> because now you're trusting turbo-tax instead of the state to correctly interpret the tax code for your situation. > > doing it yourself, or having a 3rd party accountant or software do it is the way you keep the revenue service honest - true to their own convoluted, overly-complex rules.
Doing it yourself also makes it blatantly clear to you that the tax code has nothing to do with raising revenue, and everything to do with social engineering.
Seriously. With respect to those who died on the Challenger, did we really need Congress to direct the IRS to spend time writing up "Astronauts Who Die In The Line Of Duty" guidelines for the 2003 tax year? Do we really need laws that micromanage our lives to the point that seven people on the entire planet (maybe 6, I'm not sure if the law covers the Israeli, but if he earned that income from NASA, perhaps he also has to dual-file with the IRS) get a tax break?
If the goal of tax policy is the collection of revenue to fund projects that the State has decided to commit resources to, the answer is "no".
If the goal of tax policy is to remind the serfs who is Lord and who is Serf, and that the Serfs had goddamn well better keep in their place if they know what's good for them, then the answer is "yes".
Do your taxes by hand with a calculator. And decide for yourself on the basis of your observations, what the tax code is really all about.
Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
-Rand, Atlas Shrugged
I'm not gonna go Randroid and suggest that taxes should be abolished. I'm not even gonna go with my personal opinion that taxes should be reduced.
As someone who lives in America, the land that spends $200 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR in complying with ITS OWN GODDAMN TAX CODE, I am going to go so far as to say the Internal Revenue Code needs to be scrapped and replaced with something less complex, even if tax rates rise under a new system.
Either the US tax code is radically reformed, or I - someone who pays more in taxes than I spend on all other expenses, including my own food, shelter, and entertainment combined - will fucking walk to any country that'll have me.
> Canadian income tax form? 4 pages long. Big type. Double spaced
The 1040 is only two pages long. Of course, each line in that page typically requires the filing of a nother two-page form, or the filling out of a 40-line worksheet, that isn't even part of the forms.
(The 1040, unlike the Canadian forms, is a triumph of style over substance. I'm sure there's a bureaucrat somewhere that gets told to make sure every tax form is two pages long -- but because Congress didn't say anything about the complexity of the calculations that make up each line on the form, every line gets linked to a separate form. Talk about user design.)
> I hear the IRS rapes your wife, sells your children, and burns your house to the ground for anything more than 10 bucks.
You heard incorrectly.
Your wife only becomes eligible for the VIP (that's "Voluntary Impregnation Programme") treatment if you're a Head of Household who fails to timely file his Form 6969, ("Voluntary Declaration of Seignieur's Rights With Respect To A Spouse") and form 6868 ("We Do You Instead And Your Dependent Children Each Owe Us One"), unless said dependent children each filed, in triplicate, Form 7272 ("With Three Fingers Up Your Ass") for the four preceding tax years.
Geez, don't you people read your Revenue Bulletins and Interpretation Bulletins that get published during the first week of April? Just because the Revenue Bulletins aren't available at your post office doesn't mean you can't get them on the web, or subscribe to the IRS snail-mail mailing list for them. As the IRS explains repeatedly, the US tax code is based on a system of voluntary compliance. Ignorance of the law is no excuse!
> Having said all that, I'll surrender up an observation for the Indian IT force; take it for what it's worth, which might be much or little. One of the major reasons why America got to be where it is today has to do with the spirit of its founding, in that those who came here and spread west did so in the pursuit of that which they couldn't have achieved back in England, or in the more established of the colonies, and then the States. They were willing to throw off virtually everything in an effort to reach for the brass ring, overturning centuries of "that's the way it's done" in favor of "this is what works".
Interesting. Reading the interview with the Indian IT geeks, I had exactly the same thought.
I came to a conclusion opposite to yours, however: The Indian geeks interviewed in that example are the very embodiment of the work ethic that once made America great.
If, as it appears to me, that work ethic no longer exists in North America anymore, then Indian companies (and Filipino companies to which Indian grunt-level work is outsourced) are gonna be the place to invest in the next decade.
Indians: You're welcome to take "my" job the day my employer decides you can do my job faster, better, and cheaper than I can. Because when that day comes, you'll have earned my job. Rock on!
And that stands regardless of whether I end up keeping my job, goofing around on my Playstation-6 in the mansion I bought with the returns from my investments in transnational corporations, or on a park bench with a sign saying "Will Code For Food".
Really not my day for cut-and-paste. I'm gonna have to eumemetize myself at this rate!
>Eugenics was given a bad name by the Nazis because they sterilized and killed people in the name of ensuring racial purity. Minus the killing, and with a fractionally improved goal, that's not far off what modern supporters of eugenics are supporting. That's why it has a bad name.
Which I, arguing from axioms different from yours, interpreted as "So where's the problem with eugenics, on the grounds that both my methods and goals are wholly different from those of the Nazis?"
But yeah, we're in agreement that due to the killing and the "racial purity" nonsense, the Nazis did give Eugenics a bad name. My argument is that given different goals and less killing, the bad name is no longer justified.
> Eugenics was given a bad name by the Nazis because they sterilized and killed people in the name of ensuring racial purity. Minus the killing, and with a fractionally improved goal, that's not far off what modern supporters of eugenics are supporting. That's why it has a bad name.
We may be arguing from different axioms, which would account for my interpretation of your post as follows:
I have no interest in racial purity, only economics, and the point of sterilizing the culturally-ineducable is that you won't need to kill or imprison the next generation.
Incidentally, that's pretty much what we're doing today, except at great social and fiscal cost. All those prisoners take serious cash to house, and I'd even lump the prison guards in with the prisoners when it comes to being a drain on the economy and having useful skills -- where's the economic value in a resume that says "I can keep people locked up, beat them occasionally, and arrange gladiator fights on which other prisoners can gamble, with rape rights going to the winner's gang."
So in short -- if made Emperor, I'd... proceed not to do the things the Nazis did, and I'd proceed to do them for different goals. So where's the problem again?:-)
> It take a lot more skill to max out a decently setup and clean Addams Family pinball game than to beat the boss in any fighting game.
Problem is, it takes even more skill to find a decently set-up and clean Addams Family pinball machine these days than it does to play it. In other words, finding a good pinball joing is damn near impossible.
> Anybody know of a pinball museum with accessible games to play?
Google for a pinball collector named Tim Arnold. He has semiregular "fun nights" in Las Vegas that'll give you a chance to play some of the machines in his astounding collection.
Tim has also set up a nonprofit to found and fund an open-to-the-public pinball museum that would be a welcome addition to Vegas.
If you're in the Bay Area, be sure to attend the annual CA Extreme classic coin-op convention in San Jose, and Pin-A-Go-Go (link to one of many 2002 show reviews) in Dixon, near Sacramento.
Bah. Cookie ate my first post. Didn't mean to post as AC.
> What you're doing is taking something many people have an aversion to (intrusive gene therapy etc) and using it as a rational for why bloody wars that clean out the working classes are good. You're basically making the argument that rich beautiful people (most of whom got beautiful primarily by virtue of being rich) are actually better in a vague "scientific evolutionary" sense than the rest of us. > >
The corollary is that the poor and ugly people are worse. The same logic was used to justify the sterilization movements in the United States and the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany.
No, the Jews were exterminated because (1) the Nazis needed a scapegoat, and (2) if you believed Nazi propaganda, because they controlled all the money on the planet, or some such bunkum.
The sterilization movement in the US had nothing to do with scapegoating or allegations of control - I fail to recall any allegation that the retarded were Communist infiltrators or secretly holding onto the world's purse strings, from even the most strident McCarthyite.
Eugenics is not National Socialism. The Nazis gave eugenics a bad rap, and maybe it's time we realized that eugenics is nothing to be afraid of.
Seriously - what's so wrong with selecting for intelligence, as opposed to "big butts"? Intelligence is partially determined by genetics, and also by cultural factors. Both need to be selected for.
I'll grant that there are almost as many potential Einsteins in the ghettoes as there are in suburbia. But if you've got Einstein's genes, and you're born to a crack whore shitting out six kids and raising them in a memeset that considers its own ignorance as a mark of cultural pride ("Yo, dat skoolin's fo' whitey! Y'all don't wants ta be actin' white!"), you're doomed from the get-go. When more of your population group is in prison than in college, you don't have an intelligence problem, you have a cultural problem.
Likewise, the most hundrum set of IQ100 genes, raised in a culture that values knowledge, science, and realizes that a good education is a key to survival in a knowledge-based economy, can have a successful and productive life.
If we wanted to be technical, I'm arguing more about memetics than genetics, and my sterilization programme should be called "eumetics", rather than "eugenics".
As someone who pays more in taxes to support the aforementioned trash than I spend on every other expense, including food, shelter, travel, ongoing education, and recreational activities combined, I want some return on that investment. Breeding more consumers of social services feeds my government's appetite for more voters, but doesn't contribute in any way to my country's long-term economic stability.
Eliminating the drag on our economy - preferably through through sterilization, less preferably through cutting social payments without cutting the population of consumers, and much less preferably through extermination - and using the savings to fund the education of people who are culturally receptive to learning, would be a Big Win.
You may not like the fact that high educational standards are required of the citizens of post-industrial states in a globalized economy, but that's the economic reality. We need to improve our population's net overall educational level, and eumetics (the sterilization of those who are uneducated, unemployable, and have demonstrated themselves culturally-unreceptive-to-learning) is merely the least repugnant way of doing it.
Finally, consider that a eumetics programme could be less repugnant than what we're doing now -- namely government funding of excessive breeding, throwing the offspring in prison, and charging the economically productive for the government's privilege to do so.
> "I hear Shelly's daughter can suck start a Harley from 50 feet away."
>"You don't love me...."
> >
That'll either get you slapped, dumped, or the best blow job of your life.
> I'm very glad I have the girl I do involved in my life - maybe it's just that way when two people love each other - it's just such a good feeling that once you have it, you don't want to be without it.
I'm very glad I have heroin in my life - maybe it's just that way when you find something you love - it's just such a good feeling that once you have it, you don't want to be without it.
Got a problem with the heroin analogy? Fine. s/heroin/oxytocin/g.
Output: Hopefully, you end up more ethanol than you started with, so you have something to drink. It's a pity that last step is required to get a final product (ethanol) with a high enough energy density to run farm equipment, because (by definition) the process of turning sugar into ethanol and a big pile of yeast is a net loss, unless you can find a good use for the yeast.
But as long as you end up with more alcohol than you started with, you still win. A cornfield is just a huge solar collector -- so long as you only waste some of that energy when you turn the corn sugar into ethanol, you can still come out ahead.
> > Does anyone see anything oxymoronic about the people that gave us the Patriot Act talking about privacy?
>
> At least we didn't have to register to read their comments.
You take back what you said about Raph Koster and his project to modernize the opinion-gathering function of the Federal Register, or your kids are spending the rest of their lives in Gitmo, starting tomorrow, bud! We give you citizens access to the workings of government, but we can ban you just as quick!
> I was about ready to write "Oxymoron of the day: Privacy Officer for the Department of Homeland Security."
> >
A nice little placebo position really. Let's make people think that privacy rights are being respected. It's like most privacy policies on websites; not worth the bandwidth they waste.
In short, a former Doubleclick executive is perfect for the job!
> Sure, some use amendments to imply one, but it just is not there, and the same amendments can be used to imply such things as a supposed "right to security" which can erode a supposed "right to privacy". > >
Time for an amendment.
Agreed!
AMENDMENT XXVIII:
Section 1. The fourth and ninth articles of amendment to the Constitution of the United States are hereby repealed.
> The sales people DO remember their most frequent customers, and the customers are trained by the salesperson to deal only with that salesperson..
Yes, very true. But I wonder how long that's going to be true. Fast-forward two or three years when every minimum-wage flunky is reading the same script at Wal-Mart. ("Hiya, Clem! Been a few months since I last seen ya! Lemme axe ya sumtin', do ya want another gallon jar of pickles!")
The Prada employee who gets the commission is going to be the one who says "Who the fuck are you, and what makes you think you're worthy to shop here?" before launching into the sales pitch:)
> Yet another attempt to add the personal touch to the cold world of business.
Given the target demographic -- people who shop for status, rather than function -- this is a pretty clever idea. People who shop Prada probably do it for the ego-stroking they get from the sales staff as much as they do from the ego-stroking they get from their peers when they show off their new toy.
I'll bet you that 90% of that target demographic actually thinks their salesdrone actually remembers them. Your typical vapid trophy wife is one thing, but think of all the trophy wives' grandmothers who also have to shop for status.
"No, Antoine wouldn't be just reciting lines from a script being displayed to him from the cash register based on the RFID data from the loyalty card in my pocket, and stop talking in acronyms, you silly geek! He knew it was me, he even remembered my name and what I bought two years ago! My God, I must be so attractive to have made an impression on him like that!"
Re:A day with SCO is like a day without sunshine
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 4, Funny
> To quote Garbage, I'm only happy when it rains.
Long as we're on the subject of "A Day Without SCO..."
A day without SCO is like a day without mistaking the colostomy bag with the an enema bag.
The proof of the formula for the edge/vertices/polyhedra thing is simple enough that it's actually an argument against "just do the experiment for n=1, n=2, n=3, until you get bored, and pretend it's a proof".
(And I was an empiricist at heart. Numerical methods for integrating to compute the volume of an object, or for diffEQs are a lot more fun than "doing the math" and coming up with a closed-form solution. But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate an actual solution to a mathematical problem, as opposed to just a graph and a handwaving "as the error bound decreases and my CPU load goes up, the answer asymptotically approaches some the square root of some irrational number times a constant"
> On another note, a lot of women regret them later and have bad dreams, suicidal thoughts, etc.
You left something out. Allow me to fill in the gap.
On another note, a lot of women who have had bricks thrown at them, been called "murderer", "whore", "cunt" by religious fanatics, and been advised to wear bulletproof vests for protection against stray bullets and/or shrapnel from bombs and rifles aimed at killing their doctors, have had bad dreams, suicidal thoughts, etc.
Of course I'm only talking about the women of Afghanistan under the Taliban, because such barbarism would never happen here.
P.S. Fuck you, fundie. I'm for abortion. I'm for cloning. I'm for any technology that advances the human condition. For many reasons, but to choose the least rational of which as the only one you might understand, God gave human beings dominion over the earth and every living thing on it. Sentient beings get rights. Non-sentients don't. Deal with it.
> What about poor people? What if you were born into this world to poor parents, and you got ill? Shouldn't you be allowed health care for free?
What if you were born into this world a smart person, and you busted your ass for eight years to become a doctor? Shouldn't the government force you to work for free?
> For example, it's interesting to note
that the digits in pi occur with roughly equal frequency, but that we don't have a proof of this. It is not interesting to count the frequencies of the first 200 digits of pi by hand to convince ourselves of this, and then to get a bad grade on it because we missed a digit somewhere.
Option 1:
Write a program to calculate pi to 200 decimal places, have it count the digits, and submit the answer. I could do this more quickly than I could count 200 digits.
Option 2: Prove that the distribution of digits in a base-10 representation of pi is random, and submit the proof. I couldn't do this in less time than it'd take me to do Option 1. But doing Option 1 and writing a few paragraphs on researchers attempting who are working on proof of the prove normality of pi, is probably the sort of thing that would make your teacher/prof weep with joy.
I'd go so far as to say that the purpose of the exericse wasn't to see if his class could count digits, but to find the one or two students in class thinking far enough ahead to do option 1, or research option 2.
> Like when you ask: "Can you pass me the salt?" you are not actually asking if the person is able to pass you the salt, you are expressing your will the the person will pass it to you.
Rather like the old joke about the freudian slip, where the guy meant to say "Please pass the salt", but it came out as "You fucking bitch, you ruined my life."
> Raph Koster of SWG is now an expert in designing societies?
> Please. > If you play SWG, you know what kind of society it is. One where players are encouraged to do mindless missions in pursuit of the mystical plum to be a jedi
"He's perfect for the job!"
- Treas. Secretary John Snow
>
Have players complained? Sure, check out the development forums (restricted to paying subscribers of SWG), and you'll find many requests going untouched.
"He's perfect for the job!"
- Norm Mineta, the entire Department of Transportation, and TSA
> And the people who actually go and complain on a bulletin board is just a small percentage of
the persons who actually play, get disgruntled, and leave.
"He's perfect for the job!"
- The entire contingent of HomeSec that used to be the INS
And what the original didn't say - people who do raise questions about things like server stability or scalability tend to get banned from the forums.
"He's perfect for the job!
- Atty. General John Ashcroft.
Slashdot Mirror
>
> doing it yourself, or having a 3rd party accountant or software do it is the way you keep the revenue service honest - true to their own convoluted, overly-complex rules.
Doing it yourself also makes it blatantly clear to you that the tax code has nothing to do with raising revenue, and everything to do with social engineering.
Seriously. With respect to those who died on the Challenger, did we really need Congress to direct the IRS to spend time writing up "Astronauts Who Die In The Line Of Duty" guidelines for the 2003 tax year? Do we really need laws that micromanage our lives to the point that seven people on the entire planet (maybe 6, I'm not sure if the law covers the Israeli, but if he earned that income from NASA, perhaps he also has to dual-file with the IRS) get a tax break?
If the goal of tax policy is the collection of revenue to fund projects that the State has decided to commit resources to, the answer is "no".
If the goal of tax policy is to remind the serfs who is Lord and who is Serf, and that the Serfs had goddamn well better keep in their place if they know what's good for them, then the answer is "yes".
Do your taxes by hand with a calculator. And decide for yourself on the basis of your observations, what the tax code is really all about.
I'm not gonna go Randroid and suggest that taxes should be abolished. I'm not even gonna go with my personal opinion that taxes should be reduced.
As someone who lives in America, the land that spends $200 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR in complying with ITS OWN GODDAMN TAX CODE, I am going to go so far as to say the Internal Revenue Code needs to be scrapped and replaced with something less complex, even if tax rates rise under a new system.
Either the US tax code is radically reformed, or I - someone who pays more in taxes than I spend on all other expenses, including my own food, shelter, and entertainment combined - will fucking walk to any country that'll have me.
The 1040 is only two pages long. Of course, each line in that page typically requires the filing of a nother two-page form, or the filling out of a 40-line worksheet, that isn't even part of the forms.
(The 1040, unlike the Canadian forms, is a triumph of style over substance. I'm sure there's a bureaucrat somewhere that gets told to make sure every tax form is two pages long -- but because Congress didn't say anything about the complexity of the calculations that make up each line on the form, every line gets linked to a separate form. Talk about user design.)
> I hear the IRS rapes your wife, sells your children, and burns your house to the ground for anything more than 10 bucks.
You heard incorrectly.
Your wife only becomes eligible for the VIP (that's "Voluntary Impregnation Programme") treatment if you're a Head of Household who fails to timely file his Form 6969, ("Voluntary Declaration of Seignieur's Rights With Respect To A Spouse") and form 6868 ("We Do You Instead And Your Dependent Children Each Owe Us One"), unless said dependent children each filed, in triplicate, Form 7272 ("With Three Fingers Up Your Ass") for the four preceding tax years.
Geez, don't you people read your Revenue Bulletins and Interpretation Bulletins that get published during the first week of April? Just because the Revenue Bulletins aren't available at your post office doesn't mean you can't get them on the web, or subscribe to the IRS snail-mail mailing list for them. As the IRS explains repeatedly, the US tax code is based on a system of voluntary compliance. Ignorance of the law is no excuse!
Interesting. Reading the interview with the Indian IT geeks, I had exactly the same thought.
I came to a conclusion opposite to yours, however: The Indian geeks interviewed in that example are the very embodiment of the work ethic that once made America great.
If, as it appears to me, that work ethic no longer exists in North America anymore, then Indian companies (and Filipino companies to which Indian grunt-level work is outsourced) are gonna be the place to invest in the next decade.
Indians: You're welcome to take "my" job the day my employer decides you can do my job faster, better, and cheaper than I can. Because when that day comes, you'll have earned my job. Rock on!
And that stands regardless of whether I end up keeping my job, goofing around on my Playstation-6 in the mansion I bought with the returns from my investments in transnational corporations, or on a park bench with a sign saying "Will Code For Food".
Obviously, you've never talked to a sheep.
>Eugenics was given a bad name by the Nazis because they sterilized and killed people in the name of ensuring racial purity. Minus the killing, and with a fractionally improved goal, that's not far off what modern supporters of eugenics are supporting. That's why it has a bad name.
Which I, arguing from axioms different from yours, interpreted as "So where's the problem with eugenics, on the grounds that both my methods and goals are wholly different from those of the Nazis?"
But yeah, we're in agreement that due to the killing and the "racial purity" nonsense, the Nazis did give Eugenics a bad name. My argument is that given different goals and less killing, the bad name is no longer justified.
We may be arguing from different axioms, which would account for my interpretation of your post as follows:
I have no interest in racial purity, only economics, and the point of sterilizing the culturally-ineducable is that you won't need to kill or imprison the next generation.
Incidentally, that's pretty much what we're doing today, except at great social and fiscal cost. All those prisoners take serious cash to house, and I'd even lump the prison guards in with the prisoners when it comes to being a drain on the economy and having useful skills -- where's the economic value in a resume that says "I can keep people locked up, beat them occasionally, and arrange gladiator fights on which other prisoners can gamble, with rape rights going to the winner's gang."
So in short -- if made Emperor, I'd... proceed not to do the things the Nazis did, and I'd proceed to do them for different goals. So where's the problem again? :-)
Problem is, it takes even more skill to find a decently set-up and clean Addams Family pinball machine these days than it does to play it. In other words, finding a good pinball joing is damn near impossible.
> Anybody know of a pinball museum with accessible games to play?
Google for a pinball collector named Tim Arnold. He has semiregular "fun nights" in Las Vegas that'll give you a chance to play some of the machines in his astounding collection.
Tim has also set up a nonprofit to found and fund an open-to-the-public pinball museum that would be a welcome addition to Vegas.
If you're in the Bay Area, be sure to attend the annual CA Extreme classic coin-op convention in San Jose, and Pin-A-Go-Go (link to one of many 2002 show reviews) in Dixon, near Sacramento.
> What you're doing is taking something many people have an aversion to (intrusive gene therapy etc) and using it as a rational for why bloody wars that clean out the working classes are good. You're basically making the argument that rich beautiful people (most of whom got beautiful primarily by virtue of being rich) are actually better in a vague "scientific evolutionary" sense than the rest of us.
>
> The corollary is that the poor and ugly people are worse. The same logic was used to justify the sterilization movements in the United States and the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany. No, the Jews were exterminated because (1) the Nazis needed a scapegoat, and (2) if you believed Nazi propaganda, because they controlled all the money on the planet, or some such bunkum.
The sterilization movement in the US had nothing to do with scapegoating or allegations of control - I fail to recall any allegation that the retarded were Communist infiltrators or secretly holding onto the world's purse strings, from even the most strident McCarthyite.
Eugenics is not National Socialism. The Nazis gave eugenics a bad rap, and maybe it's time we realized that eugenics is nothing to be afraid of.
Seriously - what's so wrong with selecting for intelligence, as opposed to "big butts"? Intelligence is partially determined by genetics, and also by cultural factors. Both need to be selected for.
I'll grant that there are almost as many potential Einsteins in the ghettoes as there are in suburbia. But if you've got Einstein's genes, and you're born to a crack whore shitting out six kids and raising them in a memeset that considers its own ignorance as a mark of cultural pride ("Yo, dat skoolin's fo' whitey! Y'all don't wants ta be actin' white!"), you're doomed from the get-go. When more of your population group is in prison than in college, you don't have an intelligence problem, you have a cultural problem.
Likewise, the most hundrum set of IQ100 genes, raised in a culture that values knowledge, science, and realizes that a good education is a key to survival in a knowledge-based economy, can have a successful and productive life.
If we wanted to be technical, I'm arguing more about memetics than genetics, and my sterilization programme should be called "eumetics", rather than "eugenics".
As someone who pays more in taxes to support the aforementioned trash than I spend on every other expense, including food, shelter, travel, ongoing education, and recreational activities combined, I want some return on that investment. Breeding more consumers of social services feeds my government's appetite for more voters, but doesn't contribute in any way to my country's long-term economic stability.
Eliminating the drag on our economy - preferably through through sterilization, less preferably through cutting social payments without cutting the population of consumers, and much less preferably through extermination - and using the savings to fund the education of people who are culturally receptive to learning, would be a Big Win.
You may not like the fact that high educational standards are required of the citizens of post-industrial states in a globalized economy, but that's the economic reality. We need to improve our population's net overall educational level, and eumetics (the sterilization of those who are uneducated, unemployable, and have demonstrated themselves culturally-unreceptive-to-learning) is merely the least repugnant way of doing it.
Finally, consider that a eumetics programme could be less repugnant than what we're doing now -- namely government funding of excessive breeding, throwing the offspring in prison, and charging the economically productive for the government's privilege to do so.
>"You don't love me...."
>
> That'll either get you slapped, dumped, or the best blow job of your life.
Win-win-win scenario. :)
I'm very glad I have heroin in my life - maybe it's just that way when you find something you love - it's just such a good feeling that once you have it, you don't want to be without it.
Got a problem with the heroin analogy? Fine. s/heroin/oxytocin/g.
Using an ethanol-to-hydrogen-powered farm equipment to grow crops that are fermented into ethanol is precisely that approach.
Input: Ethanol (farm equipment), Sunlight (solar power), Solar-powered Self-Replicating Sugar Bioassembler ("corn"), Sugar-powered Self-Replicationg Ethanol Bioassembler ("yeast").
Output: Hopefully, you end up more ethanol than you started with, so you have something to drink. It's a pity that last step is required to get a final product (ethanol) with a high enough energy density to run farm equipment, because (by definition) the process of turning sugar into ethanol and a big pile of yeast is a net loss, unless you can find a good use for the yeast.
But as long as you end up with more alcohol than you started with, you still win. A cornfield is just a huge solar collector -- so long as you only waste some of that energy when you turn the corn sugar into ethanol, you can still come out ahead.
>
> At least we didn't have to register to read their comments.
You take back what you said about Raph Koster and his project to modernize the opinion-gathering function of the Federal Register, or your kids are spending the rest of their lives in Gitmo, starting tomorrow, bud! We give you citizens access to the workings of government, but we can ban you just as quick!
>
> A nice little placebo position really. Let's make people think that privacy rights are being respected. It's like most privacy policies on websites; not worth the bandwidth they waste.
In short, a former Doubleclick executive is perfect for the job!
>
> Time for an amendment.
Agreed!
AMENDMENT XXVIII:
Section 1. The fourth and ninth articles of amendment to the Constitution of the United States are hereby repealed.
Yes, very true. But I wonder how long that's going to be true. Fast-forward two or three years when every minimum-wage flunky is reading the same script at Wal-Mart. ("Hiya, Clem! Been a few months since I last seen ya! Lemme axe ya sumtin', do ya want another gallon jar of pickles!")
The Prada employee who gets the commission is going to be the one who says "Who the fuck are you, and what makes you think you're worthy to shop here?" before launching into the sales pitch :)
Given the target demographic -- people who shop for status, rather than function -- this is a pretty clever idea. People who shop Prada probably do it for the ego-stroking they get from the sales staff as much as they do from the ego-stroking they get from their peers when they show off their new toy.
I'll bet you that 90% of that target demographic actually thinks their salesdrone actually remembers them. Your typical vapid trophy wife is one thing, but think of all the trophy wives' grandmothers who also have to shop for status.
"No, Antoine wouldn't be just reciting lines from a script being displayed to him from the cash register based on the RFID data from the loyalty card in my pocket, and stop talking in acronyms, you silly geek! He knew it was me, he even remembered my name and what I bought two years ago! My God, I must be so attractive to have made an impression on him like that!"
Long as we're on the subject of "A Day Without SCO..."
A day without SCO is like a day without mistaking the colostomy bag with the an enema bag.
The proof of the formula for the edge/vertices/polyhedra thing is simple enough that it's actually an argument against "just do the experiment for n=1, n=2, n=3, until you get bored, and pretend it's a proof".
(And I was an empiricist at heart. Numerical methods for integrating to compute the volume of an object, or for diffEQs are a lot more fun than "doing the math" and coming up with a closed-form solution. But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate an actual solution to a mathematical problem, as opposed to just a graph and a handwaving "as the error bound decreases and my CPU load goes up, the answer asymptotically approaches some the square root of some irrational number times a constant"
You left something out. Allow me to fill in the gap.
On another note, a lot of women who have had bricks thrown at them, been called "murderer", "whore", "cunt" by religious fanatics, and been advised to wear bulletproof vests for protection against stray bullets and/or shrapnel from bombs and rifles aimed at killing their doctors, have had bad dreams, suicidal thoughts, etc.
Of course I'm only talking about the women of Afghanistan under the Taliban, because such barbarism would never happen here.
P.S. Fuck you, fundie. I'm for abortion. I'm for cloning. I'm for any technology that advances the human condition. For many reasons, but to choose the least rational of which as the only one you might understand, God gave human beings dominion over the earth and every living thing on it. Sentient beings get rights. Non-sentients don't. Deal with it.
What if you were born into this world a smart person, and you busted your ass for eight years to become a doctor? Shouldn't the government force you to work for free?
If everyone is entitled to his or her own life, then doesn't that also include the doctors?
Option 1:
Write a program to calculate pi to 200 decimal places, have it count the digits, and submit the answer. I could do this more quickly than I could count 200 digits.
Option 2:
Prove that the distribution of digits in a base-10 representation of pi is random, and submit the proof. I couldn't do this in less time than it'd take me to do Option 1. But doing Option 1 and writing a few paragraphs on researchers attempting who are working on proof of the prove normality of pi, is probably the sort of thing that would make your teacher/prof weep with joy.
I'd go so far as to say that the purpose of the exericse wasn't to see if his class could count digits, but to find the one or two students in class thinking far enough ahead to do option 1, or research option 2.
Rather like the old joke about the freudian slip, where the guy meant to say "Please pass the salt", but it came out as "You fucking bitch, you ruined my life."
Exactly as with a real-world government. The MMOG model should therefore work in the real world just as it does in the game world.
> Raph Koster of SWG is now an expert in designing societies?
> Please.
> If you play SWG, you know what kind of society it is. One where players are encouraged to do mindless missions in pursuit of the mystical plum to be a jedi
"He's perfect for the job!"
- Treas. Secretary John Snow
> Have players complained? Sure, check out the development forums (restricted to paying subscribers of SWG), and you'll find many requests going untouched.
"He's perfect for the job!"
- Norm Mineta, the entire Department of Transportation, and TSA
> And the people who actually go and complain on a bulletin board is just a small percentage of the persons who actually play, get disgruntled, and leave.
"He's perfect for the job!"
- The entire contingent of HomeSec that used to be the INS
And what the original didn't say - people who do raise questions about things like server stability or scalability tend to get banned from the forums.
"He's perfect for the job!
- Atty. General John Ashcroft.