"the country which throw the bombs invaded Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan,"
Indeed, if the US got nuked by Japan or Germany in WWII, the US might not have invaded other countries after that...
I should add, show me the people in Taiwan or South Korea who are mad today about the US "invasion" there. Both of those countries still seek US military support today against their aggressive autocratic neighbors.
"It was a less selfish era, with known big time CEOs turning down pay raises because, as they put it "I earn enough"
So you are saying CEOs didn't have company-paid cars, homes, vacations, get corporate gifts of tax-free municipal bonds, and did not have their companies lease capital equipment from executives who then used accelerated depreciation on said equipment and later sold them at a loss?
Or take for example Howard Hughes, who in 1953 avoided taxes by funneling money through the theoretically charitable Hughes Medical Institute, a dummy corporation (which later had to go legit after tax laws changed).
It ended up that the rich paid MORE revenue in taxes to the government AFTER the JFK tax cut.
"But they only destroyed two Japanese cities with them!"
You'll notice Japan has not invaded the following countries since then: Burma, China, Indochina, the Philippines, Malaysia, Manchuria, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the US (think Aleutians).
"What's your alternative venue for the countries of the world to talk to each other rather than shooting at each other when there is an issue that straddles across their borders?"
Videoconferencing. It would be cheaper than the UN and just as effective (as in not very).
I can't think of one useful thing the UN Security Council has done since the Korean War, and that's only because the Russian autocracy of the time did not show up that day.
You should ask someone who made over $200,000 in the 1950's if they actually paid much of their "income" at the high top marginal rates (before the JFK tax cut).
You will find that most high-income people were avoiding taxes in the era before computers could hunt down all your bank accounts. There were a wide number of loopholes and tax shelters.
"Why shouldn't President Obama simply instruct the secretary of the Treasury to zero out every program he finds personally objectionable?"
Why not? The President must pay debts and must appropriate money from the Treasury as per law, but when the Treasury runs out of money, the President can't appropriate any more. Obviously the President has to triage non-debt payments.
Social Security is indexed to inflation, but the retirement age has been pushed up a few times, plus Social Security retirement income is now taxable to some extent if you have other income.
1) The 14th Amendment requires the executive branch to pay debt service 2) A Supreme Court decision during the Nixon presidency says the executive branch must appropriate money from the treasury as directed by Congress.
So here is what will happen if the debt ceiling does not get lifted. The US will continue to service Federal Debt as Constituionally required. Money left over in the treasury is appropriated as per law, until you run out of money to appropriate.
The executive has to decide in what priority to appropriate non-debt payments. I'd put Congressional salaries last in line...
"Since the 1980's, the USA gave up most of the raw manufacturing capability that made us great in the 1950's and 60's."
This is untrue. US manufacturing output, measured in cost of goods produced, is near all time highs, and has been continually rising except for a small blip during the most recent economic unpleasantness.
US manufacturing employment has dropped dramatically due to automation and concentration on manufacturing of higher value goods.
This is very similar to the fate of agriculture in the US. 150 years ago, the vast majority of Amerians were employed in agriculture. Today, only a few percent are, yet those few workers produce far more food than the entire agriculture workforce of 150 years ago because of farm mechanization.
China excels in low-skilled assembly of products that is just hard enough to not be easilly done by robots. If it can be done by robots, it can be done in the US it Japan.
The de-culturation in the article is nothing new. My great-grandfather Jarsoslav changed his name to "Jerry" when he moved to the US from Bohemia in 1912.
I've lived in $300 per month rent for a room. Put three people in a bedroom, and you get $100 per month. There are a lot of poor people in the world who would love to live in even a bad situation in the US.
My great uncle (first gen American in a Russian family) lived four to a room in a tenement with no indoor plumbing. He went on to become a research biologist.
"The fundamental problem is that the government pays for services at whatever rate the medical community claims they are worth"
Doctors will tell you that Medicare and especially Medicaid pay far below the rate of private health insurance. One doctor compared his Medicaid patients to "working for free."
Medicare/Medicaid has a problem that people will soon be using more services than are being paid for in taxes.
Your solution (which I term "screw the doctors") has been tried many places though. You can force doctors to make less money than they would receive in a free market. I suspect there are drawbacks, but it is done places.
Why should the American have to obey a $10/hour minimum wage, but his Asian counterpart does not?
Imagine if we had no minimum wage and free immigration. Chinese could move to the US, work for $1/hour, experience political and personal freedom, but still be under our environmental regulations for real pollution externalities.
Nuclear power plants can not rapidly change power output. Fast changes in power level can lead to instability due to short-lived fission products that don't get burned up with enough neutron flux.
While I expect they have the flood thing handled, what gives me pause is when I looked up how many nuclear sites there are (440 roughly) and how many major disasters have occurred (chernoble, TMI and now Fukishima). So a quick calculation says if I have a plant within a few miles of me, there is roughly a 1% chance in a typical lifetime that my home will be un-inhabitable for the next 100 years or so.
TMI did not make any private property "uninhabitable".
Be that as it may, yes, a 1% per lifetime risk of major nuclear accident is not crazy, but I can assure you a 99% risk of death from some other cause in your lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
"the country which throw the bombs invaded Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan,"
Indeed, if the US got nuked by Japan or Germany in WWII, the US might not have invaded other countries after that...
I should add, show me the people in Taiwan or South Korea who are mad today about the US "invasion" there. Both of those countries still seek US military support today against their aggressive autocratic neighbors.
"It was a less selfish era, with known big time CEOs turning down pay raises because, as they put it "I earn enough"
So you are saying CEOs didn't have company-paid cars, homes, vacations, get corporate gifts of tax-free municipal bonds, and did not have their companies lease capital equipment from executives who then used accelerated depreciation on said equipment and later sold them at a loss?
Or take for example Howard Hughes, who in 1953 avoided taxes by funneling money through the theoretically charitable Hughes Medical Institute, a dummy corporation (which later had to go legit after tax laws changed).
It ended up that the rich paid MORE revenue in taxes to the government AFTER the JFK tax cut.
"But they only destroyed two Japanese cities with them!"
You'll notice Japan has not invaded the following countries since then: Burma, China, Indochina, the Philippines, Malaysia, Manchuria, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the US (think Aleutians).
"What's your alternative venue for the countries of the world to talk to each other rather than shooting at each other when there is an issue that straddles across their borders?"
Videoconferencing. It would be cheaper than the UN and just as effective (as in not very).
I can't think of one useful thing the UN Security Council has done since the Korean War, and that's only because the Russian autocracy of the time did not show up that day.
You should ask someone who made over $200,000 in the 1950's if they actually paid much of their "income" at the high top marginal rates (before the JFK tax cut).
You will find that most high-income people were avoiding taxes in the era before computers could hunt down all your bank accounts. There were a wide number of loopholes and tax shelters.
"Why shouldn't President Obama simply instruct the secretary of the Treasury to zero out every program he finds personally objectionable?"
Why not? The President must pay debts and must appropriate money from the Treasury as per law, but when the Treasury runs out of money, the President can't appropriate any more. Obviously the President has to triage non-debt payments.
I'd start by not paying Congress...
Social Security is indexed to inflation, but the retirement age has been pushed up a few times, plus Social Security retirement income is now taxable to some extent if you have other income.
1) The 14th Amendment requires the executive branch to pay debt service
2) A Supreme Court decision during the Nixon presidency says the executive branch must appropriate money from the treasury as directed by Congress.
So here is what will happen if the debt ceiling does not get lifted. The US will continue to service Federal Debt as Constituionally required. Money left over in the treasury is appropriated as per law, until you run out of money to appropriate.
The executive has to decide in what priority to appropriate non-debt payments. I'd put Congressional salaries last in line...
The Nigerian movie industry ("NollyWood") makes films in English so they can sell throughout Africa.
"Since the 1980's, the USA gave up most of the raw manufacturing capability that made us great in the 1950's and 60's."
This is untrue. US manufacturing output, measured in cost of goods produced, is near all time highs, and has been continually rising except for a small blip during the most recent economic unpleasantness.
US manufacturing employment has dropped dramatically due to automation and concentration on manufacturing of higher value goods.
This is very similar to the fate of agriculture in the US. 150 years ago, the vast majority of Amerians were employed in agriculture. Today, only a few percent are, yet those few workers produce far more food than the entire agriculture workforce of 150 years ago because of farm mechanization.
China excels in low-skilled assembly of products that is just hard enough to not be easilly done by robots. If it can be done by robots, it can be done in the US it Japan.
Indeed, China is mainly a final assembler of electronics. Most electronic parts are made in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and of course the US.
The de-culturation in the article is nothing new. My great-grandfather Jarsoslav changed his name to "Jerry" when he moved to the US from Bohemia in 1912.
I've lived in $300 per month rent for a room. Put three people in a bedroom, and you get $100 per month. There are a lot of poor people in the world who would love to live in even a bad situation in the US.
My great uncle (first gen American in a Russian family) lived four to a room in a tenement with no indoor plumbing. He went on to become a research biologist.
"The fundamental problem is that the government pays for services at whatever rate the medical community claims they are worth"
Doctors will tell you that Medicare and especially Medicaid pay far below the rate of private health insurance. One doctor compared his Medicaid patients to "working for free."
Medicare/Medicaid has a problem that people will soon be using more services than are being paid for in taxes.
Your solution (which I term "screw the doctors") has been tried many places though. You can force doctors to make less money than they would receive in a free market. I suspect there are drawbacks, but it is done places.
I don't think anyone has raised $7 billion on Kickstarter before...
"Our children are being groomed to be the poorly fed, poorly housed, poorly educated drones of the likes of of the Koch Brothers"
Of course our kids are actually eating too much, live in the largest homes in history, and are more likely to go to college than ever.
The big ticket items of Federal government spending are not corporate subsidies (although yes they should be cut as well), but:
Social Security
Medicare
Defense
The big ticket items of state government spending are education and health cate (mainly Medicaid).
Recently the navy "disabled" (i.e. caught on fire) a small ship using a high-power solid-state laser (video here)
Why should the American have to obey a $10/hour minimum wage, but his Asian counterpart does not?
Imagine if we had no minimum wage and free immigration. Chinese could move to the US, work for $1/hour, experience political and personal freedom, but still be under our environmental regulations for real pollution externalities.
I am in a software union.
Which one?
I used Wave for social collaboration once - it got unwieldy very quickly.
Nuclear power plants can not rapidly change power output. Fast changes in power level can lead to instability due to short-lived fission products that don't get burned up with enough neutron flux.
The problem is that no one pays $1000 a plate for dinner with 500 people over Skype.
While I expect they have the flood thing handled, what gives me pause is when I looked up how many nuclear sites there are (440 roughly) and how many major disasters have occurred (chernoble, TMI and now Fukishima). So a quick calculation says if I have a plant within a few miles of me, there is roughly a 1% chance in a typical lifetime that my home will be un-inhabitable for the next 100 years or so.
TMI did not make any private property "uninhabitable".
Be that as it may, yes, a 1% per lifetime risk of major nuclear accident is not crazy, but I can assure you a 99% risk of death from some other cause in your lifetime.
Object-oriented programming is a cult.
It exists to make it more difficult for people to learn programming.
It does not actually provide any of its stated benefits (such as code re-use).
Yes, it is nice to have big class libraries, but those could also be big function libraries with little change in benefit.