You're forgetting the biggest factor of all: aftertax income. Beyond $25K/year of adjusted gross income for singles, it costs an employer $2 to put $1 in your pocket, more if you're in the People's State of Kalifornia or Taxachusettes. So Big Brother's income goes up faster than yours, percentage wise.
I like Arsdigita's business philosophy, but it leaves them wide open for getting raped by the taxman. (Paying out cash instead of stock; long-term capital gains tax is 20%, and no Socialist Security and Mediscare taxes.) Still, I think it's worth the tax hit for the reduced aggravation from not having to watch a manic-depressive company stock price.
I'll assume that everyone at Arsdigita is going to vote for George W. Bush? (grin)
(A big,,!,, to the socialist who modded down my last post. Hypocrits, all pompous about "freedom of speech" until someone disagrees with you.)
Ha! Rational distribution of national assets... rational to the unelected bureacrats who run the government monopolies. If you disagree with them, well, that's too damn bad. Unless you've got money or ambition, then you can go to America.
Ah, so you fear the poor, and think if you give them goodies they'll leave you alone? Gee, how enlightened. I bet you'd fight the school choice bill we're going to vote on Tuesday here in Michigan that'd break the government education monopoly and give the "underclass" a decent shot at a real education.
And here's a clue: they aren't "resources", they're people, and if you have to set up barriers to keep them from running away, YOU HAVE A DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEM! Gotta love that Soviet thinking: "if we don't build the Berlin Wall all the smart people will leave!"
Also, I'll always have a soft spot for Bill because he tried to do the right thing (Socialized Medicine)...
But if he had succeeded, who would employ Canadian doctors?
(1/4 of Canadian doctors work in America, along with numerous other refugees from Socialism. And America is footing the worlds drug development cost, along with most other medical advances. Freedom isn't free. Socialism is slavery.)
I've noticed a pattern of foreign firms settling ridiculous lawsuits rather than take their chances with America's courts and rapacious trial lawyers. Remember the suit Toshiba settled for $2 BILLION over a floppy drive controller that could theoretically malfunction under high CPU loads, which no one had ever manage to do in real life? This is just more of the same.
Guess what, trial lawyers send 90%+ of their political "contributions" to the Democratic Party. If Gore gets elected, it'll be four more years of guaranteed courtroom insanity.
People don't need the latest and greatest PCs, just like people don't need $40,000 SUVs, or $500,000 McMansions. But they buy a helluva lot of all three in my neighborhood (in Michigan, no less). And lets face it, shelling out $3K for the latest and greatest PC (subsidized by whatever the old PC fetches) isn't overly difficult for the upper half in America, and that price point keeps getting lower.
My state-of-the-art Athlon box at home whomps the 2-year-old Dell P2-400 box (that was close to state of the art at the time) when it comes to Java development, Quake, and everything else that can make use of processor cycles. Screw the cost/benefit analysis, just gimme.
Personally, I can't wait for dual 1.5GHz Athlon boxes early next year...
$30/per and 25% of ad revenues doesn't sound too outrageous to me, given the heavy capital costs of building/upgrading the cable plant. Given MediaOne charges me $40/mo for cable modem service, that leaves $10/mo plus 75% of ad revenues to play with, which, given how cheap telephone modem based service is getting (and T3/dialup/etc charges drop out), seems pretty reasonable. Or, if T3 charges still apply, it's *still* a good deal. (Remember kids, the customer doesn't have to dedicate a $20/mo telephone line to Internet service anymore.)
Not good enough for you? Get your local governments to stop granting legal monopolies in exchange for taxes... er, "franchise fees", and let competing cable companies set up shop with their own plant. Maybe someone will have the brains to do full-blown fiber-to-the-home. "Why yes, I *would* like a 100Mbps pipe to the Internet..."
Ramesh Ponnuru is a writer at National Review. Very good writer, young guy (twentysomething), saw him on Politically Incorrect once. If you search the NR site you can probably find the article. I subscribe to the dead trees version.
I thought Gore's patron was Occidental Petroleum? Run by the famously amoral Armand Hammer? (Did deals with Libya and other fun people...)
G.W. Bush has a total of 5 years of political experience... He's been nominated mainly because of his ties to his dad...
Like Al Gore would be the Democrats candidate if it wasn't for his Senator daddies' TOBACCO FORTUNE.
Bush was nominated because he's managed to get large numbers of independents and Democrats to vote for him and work with him in addition to the Republican base. He even won reelection as Governor of Texas, which (if I recall last night's Frontline program on the candidates correctly) was the first time anyone's done that? People say they're sick of partisan politics, therefore the Republican establishment wing picked Bush, and the rest of the party was too fragmented to challenge him (and Forbes still hasn't learned how to campaign, alas).
Ramesh Ponnuru on the thought of a Gore victory: "Imagine a Birkenstock on your face, forever".
I can guarantee that AMD will fight Rambus, probably in concert with Micron Technologies given AMD's early backing of DDR SDRAM and mutual self-interest. Jerry Sanders (AMD CEO) is a self-described "Cowboy Capitalist"; he won't knuckle under without a fight. This interview with Sanders will give you a good idea of what he thinks about people who play lawyerball (almost a half-hour, but fun to listen to).
BTW, I got the link from The Savvy Analyst, which calls AMD the "Best Stock Available". (Full disclosure: I'm long AMD, big-time.)
...the best thing to do would be to make investments in space exploration/development tax deductable, as well as making all capital gains on such investments tax-free. That's far better than having to go thru a politically messy grant project, and much more likely to get funding to projects that will actually work. The justification for these tax breaks would be that this is extremely high-risk work in America's (heck, world's) long-term national interest.
...Intel will be outgunned by the AMD Athlon until the 130 nanometer die shrink in 2H 2001, at which point they get SledgeHammered?
Remember, they won't be able to produce very many of the *huge* P4 chips on their existing 180 nanometer fabs. It'll be like the 60MHz and 66MHz Pentiums were when they first came out (to ward off the Am486), only much worse.
But how does the ATI's image quality, specifically text at 1600x1200 res, compare to nVidia's? I'm using a Matrox G400 Max (which looks *great*, but slow) because the nVidia's I've bought (the last being a Creative Labs GeForce256) looked fuzzy at hires, at least compared to the Matrox. I want to play Quake 3 at 1600x1200, but I can't sacrifice text.
I read Ian Angell's inequality.pdf (thanks for the link), and he's half-right. Democracy can degenerate into slavery ("The politics of envy is suicide"), France being a good example. But here in America, where the "loser class" isn't as dominant as it is in Europe (America being founded by and a magnet for men and women of ability), where we have more freedom (or at least a lower level of enslavement to the state), we're seeing a largely successful transition from low-skill manufacturing jobs to low-skill service-sector jobs, the proliferation of restaurants being an obvious example. Angell is also dead wrong about manufacturing going away: it will simply be done by fewer but greater-skilled workers, the elite of them building the machines that build most everything. Protectionist Europe hasn't made the break with the past that America has, and that's coloring Angell's views.
Interestingly, various European nations appear to finally be getting the hint. Even Germany is talking tax cuts now. Whether they'll back down far enough soon enough remains to be seen, but it is encouraging.
>...it's built on the same lines with Thunderbird...
No, the Duron is built by AMD's Austin, Texas fab using aluminum interconnects, while the Thunderbirds are built by the new Dresden, Germany fab using copper interconnects. The Duron can be overclocked so easily because it's a considerably smaller chip (half the onboard cache memory) than the Thunderbird.
My 800MHz Thunderbird is stable at 900MHz. Under heavy CPU load, it becomes unstable at 950MHz and 1000MHz, but I can completely boot at those speeds. I recommend that if you're going to overclock a Thunderbird, only add another 100MHz, and keep your core voltage as low as possible (1.7v or 1.75v). If I was buying today, I'd spend the extra bucks for the 900MHz part.
In short, an Open Source Libertarian is someone who decides to contribute his code to the world and share with others who have chosen likewise. Given the near-zero distribution/replication cost of software, this works. It works best for software that is basic infrastructure, what we'd normally pay a government to build in the physical world, and perhaps demonstrates that even there forced taxation isn't necessary or just.
The key word is chose. Microsoft has not chosen to open source their property, and that's OK. Some of us may chose to buy Windows, some of us may chose Linux, some of us may chose a little of both. Decide as a free individual what you want to do with your life and the results of your labor.
As for "cyberselfishness": philanthropy is an old man's game, for when entrepreneurs are done creating wealth. To complain that the Silicon Valley geeks won't stop creating wealth and start giving it away is absurd. Bill Gates is transitioning to philanthropy, after creating $billions. If you're too impatient to wait, may I humbly suggest you create your own wealth to do with as you see fit?
Forbes is a private, family run and held company. They have no stockholders to answer to.
From the article, it sounds like Forbes made a reasonable compromise (just testify whether the story was accurate or not). Nothing that would endanger the sources. If the prosecuters ask other questions, he'd have to remind them of the deal they'd made, but with the magazine backing him I don't think the prosecution would push that very far.
Fixing sprawl is easy: just ease up on the zoning ordnances that mandate low population density. It never ceases to amaze me how the anti-sprawl and anti-growth advocates never get this cause-and-effect. We've actually got zoning ordnances mandating 10 acre lots in some areas! If developers were permitted to build 50-story buildings in downtown neighborhoods (where they're appropriate) rather than having to fight tooth-and-nail with bureaucrats to build 7 story buildings, we'd make vastly more efficient use of space, make public transportation (aka car-free lifestyle) far more plausible, make more efficient use of city services, and take pressure off the housing demand (and inflating cost) in the surrounding suburban neighborhoods.
Concrete vs. asphalt: we've been thru this locally. Concrete costs 10% more, so under the usual lowest-bidder rules it loses. But it lasts twice as long, so they spec'd it when rebuilding one of the major roads last year. Works great. Highly recommended.
> BTW, do any Brits think it is a gross breach of sovereignty to have foreign bases in the UK? I > mean, how would Americans feel if foreigners set up a military base here?
Well, if Britain had bailed America out in WWII, I'd cut y'all some slack, o "This means peace in our time!" people...
The fact that Gateway is only having trouble with 1GHz Thunderbirds is a dead giveaway that they have a power supply issue. If you look up recommended power supplies on the AMD website, you'll notice that an awful lot drop off the list as soon as you spec a 1GHz processor.
When I build my dual processor Athlon box later this year (waiting on the AMD 770 chipset and Mustang core CPUs like the rest of the world), I'm going to use a PC Power and Cooling 350watt power supply. That'll handle anything I'm going to throw at it.
Example: the holding of Pinochet by request of a Spanish judge, with neither the UK nor Spanish governments having any jurisdiction over the alledged crimes of the General. And Pinochet was Britain's *friend* in the previous two administrations. Basically, he was arrested because it made a bunch of geezer European leftists happy.
You really think they'll leave Sealand alone if it starts cutting into the taxes the socialist European governments rape their citizens with? (Not that the US is doing too well in this regard...)
Still, I'll give Havenco better than even-money odds of success, just because they aren't dependent on any given site. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of their principals were arrested as soon as they set foot in whatever offended country on whatever trumped-up charge, and get kept in confinement for a year or two while the lawyers fight it out. Hopefully I'm being overly cynical.
"Second, the non-US view: How would it benefit anyone outside the US, in a long term developmental perspective, if the US made it easier for people to immigrate and work? US higher education creates enough of a "brain drain" already; the world outside of the US and Western Europe needs more bright minds to stay, and build industry at home."
If those nations want to keep their best and brightest, they should stop going out of their way to make America's 50% marginal tax rate look good. (Higher than that in the People's State of California.)
Keeping talent is easy. Just get out of our way and let us do our jobs. I refuse to feel sorry for socialist nations like Russia and France that refuse to get a (blindingly obvious) clue.
If you have to force people to stay in a system/nation, YOU HAVE A DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEM! (Insert obligatory Social Security rant here.)
The $billions Microsoft and its employees currently pay in US taxes could be used to slash BC's tax rate for everyone. Add in the secondary effects, and you could drop BC's tax rates below America's and still collect more revenue within a few years. Really, America's 50% marginal tax rate (Federal income, Federal Social Security/Mediscare, State income, etc) isn't that hard to beat. Yup, I'm talking classic supply-side economics here. Great way to make the fascist Clintonistas look really stupid.
Or Microsoft could just buy Cuba, as another poster suggested. Turn it into another Hong Kong, only with better weather.
George Gilder had a great line: "DSL is equivalent to the Pony Express engineering winged horses to compete with the telegraph". It's an expensive kludge to hobble around the fact that the telcos need to rip out their copper infrastructure and replace it with fiber. Which they could do, if their upper management were cluefull.
Any service using the telcos infrastructure is doomed. Get a cable modem. Or get a big pile of venture capital and start stringing up you neighborhood with fiber-to-the-home. Or fixed-point wireless. Anything but the antiquated copper the telcos use.
Slashdot Mirror
You're forgetting the biggest factor of all: aftertax income. Beyond $25K/year of adjusted gross income for singles, it costs an employer $2 to put $1 in your pocket, more if you're in the People's State of Kalifornia or Taxachusettes. So Big Brother's income goes up faster than yours, percentage wise.
I like Arsdigita's business philosophy, but it leaves them wide open for getting raped by the taxman. (Paying out cash instead of stock; long-term capital gains tax is 20%, and no Socialist Security and Mediscare taxes.) Still, I think it's worth the tax hit for the reduced aggravation from not having to watch a manic-depressive company stock price.
I'll assume that everyone at Arsdigita is going to vote for George W. Bush? (grin)
(A big ,,!,, to the socialist who modded down my last post. Hypocrits, all pompous about "freedom of speech" until someone disagrees with you.)
Ha! Rational distribution of national assets... rational to the unelected bureacrats who run the government monopolies. If you disagree with them, well, that's too damn bad. Unless you've got money or ambition, then you can go to America.
Ah, so you fear the poor, and think if you give them goodies they'll leave you alone? Gee, how enlightened. I bet you'd fight the school choice bill we're going to vote on Tuesday here in Michigan that'd break the government education monopoly and give the "underclass" a decent shot at a real education.
And here's a clue: they aren't "resources", they're people, and if you have to set up barriers to keep them from running away, YOU HAVE A DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEM! Gotta love that Soviet thinking: "if we don't build the Berlin Wall all the smart people will leave!"
But if he had succeeded, who would employ Canadian doctors?
(1/4 of Canadian doctors work in America, along with numerous other refugees from Socialism. And America is footing the worlds drug development cost, along with most other medical advances. Freedom isn't free. Socialism is slavery.)
I've noticed a pattern of foreign firms settling ridiculous lawsuits rather than take their chances with America's courts and rapacious trial lawyers. Remember the suit Toshiba settled for $2 BILLION over a floppy drive controller that could theoretically malfunction under high CPU loads, which no one had ever manage to do in real life? This is just more of the same.
Guess what, trial lawyers send 90%+ of their political "contributions" to the Democratic Party. If Gore gets elected, it'll be four more years of guaranteed courtroom insanity.
Pluto Pup!
My state-of-the-art Athlon box at home whomps the 2-year-old Dell P2-400 box (that was close to state of the art at the time) when it comes to Java development, Quake, and everything else that can make use of processor cycles. Screw the cost/benefit analysis, just gimme.
Personally, I can't wait for dual 1.5GHz Athlon boxes early next year...
$30/per and 25% of ad revenues doesn't sound too outrageous to me, given the heavy capital costs of building/upgrading the cable plant. Given MediaOne charges me $40/mo for cable modem service, that leaves $10/mo plus 75% of ad revenues to play with, which, given how cheap telephone modem based service is getting (and T3/dialup/etc charges drop out), seems pretty reasonable. Or, if T3 charges still apply, it's *still* a good deal. (Remember kids, the customer doesn't have to dedicate a $20/mo telephone line to Internet service anymore.)
Not good enough for you? Get your local governments to stop granting legal monopolies in exchange for taxes... er, "franchise fees", and let competing cable companies set up shop with their own plant. Maybe someone will have the brains to do full-blown fiber-to-the-home. "Why yes, I *would* like a 100Mbps pipe to the Internet..."
I thought Gore's patron was Occidental Petroleum? Run by the famously amoral Armand Hammer? (Did deals with Libya and other fun people...)
Like Al Gore would be the Democrats candidate if it wasn't for his Senator daddies' TOBACCO FORTUNE.
Bush was nominated because he's managed to get large numbers of independents and Democrats to vote for him and work with him in addition to the Republican base. He even won reelection as Governor of Texas, which (if I recall last night's Frontline program on the candidates correctly) was the first time anyone's done that? People say they're sick of partisan politics, therefore the Republican establishment wing picked Bush, and the rest of the party was too fragmented to challenge him (and Forbes still hasn't learned how to campaign, alas).
Ramesh Ponnuru on the thought of a Gore victory: "Imagine a Birkenstock on your face, forever".
BTW, I got the link from The Savvy Analyst, which calls AMD the "Best Stock Available". (Full disclosure: I'm long AMD, big-time.)
Intel's response. I'm still glad I dumped my Intel shares and rolled the money into AMD.
...the best thing to do would be to make investments in space exploration/development tax deductable, as well as making all capital gains on such investments tax-free. That's far better than having to go thru a politically messy grant project, and much more likely to get funding to projects that will actually work. The justification for these tax breaks would be that this is extremely high-risk work in America's (heck, world's) long-term national interest.
...Intel will be outgunned by the AMD Athlon until the 130 nanometer die shrink in 2H 2001, at which point they get SledgeHammered?
Remember, they won't be able to produce very many of the *huge* P4 chips on their existing 180 nanometer fabs. It'll be like the 60MHz and 66MHz Pentiums were when they first came out (to ward off the Am486), only much worse.
But how does the ATI's image quality, specifically text at 1600x1200 res, compare to nVidia's? I'm using a Matrox G400 Max (which looks *great*, but slow) because the nVidia's I've bought (the last being a Creative Labs GeForce256) looked fuzzy at hires, at least compared to the Matrox. I want to play Quake 3 at 1600x1200, but I can't sacrifice text.
I read Ian Angell's inequality.pdf (thanks for the link), and he's half-right. Democracy can degenerate into slavery ("The politics of envy is suicide"), France being a good example. But here in America, where the "loser class" isn't as dominant as it is in Europe (America being founded by and a magnet for men and women of ability), where we have more freedom (or at least a lower level of enslavement to the state), we're seeing a largely successful transition from low-skill manufacturing jobs to low-skill service-sector jobs, the proliferation of restaurants being an obvious example. Angell is also dead wrong about manufacturing going away: it will simply be done by fewer but greater-skilled workers, the elite of them building the machines that build most everything. Protectionist Europe hasn't made the break with the past that America has, and that's coloring Angell's views.
Interestingly, various European nations appear to finally be getting the hint. Even Germany is talking tax cuts now. Whether they'll back down far enough soon enough remains to be seen, but it is encouraging.
No, the Duron is built by AMD's Austin, Texas fab using aluminum interconnects, while the Thunderbirds are built by the new Dresden, Germany fab using copper interconnects. The Duron can be overclocked so easily because it's a considerably smaller chip (half the onboard cache memory) than the Thunderbird.
My 800MHz Thunderbird is stable at 900MHz. Under heavy CPU load, it becomes unstable at 950MHz and 1000MHz, but I can completely boot at those speeds. I recommend that if you're going to overclock a Thunderbird, only add another 100MHz, and keep your core voltage as low as possible (1.7v or 1.75v). If I was buying today, I'd spend the extra bucks for the 900MHz part.
The key word is chose . Microsoft has not chosen to open source their property, and that's OK. Some of us may chose to buy Windows, some of us may chose Linux, some of us may chose a little of both. Decide as a free individual what you want to do with your life and the results of your labor.
As for "cyberselfishness": philanthropy is an old man's game, for when entrepreneurs are done creating wealth. To complain that the Silicon Valley geeks won't stop creating wealth and start giving it away is absurd. Bill Gates is transitioning to philanthropy, after creating $billions. If you're too impatient to wait, may I humbly suggest you create your own wealth to do with as you see fit?
Forbes is a private, family run and held company. They have no stockholders to answer to.
From the article, it sounds like Forbes made a reasonable compromise (just testify whether the story was accurate or not). Nothing that would endanger the sources. If the prosecuters ask other questions, he'd have to remind them of the deal they'd made, but with the magazine backing him I don't think the prosecution would push that very far.
Fixing sprawl is easy: just ease up on the zoning ordnances that mandate low population density. It never ceases to amaze me how the anti-sprawl and anti-growth advocates never get this cause-and-effect. We've actually got zoning ordnances mandating 10 acre lots in some areas! If developers were permitted to build 50-story buildings in downtown neighborhoods (where they're appropriate) rather than having to fight tooth-and-nail with bureaucrats to build 7 story buildings, we'd make vastly more efficient use of space, make public transportation (aka car-free lifestyle) far more plausible, make more efficient use of city services, and take pressure off the housing demand (and inflating cost) in the surrounding suburban neighborhoods.
Concrete vs. asphalt: we've been thru this locally. Concrete costs 10% more, so under the usual lowest-bidder rules it loses. But it lasts twice as long, so they spec'd it when rebuilding one of the major roads last year. Works great. Highly recommended.
> BTW, do any Brits think it is a gross breach of sovereignty to have foreign bases in the UK? I
> mean, how would Americans feel if foreigners set up a military base here?
Well, if Britain had bailed America out in WWII, I'd cut y'all some slack, o "This means peace in our time!" people...
When I build my dual processor Athlon box later this year (waiting on the AMD 770 chipset and Mustang core CPUs like the rest of the world), I'm going to use a PC Power and Cooling 350watt power supply. That'll handle anything I'm going to throw at it.
Example: the holding of Pinochet by request of a Spanish judge, with neither the UK nor Spanish governments having any jurisdiction over the alledged crimes of the General. And Pinochet was Britain's *friend* in the previous two administrations. Basically, he was arrested because it made a bunch of geezer European leftists happy.
You really think they'll leave Sealand alone if it starts cutting into the taxes the socialist European governments rape their citizens with? (Not that the US is doing too well in this regard...)
Still, I'll give Havenco better than even-money odds of success, just because they aren't dependent on any given site. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of their principals were arrested as soon as they set foot in whatever offended country on whatever trumped-up charge, and get kept in confinement for a year or two while the lawyers fight it out. Hopefully I'm being overly cynical.
If those nations want to keep their best and brightest, they should stop going out of their way to make America's 50% marginal tax rate look good. (Higher than that in the People's State of California.)
Keeping talent is easy. Just get out of our way and let us do our jobs. I refuse to feel sorry for socialist nations like Russia and France that refuse to get a (blindingly obvious) clue.
If you have to force people to stay in a system/nation, YOU HAVE A DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEM! (Insert obligatory Social Security rant here.)
Or Microsoft could just buy Cuba, as another poster suggested. Turn it into another Hong Kong, only with better weather.
George Gilder had a great line: "DSL is equivalent to the Pony Express engineering winged horses to compete with the telegraph". It's an expensive kludge to hobble around the fact that the telcos need to rip out their copper infrastructure and replace it with fiber. Which they could do, if their upper management were cluefull.
Any service using the telcos infrastructure is doomed. Get a cable modem. Or get a big pile of venture capital and start stringing up you neighborhood with fiber-to-the-home. Or fixed-point wireless. Anything but the antiquated copper the telcos use.
Government regulators can't mandate cluefulness.