It's grammatically incorrect to use a comma before the word "and".
If the "and" is separating the second-to-last and last items in a list (e.g. "Bread, butter and honey", not "bread, butter, and honey") that is a debatable stance to take. (Although the opposing position is named after Oxford, so is hardly an un-British thing).
But if the comma OP put after "punctuation" indicates that they intended "and the associated troublesome punctuation" to be a parenthetical clause, in which case it was missing the opening comma. Also acceptable, and perhaps better for clarity so people don't mis-parse it like you did, would be to de-parenthesize that clause, by omitting the the comma after "punctuation", instead. Or else to use actual parentheses to demarcate the parenthetical clause.
I do actually propose exactly that. I would have UBI implemented by making tax refunds paid out in monthly installments instead of one lump sum (and let payments be made in monthly installments too, to be fair), then offering everyone a refundable tax credit of the UBI amount, and appending a new flat tax equal to that amount divided by the mean income. So if you make exactly the mean income, you see no change whatsoever. The further below the mean income you make, the faster your taxes drop. At some point they hit zero, then go negative, and when your income hits zero the taxes you "pay" are negative that refundable tax credit UBI amount, i.e. you get that much money, so nobody ever ends up with less than that much to live off of.
Looking from European angle here too, so basically you are saying they are Republicans advocating anarchism?
Looking from an anarchist angle here, no not at all. Republicans only want the democratic government to get out of the way of the various kinds of non-democratic governance that they approve of: corporate and religious. They want the powerful to get away with running roughshod over everyone else, and the masses to be powerless to band together to do anything to stop them. They love big government when it serves the interests of those already in power. That's the complete opposite of anarchism, which is radically democratic, anti-hierarchical, and egalitarian.
subtract the 25,000 Poverty Line (or whatever it is)
Just FYI, the current poverty line is around $25k for a family of four, which is usually two income-earning adults and two children. If you're ignoring the size of the household, and just taxing each individual, then a poverty line of $25k would mean that about half of the populace fall below that, since $25k is also about the median personal income. (That average household has two such incomes, which is what makes the median household income closer to $50k).
Also, that aside, your scheme looks remarkably similar to my basic income scheme, since you don't have any business logic to stop your formula from running negative. My proposed basic income scheme is a fixed tax credit of some fraction of the mean income, funded by a flat income tax of that same percent (and tax refunds changed to be paid out in monthly installments). So you pay:
X%*your_income - X%*mean_income.
If your_income < mean_income, you "pay" a negative amount, meaning you actually receive money; and if your_income = 0, that payout is equal to X%*mean_income, so nobody ever ends up with less than that to live off of, which is what makes it a basic income in effect. And because of the way incomes distribution is so skewed, with the mean so far above the median, this works out to a net payout to about 75% of the people, only a small net loss to most of the remaining 25%, and the math guarantees that that all balances out and has zero impact on the overall government budget.
If we set X%*mean_income = poverty_line, that's basically the same as your formula, except the tax rate is pegged to the poverty line threshold. Of course my formula is just for how to fund the basic income, and if you also want to fund other government services you need to figure out what Y% of the GDP you need to tax to cover that, and then tax people (X+Y)%*their_incomes - X%*mean_income so you end up with Y%*all_incomes total tax receipts.
and everyone pays for it, but what you pay is proportional to your income and what you get is fixed, so if your income is lower than mean (which most people’s are; mean is usually a lot higher than median) you see net benefit and only if it it’s above it (which most people’s aren’t) do you see net loss.
"Try to remember: grammar, and the associated troublesome punctuation, are the potential difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit."
It sounds like you are talking about dark energy rather than dark matter. Dark energy is whatever it is that is accelerating the expansion of the galaxies away from each other. Dark matter is whatever is keeping galaxies gravitationally bound into themselves given the rates that we observe them spinning (at which rates the mass accounted for by visible matter would not be enough to keep all the stars in them from flying apart into intergalactic space).
If you find what you're looking for, let the rest of us know too, because as far as I can tell pretty much the entire internet is like this now (except for small enclaves of equally-reactionary backlash to that).
They're called lakes. You dam up a river or creek somewhere. When it rains, the water level goes up. When it's not raining, it gradually goes down, because the water is being used municipally.
There's a lake that's 60-70 years old that supplies most of the water to my hometown. There was a drought during my childhood, and I grew up knowing that lake to have two islands, a big one and a little one. Turns out the little one wasn't supposed to exist: that was a bit of lake bed peeking above the water surface because it had gotten so low. After the El Niño storms in the mid-90s, the lake was full to the brim, and remained mostly full for most of my adult life, but slowly dwindled down to record lows after such a long drought, so the point that instead of one island, instead of two islands, it had only two peninsulas, because so much of it had run dry you could walk out to either island on the dry lake bed.
I should go take a look at the lake this weekend, after all of the heavy rains we've been getting lately, and see how many islands there are in it now.
I'm not sure that we would be able to hear the supernova, for the same reason I'm not sure you'd be able to hear a gunshot in a hurricane. A given star system's interplanetary medium is generally comoving with the star, and blowing outward with that star's solar wind. That star is then moving quite rapidly through the interstellar medium, and there's a "bow shock" where the two meet, where an object traveling through the interplanetary medium would suddenly be hit by the different speed and direction of the interstellar medium. (We've seen that happen when our Voyager probes exited the solar system). So, even as big and powerful as a supernova is, I'm not sure that its shockwave through its own interplanetary medium would be enough to continue across that threshold out into the interstellar medium, just like the shockwave in the air from the muzzle of a gun being fired might easily be lost in the greater motion of the air around it if that air happens to be roaring like a hurricane. (Or perhaps better than the hurricane metaphor: imagine two people falling through the atmosphere, and one of them fires off a gun. I expect that the sound of the gunshot might not travel very far, over the rush of air swirling around it. Stars are "falling through" the interstellar medium like that, so the same problem might be in effect).
The kinds of particles, like for example electrons, that travel through vacuum, are waves in quantum fields. There is an electron field everywhere, some amount of "electron-ness" everywhere, and an electron particle is an excitation of that field. That particle would be massless, like all particles would be, if it weren't for some of its kinetic energy being bound up in interactions with other fields; in the case of free-travelling electrons, the Higgs field. Mass is just energy that's bound up doing something other than moving; most of the mass of a proton, for instance, is the binding energy of the color force holding its quarks together, way way way more than the rest-mass of those quarks (again, from the Higgs field) contributes.
Phonons are "quasiparticles" in that they are excitations of something other than a quantum field; they're compression waves in a medium like air or water. Quantum fields are everywhere, but air and water aren't everywhere, so phonons can't travel through a vacuum. To say that they have mass is, most likely (not having read all this new research yet), to say that some of their energy is bound up doing something other than moving the constituent particles of their medium. Or perhaps, since their mass is negative, that they are constantly drawing energy from their medium? In any case, it's definitely not to say that they are made of some kind of matter, which can then carry itself through the vacuum.
FWIW though, sound can travel through what we normally think of as "vacuum", since true vacuum doesn't actually exist. The space between planets is filled with a thin gas called the interplanetary medium; the space between stars is likewise filled with an even thinner interstellar medium; and the space between galaxies with an even thinner intergalactic medium. A very high-amplitude long-wavelength compression wave in this medium can travel through it, just so long as the wave moves the constituent particles hard enough and far enough that they can actually reach their nearest neighbor particles, quite some ways away in such a thin medium, and induce a similar motion in those.
Republicans actually didn't coin the term "fake news". It was beginning to come into popular circulation around the same time as Trump's election, to refer to actual fake news sites like these, and the ones that promulgated the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and such. Then Trump started smearing every actual reputable news organization with the term, and now the term just sounds like a crazy Trumpism, instead of the useful descriptor of actually fake sites actually purporting to be news, like these.
What happens next is that their best out is to sell the rental house, but no other potential landlords will be buying (for the same reasons they're selling), only people who need the housing to live in, and they'll only be able to pay what they can actually afford without relying on someone else to pay their mortgage for them like a landlord wordl, so the former landlords will have to sell at those affordable prices (or else not sell at all and take a total loss), meaning the cost of housing drops back down to reasonable levels.
Or, looking at the situation the other way around: the existence of rent in the first place inflated prices above what they naturally would have been in a market without rent.
To be crude about it, you probably don't need to suck a dick to have an opinion about whether you are going to enjoy the experience.
Coworker told me a joke with that as its crux once:
Coworker: "Are you gay?" Me: "...no?" Coworker: "Well how do you know? Have you ever sucked a cock before?" Me: "...no." (That was a lie, but I was in the closet back then). Coworker: "So then you don't really know. See me, I was in the Navy. I've sucked a few cocks. I didn't like it, so I know I'm not gay. You? Never sucked a cock before? Might be gay."
and of course other substitutes that are just not right in food (cellulose, fibers etc.).
You know that cellulose is the chemical name for dietary fiber, which is something very good for you that is sadly lacking in a lot of processed foods, right?
Microsoft should be broken up by DoJ again in an antitrust action
That implies that they were broken up by the DoJ once before. They were found guilty of antitrust violations, yes, but before any action could be taken against them Bush took office and his DoJ declined to follow up on the matter.
I saw some meteors, like the "shooting star" type entering our atmosphere, very near the moon in the sky while watching the total eclipse. Hadn't even occurred to me that some of them might actually be near the moon in space as well. Obviously not the ones I saw, since those were crossing our atmosphere and the moon is nowhere near our atmosphere, but I guess there was a shower of them and some were further away than the ones I saw, far enough to hit the moon.
Slashdot Mirror
It's grammatically incorrect to use a comma before the word "and".
If the "and" is separating the second-to-last and last items in a list (e.g. "Bread, butter and honey", not "bread, butter, and honey") that is a debatable stance to take. (Although the opposing position is named after Oxford, so is hardly an un-British thing).
But if the comma OP put after "punctuation" indicates that they intended "and the associated troublesome punctuation" to be a parenthetical clause, in which case it was missing the opening comma. Also acceptable, and perhaps better for clarity so people don't mis-parse it like you did, would be to de-parenthesize that clause, by omitting the the comma after "punctuation", instead. Or else to use actual parentheses to demarcate the parenthetical clause.
I do actually propose exactly that. I would have UBI implemented by making tax refunds paid out in monthly installments instead of one lump sum (and let payments be made in monthly installments too, to be fair), then offering everyone a refundable tax credit of the UBI amount, and appending a new flat tax equal to that amount divided by the mean income. So if you make exactly the mean income, you see no change whatsoever. The further below the mean income you make, the faster your taxes drop. At some point they hit zero, then go negative, and when your income hits zero the taxes you "pay" are negative that refundable tax credit UBI amount, i.e. you get that much money, so nobody ever ends up with less than that much to live off of.
Looking from European angle here too, so basically you are saying they are Republicans advocating anarchism?
Looking from an anarchist angle here, no not at all. Republicans only want the democratic government to get out of the way of the various kinds of non-democratic governance that they approve of: corporate and religious. They want the powerful to get away with running roughshod over everyone else, and the masses to be powerless to band together to do anything to stop them. They love big government when it serves the interests of those already in power. That's the complete opposite of anarchism, which is radically democratic, anti-hierarchical, and egalitarian.
subtract the 25,000 Poverty Line (or whatever it is)
Just FYI, the current poverty line is around $25k for a family of four, which is usually two income-earning adults and two children. If you're ignoring the size of the household, and just taxing each individual, then a poverty line of $25k would mean that about half of the populace fall below that, since $25k is also about the median personal income. (That average household has two such incomes, which is what makes the median household income closer to $50k).
Also, that aside, your scheme looks remarkably similar to my basic income scheme, since you don't have any business logic to stop your formula from running negative. My proposed basic income scheme is a fixed tax credit of some fraction of the mean income, funded by a flat income tax of that same percent (and tax refunds changed to be paid out in monthly installments). So you pay:
X%*your_income - X%*mean_income.
If your_income < mean_income, you "pay" a negative amount, meaning you actually receive money; and if your_income = 0, that payout is equal to X%*mean_income, so nobody ever ends up with less than that to live off of, which is what makes it a basic income in effect. And because of the way incomes distribution is so skewed, with the mean so far above the median, this works out to a net payout to about 75% of the people, only a small net loss to most of the remaining 25%, and the math guarantees that that all balances out and has zero impact on the overall government budget.
If we set X%*mean_income = poverty_line, that's basically the same as your formula, except the tax rate is pegged to the poverty line threshold. Of course my formula is just for how to fund the basic income, and if you also want to fund other government services you need to figure out what Y% of the GDP you need to tax to cover that, and then tax people (X+Y)%*their_incomes - X%*mean_income so you end up with Y%*all_incomes total tax receipts.
the U in UBI means universal. everyone gets it.
and everyone pays for it, but what you pay is proportional to your income and what you get is fixed, so if your income is lower than mean (which most people’s are; mean is usually a lot higher than median) you see net benefit and only if it it’s above it (which most people’s aren’t) do you see net loss.
Not sure if this was the joke, but:
"Try to remember: grammar, and the associated troublesome punctuation, are the potential difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit."
The bullet cluster would like a word with you.
It sounds like you are talking about dark energy rather than dark matter. Dark energy is whatever it is that is accelerating the expansion of the galaxies away from each other. Dark matter is whatever is keeping galaxies gravitationally bound into themselves given the rates that we observe them spinning (at which rates the mass accounted for by visible matter would not be enough to keep all the stars in them from flying apart into intergalactic space).
Slightly apropos, the word "quark" in German is slang for "rubbish" or nonsense.
Any connection to "quark cheese" scraps? (Like maybe those bits of cheese were considered "rubbish", discardable?)
an aquifer is something different
this is not an aquifer
If you find what you're looking for, let the rest of us know too, because as far as I can tell pretty much the entire internet is like this now (except for small enclaves of equally-reactionary backlash to that).
They're called lakes. You dam up a river or creek somewhere. When it rains, the water level goes up. When it's not raining, it gradually goes down, because the water is being used municipally.
There's a lake that's 60-70 years old that supplies most of the water to my hometown. There was a drought during my childhood, and I grew up knowing that lake to have two islands, a big one and a little one. Turns out the little one wasn't supposed to exist: that was a bit of lake bed peeking above the water surface because it had gotten so low. After the El Niño storms in the mid-90s, the lake was full to the brim, and remained mostly full for most of my adult life, but slowly dwindled down to record lows after such a long drought, so the point that instead of one island, instead of two islands, it had only two peninsulas, because so much of it had run dry you could walk out to either island on the dry lake bed.
I should go take a look at the lake this weekend, after all of the heavy rains we've been getting lately, and see how many islands there are in it now.
I'm not sure that we would be able to hear the supernova, for the same reason I'm not sure you'd be able to hear a gunshot in a hurricane. A given star system's interplanetary medium is generally comoving with the star, and blowing outward with that star's solar wind. That star is then moving quite rapidly through the interstellar medium, and there's a "bow shock" where the two meet, where an object traveling through the interplanetary medium would suddenly be hit by the different speed and direction of the interstellar medium. (We've seen that happen when our Voyager probes exited the solar system). So, even as big and powerful as a supernova is, I'm not sure that its shockwave through its own interplanetary medium would be enough to continue across that threshold out into the interstellar medium, just like the shockwave in the air from the muzzle of a gun being fired might easily be lost in the greater motion of the air around it if that air happens to be roaring like a hurricane. (Or perhaps better than the hurricane metaphor: imagine two people falling through the atmosphere, and one of them fires off a gun. I expect that the sound of the gunshot might not travel very far, over the rush of air swirling around it. Stars are "falling through" the interstellar medium like that, so the same problem might be in effect).
"Mass" isn't the same thing as "matter".
The kinds of particles, like for example electrons, that travel through vacuum, are waves in quantum fields. There is an electron field everywhere, some amount of "electron-ness" everywhere, and an electron particle is an excitation of that field. That particle would be massless, like all particles would be, if it weren't for some of its kinetic energy being bound up in interactions with other fields; in the case of free-travelling electrons, the Higgs field. Mass is just energy that's bound up doing something other than moving; most of the mass of a proton, for instance, is the binding energy of the color force holding its quarks together, way way way more than the rest-mass of those quarks (again, from the Higgs field) contributes.
Phonons are "quasiparticles" in that they are excitations of something other than a quantum field; they're compression waves in a medium like air or water. Quantum fields are everywhere, but air and water aren't everywhere, so phonons can't travel through a vacuum. To say that they have mass is, most likely (not having read all this new research yet), to say that some of their energy is bound up doing something other than moving the constituent particles of their medium. Or perhaps, since their mass is negative, that they are constantly drawing energy from their medium? In any case, it's definitely not to say that they are made of some kind of matter, which can then carry itself through the vacuum.
FWIW though, sound can travel through what we normally think of as "vacuum", since true vacuum doesn't actually exist. The space between planets is filled with a thin gas called the interplanetary medium; the space between stars is likewise filled with an even thinner interstellar medium; and the space between galaxies with an even thinner intergalactic medium. A very high-amplitude long-wavelength compression wave in this medium can travel through it, just so long as the wave moves the constituent particles hard enough and far enough that they can actually reach their nearest neighbor particles, quite some ways away in such a thin medium, and induce a similar motion in those.
You must have bought your UID off of someone much older than you really are, because you sound like you must be new here.
Slashdot has been political since at least the 2000 election.
Maybe you've just been living under a rock since the 90s?
Republicans actually didn't coin the term "fake news". It was beginning to come into popular circulation around the same time as Trump's election, to refer to actual fake news sites like these, and the ones that promulgated the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and such. Then Trump started smearing every actual reputable news organization with the term, and now the term just sounds like a crazy Trumpism, instead of the useful descriptor of actually fake sites actually purporting to be news, like these.
"Alternative facts" is all theirs, though.
What happens next is that their best out is to sell the rental house, but no other potential landlords will be buying (for the same reasons they're selling), only people who need the housing to live in, and they'll only be able to pay what they can actually afford without relying on someone else to pay their mortgage for them like a landlord wordl, so the former landlords will have to sell at those affordable prices (or else not sell at all and take a total loss), meaning the cost of housing drops back down to reasonable levels.
Or, looking at the situation the other way around: the existence of rent in the first place inflated prices above what they naturally would have been in a market without rent.
To be crude about it, you probably don't need to suck a dick to have an opinion about whether you are going to enjoy the experience.
Coworker told me a joke with that as its crux once:
Coworker: "Are you gay?"
Me: "...no?"
Coworker: "Well how do you know? Have you ever sucked a cock before?"
Me: "...no." (That was a lie, but I was in the closet back then).
Coworker: "So then you don't really know. See me, I was in the Navy. I've sucked a few cocks. I didn't like it, so I know I'm not gay. You? Never sucked a cock before? Might be gay."
I wish I could give you a Funny mod.
There is also a Shazam movie coming out soon. And nowadays, his superhero name really is Shazam, despite the TVtrope title to the contrary.
Having a DC character named "Captain Marvel" was always a bad idea.
That's not "no longer capitalism", that's a consequence of capitalism.
and of course other substitutes that are just not right in food (cellulose, fibers etc.).
You know that cellulose is the chemical name for dietary fiber, which is something very good for you that is sadly lacking in a lot of processed foods, right?
Microsoft should be broken up by DoJ again in an antitrust action
That implies that they were broken up by the DoJ once before. They were found guilty of antitrust violations, yes, but before any action could be taken against them Bush took office and his DoJ declined to follow up on the matter.
I saw some meteors, like the "shooting star" type entering our atmosphere, very near the moon in the sky while watching the total eclipse. Hadn't even occurred to me that some of them might actually be near the moon in space as well. Obviously not the ones I saw, since those were crossing our atmosphere and the moon is nowhere near our atmosphere, but I guess there was a shower of them and some were further away than the ones I saw, far enough to hit the moon.
<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Launch_and_early_growth</ref>