MOD UP, It amazes me how many times this fact is ignored. Buffett "only" pays 15% on dividends because the corp has already paid around 35% (specifically 38% last year for berkshire if I recall correctly) meaning that Buffetts real tax rate on his dividends is 50%!
The tax rate in the USA is what holds our economy back and is very excessive, add up your taxes, they are ludicrous. For me: income 33% (self employed, my effective rate last year), state 7%, property 3%, sales tax 7% for a TOTAL OF 50% !!!!
If you are not self employed be sure to include your employers contributions to Medicare and SS (usually 6%) as if they weren't paid by them that would be 100% extra salary for you.
Microsoft said the Metro interface will be loaded with a minimal Windows 8 back end (DLLs, drivers, etc), to make loading it quick and use less memory, if they supported plugins that would put an unknown amount of time on loading and memory usage and rely on 3rd parties for a fast browsing experience, especially on slower tablet devices.
This user post in the pirate bay sums it up quite nicely:
"As far as I know, this build is probably worse than the original, since it's uploaded by the developers themselves, and you don't have an option to turn it into a 1:1 copy of the retail version. So, good try tinyz, but we like to get what money would get us, not what the devs want us to get for free. Just wait for the retail version to get uploaded. "
You can't negotiate with criminals, its not because its too expensive, its not because it doesn't have a demo, its not because it doesn't have the correct features, they are only excuses for stealing. Ideas such uploading directly to TPB are futile, what if every game does it? Eventually news would spread to the mass market and then no one would buy any game? A great way to destroy your own market.
We should demand better and the solution is painfully obvious and simple. A new exchange that only trades once per day, if a company is on this exchange it can be on no others. All orders are queued until trading is "resolved" once per day. When resolving, buy and sell orders are matched based on limit prices, there is no high and low for the day, only an opening price and a closing price. You could even have tickers that are resolved only once per week, month, or year. This would go a long way in reducing the panic in trading.
I don't think the writer knows what self-effacing means:
from Wikipedia: Self-efficacy is a term used in psychology, roughly corresponding to a person's belief in their own competence.
from the article: The site said that self-effacing men have greater success rates, with words such as "awkward, apologise, kinda" and "probably" likely to increase success because "appearing unsure makes the writer seem more vulnerable and less threatening".
Self-effacing doesn't mean to appear more unsure, it means to appear more sure. Furthermore they misspelled apologize! Perhaps they wrote the article because they aren't getting many dates?
Also are the problems of manufacturing costs and space usage. Rather than paying for an elaborate and expensive support structure that mimics a tree and uses up your entire yard, I would guess a tracking system would be cheaper, and provide better output.
In the video he explains they are now at 50% power usage of xo1, and hope to get to 20% of its usage in order to be able have onboard power, my guess is the thing uses so much power currently its not feasible, and even at 20% power usage of the 1st model its probably only powered via onboard sources for a very short time, less than an hour. Once you get onboard power it will weigh significantly more. Even if you have to use a tether it may be useful when loading a lot of very heavy individual things that require dexterity, but it seems like such a specific application that it won't economically viable, hence their target of the military, which is the gold standard for wasting money on niche crap like this.
Its about one thing and one thing only, piracy. There is a reason hardly any games are released on PC these days, even though the cheapest PCs outclass consoles by 10:1, piracy is much less on consoles than PCs. People steal, whine, and bitch about their god given right of able to buy games at whatever price they think is 'fair', or that there is no demo, or its not long enough, they are all excuses, if you don't want to buy the game then don't and shut the fuck up! By stealing the game you only push developers further to DRM, you only incrementally erode the very thing you want, you only fuck yourself over in the long run. With the mob though there is only one outcome, which we are almost to, people steal, make excuses, and developers are pushed to the only thing that can truly prevent DRM, online game components for very single game released. Hell even as a single man indie dev I am going to be putting online components in my games in the future, you simply cannot sell anything without them, I see my games stolen by a 100:1 to 10,000:1 ratio, it doesn't matter how cheap they are, how long the demo is, or if there is no DRM at all. People steal because everyone does it, its easy to do, and there are no direct consequences to themselves.
Nokia may be poised for the turnaround of this decade, Apple was clearly the biggest turnaround in the last 20 years, from 90 days to bankruptcy to the largest market cap company in the world. I have no doubt your comment when Apple was in the news 15 years ago would be: Apple is still in business?
Which do you think is a better growth investment and more likely, Apple will further grow 1000x its size and revenues from its _current_ position, or for Nokia to make a comeback? Clearly the safer bet is on Nokia for extreme potential growth, granted they have obstacles to overcome, many unknowns, and have to define a new technology or segment like Apple did with the iPod, which seems rather unlikely but is possible.
They are still giving them AA+ rating, and the other agencies are giving them AAA. When all financial institutions were bailed out, our government bought the debt, ALL of the toxic assets are now part of our 14T debt which is AAA rated. Anyone who holds dollars or bonds owns that debt.
Makes total sense to me, many of my neighbors have $10-30k backup generators installed that have never been used as of yet. If you can offset this cost to a car you are going to use everyday that basically discounts the cost of the car to almost free, plus you get to take it with you when you move rather than it being a sunk cost in your house. Granted the backup generators are natural gas and will run indefinitely, but considering they have never been used, and most power outages are quite short using your car is a great middle ground between having no backup and a very expensive dedicated system.
I agree 100% that the government should not be doing anything profitable, if it is profitable that means taxes are too high and should be lowered. All of the examples you mentioned can be profitable though:
There are many private schools that are profitable, and if all schools were private I have no doubt they would be managed more effectively, provide better education, and be much cheaper. The trade off is not everyone is going to be able to afford them and some see this as 'not fair' which is complete hooey. This can rather easily be seen by the current college bubble, just because you have an education does not mean you get a job and are better off, or that you are qualified, or smart, an education is certainly an indicator of such, but by no means an guarantee. The USA would be much stronger economically if we didn't force everyone to go to school, we would have a large cheap unskilled labor supply for manufacturing instead of what we have now, an overpaid bloated unionized dinosaur.
Police and fire can also be privatized, and in some counties still are (virginia). The issue is that if your neighbors house is burning down it is likely to cause your house to burn down, so it is not a good idea for the community as a whole to allow people to not choose fire protection.
Even national defense could be privatized, nearly every single weapon is made privately already, why not deploy it privately as well? The government would have to oversee the plans and details of course to coordinate several private companies in a war effort, but there is no inherent reason it can't be done.
The point is nearly everything can be done privately if we wanted it so, but it will never happen in our country because the government has grown into the massive beast.
I totally agree, but at least with solar we are going into debt for seemingly much better reasons:
1) building infrastructure in our own country 2) not funding another war or the military 3) replacing non renewable energy sources 4) distributing the energy grid
Our money is and can be spent on much worse things.
How much money Lucasfilms has is irrelevant. This is yet another strike against business by government. The sculptor was hired by Lucasfilms, therefore any creations of his during employment are the property of Lucasfilms forevermore. The sculptor did not take any risks with his money, he was getting a paycheck, Lucasfilms bear all the risk in the production of the film and thus should bear all the profits. Unless there are prearranged royalty or profit sharing contracts, which I have no idea why there would be as sculptors are a dime a dozen, then he is entitled to nothing. One day soon people will wake up to the fact that government can not provide everything for you and businesses takes risks and therefor must be compensated for it, the good news is that day of economic reckoning is coming much sooner than everyone thinks.
I agree, I was on the fence about canceling before this, now that this is happening I'm canceling for sure. Their streaming content is worthless, there are a few good movies on it every once and while and I see a lot of new content was recently added, but the interface on the PS3 is so limited with 75 titles per category, and 90% of their stuff is old or low budget, and of the other 10% I have seen most of it or don't want to to see it.
As for the DVDs not much lost there, I watch maybe 3 per month, and that is scrounging for titles it seems, I'll save time by simply using on demand for $5 each, that is before I cancel my cable as well.
And I haven't done a single situp in the last 20 years.
And no... this is not a joke post.:-)
I figure I've got another 8-10 good years left then the hip or back probably goes to arthritis.
I have two six packs! Both are the fridge, and I haven't done a single sit up in the last 30 years!
And yes... this is a joke post:D
I figure I've got another 10-12 great years left then the elbow or wrist goes to arthritis, after which time I plan on buying one of those helmet beer holders with a straw.
Both issues are easily compensated for: 1) wind, simply design a saucer shaped balloon with very low wind resistance, furthermore you could have a rotatable properly for exact positioning 2) simply store a small amount of helium on a tank which controls altitude
Why not just use a balloon? The only advantage I can see this having is less movement due to wind, but designing a properly shaped balloon should easily defeat that, and more importantly a balloon would be much quieter at low altitudes, use much less power, and stay aloft even if the power is cut. Seems like a case of a hammer looking for a nail.
The funny thing is their new UI showcases the most unimportant aspect of the movie, the box cover. Reviews, description, ratings, genre, actors are all more more important than box covers.
Interesting metric. What probably counts more is the level of education required for those employees. My guess is in a heliostat most of the labor involved has to do with cleaning the mirrors, now you are talking an unskilled $10/hour job vs a nuclear plant tech that is making $50+/hour, even if there were 5 employees per MW in the solar plant it would still be better. Looking at raw employees per MW doesn't seem to be of much use. The much more important issues are rather obvious:
1) no nuclear waste 2) no nuclear fuel 3) the worst that could happen is some molten salt all over the desert 4) workers require less training and clearances 5) the plant is much less of a terrorist target
About the only downsides are cost and land space, since in the USA we have an abundance of both (compared to every other industrialized nation) we should be building these things all over the place, even in not so sunny places. Since no body wants to cut the defense budget (which is massively overinflated and a waste IMO) we should have the army start building and running these.
- only allow real names, this alone keeps a huge portion of discussions on the up and up - social and merchant site integration, sites where users can be verified in some way, facebook or amazon via a credit card increases a users default good karma - no displayed point system, or post tally, or userid snobs - threading is essential, so the replies are tied to the original post - keep it simple. plain text. uses less bandwidth - a few questions asking detailed information about the article which allows the user to post comments, what is the point of them commenting on the article if they haven't read it? in any case it will reduce trolling - users are allowed to permanently hide or upvote other specific users - comments are shown based on a score calculated based on: user score threshold setting, user verification results, recently posted comments score, number of recent votes to other users comments (the more they read and interact with other users the more they should be seen by others) - all users can vote on others comments after a certain number of comments are posted, verification is done, or time has passed
Slashdot Mirror
MOD UP, It amazes me how many times this fact is ignored. Buffett "only" pays 15% on dividends because the corp has already paid around 35% (specifically 38% last year for berkshire if I recall correctly) meaning that Buffetts real tax rate on his dividends is 50%!
The tax rate in the USA is what holds our economy back and is very excessive, add up your taxes, they are ludicrous. For me: income 33% (self employed, my effective rate last year), state 7%, property 3%, sales tax 7% for a TOTAL OF 50% !!!!
If you are not self employed be sure to include your employers contributions to Medicare and SS (usually 6%) as if they weren't paid by them that would be 100% extra salary for you.
Microsoft said the Metro interface will be loaded with a minimal Windows 8 back end (DLLs, drivers, etc), to make loading it quick and use less memory, if they supported plugins that would put an unknown amount of time on loading and memory usage and rely on 3rd parties for a fast browsing experience, especially on slower tablet devices.
Hard to believe its not more efficient to hire unskilled labor to cut the fridge apart and simply sort the foam, plastic, and steel pieces by hand.
This user post in the pirate bay sums it up quite nicely:
"As far as I know, this build is probably worse than the original, since it's uploaded by the developers themselves, and you don't have an option to turn it into a 1:1 copy of the retail version. So, good try tinyz, but we like to get what money would get us, not what the devs want us to get for free. Just wait for the retail version to get uploaded. "
You can't negotiate with criminals, its not because its too expensive, its not because it doesn't have a demo, its not because it doesn't have the correct features, they are only excuses for stealing. Ideas such uploading directly to TPB are futile, what if every game does it? Eventually news would spread to the mass market and then no one would buy any game? A great way to destroy your own market.
We should demand better and the solution is painfully obvious and simple. A new exchange that only trades once per day, if a company is on this exchange it can be on no others. All orders are queued until trading is "resolved" once per day. When resolving, buy and sell orders are matched based on limit prices, there is no high and low for the day, only an opening price and a closing price. You could even have tickers that are resolved only once per week, month, or year. This would go a long way in reducing the panic in trading.
to absorb all of the space junk into one big blob.
I don't think the writer knows what self-effacing means:
from Wikipedia:
Self-efficacy is a term used in psychology, roughly corresponding to a person's belief in their own competence.
from the article:
The site said that self-effacing men have greater success rates, with words such as "awkward, apologise, kinda" and "probably" likely to increase success because "appearing unsure makes the writer seem more vulnerable and less threatening".
Self-effacing doesn't mean to appear more unsure, it means to appear more sure. Furthermore they misspelled apologize! Perhaps they wrote the article because they aren't getting many dates?
Also are the problems of manufacturing costs and space usage. Rather than paying for an elaborate and expensive support structure that mimics a tree and uses up your entire yard, I would guess a tracking system would be cheaper, and provide better output.
In the video he explains they are now at 50% power usage of xo1, and hope to get to 20% of its usage in order to be able have onboard power, my guess is the thing uses so much power currently its not feasible, and even at 20% power usage of the 1st model its probably only powered via onboard sources for a very short time, less than an hour. Once you get onboard power it will weigh significantly more. Even if you have to use a tether it may be useful when loading a lot of very heavy individual things that require dexterity, but it seems like such a specific application that it won't economically viable, hence their target of the military, which is the gold standard for wasting money on niche crap like this.
Its about one thing and one thing only, piracy. There is a reason hardly any games are released on PC these days, even though the cheapest PCs outclass consoles by 10:1, piracy is much less on consoles than PCs. People steal, whine, and bitch about their god given right of able to buy games at whatever price they think is 'fair', or that there is no demo, or its not long enough, they are all excuses, if you don't want to buy the game then don't and shut the fuck up! By stealing the game you only push developers further to DRM, you only incrementally erode the very thing you want, you only fuck yourself over in the long run. With the mob though there is only one outcome, which we are almost to, people steal, make excuses, and developers are pushed to the only thing that can truly prevent DRM, online game components for very single game released. Hell even as a single man indie dev I am going to be putting online components in my games in the future, you simply cannot sell anything without them, I see my games stolen by a 100:1 to 10,000:1 ratio, it doesn't matter how cheap they are, how long the demo is, or if there is no DRM at all. People steal because everyone does it, its easy to do, and there are no direct consequences to themselves.
Nokia may be poised for the turnaround of this decade, Apple was clearly the biggest turnaround in the last 20 years, from 90 days to bankruptcy to the largest market cap company in the world. I have no doubt your comment when Apple was in the news 15 years ago would be: Apple is still in business?
Which do you think is a better growth investment and more likely, Apple will further grow 1000x its size and revenues from its _current_ position, or for Nokia to make a comeback? Clearly the safer bet is on Nokia for extreme potential growth, granted they have obstacles to overcome, many unknowns, and have to define a new technology or segment like Apple did with the iPod, which seems rather unlikely but is possible.
They are still giving them AA+ rating, and the other agencies are giving them AAA. When all financial institutions were bailed out, our government bought the debt, ALL of the toxic assets are now part of our 14T debt which is AAA rated. Anyone who holds dollars or bonds owns that debt.
"Among investors is the Binladen Group, the Saudi construction giant owned by the family of Osama bin Laden."
Makes total sense to me, many of my neighbors have $10-30k backup generators installed that have never been used as of yet. If you can offset this cost to a car you are going to use everyday that basically discounts the cost of the car to almost free, plus you get to take it with you when you move rather than it being a sunk cost in your house. Granted the backup generators are natural gas and will run indefinitely, but considering they have never been used, and most power outages are quite short using your car is a great middle ground between having no backup and a very expensive dedicated system.
I agree 100% that the government should not be doing anything profitable, if it is profitable that means taxes are too high and should be lowered. All of the examples you mentioned can be profitable though:
There are many private schools that are profitable, and if all schools were private I have no doubt they would be managed more effectively, provide better education, and be much cheaper. The trade off is not everyone is going to be able to afford them and some see this as 'not fair' which is complete hooey. This can rather easily be seen by the current college bubble, just because you have an education does not mean you get a job and are better off, or that you are qualified, or smart, an education is certainly an indicator of such, but by no means an guarantee. The USA would be much stronger economically if we didn't force everyone to go to school, we would have a large cheap unskilled labor supply for manufacturing instead of what we have now, an overpaid bloated unionized dinosaur.
Police and fire can also be privatized, and in some counties still are (virginia). The issue is that if your neighbors house is burning down it is likely to cause your house to burn down, so it is not a good idea for the community as a whole to allow people to not choose fire protection.
Even national defense could be privatized, nearly every single weapon is made privately already, why not deploy it privately as well? The government would have to oversee the plans and details of course to coordinate several private companies in a war effort, but there is no inherent reason it can't be done.
The point is nearly everything can be done privately if we wanted it so, but it will never happen in our country because the government has grown into the massive beast.
I totally agree, but at least with solar we are going into debt for seemingly much better reasons:
1) building infrastructure in our own country
2) not funding another war or the military
3) replacing non renewable energy sources
4) distributing the energy grid
Our money is and can be spent on much worse things.
How much money Lucasfilms has is irrelevant. This is yet another strike against business by government. The sculptor was hired by Lucasfilms, therefore any creations of his during employment are the property of Lucasfilms forevermore. The sculptor did not take any risks with his money, he was getting a paycheck, Lucasfilms bear all the risk in the production of the film and thus should bear all the profits. Unless there are prearranged royalty or profit sharing contracts, which I have no idea why there would be as sculptors are a dime a dozen, then he is entitled to nothing. One day soon people will wake up to the fact that government can not provide everything for you and businesses takes risks and therefor must be compensated for it, the good news is that day of economic reckoning is coming much sooner than everyone thinks.
I agree, I was on the fence about canceling before this, now that this is happening I'm canceling for sure. Their streaming content is worthless, there are a few good movies on it every once and while and I see a lot of new content was recently added, but the interface on the PS3 is so limited with 75 titles per category, and 90% of their stuff is old or low budget, and of the other 10% I have seen most of it or don't want to to see it.
As for the DVDs not much lost there, I watch maybe 3 per month, and that is scrounging for titles it seems, I'll save time by simply using on demand for $5 each, that is before I cancel my cable as well.
And I haven't done a single situp in the last 20 years.
And no... this is not a joke post. :-)
I figure I've got another 8-10 good years left then the hip or back probably goes to arthritis.
I have two six packs! Both are the fridge, and I haven't done a single sit up in the last 30 years!
And yes... this is a joke post :D
I figure I've got another 10-12 great years left then the elbow or wrist goes to arthritis, after which time I plan on buying one of those helmet beer holders with a straw.
Both issues are easily compensated for: 1) wind, simply design a saucer shaped balloon with very low wind resistance, furthermore you could have a rotatable properly for exact positioning 2) simply store a small amount of helium on a tank which controls altitude
Why not just use a balloon? The only advantage I can see this having is less movement due to wind, but designing a properly shaped balloon should easily defeat that, and more importantly a balloon would be much quieter at low altitudes, use much less power, and stay aloft even if the power is cut. Seems like a case of a hammer looking for a nail.
hackers are paid
companies security hole is plugged
The funny thing is their new UI showcases the most unimportant aspect of the movie, the box cover. Reviews, description, ratings, genre, actors are all more more important than box covers.
Interesting metric. What probably counts more is the level of education required for those employees. My guess is in a heliostat most of the labor involved has to do with cleaning the mirrors, now you are talking an unskilled $10/hour job vs a nuclear plant tech that is making $50+/hour, even if there were 5 employees per MW in the solar plant it would still be better. Looking at raw employees per MW doesn't seem to be of much use. The much more important issues are rather obvious:
1) no nuclear waste
2) no nuclear fuel
3) the worst that could happen is some molten salt all over the desert
4) workers require less training and clearances
5) the plant is much less of a terrorist target
About the only downsides are cost and land space, since in the USA we have an abundance of both (compared to every other industrialized nation) we should be building these things all over the place, even in not so sunny places. Since no body wants to cut the defense budget (which is massively overinflated and a waste IMO) we should have the army start building and running these.
- only allow real names, this alone keeps a huge portion of discussions on the up and up
- social and merchant site integration, sites where users can be verified in some way, facebook or amazon via a credit card increases a users default good karma
- no displayed point system, or post tally, or userid snobs
- threading is essential, so the replies are tied to the original post
- keep it simple. plain text. uses less bandwidth
- a few questions asking detailed information about the article which allows the user to post comments, what is the point of them commenting on the article if they haven't read it? in any case it will reduce trolling
- users are allowed to permanently hide or upvote other specific users
- comments are shown based on a score calculated based on: user score threshold setting, user verification results, recently posted comments score, number of recent votes to other users comments (the more they read and interact with other users the more they should be seen by others)
- all users can vote on others comments after a certain number of comments are posted, verification is done, or time has passed
some ideas copied from previous comments