You're talking about borrowing money to invest it. I'm talking about borrowing money that will be immediately spent on a house and unavailable to invest (besides the appreciation on the house).
You're either paying rent and saving and investing the rest of your money (which will eventually go toward buying a house), or paying interest and also paying down the principal debt on a house with the money you would otherwise be saving and investing. If the rent is lower than the interest on the mortgage, that leaves you more money to be investing (toward future purchase of a house) than you would be paying down the principal debt on a house after interest, and so gets you close to home ownership sooner. At some point you will have enough saved that you can put a big enough down payment down that the interest on a mortgage will be lower than rent, at which point it makes more sense to be mortgaging than renting.
The interest paid on the mortgage you'd otherwise have is every bit as pissed away as the rent on the apartment. Interest is just rent on money, rent is just interest on borrowed non-monetary capital, they're the same thing. You want to minimize them both, and sometimes you can pay less in rent than you can in interest, depending on what housing options are available, in which case you save more money renting than borrowing. Money that should be put toward eventually buying without having to borrow as much, but still.
Treasury bonds are an investment instrument. Everybody with a balanced portfolio of investments will have some of them as well as some diversified stocks, in different proportions relative to your investment strategy. Apple just has a fuckton of money, and of course has it invested so it's not losing value while they're not using it, so a significant fraction of that fuckton of money is going to be in treasury bonds.
That doesn't make the government beholden to Apple or anything. It's not like Apple can say "give me back the money you owe me now, or else". If anything it makes Apple more dependent on the Federal government, and its future ability to pay back its debts.
It's not about asking women to trust men, it's about not asking men to trust women.
If each party can see to it on their own that they're not going to make a baby, then nobody has to take anybody's word that they're handling it on their end, and if they're both taking separate precautions the pregnancy prevention is even more effective anyway.
Pro-gun people usually do split the hairs of the 2nd amendment in exactly that same way: the amendment guarantees an individual right to do a kind of activity (have and use a weapon or printing press), it doesn't enshrine any specific institution ("the press" or "the militia").
That said, the freedom of the press being an individual right doesn't say anything against people exercising that freedom being an important part of keeping our government in check, so it was kind of a non-sequitur on DeplorableCodeMonkey's part. I guess it's not technically a part of the "checks and balances" in the sense of "separation of powers" (since "the press" as an institution don't have any special legal powers), and maybe that's all he meant?
Except everyone's income doesn't go up an even $10k/yr, because people are also shouldering the cost of paying out that money, in proportion to their income. People at the very very bottom see their income go up $10k/yr. People in the middle see no change whatsoever because they're paying the same as they're getting. People at the top see a net loss. There's not $10k/person/year extra money in the economy, there's the same amount of money going around, it's just that who gets how much of it gets leveled out a little. A lot of people at the very bottom see a huge percent gain in their income, people around the middle don't notice much, and a few people at the top see a small percent loss, but on the whole there's the same amount of money around.
I'm not certain what a "gap year plan" is, but what you describe is what I picture when I hear that phrase, and it's included in their list of acceptable plans.
If the student's plan is "I'm going to be an EE, and here's the acceptance letter from the college I'm going to go to to do that", then they pass.
After that, if they decide to do CS instead, that's fine. The diploma doesn't get retroactively withdrawn if you don't follow through with the plan.
Can't get into a good school? Can't get a good job? That's fine: "I'm going to go to crappy local community college and try to transfer to a better school from there" is an acceptable plan too. CCC will accept anybody so anybody can say they're going to do that. "I'm going to flip burgers part time at the local burger shack who'll hire anyone until I can figure out what the fuck else to do for a living" is an acceptable plan too.
You're going to do something after you graduate high school. This new law basically just adds a mandatory assignment to senior year: show us what you're going to do after you graduate. It can be basically anything. Go to any school. Get any job. They can be shitty ones if you can't find better ones. You're going to end up doing one of those things or another eventually (or you're going to starve to death in the street), so just pick one and you pass. And then you can change your mind later if you figure out that a better option than those is actually available.
All this assignment does is force to you figure out which, of the options immediately available to you, is the best one you can actually start doing now, and then show that you're going to start doing that. After that you can change direction all you want, so no opportunity is lost. It just makes you think about your future, and that's not a bad thing.
It doesn't say you have to do your plan, just that you have to have a plan. If in senior year of high school you thought you'd end up an EE and put that down as your plan, but then switched to CS and then math along the way, you met the requirements just fine.
This is such a ridiculously low bar. Basically any answer besides your "smoke a lot of dope" joke gets a passing grade. It's little more than asking "what do you want to be when you grow up" (with the additional part being "and how do you think you're going to become that?"). You don't have to actually do that "when you grow up", just show that you have some idea for what you're going to do next. If the plans change along the way, no problem, just so long as you have somewhere or another in mind at the start.
Taxing robot "workers" is dumb. They're not people. Tax the people who own the robots, but not because they own the robots, just tax them like everyone else, and fund a basic income with that tax. Then if robots make their owners super rich and make a lot of other people unemployable, those owners will end up paying a higher share of the taxes and the newly-unemployables will keep a bigger share of their basic income, automatically. The whole system can be robot-agnostic and perfectly address the potential robot problem just as well as any of a myriad of similar problems that we've already got.
Assuming that an UBI will be paid for by taxes, it is equivalent to a negative income tax. Paying the UBI as a tax credit would make it explicitly a negative income tax. Nothing really changes but the name, the effect is exactly the same.
That is how I advocate an UBI should be done:
First, in preparation, make tax refunds paid out in monthly installments instead of in one lump sum (and to be fair and symmetrical, allow tax payments still due after filing to be paid in monthly installments too). Most people, who already get at least some small tax refund, will thus get a small payment from the government every month right away with just this change.
Then, give everyone the same tax credit of some (initially small) fraction of the mean income, and fund that by an additional flat tax of that same fraction of their own income. (So e.g. if you start with a 1% mean income tax credit, it's funded with a 1% flat tax). That is automatically completely revenue-neutral (because that's how averages work), but reduces the tax burden / increases the tax refund of low-income people, shifting it to high-income people, with people near the mean income seeing almost no change. (Because 1% of the mean income minus 1% of your income is greater than zero the further below the mean your income is, exactly zero when your income is the mean, and less than zero the further above the mean your income is).
Then, slowly increase that percent until the tax credit being given is at least equal to a poverty-line income. Et voila, you now have a tax-funded basic income. Make the tax credit received from this program count as "income" for the purpose of means-tested welfare programs, and watch people gradually fall off the rolls of those means-tested programs as the percent is increased, until most of them can be shuttered entirely, reducing everyone's taxes in the process.
I'm not sure where this idea that sexual preference is inherent and unchangeable comes from. Well, some preferences seem to be, like being straight or gay.
From what I can tell, all these notions of sexual orientation and gender identity essentialism seem to stem from a defensive posture taken by the queer community, one that (as a genderqueer and pansexual person myself) has always seemed to have really unfortunate implications to me. It seems like the "it's not a choice!" mantra stems from a reaction to people saying that queer people are making bad (immoral, etc) life choices. But if something isn't a choice, so goes the folk notion of moral responsibility at least, then you can't be blamed for it, so to escape those attacks people take up the position that there's no choice involved.
I've always thought that had the unfortunate implication of ceding the attacker's claims that there's something wrong with the behavior/feelings/etc in the first place, and just claiming "I can't help it!" But if (as in most cases of e.g. trans or gay people, not with pedophilia here) there's nothing wrong in the first place, then there's no "helping it" to be done at all. Do you like any weird foods that other people think are gross? Why do you like them? Is that a matter of free choice, nature, or nurture? (It's probably a complex mix of all of them but) it doesn't matter, so long as we're not talking about killing people to eat their brains or something, because even if everybody else thinks your preferences are disgusting, you don't have to justify them to anyone but yourself.
Could I possibly avoid being attracted to who I'm attracted to? Maybe, I don't know, it's probably a complicated and difficult question to answer, and outside of idle academic curiosity I don't want and don't need to bother trying to answer it because it doesn't matter, I don't have to avoid being attracted to who I'm attracted to, because there's nothing wrong with it.
Maybe with pedophiles it is more important to answer that question. Or maybe it's just enough to make sure they know how to control their actions in spite of their feelings, like everyone should be able to anyway. (Most men's sexual attraction to women doesn't compel them to rape them, even most men who aren't able to find consenting partners usually manage to just go without, however much it might pain them to do so.) Which highlights the other side of the unfortunate implications the "I don't have a choice!" plea has. If someone has some psychological compulsion to do something terrible, like the aforementioned brain-eating cannibalism, that doesn't get them off the hook for it. The just purpose of punishment is not to inflict suffering on people for their bad choices, it's to protect other people from their bad behavior, if possible by reforming the perpetrators not to attempt those behaviors again, and to making them alone bear the cost of those behaviors, and if the perpetrators suffering is a necessary side-effect of achieving those goals, then so be it. If something is truly not a choice, then inflicting suffering won't be effective at reform, but that doesn't mean you just let the perps go because they couldn't help it. You still need to make sure restitution is paid to their victims and future victims are protected. However you can manage to do that. It doesn't matter that inflicting suffering won't accomplish that because they don't have a choice; a just society still has to do something about it. If that means locking them up for the protection of others then it doesn't matter one way or another that they didn't have a choice, because it's not about beating them over the head for their bad choices, it's just about protecting other people.
"Eudaimonic" in general English means "conducive to happiness" because "eudaimonia" is a Greek word that most closely translates into English as "happiness", but in classical Greek philosophy "eudaimonia" means a specific kind of happiness. (Similar to how there are a bunch of different words for love: eros, agape, philos, etc). TFA is saying that that kind of happiness is what one should pursue, as opposed to a different kind of happiness.
Specifically, eudaimonia, which literally translated to something more like "good spirits", means something like "a life well lived", a life of achievement and intellectual self-satisfaction; as opposed to something like hedonia, which is just physiological pleasure.
And FWIW if Bernie had gotten the Democratic nomination I would have voted for him to reward the Democrats for a step in the right direction (and also because Bernie was actually a better candidate than Stein, having similar policies but more experience and effective passion).
I'm not a Green Party member, but I usually vote Greens where available. I voted for Stein understanding that my electors would go to Clinton anyway because I'm in California (hoping to ever-so-slightly entice the Democrats to more Greenish policies in the future to recapture that vote), but if I lived somewhere that that would have made it likely my electors would have gone to Trump, I've voted Clinton in a heartbeat.
And it occurs to me now, the methods to do this are already well-known. It's basically just a 'users who liked this also liked...' Like you'd see on innumerable shopping sites already, but applied to posts instead of products.
You have a relation score to other users based primarily on how much you've liked/disliked (or thumbed-up or -down, or +/-1'd, whatever) their posts. That relation score determines how likely you are to see something else from that user in the future. If you like a lot of some user's posts, you'll see more stuff from that user. If you dislike a lot of some user's posts, you start seeing less of their stuff. However, that filtering is transitive. You will also see more of the stuff that's liked by users whose stuff you like. If Alice likes a lot of Bob's posts and Bob likes a lot of Charlie's posts then Alice will start seeing more stuff from Charlie too.
And, in solution to the problem at hand, you also see less of the stuff that's liked by that user you don't like. So if you dislike a bunch of posts by a bigot who likes a bunch of other bigots' posts, you'll automatically see less of those other bigots' posts too. So you only have to start telling the system that you don't like a few of a certain kind of people (or rather, a few of a certain kind of post), and then because those people (who posted that stuff) are telling the system what they like (so that they can see more of it), the system will know what not to show you ahead of time.
I wasn't telling you what was comprehensible to you or not, obviously; I was trying to help someone who didn't understand it to figure out what, specifically, might be throwing them off, and so to understand it with that removed.
The "that" would be correct if the copula were "is" rather than "to be". You can find that an X is a Y, or you can find an X to be a Y, but you can't grammatically find that an X to be a Y.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking about borrowing money to invest it. I'm talking about borrowing money that will be immediately spent on a house and unavailable to invest (besides the appreciation on the house).
You're either paying rent and saving and investing the rest of your money (which will eventually go toward buying a house), or paying interest and also paying down the principal debt on a house with the money you would otherwise be saving and investing. If the rent is lower than the interest on the mortgage, that leaves you more money to be investing (toward future purchase of a house) than you would be paying down the principal debt on a house after interest, and so gets you close to home ownership sooner. At some point you will have enough saved that you can put a big enough down payment down that the interest on a mortgage will be lower than rent, at which point it makes more sense to be mortgaging than renting.
In this scenario, Apple is the bank, not the USG. So if Apple loans enough money, the USG owns them.
The interest paid on the mortgage you'd otherwise have is every bit as pissed away as the rent on the apartment. Interest is just rent on money, rent is just interest on borrowed non-monetary capital, they're the same thing. You want to minimize them both, and sometimes you can pay less in rent than you can in interest, depending on what housing options are available, in which case you save more money renting than borrowing. Money that should be put toward eventually buying without having to borrow as much, but still.
Treasury bonds are an investment instrument. Everybody with a balanced portfolio of investments will have some of them as well as some diversified stocks, in different proportions relative to your investment strategy. Apple just has a fuckton of money, and of course has it invested so it's not losing value while they're not using it, so a significant fraction of that fuckton of money is going to be in treasury bonds.
That doesn't make the government beholden to Apple or anything. It's not like Apple can say "give me back the money you owe me now, or else". If anything it makes Apple more dependent on the Federal government, and its future ability to pay back its debts.
It's not about asking women to trust men, it's about not asking men to trust women.
If each party can see to it on their own that they're not going to make a baby, then nobody has to take anybody's word that they're handling it on their end, and if they're both taking separate precautions the pregnancy prevention is even more effective anyway.
What is with that title? "EPA. Reversed Course on Ozone Rule"? Why is there a period after "EPA"?
"Mathematics" is singular. Do you say "mathematics is..." or "mathematics are..."?
"Maths" is an error based on misunderstanding that fact.
Thank you.
You realize that MtF transgendered people stop ovulating due to hormone treatments, right?
I think you mean FtM. MtF people don't have ovaries to begin with.
Pro-gun people usually do split the hairs of the 2nd amendment in exactly that same way: the amendment guarantees an individual right to do a kind of activity (have and use a weapon or printing press), it doesn't enshrine any specific institution ("the press" or "the militia").
That said, the freedom of the press being an individual right doesn't say anything against people exercising that freedom being an important part of keeping our government in check, so it was kind of a non-sequitur on DeplorableCodeMonkey's part. I guess it's not technically a part of the "checks and balances" in the sense of "separation of powers" (since "the press" as an institution don't have any special legal powers), and maybe that's all he meant?
Except everyone's income doesn't go up an even $10k/yr, because people are also shouldering the cost of paying out that money, in proportion to their income. People at the very very bottom see their income go up $10k/yr. People in the middle see no change whatsoever because they're paying the same as they're getting. People at the top see a net loss. There's not $10k/person/year extra money in the economy, there's the same amount of money going around, it's just that who gets how much of it gets leveled out a little. A lot of people at the very bottom see a huge percent gain in their income, people around the middle don't notice much, and a few people at the top see a small percent loss, but on the whole there's the same amount of money around.
I'm not certain what a "gap year plan" is, but what you describe is what I picture when I hear that phrase, and it's included in their list of acceptable plans.
Receiving an acceptance letter to start doing a program doesn't mean you have to follow through on the program.
If the student's plan is "I'm going to be an EE, and here's the acceptance letter from the college I'm going to go to to do that", then they pass.
After that, if they decide to do CS instead, that's fine. The diploma doesn't get retroactively withdrawn if you don't follow through with the plan.
Can't get into a good school? Can't get a good job? That's fine: "I'm going to go to crappy local community college and try to transfer to a better school from there" is an acceptable plan too. CCC will accept anybody so anybody can say they're going to do that. "I'm going to flip burgers part time at the local burger shack who'll hire anyone until I can figure out what the fuck else to do for a living" is an acceptable plan too.
You're going to do something after you graduate high school. This new law basically just adds a mandatory assignment to senior year: show us what you're going to do after you graduate. It can be basically anything. Go to any school. Get any job. They can be shitty ones if you can't find better ones. You're going to end up doing one of those things or another eventually (or you're going to starve to death in the street), so just pick one and you pass. And then you can change your mind later if you figure out that a better option than those is actually available.
All this assignment does is force to you figure out which, of the options immediately available to you, is the best one you can actually start doing now, and then show that you're going to start doing that. After that you can change direction all you want, so no opportunity is lost. It just makes you think about your future, and that's not a bad thing.
It doesn't say you have to do your plan, just that you have to have a plan. If in senior year of high school you thought you'd end up an EE and put that down as your plan, but then switched to CS and then math along the way, you met the requirements just fine.
This is such a ridiculously low bar. Basically any answer besides your "smoke a lot of dope" joke gets a passing grade. It's little more than asking "what do you want to be when you grow up" (with the additional part being "and how do you think you're going to become that?"). You don't have to actually do that "when you grow up", just show that you have some idea for what you're going to do next. If the plans change along the way, no problem, just so long as you have somewhere or another in mind at the start.
Taxing robot "workers" is dumb. They're not people. Tax the people who own the robots, but not because they own the robots, just tax them like everyone else, and fund a basic income with that tax. Then if robots make their owners super rich and make a lot of other people unemployable, those owners will end up paying a higher share of the taxes and the newly-unemployables will keep a bigger share of their basic income, automatically. The whole system can be robot-agnostic and perfectly address the potential robot problem just as well as any of a myriad of similar problems that we've already got.
Assuming that an UBI will be paid for by taxes, it is equivalent to a negative income tax. Paying the UBI as a tax credit would make it explicitly a negative income tax. Nothing really changes but the name, the effect is exactly the same.
That is how I advocate an UBI should be done:
First, in preparation, make tax refunds paid out in monthly installments instead of in one lump sum (and to be fair and symmetrical, allow tax payments still due after filing to be paid in monthly installments too). Most people, who already get at least some small tax refund, will thus get a small payment from the government every month right away with just this change.
Then, give everyone the same tax credit of some (initially small) fraction of the mean income, and fund that by an additional flat tax of that same fraction of their own income. (So e.g. if you start with a 1% mean income tax credit, it's funded with a 1% flat tax). That is automatically completely revenue-neutral (because that's how averages work), but reduces the tax burden / increases the tax refund of low-income people, shifting it to high-income people, with people near the mean income seeing almost no change. (Because 1% of the mean income minus 1% of your income is greater than zero the further below the mean your income is, exactly zero when your income is the mean, and less than zero the further above the mean your income is).
Then, slowly increase that percent until the tax credit being given is at least equal to a poverty-line income. Et voila, you now have a tax-funded basic income. Make the tax credit received from this program count as "income" for the purpose of means-tested welfare programs, and watch people gradually fall off the rolls of those means-tested programs as the percent is increased, until most of them can be shuttered entirely, reducing everyone's taxes in the process.
I'm not sure where this idea that sexual preference is inherent and unchangeable comes from. Well, some preferences seem to be, like being straight or gay.
From what I can tell, all these notions of sexual orientation and gender identity essentialism seem to stem from a defensive posture taken by the queer community, one that (as a genderqueer and pansexual person myself) has always seemed to have really unfortunate implications to me. It seems like the "it's not a choice!" mantra stems from a reaction to people saying that queer people are making bad (immoral, etc) life choices. But if something isn't a choice, so goes the folk notion of moral responsibility at least, then you can't be blamed for it, so to escape those attacks people take up the position that there's no choice involved.
I've always thought that had the unfortunate implication of ceding the attacker's claims that there's something wrong with the behavior/feelings/etc in the first place, and just claiming "I can't help it!" But if (as in most cases of e.g. trans or gay people, not with pedophilia here) there's nothing wrong in the first place, then there's no "helping it" to be done at all. Do you like any weird foods that other people think are gross? Why do you like them? Is that a matter of free choice, nature, or nurture? (It's probably a complex mix of all of them but) it doesn't matter, so long as we're not talking about killing people to eat their brains or something, because even if everybody else thinks your preferences are disgusting, you don't have to justify them to anyone but yourself.
Could I possibly avoid being attracted to who I'm attracted to? Maybe, I don't know, it's probably a complicated and difficult question to answer, and outside of idle academic curiosity I don't want and don't need to bother trying to answer it because it doesn't matter, I don't have to avoid being attracted to who I'm attracted to, because there's nothing wrong with it.
Maybe with pedophiles it is more important to answer that question. Or maybe it's just enough to make sure they know how to control their actions in spite of their feelings, like everyone should be able to anyway. (Most men's sexual attraction to women doesn't compel them to rape them, even most men who aren't able to find consenting partners usually manage to just go without, however much it might pain them to do so.) Which highlights the other side of the unfortunate implications the "I don't have a choice!" plea has. If someone has some psychological compulsion to do something terrible, like the aforementioned brain-eating cannibalism, that doesn't get them off the hook for it. The just purpose of punishment is not to inflict suffering on people for their bad choices, it's to protect other people from their bad behavior, if possible by reforming the perpetrators not to attempt those behaviors again, and to making them alone bear the cost of those behaviors, and if the perpetrators suffering is a necessary side-effect of achieving those goals, then so be it. If something is truly not a choice, then inflicting suffering won't be effective at reform, but that doesn't mean you just let the perps go because they couldn't help it. You still need to make sure restitution is paid to their victims and future victims are protected. However you can manage to do that. It doesn't matter that inflicting suffering won't accomplish that because they don't have a choice; a just society still has to do something about it. If that means locking them up for the protection of others then it doesn't matter one way or another that they didn't have a choice, because it's not about beating them over the head for their bad choices, it's just about protecting other people.
"Eudaimonic" in general English means "conducive to happiness" because "eudaimonia" is a Greek word that most closely translates into English as "happiness", but in classical Greek philosophy "eudaimonia" means a specific kind of happiness. (Similar to how there are a bunch of different words for love: eros, agape, philos, etc). TFA is saying that that kind of happiness is what one should pursue, as opposed to a different kind of happiness.
Specifically, eudaimonia, which literally translated to something more like "good spirits", means something like "a life well lived", a life of achievement and intellectual self-satisfaction; as opposed to something like hedonia, which is just physiological pleasure.
And FWIW if Bernie had gotten the Democratic nomination I would have voted for him to reward the Democrats for a step in the right direction (and also because Bernie was actually a better candidate than Stein, having similar policies but more experience and effective passion).
I'm not a Green Party member, but I usually vote Greens where available. I voted for Stein understanding that my electors would go to Clinton anyway because I'm in California (hoping to ever-so-slightly entice the Democrats to more Greenish policies in the future to recapture that vote), but if I lived somewhere that that would have made it likely my electors would have gone to Trump, I've voted Clinton in a heartbeat.
And it occurs to me now, the methods to do this are already well-known. It's basically just a 'users who liked this also liked...' Like you'd see on innumerable shopping sites already, but applied to posts instead of products.
How is this for a solution:
You have a relation score to other users based primarily on how much you've liked/disliked (or thumbed-up or -down, or +/-1'd, whatever) their posts. That relation score determines how likely you are to see something else from that user in the future. If you like a lot of some user's posts, you'll see more stuff from that user. If you dislike a lot of some user's posts, you start seeing less of their stuff. However, that filtering is transitive. You will also see more of the stuff that's liked by users whose stuff you like. If Alice likes a lot of Bob's posts and Bob likes a lot of Charlie's posts then Alice will start seeing more stuff from Charlie too.
And, in solution to the problem at hand, you also see less of the stuff that's liked by that user you don't like. So if you dislike a bunch of posts by a bigot who likes a bunch of other bigots' posts, you'll automatically see less of those other bigots' posts too. So you only have to start telling the system that you don't like a few of a certain kind of people (or rather, a few of a certain kind of post), and then because those people (who posted that stuff) are telling the system what they like (so that they can see more of it), the system will know what not to show you ahead of time.
I wasn't telling you what was comprehensible to you or not, obviously; I was trying to help someone who didn't understand it to figure out what, specifically, might be throwing them off, and so to understand it with that removed.
The "that" would be correct if the copula were "is" rather than "to be". You can find that an X is a Y, or you can find an X to be a Y, but you can't grammatically find that an X to be a Y.