The atmosphere doesn't care who produces the pollution or whether someone is polluting more than "their bit". The atmosphere can only absorb a certain amount of carbon before we all die. What matters is the total amount produced.
Their dollar would be worth less because everything would be more expensive.
Using the figures from Q47 on your site and ignoring state sales taxes (which I assume would still be added under a fairtax system):
Currently:
You earn $130, you keep $100. A $100 item costs $100. This is 100% of your income.
FairTax:
You earn $130, you keep $130. A $100 item with a sales tax of 30% costs $130. This is also 100% of your income.
So, to buy a $100 item now costs you $100. To buy $100 dollar item under the fairtax system costs you $130. Therefore your dollar is worth less, as you need more dollars to purchase the same value of goods.
As it says all over that site, the FairTax is revenue neutral, so this is by design. You cannot magic more money into the economy by altering the tax system. You have to either raise or lower overall revenue rates, which the fairtax, by definition, does not.
I see no intrinsic problem with the FairTax system, but I am innately suspicious of anything that relies on people to consume their way through life. As oil will show us in the next couple of years, resources are finite; people should be encouraged to buy less petro-chemical-based-cheap-chinese-crap, not more.
Also, answers like this:
Why is the FairTax better than our current system? Our present tax system is one of the reasons that people are finding it so difficult to get ahead these days. It is one of the reasons the next generation may not have a standard of living as high as this generation. Cars replaced the horse and buggy, the telephone replaced the telegraph, and the FairTax replaces the income tax. The income tax is holding us back and making it more difficult than it needs to be to improve our families' standard of living. It makes it needlessly difficult for our businesses to compete in international markets. It wastes vast resources on complying with needless paperwork. We can do better and we mus
Are guaranteed to get my goat. If they have to avoid answering a fundamental question with crap like that, they must be hiding something. My guess is it's a certainly no better and possibly worse than the current system.
BTW, If you're going to publicly evangelise something at least take the time to understand how it works.
Yes, this particularly applies to companies too. ExxonMobil for example, only pays 11% tax on average. Gutting isn't it?
My personal preferred tax system is the Flat Rate system, assuming it's applied properly (ie get rid of exemptions) and to companies, as in use in some Eastern European countries (eg Estonia). In this one you set a flat rate that every one pays, at a level that means overall tax income is the same, but gets rid of thousands of bureaucrats and puts millions of lawyers out of work. One ExxonMobil sized company paying 18% instead of 11% would probably allow everyone's tax bill to drop a couple of percentage points.
No doubt there are problems with it, but a simple system always works better than complex one.
Insightful? Why is that Insightful? That's just wrong. I hope to god congress doesn't make laws based on such flawed logic as this.
If income tax is going to be replaced by a sales tax, that sales tax is going to have to be pretty damn high to compensate. If, as you say, the overall level of taxation is going to remain the same, then, by definition, the value of a person's income (assuming they are in the band that remains with the same level of taxation) must remain exactly the same. People aren't suddenly going to have a lot of extra "real" money to spend; the dollar in their pocket will now be worth a lot less as they are going to have to spend more money to get the same amount of things. Sounds like inflation to me.
As an aside, it seems to me that a government system that relied only on sales tax to collect revenues would be major risk from fluctuations in the economy. When people stop spending money for some reason the government is going to collect less tax. I don't think that would work.
I remind you that if you get rid of me, you wont live very long. Because unlike me, and people like me, Muslims are not so tolorant of those who practice Homosexuality, Abortion, Drinking, Partying, and other such things I am sure you find perfectly reasonable and normal. Marginalize Christianity in the US and like France, Holland, Germany, and Britain we will fall into the control of Islam. (yes, I know they arent quite there yet, but they will be in 10 years)
Have you actually been to a muslim country? or any of the ones you list above? or in fact out of your state? The muslim countries you see on TV (Iran, Saudi, Kuwait) are not typical in any respect whatsoever. I know from experience that the Indonesians (the most populous muslim country on earth) have no problems partying, drinking, etc and I believe the Turks, the Malaysians and swathes of central asia have a similar outlook on life. No, the countries you hear about on TV all have fundamentalist governments or clergy. Now the strange thing about fundamentalists is that whatever creed they follow they all end up believing the same thing, so your christian fundamentalist gubment would not be very long in banning abortion, homosexuality, drinking and partying (in that order). (In fact that would make a good "fundmentalist test" for any government: US gets 1 point, Western Europe gets 0, Saudi Arabia gets 3, the old Afghanistan got 4).
Christianity is already marginalised in most western european nations (Italy being the exception. Britain in particular is full of empty and abandoned churchs), but strangely they are not currently under the control of, or about to fall to Islam. That is beacuse it's not christianity per se that has been marginalised, but the whole idea of religion. Most British people would consider anyone who went to church regularly a fanatic. Simple common-sense tells you that Islam is not about to sweep across Europe.
"Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
This phrase clearly does TWO things
1)It says the US Congress cannot setup a national Religion.
That phrase says no such thing. Do you recall the reason that your nation exists? In large part it was because England wanted rid of their fundamentalists and other religous agitators who were banned (lucky for them they weren't catholic, they were usually simply killed and were banned from travelling to the colonies). That phrase is part of the constitution as a direct response to the banning of new religions in England; essentially the founding fathers thumbing their nose at their former mother country.
oh, I was just making up numbers as an example. But if someone *could* make a gaming distro that was tuned to gaming performance, then that would be incentive for many people to at least try the switch.
You can repeat that line all you want, but if it doesn't "just work" on any given set of reasonably up-to-date hardware, it is never going to threaten windows. Selecting your hardware is an option only for your knowledgable geek, who's done it 5 times before and found things out the hard way.
Improving Hardware support and getting hardware manufacturers to play are the two areas linux needs to concentrate on if it is threaten windows. Once a distro can be guaranteed to work on the latest pre-built machine that you buy in PCMart *then* you can start to pressurise software manufacturers into making their products support linux.
It's a vicious circle; no one will use linux until they can run everyday software on it, but no one will make this software until many people are running linux. At the moment, many people CAN'T run linux so it's not even an issue (christ, centos won't work on my 3 year old dell laptop).
Actually, a good way in to the mainstream for linux would be gaming. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of high-end (home-user) sales are gaming oriented; a video card costs $500 alone. Anyone who spends money like that, and follows the yearly update cycles, probably wouldn't think too hard about switching to an OS that could play BF2 20% faster. Then, once it becomes established, the high street stores have to follow, then once it's in them, it enters the mainstream conciousness and becomes a realistic, and even attractive, alternative for mr and mrs sixpack.
Of course, getting software houses to produce linux friendly games would be part of the catch-22.
Gaim's good on both Linux *and* Windows. The Windows port is solid. And it's Free Software.
I disagree with that. Gaim is as buggy as hell on windows. It's partly the UI, so I guess that could be the GTK, but it's forever leaving tooltips over other apps, losing messages, ignoring its prefs and is a bitch to start up if you have logging on (take a tip from jajc guys, DON'T load the entire 2 year's log into history on startup). And some of the keybaord shortcuts are just plain wrong, I mean, as far as I know Ctrl-Z has alway been "Undo", not "Minimize"! who thought of that one?
I am about as liberal as you can get. I think that the role of the government should be expanded such that it provides a very large safety net for the disadvantaged, and I think that many services that we now pay for ought to be subsidized such that those services (medical, roads, etc) are free/affordable for at least the most disadvantaged and ideally for the whole citizenry.
That's not liberal, that's socialist. Being Liberal means you support people's freedom to do things; socialism means you think society should support its less well off members. The two things are not neccesarily contradictory, but liberalism is usually seen as being against state intervention in any way. The rest of what you say is liberal, but that statement is, while not the exact opposite, pretty close.
OK, I'm just being an arse here, I know that the definition of "liberal" has been warped in the states, but I've never understood how this new political definition came about; socialist things are always attributed to the "liberals". Maybe you're not allowed to say "socialist" in the US? Most liberal ideas chime better with the right than the left anyway, eg smaller government, lower taxes.
Intel have plants all over the world, I don't think any US export restrictions are going to hamper them selling chips to anywhere. I don't know whether US export restrictions are meant to apply to IP or the physical product, but the fact that they have plants in China suggest neither, as the Chinese aren't going to let the US stop them sending stuff to N Korea if they want to.
Si, what we need is the ultimate sim game: design your city, a la SimCity, and the AI learns how a successful city works -> Move up and produce a state/country of AI run cities (a la Civ) -> Move up and run a planet of AI run states -> empire of AI run planets. Of course you could be anal and start from the Sims level, or even the SimAnt level ("Can you drive your ants to take over the universe?!").
and so forth. Anyway, what I was getting at was that Scalability and self-maintaining systems are good.
Games of Galciv, etc., especially during end-game in large galaxies, become exercises in repetition, scrolling through dozens of systems and hundreds of units each turn. This is something the computer is far more able to manage than I am.
For me this is the thing makes me become bored of these games in the end. I really enjoy them while you're building stuff, but they are never scalable. City/Colonies/Planets/whatever should be able to look after themselves, and not have me constantly interfering to keep them running. This has tried to be implemented in the form of trade routes and I recall something about governors in Civ III or Alpha Centurai, but they never really worked properly. Hmmm... maybe forming cities into self governing states/provinces would work...
Firstly: Irish Americans have been funding Irish Republicanism since long before the present troubles, dating back to late 1800s at least with the founding of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
I would agree with that.
Secondly: Very few people died in London, or even mainland UK in total, compared to how many died in Northern Ireland during the troubles. *Far* more civilians died in NI at the hands of the UK state apparatus than British civilians did in UK mainland at hands of IRA. (See this for source).
All that source tells me is that far, far more people died at the hands of republican paras than at the hands of the British Army: 1896 vs 316. It doesn't even mention the mainland. And those figures don't include all the knee-cappings and beatings of innocent people they just didn't like and probably exclude the killing of drug dealers to protect their own revenue source. From memory I'd say you're probably right, the IRA killed about 150 people on the mainland. This pales against the 3000 odd killed in total in NI though.
This is waffle. The current peace process was well-underway, long before Sept 11th.
No, the GFA was dead in the water by Sept 01, Sinn Fein/IRA had no reason to keep to it as they were still well funded, if not well supported.
The last bomb in the UK attributed to the IRA exploded in Ealing Broadway in London on the 3rd August 2001. Coincidence?
Give the province back to Ireland.
Please, take it... You will find no support in England for keeping the province outside of the Government. It's a massive black hole that sucks in money and gives nothing but trouble back. Unfortunately, 98% of the Republic doesn't want it back either.
lol, it depends how far you want to take it... The English (not British) have been in Ireland for over 800 years. The English people who repressed the Irish in 1350 are same race who repressed the Algonquians in New England and Virginia in 1650, the Australian aborigines in 1750 and the Maoris in 1850. Last I looked, the only one of the present occupiers of those lands who are contemplating giving anything back to the original owners is New Zealand (and ironically, the Maori themselves only came from Tahiti in the 12th Century). No-one is mooting that idea that Manhattan Island should be returned to the Delawares, and that was swindled off them in 1620-something, 300 years after the English invasion of Ireland.
I was merely pointing out (perhaps a little flippantly) that it's common knowledge that the Irish communities of Boston and New York were the prime funders of the various IRA incarnations who killed many, many people in London thoughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. It escaped no-one's notice that the IRA's funding, and thence their will to fight, dried up around about 12th September 2001. Terrorism isn't fun when it happens to you.
(The laissez-faire American attitude to this is wonderfully demonstrated by the the Simpsons episode where it's St Patricks Day [bart gets drunk]. They show a British theme pub being blown up as part of the celebrations. How much would you like to bet that the Simpsons NEVER have a "plane flying into skyscrapers" gag?)
The English are of course the root problem of all the problems in NI today. Unfortunately that IS history and can't be undone. Centuries of mistreatment and propaganda have turned Ulster into a ghetto run by quasi-religious, gun-toting militia. The problem now is how to get rid of them. Nuke them all I say; let Odin sort them out
Look at the quality of that health care. Many, many people turn to the private sector.
Numbers? Source? It costs a couple of grand a year for private healthcare; the average wage is about 18k a year. I'm betting most people aren't spending 5% of their salary on private healthcare. Only for executives and visiting americans.
Violent crime rose dramatically since they took affect.
No, recorded violent crime rose dramatically. Previously a brawl involving 10 people constitued 1 crime. Now it constitutes 10.
Oh, and gun crime has fallen year on year since the year dot.
Slashdot Mirror
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4413540.stm
I wish I had mod points for you...
The atmosphere doesn't care who produces the pollution or whether someone is polluting more than "their bit". The atmosphere can only absorb a certain amount of carbon before we all die. What matters is the total amount produced.
This is dwarfed by the subsidies that govts give to the world's richest industry, Oil.
And while you're at it, why not stick a toaster in your tv? I've always wondered why Sony don't do the TVToaster...
Their dollar would be worth less because everything would be more expensive.
Using the figures from Q47 on your site and ignoring state sales taxes (which I assume would still be added under a fairtax system):
Currently: You earn $130, you keep $100. A $100 item costs $100. This is 100% of your income.
FairTax: You earn $130, you keep $130. A $100 item with a sales tax of 30% costs $130. This is also 100% of your income.
So, to buy a $100 item now costs you $100. To buy $100 dollar item under the fairtax system costs you $130. Therefore your dollar is worth less, as you need more dollars to purchase the same value of goods.
As it says all over that site, the FairTax is revenue neutral, so this is by design. You cannot magic more money into the economy by altering the tax system. You have to either raise or lower overall revenue rates, which the fairtax, by definition, does not.
I see no intrinsic problem with the FairTax system, but I am innately suspicious of anything that relies on people to consume their way through life. As oil will show us in the next couple of years, resources are finite; people should be encouraged to buy less petro-chemical-based-cheap-chinese-crap, not more.
Also, answers like this:
Are guaranteed to get my goat. If they have to avoid answering a fundamental question with crap like that, they must be hiding something. My guess is it's a certainly no better and possibly worse than the current system.
BTW, If you're going to publicly evangelise something at least take the time to understand how it works.
nickMy personal preferred tax system is the Flat Rate system, assuming it's applied properly (ie get rid of exemptions) and to companies, as in use in some Eastern European countries (eg Estonia). In this one you set a flat rate that every one pays, at a level that means overall tax income is the same, but gets rid of thousands of bureaucrats and puts millions of lawyers out of work. One ExxonMobil sized company paying 18% instead of 11% would probably allow everyone's tax bill to drop a couple of percentage points.
No doubt there are problems with it, but a simple system always works better than complex one.
If income tax is going to be replaced by a sales tax, that sales tax is going to have to be pretty damn high to compensate. If, as you say, the overall level of taxation is going to remain the same, then, by definition, the value of a person's income (assuming they are in the band that remains with the same level of taxation) must remain exactly the same. People aren't suddenly going to have a lot of extra "real" money to spend; the dollar in their pocket will now be worth a lot less as they are going to have to spend more money to get the same amount of things. Sounds like inflation to me.
As an aside, it seems to me that a government system that relied only on sales tax to collect revenues would be major risk from fluctuations in the economy. When people stop spending money for some reason the government is going to collect less tax. I don't think that would work.
Have you actually been to a muslim country? or any of the ones you list above? or in fact out of your state? The muslim countries you see on TV (Iran, Saudi, Kuwait) are not typical in any respect whatsoever. I know from experience that the Indonesians (the most populous muslim country on earth) have no problems partying, drinking, etc and I believe the Turks, the Malaysians and swathes of central asia have a similar outlook on life. No, the countries you hear about on TV all have fundamentalist governments or clergy. Now the strange thing about fundamentalists is that whatever creed they follow they all end up believing the same thing, so your christian fundamentalist gubment would not be very long in banning abortion, homosexuality, drinking and partying (in that order). (In fact that would make a good "fundmentalist test" for any government: US gets 1 point, Western Europe gets 0, Saudi Arabia gets 3, the old Afghanistan got 4).
Christianity is already marginalised in most western european nations (Italy being the exception. Britain in particular is full of empty and abandoned churchs), but strangely they are not currently under the control of, or about to fall to Islam. That is beacuse it's not christianity per se that has been marginalised, but the whole idea of religion. Most British people would consider anyone who went to church regularly a fanatic. Simple common-sense tells you that Islam is not about to sweep across Europe.
"Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
This phrase clearly does TWO things
1)It says the US Congress cannot setup a national Religion.
That phrase says no such thing. Do you recall the reason that your nation exists? In large part it was because England wanted rid of their fundamentalists and other religous agitators who were banned (lucky for them they weren't catholic, they were usually simply killed and were banned from travelling to the colonies). That phrase is part of the constitution as a direct response to the banning of new religions in England; essentially the founding fathers thumbing their nose at their former mother country.
oh, I was just making up numbers as an example. But if someone *could* make a gaming distro that was tuned to gaming performance, then that would be incentive for many people to at least try the switch.
Improving Hardware support and getting hardware manufacturers to play are the two areas linux needs to concentrate on if it is threaten windows. Once a distro can be guaranteed to work on the latest pre-built machine that you buy in PCMart *then* you can start to pressurise software manufacturers into making their products support linux.
It's a vicious circle; no one will use linux until they can run everyday software on it, but no one will make this software until many people are running linux. At the moment, many people CAN'T run linux so it's not even an issue (christ, centos won't work on my 3 year old dell laptop).
Actually, a good way in to the mainstream for linux would be gaming. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of high-end (home-user) sales are gaming oriented; a video card costs $500 alone. Anyone who spends money like that, and follows the yearly update cycles, probably wouldn't think too hard about switching to an OS that could play BF2 20% faster. Then, once it becomes established, the high street stores have to follow, then once it's in them, it enters the mainstream conciousness and becomes a realistic, and even attractive, alternative for mr and mrs sixpack.
Of course, getting software houses to produce linux friendly games would be part of the catch-22.
I disagree with that. Gaim is as buggy as hell on windows. It's partly the UI, so I guess that could be the GTK, but it's forever leaving tooltips over other apps, losing messages, ignoring its prefs and is a bitch to start up if you have logging on (take a tip from jajc guys, DON'T load the entire 2 year's log into history on startup). And some of the keybaord shortcuts are just plain wrong, I mean, as far as I know Ctrl-Z has alway been "Undo", not "Minimize"! who thought of that one?
(And I didn't even mention file transfers)
That's not liberal, that's socialist. Being Liberal means you support people's freedom to do things; socialism means you think society should support its less well off members. The two things are not neccesarily contradictory, but liberalism is usually seen as being against state intervention in any way. The rest of what you say is liberal, but that statement is, while not the exact opposite, pretty close.
OK, I'm just being an arse here, I know that the definition of "liberal" has been warped in the states, but I've never understood how this new political definition came about; socialist things are always attributed to the "liberals". Maybe you're not allowed to say "socialist" in the US? Most liberal ideas chime better with the right than the left anyway, eg smaller government, lower taxes.
Intel have plants all over the world, I don't think any US export restrictions are going to hamper them selling chips to anywhere. I don't know whether US export restrictions are meant to apply to IP or the physical product, but the fact that they have plants in China suggest neither, as the Chinese aren't going to let the US stop them sending stuff to N Korea if they want to.
Yes, that looks exactly like what I'm talking about...
and so forth. Anyway, what I was getting at was that Scalability and self-maintaining systems are good.
For me this is the thing makes me become bored of these games in the end. I really enjoy them while you're building stuff, but they are never scalable. City/Colonies/Planets/whatever should be able to look after themselves, and not have me constantly interfering to keep them running. This has tried to be implemented in the form of trade routes and I recall something about governors in Civ III or Alpha Centurai, but they never really worked properly. Hmmm... maybe forming cities into self governing states/provinces would work...
just thinking out loud here :)
I have no idea. Please, enlighten us...
BTW, you havn't had republican bombs in London for a *long* time, have you?
What the hell does that mean? You want more?! No bombs by anyone will do me fine.It's 4 years since the last IRA bomb in the UK: August 2001.
Dang, 94%, not 98%
Firstly: Irish Americans have been funding Irish Republicanism since long before the present troubles, dating back to late 1800s at least with the founding of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
I would agree with that.
Secondly: Very few people died in London, or even mainland UK in total, compared to how many died in Northern Ireland during the troubles. *Far* more civilians died in NI at the hands of the UK state apparatus than British civilians did in UK mainland at hands of IRA. (See this for source).
All that source tells me is that far, far more people died at the hands of republican paras than at the hands of the British Army: 1896 vs 316. It doesn't even mention the mainland. And those figures don't include all the knee-cappings and beatings of innocent people they just didn't like and probably exclude the killing of drug dealers to protect their own revenue source. From memory I'd say you're probably right, the IRA killed about 150 people on the mainland. This pales against the 3000 odd killed in total in NI though.This is waffle. The current peace process was well-underway, long before Sept 11th.
No, the GFA was dead in the water by Sept 01, Sinn Fein/IRA had no reason to keep to it as they were still well funded, if not well supported. The last bomb in the UK attributed to the IRA exploded in Ealing Broadway in London on the 3rd August 2001. Coincidence?Give the province back to Ireland.
Please, take it... You will find no support in England for keeping the province outside of the Government. It's a massive black hole that sucks in money and gives nothing but trouble back. Unfortunately, 98% of the Republic doesn't want it back either.yes, so it is. I haven't checked since I was last earning one :)
That is the mean though, I'm willing to bet the median is more like 18k. Just one BP executive will twist that average by quite a lot.
I was merely pointing out (perhaps a little flippantly) that it's common knowledge that the Irish communities of Boston and New York were the prime funders of the various IRA incarnations who killed many, many people in London thoughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. It escaped no-one's notice that the IRA's funding, and thence their will to fight, dried up around about 12th September 2001. Terrorism isn't fun when it happens to you.
(The laissez-faire American attitude to this is wonderfully demonstrated by the the Simpsons episode where it's St Patricks Day [bart gets drunk]. They show a British theme pub being blown up as part of the celebrations. How much would you like to bet that the Simpsons NEVER have a "plane flying into skyscrapers" gag?)
The English are of course the root problem of all the problems in NI today. Unfortunately that IS history and can't be undone. Centuries of mistreatment and propaganda have turned Ulster into a ghetto run by quasi-religious, gun-toting militia. The problem now is how to get rid of them. Nuke them all I say; let Odin sort them out
http://www.inac.org/
http://www.irishfreedomcommittee.net/
Look at the quality of that health care. Many, many people turn to the private sector.
Numbers? Source? It costs a couple of grand a year for private healthcare; the average wage is about 18k a year. I'm betting most people aren't spending 5% of their salary on private healthcare. Only for executives and visiting americans.
Violent crime rose dramatically since they took affect.
No, recorded violent crime rose dramatically. Previously a brawl involving 10 people constitued 1 crime. Now it constitutes 10.
Oh, and gun crime has fallen year on year since the year dot.