for. Pay your own way, assholes.
Saying 'Americans don't know how good they have it' might be true, but that doesn't mean that Americans, if they magically cut back expenses, can live on a dollar a day at the same level as people living in some African village.
Dude, you are talking to the wrong person. I've done it. I've had friends feed families the same way. All it takes is a little area knowledge - knowing when stores toss stale stock. Knowing when garbage pickup is. You are probably unaware, but there is an entire subculture of people in the untied states - hundreds of thousands strong - that live off of what you and I throw away. You are speaking from a position of ignorance, and I am not.
I think the real problem is that people mostly can't afford to live close to where they work.
I think the real problem is that people mostly can't afford to live close to where they work if they aren't willing to live next to black people. FTFY.
Where I live, affordable housing in good neighborhoods is easy to come by - as long as it isn't lily white.
I am very aware of the history of the US. 100 years ago, we were China. Look at us now. We had to go through some pretty nasty stuff to get here, but we got here. So will the rest of the world.
I hope you don't misunderstand my point. My point is not that we should tailor our foreign policy to benefit the third world at our expense. My point is that it seems awfully fucking selfish to me that we are complaining about not being able to maintain our (relative to the rest of the world) lavish standard of living because the jobs are going to capable, deserving people who are willing to do them for less.
A strong Indian middle class is good for India. It's pretty much useless to everyone else.
Bullshit. People with no money buy no things. People with money buy things. If you want to sell stuff, having people with money around is good for you. I know grade-schoolers who can figure that out.
It's good to know that you can take the hit. But "we"? Sorry, but no: minimum-wage jobs already pay insufficiently to live without getting food stamps or equivalent, and there's further downward pressure there. Also, as industrial jobs disappear, those minimum-wage service jobs become the only ones available to anyone but the best of the best. And the situation is heading the same way in all Western countries.
Its all about where you stand. Give me minimum wage in the US over the best job in Haiti any day of the week. No one in the US is starving. That is not true everywhere else.
You know, the time is getting ripe for another try. Nothing helps the Communist cause as much as unfettered capitalism.
This is not about communism. This is about realizing that a strong middle class is a good thing. EVERYONE does better when the middle class is strong - poor, middle, and rich. The post-World War II American standard of living was COMPLETELY UNSUSTAINABLE, if only because eventually the rest of the world will crack out the guillotine. If our middle class standard of living must decline - as I believe it must - let the beneficiaries be the creation of a middle class somewhere else. We'll all be better off in the long run.
Uh, I think we've pretty clearly demonstrated we can't afford to take the hit, as our economy is in shambles.
Most of the world would kill to live in this "shambles economy". Our homeless are better fed than most of the world's middle class. With what I can pull out of a dumpster here in the US, I'd be upper class in some parts of the world.
I think you miss the point about foreign workers. Yes, they have it a lot worse than we do. Yes, it is practically slave labor. But they are getting paid. They are no longer subsistence farmers. That is the beginnings of an economy, and that is what will eventually end grinding poverty. There are people in the world that cannot find a piece of cardboard to use as shelter; who literally are eating dirt. Working 14 hours days in a factory for little to no money sounds like a good deal in comparison. It is all about where you stand. How many people do you think should starve to death this year so you can maintain your standard of living?
I apologize profusely if I count myself as a human first and an American second, but it is the truth. Globalization may have put a serious dent into our standard of living, but considering how fat Americans are, we can afford to take the hit. Meanwhile, there are millions of people in Asia and South America who for the first time in history don't have to worry about their children starving. You don't really believe we could keep on consuming 2/3rds of the world's resources, did you?
A rising tide lifts all boats. A strong Indian middle class is almost as good for us as a strong American middle class. Those of us in the middle should bear in mind that CEOs do not see national borders, only markets. Perhaps we should emulate them. We have more in common with Chinese factory workers and Indian tech support than we think we do.
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I'm not sure what your issue is, unless you are one of those "all taxes are bad, mmkay?" loons. Some taxes are necessary for a functional government. Any taxes you levy will influence behavior. Why not be intelligent about how you do it?
Good for you. What should we tax then? Any tax you levy is going to change economic behavior. Why not change it in directions that benefit society?
I'm a firm believer in using the tax code to influence behavior. Tax the snot out of them. Considering that my house is entirely lit by canned lighting on dimmer switches, an incandescent ban means I basically have to rewire my house - fluorescent dimmables just don't work. If they were heavily taxed - to the point of being slightly more expensive that the fluorescents - then I would have an alternative, while the majority of the market will still make the choice you want them to. Everybody wins.
And that was all well and good when a university education could be had for the price of a reasonable car. Today, putting my kid through an average level state school is going to cost me 6 figures, no joke. I've got a 4 year old, and I am being told I need to save A QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS to put him through THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI. Not Harvard, not Yale, Mizzou. If he wants to be an art major, he I wish him all the happiness and success in the world. I'm not paying for it.
That's an awfully rosy view of business. If business was so easy to change, I would have a choice of more than two internet providers. An entrenched business is just as hard to change as government - we are still waiting for Linux on the desktop, aren't we? I realize you are Libertarian, and this is like religion for you, but I state this unequivocally - there are some problems that are best solved by monopoly (government), and there are some that are best solved through competition (business). Health care is the perfect example. In every way, the profit motive in health care works against the patient. This holds true pretty much every place where the same outcome is desired for all "consumers" - where there is no way to compete on the product or service, so the only place to compete is on price. Health care, retirement security (not planning, but security), fire prevention, universal education...all of these functions are more efficiently served by government than business. In the long term, the inherent self interest of business always results in society being worse off, as business seeks to maximize profits regardless of consequence. See how that works? Absolutist positions are lazy thinking. Ideology is only good for getting people killed; it rarely is effective at solving real problems.
I honestly don't know many people who think the 'public sector' is this honorable public service anymore. It's a gang of self-interested mafia members.
And businesses aren't? You are delusional. There is not something magic that happens when a person collects a check from one employer versus another. Human organizations take certain shapes. Inefficient bureaucracy develops in any organization of sufficient size, and if you do not believe this, you have not worked for a large company. There are incompetent organizations in both the public and private world, and there are marvels of efficiency in the public and private world. Painting one side or the other with a broad brush is just lazy thinking.
Gabe if you are listening - I am transferring as much business as I can from Steam to Amazon for this very reason. Their flexibility means they are offering a better product. I couldn't care less about friends lists, or achievements, or any of the rest of that crap. I want to be able to LEGALLY play my games without screwing with CDs, or logging in and out of a Steam account because my kid wants to play a game attached to my account. Until you fix this, I'm taking my business elsewhere.
RULE 1 FUCKER! SHUT UP!
People are flocking to DRM free software not ultimately because of DRM but because of pirates. PIRATES necessitate the need for DRM.
Do I blame the terrorists for the completely unnecessary and useless groping I have to go through by the TSA? Nope. I blame the TSA for its corrupt, knee-jerk, in-elegant, and ineffective response. The Israeli's are under real threat, and have managed to get by without touching anybody's junk.
You are making a false assumption. You are assuming that DRM is the only response a game developer has to piracy. It isn't. They have choices that do not negatively impact their paying customers, but they do not choose to use them - for the life of me I cannot figure out why. DRM certainly doesn't stop pirates.
There is a saying in security - locks only stop honest people. If I really want to get into your house, a lock will barely slow me down. In software, your DRM should be like a door lock - enough to stop someone from saying - "hey, I can just burn a copy of this", but not enough to intrude. License key activation is more than sufficient for this. Anything else is just make it more difficult for the legitimate user, and still failing miserably at stopping anyone else.
I believe that was my point. But thanks for pointing it out to me pedantically. Some of the other readers might not have gotten it.
Dude, I'm a general studies major. They do not get more "liberal arts" than me. I took 300 level courses in Philosophy, Computer Programming, Anthropology, Psychology, English, Religion, and History. I studied Freud in the German, Plato in the Ancient Greek, and Object Oriented Analysis and Design back when UMD still had diapers. When I went to school, I could get an entire Bachelors degree for what UM-Columbia costs for one semester. What exactly does knowing that I am not rich nor am likely to ever be rich have anything to do with thinking for myself? (Fuck you, btw.) A university education at one time was actually about education. Now a university education is a prerequisite for any job not requiring a name tag. It is the price you pay for the happiness of of your children. If you don't understand that, then perhaps you need to re-evaluate the efficacy of your education.
I've never taken Latin. However, the one time I took a serious IQ test, I was able to manage a perfect score on the vocabulary section because I understood how Latin informs the modern English language. Moreover, you can see how things are connected - the Spanish word for tongue is lengua, which comes from the same root as the English world "language". Thus, without ever have having seen the word, I know that lingual likely means "of language" just by knowing how words are put together.
The University of Missouri at Columbia (not nearly a top tier school - this is a state school, a step above a community college) will run me 80 thousand for a four year degree, IF I get my kid in today and IF he gets it done in four years. For that amount of money, it better be about utility. I am not the idle rich, that can afford to send my child to university to make him a better man. I'm a serf, and I send my child to university so he can feed his family.
I have to take exception with #4. With the way our food regulatory system works, if you are at the lower end of the economic scale, often the only choices you have to feed your children are all bad ones. Vegetables are not cheap compared to pasta. I can feed a family of four for under $10 at McDonalds. In some inner cities, a.k.a. "food deserts", fresh fruits and vegetables are non-existent. When a half gallon of orange juice is equivalent to a half-hour's work for you, you don't buy your kids orange juice. You buy them orange soda, "because it least it has some juice in it". (It doesn't). How is it child abuse when it's all you can afford?
The cause is really easy to understand. No one cooks anymore.
My wife and I are the only people we know who are not related to us that cook five or more nights a week - and by cooking I mean starting with raw ingredients, not opening a bad of noodles and vegetables (which are loaded with extra calories - if you knew how much HFCS goes into a jar of pasta sauce, you'd be floored). I'll eat a pork chop, broccoli, and roasted potatoes for dinner, and consume a few hundred calories. Meanwhile, if I go to a restaurant and order the exact same meal, my calorie count has doubled. If you eat 100 extra calories a day (less than a can of soda, less than a bag of chips, less than half a snickers bar), you'll gain around 10 pounds a year. Do it for a decade, and you're a hundred pounds overweight. We pay for convenience with our waistlines.
You can't compare standards of living around the world. It doesn't fucking work.
Why the hell not?
Someone who's struggling to survive here isn't going to be comforted by the idea that they are still richer than someone working in a factory in China.
So? I couldn't care less about how comfortable they are with the idea. They are both eating. That's what I care about. One of them isn't deciding which of their children they should let go hungry. "Struggling" Americans don't know the meaning of the word.
We've proven as a society we are not willing to do that. Insisting that we do is not dealing with reality. This is why they say "reality has a well known liberal bias", and this is why it is pointless to argue with conservatives - they are too concerned with how things should be, and not the way they are.
If you want to eliminate social security, then yes, this is the plan. It's short term vs long term: employers pay 6% and employees pay 6% (now 4%) into social security per employee wage. That means you free up 12% of the economy by eliminating social security, plus the system is always going to have growing problems due to inflation and population aging. The only way to support those already paying in is to keep taxing the workforce while telling new entrants (say, people under 18) that they must manage their own retirement because they WILL NOT have social security coverage when they get old. If you think there is a definite long term benefit to eliminating social security, then you must realize the cost is taxing people for no benefit.
There is no way - ever - we as a nation will let elderly people who cannot fend for themselves suffer the consequences of poor decisions of their youth. Saying you are going to do this is all well and good, but seventy years from now, a few news stories about grandma freezing to death will be all it takes to bring it right back. We just aren't that cruel. Knowing that, can't we just be smart about it? Ideally, I agree, everyone would manage their own retirement. But just as we are not willing to let the uninsured bleed to death on the street, we won't let our elderly starve. Can't we please be realistic and try to solve the problem intelligently?
And how is that a problem?
It's not, as long as they don't expect me to subsidize their choice. I live in a house about half the size I could afford if I moved 30 miles outside of the city, but as it is now, I live less than 3 miles from work. Meanwhile, all of the douchebags that are moving to the suburbs to live in cookie cutter houses they can't afford are forcing the DOT to build massive highway expansions that I have to pay for. Pay your own way, assholes.
Saying 'Americans don't know how good they have it' might be true, but that doesn't mean that Americans, if they magically cut back expenses, can live on a dollar a day at the same level as people living in some African village.
Dude, you are talking to the wrong person. I've done it. I've had friends feed families the same way. All it takes is a little area knowledge - knowing when stores toss stale stock. Knowing when garbage pickup is. You are probably unaware, but there is an entire subculture of people in the untied states - hundreds of thousands strong - that live off of what you and I throw away. You are speaking from a position of ignorance, and I am not.
I think the real problem is that people mostly can't afford to live close to where they work.
I think the real problem is that people mostly can't afford to live close to where they work if they aren't willing to live next to black people. FTFY.
Where I live, affordable housing in good neighborhoods is easy to come by - as long as it isn't lily white.
I am very aware of the history of the US. 100 years ago, we were China. Look at us now. We had to go through some pretty nasty stuff to get here, but we got here. So will the rest of the world.
I hope you don't misunderstand my point. My point is not that we should tailor our foreign policy to benefit the third world at our expense. My point is that it seems awfully fucking selfish to me that we are complaining about not being able to maintain our (relative to the rest of the world) lavish standard of living because the jobs are going to capable, deserving people who are willing to do them for less.
A strong Indian middle class is good for India. It's pretty much useless to everyone else.
Bullshit. People with no money buy no things. People with money buy things. If you want to sell stuff, having people with money around is good for you. I know grade-schoolers who can figure that out.
It's good to know that you can take the hit. But "we"? Sorry, but no: minimum-wage jobs already pay insufficiently to live without getting food stamps or equivalent, and there's further downward pressure there. Also, as industrial jobs disappear, those minimum-wage service jobs become the only ones available to anyone but the best of the best. And the situation is heading the same way in all Western countries.
Its all about where you stand. Give me minimum wage in the US over the best job in Haiti any day of the week. No one in the US is starving. That is not true everywhere else.
You know, the time is getting ripe for another try. Nothing helps the Communist cause as much as unfettered capitalism.
This is not about communism. This is about realizing that a strong middle class is a good thing. EVERYONE does better when the middle class is strong - poor, middle, and rich. The post-World War II American standard of living was COMPLETELY UNSUSTAINABLE, if only because eventually the rest of the world will crack out the guillotine. If our middle class standard of living must decline - as I believe it must - let the beneficiaries be the creation of a middle class somewhere else. We'll all be better off in the long run.
Uh, I think we've pretty clearly demonstrated we can't afford to take the hit, as our economy is in shambles.
Most of the world would kill to live in this "shambles economy". Our homeless are better fed than most of the world's middle class. With what I can pull out of a dumpster here in the US, I'd be upper class in some parts of the world.
I think you miss the point about foreign workers. Yes, they have it a lot worse than we do. Yes, it is practically slave labor. But they are getting paid. They are no longer subsistence farmers. That is the beginnings of an economy, and that is what will eventually end grinding poverty. There are people in the world that cannot find a piece of cardboard to use as shelter; who literally are eating dirt. Working 14 hours days in a factory for little to no money sounds like a good deal in comparison. It is all about where you stand. How many people do you think should starve to death this year so you can maintain your standard of living?
I apologize profusely if I count myself as a human first and an American second, but it is the truth. Globalization may have put a serious dent into our standard of living, but considering how fat Americans are, we can afford to take the hit. Meanwhile, there are millions of people in Asia and South America who for the first time in history don't have to worry about their children starving. You don't really believe we could keep on consuming 2/3rds of the world's resources, did you?
A rising tide lifts all boats. A strong Indian middle class is almost as good for us as a strong American middle class. Those of us in the middle should bear in mind that CEOs do not see national borders, only markets. Perhaps we should emulate them. We have more in common with Chinese factory workers and Indian tech support than we think we do.