I was thinking of the SAT, but if you want to carry on this conversation, what metric would you use to determine whether any given dollar spent on education is a good or a bad idea?
Education should be the primary focus of our government spending. Doing so will have more long term benefits for us as a nation than any other expenditures.
This is a nice sound bite, but not really true. We picked the low-hanging fruit of education a long time ago. Despite enormous increases in expenditures, we have not seen significant increases in test scores, etc., over the past 30+ years. It's almost certain that we spend too much on education, not too little, but because people who make government policy are the types who do well in school and can't imagine any other way of being, we keep pushing people to go to more and more of it even when it makes no sense economically. It is entirely possible for college to be a net economic negative for someone.
This is one of the central insights of a book entitled Seeing Like a State, basically that all sorts of disastrous policies have been implemented not because they were likely to be successful at solving some particular problem (e.g., Stalinist collectivization of agriculture gave peasants a certain area of land, regardless of its quality, rather than the traditional division of best-medium-poor lands in roughly equal quantities to each family in a village even though this made it almost impossible for an outsider to identify who owned what) but because they made people's actions more visible to the state and thus more controllable (and more easily taxed).
It's not that large corporations are inherently less wasteful - they're not. It's that badly run corporations go out of business, and badly run governments don't. Defense of the nation is a perfectly legitimate function of the national government. I don't think that running a welfare state for the broad middle class is, and more relevantly I don't think it's sustainable. Obviously, YMMV.
if we don't start developing alternative technologies now, then we'll be in trouble when it does run out
Meh. We've obviously got enough left for quite a while. It might get expensive, though that will provide plenty of incentive to find new sources of energy. Pork barrel grants are not the solution; economically viable technologies are. Too bad the former does not produce the latter.
She worked there for about a year and a half. She managed an outside grant that (e.g.) paid for an all-expenses-except-transportation summer camp for poor kids. She left, the grant was still there, the camp didn't happen the next year. They didn't have to do any planning, they could have used the same plans, and the guy who actually ran the camp was still around. They just didn't give a shit. If "oh yeah, I worked there, it's a total clusterfuck" is hypocrisy to you, then file me under it.
Yeah, I was really responding to the guy a few posts up who said that people should pay attention to "stale" greens and start slowing down below the speed limit and expect to stop if the light has been green for "too long".
The UK controlled the world's oceans from 1588 until somewhere around WWI... then the US took over. Control the seas, you control the world. It just so happens that they were happy to cede control to us because it meant they could punch way above their weight in the post-colonial period because we need their bases.
Customs can be funny. I bought a gemstone abroad. Turns out that loose gems are not subject to import duty, though manufactured jewelry is. No taxes on an item worth a few thousand dollars.
Either your parents are very, very poor, or you make a whole lot of money while having a modest lifestyle. In which case, sales tax is really the least of your worries.
Global Entry is available for citizens of the US, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. Frankly, even though it makes no difference to security (you still have to have the CBP interview) I'm a little pissed that this is being offered to Saudi princes so they can skip the lines on the hideous occasions they're forced to fly commercial.
Because obviously we don't have an FBI, a US Marshals Service, a Secret Service, a DEA, or any of dozens of other armed federal law enforcement agencies. Nope, the IRS needs its own.
Why is it that every time someone complains about the size of the federal government, people feel like listing a bunch of things that are done by state and local governments as an example of why government is great?
Incidentally,
You may not like the police but would you prefer Blackwater hiring out as private security?
My neighborhood - and this is a normal, non-gated, houses $150-$200k neighborhood - has a private security force that patrols part time, because the police won't do their job. It is far from the only one like it.
No public education for the poor?
Setting aside the larger question of whether or not they actually educate those poor people, are publicly owned and operated schools staffed with government employees the only way we can think of to provide education to the general public? All my education tax money goes down the drain - my city's schools are unusably bad; I never spent a day in them, and neither will my children. My wife did work in the administration of the local school system before we married, and it firmly convinced her that the entire operation was a complete waste.
Private roads closed to non-members?
You mean like the NY, NJ, PA, OH, IN, and IL turnpike systems? The Dulles toll road? There are plenty of roads you have to pay to use, and yes, they were often privately owned and maintained in the early days of the country.
No water systems?
I guess you've never seen rural areas where water is in fact often supplied by a cooperative owned by the people who receive it? Even here in a city, where the incredibly disruptive nature of water and sewer services mean that they're always going to be provided by government (too hard to get permission to tear up all the streets otherwise), we pay for our water just like we pay for natural gas or electricity - fee for service.
I'm not an anarchist, but acknowledging that we have to have some government is not carte blanche for said government to waste other people's money, and if you sometimes sound like the crazy old guy complaining over the cost of paperclips used by the city, that doesn't mean it's always a bad idea.
Your point is well made, but again: A yellow light that is insufficiently long for a person traveling at the speed limit to determine whether or not they can safely stop without entering the intersection and then do so is too short. Slamming the brakes for every light, which is the behavior that red light cameras encourage, causes rear-end accidents. Are the rear-ending people traveling too fast? Under American traffic law they are definitionally doing so, but as long as it is possible for people to switch lanes in front of you it is impossible to know that you have adequate empty space in front of you in all circumstances.
Also, congrats on your safe driving record, but how certain that no bit of your car has ever been in an intersection when the light turned red? I've never gotten a red light running ticket, either, but I've encountered quite a few very short yellows that were just about impossible to avoid running unless you traveled well under the speed limit.
Yeah, it's pretty strange. But it's both semi modern and understandable, and I have had a great time reading annotated assembler code for CP/M and MS BASIC, which use some very cool tricks. The best I have seen was one where they had some instructions that were all 2 bytes long and only one of them should be executed based on a jump instruction. So you jumped to the one you wanted and the two byte instructions were each followed by the opcode for loading an irrelevant register with a two byte value... you jumped to the one you wanted, any subsequent code just looked like (load register with next two bytes) which swallowed up other two byte commands.
Did you actually do it? I don't have anywhere to set up shop, though I do know a guy who owns a welding supply company... between the two of us I bet we could do it. I've seriously considered joining the local blacksmithing group for this reason.
Been a long time since I heard it that way - but I've heard "That's begging the question" a fair bit to mean "you're making a circular argument", and it helps people keep the two straight in their head if they consciously choose to separate them. That said, it would be a lot simpler to call the logical fallacy "circular reasoning" instead of "begging the question".
I remember seeing a pretty cool 8080 program to zero memory. It went something like:
LXI BC, 0000
LXI HL, 0009
LXI SP, 0008
PUSH BC
PCHL HL, BC, and SP (the stack pointer) are all 16-bit registers, and the first three instructions occupy 0x0000-0x0008 in memory. PUSH BC is one byte at 0x0009, and PCHL (another one-byte instruction) sets the program counter to the value of HL; essentially it allows you to jump to the address contained in the HL register. The PUSH operation decremented the stack pointer before storing each of the bytes, so you would set the stack pointer to one higher than the highest address you wanted to overwrite. Because the 8080 was little-endian, address 0x0008 was the upper byte of the third instruction's numeric value - it was already zero (if it were big-endian you could just throw in a NOP to get it to align properly). The final PUSH operation - after the program had cycled through all of memory - wiped out the PUSH BC and PCHL operations, and the computer would go to all NOPs.
Dave Gingery's books will get you a machine shop. That's a good start. (The first thing you build is a charcoal foundry. The second is a lathe.)
There are also blacksmithing groups where you can learn how to make things with iron. Presumably any post-apocalyptic society will have ample supplies of scrap iron to work with.
I'm aware that this money is paid on their behalf. But it's not on their tax return, so I didn't include it when talking about studies that look at numbers off people's tax returns. I used the lower rate that applied at that time because... that's what everyone in the study was paying at the time and reporting on their 1040's. I'm sure that the math for total in/out includes the other half of the tax.
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I was thinking of the SAT, but if you want to carry on this conversation, what metric would you use to determine whether any given dollar spent on education is a good or a bad idea?
In other words, exactly what I said?
Education should be the primary focus of our government spending. Doing so will have more long term benefits for us as a nation than any other expenditures.
This is a nice sound bite, but not really true. We picked the low-hanging fruit of education a long time ago. Despite enormous increases in expenditures, we have not seen significant increases in test scores, etc., over the past 30+ years. It's almost certain that we spend too much on education, not too little, but because people who make government policy are the types who do well in school and can't imagine any other way of being, we keep pushing people to go to more and more of it even when it makes no sense economically. It is entirely possible for college to be a net economic negative for someone.
And you have clearly never seen Airplane!. It's comedy gold. If you have never heard of this movie, watch it. Now. And get the uncensored version.
This is one of the central insights of a book entitled Seeing Like a State, basically that all sorts of disastrous policies have been implemented not because they were likely to be successful at solving some particular problem (e.g., Stalinist collectivization of agriculture gave peasants a certain area of land, regardless of its quality, rather than the traditional division of best-medium-poor lands in roughly equal quantities to each family in a village even though this made it almost impossible for an outsider to identify who owned what) but because they made people's actions more visible to the state and thus more controllable (and more easily taxed).
It's not that large corporations are inherently less wasteful - they're not. It's that badly run corporations go out of business, and badly run governments don't. Defense of the nation is a perfectly legitimate function of the national government. I don't think that running a welfare state for the broad middle class is, and more relevantly I don't think it's sustainable. Obviously, YMMV.
vi vs emacs? Pfft, that's easy. nano FTW!
if we don't start developing alternative technologies now, then we'll be in trouble when it does run out
Meh. We've obviously got enough left for quite a while. It might get expensive, though that will provide plenty of incentive to find new sources of energy. Pork barrel grants are not the solution; economically viable technologies are. Too bad the former does not produce the latter.
She worked there for about a year and a half. She managed an outside grant that (e.g.) paid for an all-expenses-except-transportation summer camp for poor kids. She left, the grant was still there, the camp didn't happen the next year. They didn't have to do any planning, they could have used the same plans, and the guy who actually ran the camp was still around. They just didn't give a shit. If "oh yeah, I worked there, it's a total clusterfuck" is hypocrisy to you, then file me under it.
Yeah, I was really responding to the guy a few posts up who said that people should pay attention to "stale" greens and start slowing down below the speed limit and expect to stop if the light has been green for "too long".
Yeah, I know they do. I just think they shouldn't.
The UK controlled the world's oceans from 1588 until somewhere around WWI... then the US took over. Control the seas, you control the world. It just so happens that they were happy to cede control to us because it meant they could punch way above their weight in the post-colonial period because we need their bases.
Customs can be funny. I bought a gemstone abroad. Turns out that loose gems are not subject to import duty, though manufactured jewelry is. No taxes on an item worth a few thousand dollars.
Either your parents are very, very poor, or you make a whole lot of money while having a modest lifestyle. In which case, sales tax is really the least of your worries.
Global Entry is available for citizens of the US, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. Frankly, even though it makes no difference to security (you still have to have the CBP interview) I'm a little pissed that this is being offered to Saudi princes so they can skip the lines on the hideous occasions they're forced to fly commercial.
Because obviously we don't have an FBI, a US Marshals Service, a Secret Service, a DEA, or any of dozens of other armed federal law enforcement agencies. Nope, the IRS needs its own.
Low-information voters pretty much definitionally don't care about the truth, because otherwise they wouldn't be low-information voters.
Incidentally,
You may not like the police but would you prefer Blackwater hiring out as private security?
My neighborhood - and this is a normal, non-gated, houses $150-$200k neighborhood - has a private security force that patrols part time, because the police won't do their job. It is far from the only one like it.
No public education for the poor?
Setting aside the larger question of whether or not they actually educate those poor people, are publicly owned and operated schools staffed with government employees the only way we can think of to provide education to the general public? All my education tax money goes down the drain - my city's schools are unusably bad; I never spent a day in them, and neither will my children. My wife did work in the administration of the local school system before we married, and it firmly convinced her that the entire operation was a complete waste.
Private roads closed to non-members?
You mean like the NY, NJ, PA, OH, IN, and IL turnpike systems? The Dulles toll road? There are plenty of roads you have to pay to use, and yes, they were often privately owned and maintained in the early days of the country.
No water systems?
I guess you've never seen rural areas where water is in fact often supplied by a cooperative owned by the people who receive it? Even here in a city, where the incredibly disruptive nature of water and sewer services mean that they're always going to be provided by government (too hard to get permission to tear up all the streets otherwise), we pay for our water just like we pay for natural gas or electricity - fee for service.
I'm not an anarchist, but acknowledging that we have to have some government is not carte blanche for said government to waste other people's money, and if you sometimes sound like the crazy old guy complaining over the cost of paperclips used by the city, that doesn't mean it's always a bad idea.
You read some old stories...
Your point is well made, but again: A yellow light that is insufficiently long for a person traveling at the speed limit to determine whether or not they can safely stop without entering the intersection and then do so is too short. Slamming the brakes for every light, which is the behavior that red light cameras encourage, causes rear-end accidents. Are the rear-ending people traveling too fast? Under American traffic law they are definitionally doing so, but as long as it is possible for people to switch lanes in front of you it is impossible to know that you have adequate empty space in front of you in all circumstances.
Also, congrats on your safe driving record, but how certain that no bit of your car has ever been in an intersection when the light turned red? I've never gotten a red light running ticket, either, but I've encountered quite a few very short yellows that were just about impossible to avoid running unless you traveled well under the speed limit.
Yeah, it's pretty strange. But it's both semi modern and understandable, and I have had a great time reading annotated assembler code for CP/M and MS BASIC, which use some very cool tricks. The best I have seen was one where they had some instructions that were all 2 bytes long and only one of them should be executed based on a jump instruction. So you jumped to the one you wanted and the two byte instructions were each followed by the opcode for loading an irrelevant register with a two byte value... you jumped to the one you wanted, any subsequent code just looked like (load register with next two bytes) which swallowed up other two byte commands.
Did you actually do it? I don't have anywhere to set up shop, though I do know a guy who owns a welding supply company... between the two of us I bet we could do it. I've seriously considered joining the local blacksmithing group for this reason.
Been a long time since I heard it that way - but I've heard "That's begging the question" a fair bit to mean "you're making a circular argument", and it helps people keep the two straight in their head if they consciously choose to separate them. That said, it would be a lot simpler to call the logical fallacy "circular reasoning" instead of "begging the question".
I remember seeing a pretty cool 8080 program to zero memory. It went something like:
LXI BC, 0000
LXI HL, 0009
LXI SP, 0008
PUSH BC
PCHL
HL, BC, and SP (the stack pointer) are all 16-bit registers, and the first three instructions occupy 0x0000-0x0008 in memory. PUSH BC is one byte at 0x0009, and PCHL (another one-byte instruction) sets the program counter to the value of HL; essentially it allows you to jump to the address contained in the HL register. The PUSH operation decremented the stack pointer before storing each of the bytes, so you would set the stack pointer to one higher than the highest address you wanted to overwrite. Because the 8080 was little-endian, address 0x0008 was the upper byte of the third instruction's numeric value - it was already zero (if it were big-endian you could just throw in a NOP to get it to align properly). The final PUSH operation - after the program had cycled through all of memory - wiped out the PUSH BC and PCHL operations, and the computer would go to all NOPs.
Dave Gingery's books will get you a machine shop. That's a good start. (The first thing you build is a charcoal foundry. The second is a lathe.)
There are also blacksmithing groups where you can learn how to make things with iron. Presumably any post-apocalyptic society will have ample supplies of scrap iron to work with.
I'm aware that this money is paid on their behalf. But it's not on their tax return, so I didn't include it when talking about studies that look at numbers off people's tax returns. I used the lower rate that applied at that time because... that's what everyone in the study was paying at the time and reporting on their 1040's. I'm sure that the math for total in/out includes the other half of the tax.