Twitter is a good way to give short feedback to companies/organizations that A) lack forums, and B) never respond to email. You can do the equivalent of shouting out in a crowd, and if what you say matches the feelings of the room others will shout it out too, and you might get a response.
The other good thing about Twitter is that it's a fast way for person-to-person conversation when there's no existing connection between them (i.e. no common forums they visit, etc.). When Austin and Bastrop had multiple major fires on Labor Day last year, none of the major media were covering it while Twitter had live updates about which streets had houses burning, where there were still open streets to get in and out, where there were new hotspots, etc. The next best thing was KLBJ-AM who was repeating call in information, but only had a tenth of the content.
My Twitter account has like five tweets, for those two reasons. Otherwise I see no value to it.
I think it's ballooning because of the economy being so stagnant. That's expected. I'm okay with governments running deficits in bad times. The problem is that governments need to run surpluses in good times to bank money for those bad times. Instead our government gives tax breaks to ensure it never runs a surplus.
The other thing a government can do is regulate the market to try to limit the peak during good times, with the hope that this limits the crash later. I think so far our government has shown that they can only do this with limited success, especially because they (like us) don't always realize what's causing the economy to boom when it does. The people who do understand those things are too busy making a fuckton of money to pass the tips on to the government.
I think selfish would be taking the tax breaks and then not publicly talking about how little he pays - you know, like most people with at least a tenth of his wealth.
It wouldn't be too hard for the federal government to require that publicly-traded corporations pay all their taxes in the country where the majority of their executive staff and board of directors live and/or hold nationality. I'm not sure how many of Microsoft's or Google's or Apple's executive staff would want to move to the Bahamas to enable their company to not pay any taxes. Frankly, I suspect that having all their executives gone would cost them more money than they save by not paying their taxes, so they'd just suck it up and pay them.
I'm not sure what party says things like you claim. Most law does basically legislate morality. I'm struggling right now to think of one that doesn't. With that out of the way, it's all just debate over degree.
I'm a fan of letting the government do things that a government does best, and letting the market do things that the market does best, and letting private citizens do things that private citizens do best.
Meh, I don't agree with our foreign policy that much either but going all left-wing crazy in your posts will just get you labeled as a left wing crazy and ignored.
I think your second paragraph might be insightful but I'm not going to bother reading it after reading your first paragraph. Sorry.
Some of those things require CNN to have a person on the ground in those places. That's expensive. They already have a lot of people in DC and they can report on the secret service and wars and the other superficial stuff just fine. (They may have sent someone to Columbia, sure, for a limited time, but in order to report on all that other world news they'd need to have people in hotels in all those places all the time.)
Some of the other things require extensive investigative journalism, which means a producer working on it for weeks or months before it turns into a 15 minute story one day. Not very cost effective.
Because that libertarian attitude every one should be able to enter any contract he wishes without restriction doesn't account for the realities of power play in this world.
The realities of power are that really rich people, right now, can fly to countries to get organs from desperate people. So all we're really doing is exporting the problem.
We're minimizing the number of poor people in our country who are dependent upon the benevolent due to renal failure. That's worth it right there, end of argument.
Having only one kidney is neither healthy nor safe in the long term.
You only own your house to the extent that society defends it for you. Maybe that's the local beat cop, maybe it's the city swat team, maybe it's the national guard or whole fuckin' army. The point is, property "rights" have annual dues. Pay up or that right goes out the door along with the right to breath clean air, drink clean water, be treated when sick, and not be shot. (And frankly, any of those other rights like free speech and religion don't matter when you lack those first ones.)
It's not punishment. It's legal protection money. They have the most to lose if society collapses. Therefore they have the most to gain by keeping society going. And society exists because the bottom end is propped up by social safety nets. (A long time ago, it was propped up by outlets where the desperate could flee to a new life where they could gain ownership of a resource just be living and working on it. That stopped working around the 1930s when we ran out of new places to flee to.)
Meanwhile Nevada has been facing record unemployment and massive deficits. Frankly it's the fault of the idiots in Nevada who clearly elected inept politicians since good ones would find a way to tax those offices a little. (Not enough to get them to leave mind you, but enough to help salvage their deficit.) And I say this having no idea the political affiliation of those in power in Nevada.
Even Warren Buffet claims all the deductions and tax breaks he can, all while pointing out that he could and should pay more. If he, or I, or Fluffeh just gave money to the federal government, it would have no measurable effect on the overall deficit or direction of government spending. If, on the other hand, everyone who could pay more did, we could minimize the deficit when times are bad, pull into a profit when times are good, and try to get on a plan to pay down the debt.
Voluntary extra payments just let people with empathy and benevolence cover for people with neither. We don't want to enable those people to live a life of selfishness. We want to force them to comply with the will of the majority. And frankly, most of the laws of society exists to force people who lack empathy and benevolence to comply under penalty of imprisonment. Exactly what should be forced and what shouldn't is the matter for strong, healthy political debate. But anyone who argues that no one should be forced to pretend to have empathy or to do anything that benefits society likely lacks empathy and benevolence, and serves to prove why we need laws to force compliance.
THanks. Sums it up nicely. Keep in mind though that Austin Energy is rapidly building green energy sources (and other energy sources, too) to meet a growing demand.
It costs Austin $14k to subsidize 6kW of summertime peak energy generation on my roof, which I'll provide to the grid at baseline rates (or reduce my own demand at peak rates). Suppose it costs Austin more than $14k to build, transport, and maintain 6kW of summertime peak energy generation in a field in west Texas. If so, then this isn't really a subsidy, is it, it's a smart investment since I'm stuck paying for maintenance (if any) and risk (if any)?
Once it's on your home, your insurance covers it in the event of damage. The anecdotal reports I've seen indicate that solar panels are more durable than asphalt shingles when it comes to hail, so it's possible that installing a solar system will reduce your home insurance claims as well. Hence, you may not be paying for the cost of this coverage in the form of higher rates.
The inverter needs to be replaced every 10 years or so if you buy a whole-house one, but new DC panels have an inverter on the back of each panel and are warranted for 25 years (same as the panel). So again, there's no need to pay for this if something breaks.
I convinced my and my wife's parents to buy the best TV to display a picture they could find, then complement it with an Apple TV. I think that's a smarter choice than any smart TV. Personally I'm going to use a TV for a decade or more. We still use our 46" plasma bought in 2003. Who would want to be stuck with the "smart TV" options available in 2003? Who in 2021 would want to be stuck with the "smart TV" options available in 2012?
Get a TV that can provide a great picture. The content can be supplied by a cheap, readily-upgradable accessory device.
Obviously this includes government rebates, but while talking about personal out-of-pocket costs I saw a vendor in Austin, TX selling a 6kW system, installed, for $19.5k. After city of Austin $14,475 rebates (paid directly to the vendor; never out of your pocket), and $1508 federal tax credit (out of your pocket unless you pay quarterly or adjust your W4), the cost for the system was just $3,517. $3,517 is crazy good for a 6kW system, which in Texas supposedly generates about 8400 kW-h of electricity a year. At 10.5 cents per kW-h (a low rate than I pay now), that nets $882 in savings each year.
That's breakeven in less than four years. The remaining 21 years or so of system life are profit.
Solution: Ask every household who bought our TV for their fancy living room setup to run a 50 foot ethernet cable along the floor and up the wall to the television, then configure something on their router they've never heard of.
You know you pay for that, right? The service charges your bank and/or credit card processor charge the vendors take into account their work to prevent fraud. I believe they pass all fraudulent charges back to the merchant who rang them, so in this case wherever the thieves used your card will lose the funds. All of that is passed back to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
So no, it's not a tragedy if a card is occasionally misplaced and misused, but it's still a leech on the system - EVERYONE's system - to allow it to happen systemically.
I don't think we should be telling them that are not allowed to use services provided by record labels.
I don't think that the record labels should be allowed to dictate the copyright laws of our country to the point of regulating technology development, and I think that's a far greater and real threat than that of new musicians not finding experienced people in the music industry who want to help them succeed in exchange for a paycheck.
I think you should read David Brin's Uplift series. It studies the ramifications of pre-sapience vs sapience.
Personally, I think we should be working to boost the brain power of species like baboons and dolphins. The odds of an alien sapient species arriving on our planet in my lifetime are virtually nil. If we have any chance of conversing with a different sapient species in the short term, it's with a species we uplift from our planet's native stock. And personally I'd love to be alive for the first conversation we as humans have with another species as equals.
It means they can continue to raise and spend campaign funds. Remember that there are ways to convert funds from one account into another account. For example, by merely suspending his campaign, he may be able to continue gathering funds that he can convert to a senate campaign in a year, without having to declare as a senate candidate right now.
I think it also means that they don't release their existing delegates. Were he to, they would all be able to vote however they chose. Right now, though, they are still required to vote for him (for at least the first round of voting). He may be able to control how they vote if he negotiates something with, say, Gingrich.
You entered something incorrectly into Tax Act. Had an HR Block person entered your data into Tax Act, it too would have given you $900 refund.
Filing taxes: Part 1: Knowing what things you did last year were tax events. Part 2: Knowing how to apply those tax events to the tax code. Part 3: Simple math.
The HR Block person, if you used an HR Block person, helped you with parts 1 and 2. If you meant HR Block software, then their software asked a question of you in a way that you understood better or differently than Tax Act. If you know where the $1100 difference comes from, go back into Tax Act and find the question you answered differently and its results will match.
Slashdot Mirror
Twitter is a good way to give short feedback to companies/organizations that A) lack forums, and B) never respond to email. You can do the equivalent of shouting out in a crowd, and if what you say matches the feelings of the room others will shout it out too, and you might get a response.
The other good thing about Twitter is that it's a fast way for person-to-person conversation when there's no existing connection between them (i.e. no common forums they visit, etc.). When Austin and Bastrop had multiple major fires on Labor Day last year, none of the major media were covering it while Twitter had live updates about which streets had houses burning, where there were still open streets to get in and out, where there were new hotspots, etc. The next best thing was KLBJ-AM who was repeating call in information, but only had a tenth of the content.
My Twitter account has like five tweets, for those two reasons. Otherwise I see no value to it.
Troll fail
I wouldn't call it "codified by law." I'd call it "the basis of law."
I think it's ballooning because of the economy being so stagnant. That's expected. I'm okay with governments running deficits in bad times. The problem is that governments need to run surpluses in good times to bank money for those bad times. Instead our government gives tax breaks to ensure it never runs a surplus.
The other thing a government can do is regulate the market to try to limit the peak during good times, with the hope that this limits the crash later. I think so far our government has shown that they can only do this with limited success, especially because they (like us) don't always realize what's causing the economy to boom when it does. The people who do understand those things are too busy making a fuckton of money to pass the tips on to the government.
I think selfish would be taking the tax breaks and then not publicly talking about how little he pays - you know, like most people with at least a tenth of his wealth.
It wouldn't be too hard for the federal government to require that publicly-traded corporations pay all their taxes in the country where the majority of their executive staff and board of directors live and/or hold nationality. I'm not sure how many of Microsoft's or Google's or Apple's executive staff would want to move to the Bahamas to enable their company to not pay any taxes. Frankly, I suspect that having all their executives gone would cost them more money than they save by not paying their taxes, so they'd just suck it up and pay them.
I'm not sure what party says things like you claim. Most law does basically legislate morality. I'm struggling right now to think of one that doesn't. With that out of the way, it's all just debate over degree.
I'm a fan of letting the government do things that a government does best, and letting the market do things that the market does best, and letting private citizens do things that private citizens do best.
Meh, I don't agree with our foreign policy that much either but going all left-wing crazy in your posts will just get you labeled as a left wing crazy and ignored.
I think your second paragraph might be insightful but I'm not going to bother reading it after reading your first paragraph. Sorry.
Some of those things require CNN to have a person on the ground in those places. That's expensive. They already have a lot of people in DC and they can report on the secret service and wars and the other superficial stuff just fine. (They may have sent someone to Columbia, sure, for a limited time, but in order to report on all that other world news they'd need to have people in hotels in all those places all the time.)
Some of the other things require extensive investigative journalism, which means a producer working on it for weeks or months before it turns into a 15 minute story one day. Not very cost effective.
Because that libertarian attitude every one should be able to enter any contract he wishes without restriction doesn't account for the realities of power play in this world.
The realities of power are that really rich people, right now, can fly to countries to get organs from desperate people. So all we're really doing is exporting the problem.
We're minimizing the number of poor people in our country who are dependent upon the benevolent due to renal failure. That's worth it right there, end of argument.
Having only one kidney is neither healthy nor safe in the long term.
You only own your house to the extent that society defends it for you. Maybe that's the local beat cop, maybe it's the city swat team, maybe it's the national guard or whole fuckin' army. The point is, property "rights" have annual dues. Pay up or that right goes out the door along with the right to breath clean air, drink clean water, be treated when sick, and not be shot. (And frankly, any of those other rights like free speech and religion don't matter when you lack those first ones.)
It's not punishment. It's legal protection money. They have the most to lose if society collapses. Therefore they have the most to gain by keeping society going. And society exists because the bottom end is propped up by social safety nets. (A long time ago, it was propped up by outlets where the desperate could flee to a new life where they could gain ownership of a resource just be living and working on it. That stopped working around the 1930s when we ran out of new places to flee to.)
Meanwhile Nevada has been facing record unemployment and massive deficits. Frankly it's the fault of the idiots in Nevada who clearly elected inept politicians since good ones would find a way to tax those offices a little. (Not enough to get them to leave mind you, but enough to help salvage their deficit.) And I say this having no idea the political affiliation of those in power in Nevada.
Corporations are people. People who can simultaneously be in multiple places at the same time.
Even Warren Buffet claims all the deductions and tax breaks he can, all while pointing out that he could and should pay more. If he, or I, or Fluffeh just gave money to the federal government, it would have no measurable effect on the overall deficit or direction of government spending. If, on the other hand, everyone who could pay more did, we could minimize the deficit when times are bad, pull into a profit when times are good, and try to get on a plan to pay down the debt.
Voluntary extra payments just let people with empathy and benevolence cover for people with neither. We don't want to enable those people to live a life of selfishness. We want to force them to comply with the will of the majority. And frankly, most of the laws of society exists to force people who lack empathy and benevolence to comply under penalty of imprisonment. Exactly what should be forced and what shouldn't is the matter for strong, healthy political debate. But anyone who argues that no one should be forced to pretend to have empathy or to do anything that benefits society likely lacks empathy and benevolence, and serves to prove why we need laws to force compliance.
THanks. Sums it up nicely. Keep in mind though that Austin Energy is rapidly building green energy sources (and other energy sources, too) to meet a growing demand.
It costs Austin $14k to subsidize 6kW of summertime peak energy generation on my roof, which I'll provide to the grid at baseline rates (or reduce my own demand at peak rates). Suppose it costs Austin more than $14k to build, transport, and maintain 6kW of summertime peak energy generation in a field in west Texas. If so, then this isn't really a subsidy, is it, it's a smart investment since I'm stuck paying for maintenance (if any) and risk (if any)?
Once it's on your home, your insurance covers it in the event of damage. The anecdotal reports I've seen indicate that solar panels are more durable than asphalt shingles when it comes to hail, so it's possible that installing a solar system will reduce your home insurance claims as well. Hence, you may not be paying for the cost of this coverage in the form of higher rates.
The inverter needs to be replaced every 10 years or so if you buy a whole-house one, but new DC panels have an inverter on the back of each panel and are warranted for 25 years (same as the panel). So again, there's no need to pay for this if something breaks.
I convinced my and my wife's parents to buy the best TV to display a picture they could find, then complement it with an Apple TV. I think that's a smarter choice than any smart TV. Personally I'm going to use a TV for a decade or more. We still use our 46" plasma bought in 2003. Who would want to be stuck with the "smart TV" options available in 2003? Who in 2021 would want to be stuck with the "smart TV" options available in 2012?
Get a TV that can provide a great picture. The content can be supplied by a cheap, readily-upgradable accessory device.
Obviously this includes government rebates, but while talking about personal out-of-pocket costs I saw a vendor in Austin, TX selling a 6kW system, installed, for $19.5k. After city of Austin $14,475 rebates (paid directly to the vendor; never out of your pocket), and $1508 federal tax credit (out of your pocket unless you pay quarterly or adjust your W4), the cost for the system was just $3,517. $3,517 is crazy good for a 6kW system, which in Texas supposedly generates about 8400 kW-h of electricity a year. At 10.5 cents per kW-h (a low rate than I pay now), that nets $882 in savings each year.
That's breakeven in less than four years. The remaining 21 years or so of system life are profit.
Solution: Ask every household who bought our TV for their fancy living room setup to run a 50 foot ethernet cable along the floor and up the wall to the television, then configure something on their router they've never heard of.
You know you pay for that, right? The service charges your bank and/or credit card processor charge the vendors take into account their work to prevent fraud. I believe they pass all fraudulent charges back to the merchant who rang them, so in this case wherever the thieves used your card will lose the funds. All of that is passed back to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
So no, it's not a tragedy if a card is occasionally misplaced and misused, but it's still a leech on the system - EVERYONE's system - to allow it to happen systemically.
I don't think we should be telling them that are not allowed to use services provided by record labels.
I don't think that the record labels should be allowed to dictate the copyright laws of our country to the point of regulating technology development, and I think that's a far greater and real threat than that of new musicians not finding experienced people in the music industry who want to help them succeed in exchange for a paycheck.
I think you should read David Brin's Uplift series. It studies the ramifications of pre-sapience vs sapience.
Personally, I think we should be working to boost the brain power of species like baboons and dolphins. The odds of an alien sapient species arriving on our planet in my lifetime are virtually nil. If we have any chance of conversing with a different sapient species in the short term, it's with a species we uplift from our planet's native stock. And personally I'd love to be alive for the first conversation we as humans have with another species as equals.
It means they can continue to raise and spend campaign funds. Remember that there are ways to convert funds from one account into another account. For example, by merely suspending his campaign, he may be able to continue gathering funds that he can convert to a senate campaign in a year, without having to declare as a senate candidate right now.
I think it also means that they don't release their existing delegates. Were he to, they would all be able to vote however they chose. Right now, though, they are still required to vote for him (for at least the first round of voting). He may be able to control how they vote if he negotiates something with, say, Gingrich.
You entered something incorrectly into Tax Act. Had an HR Block person entered your data into Tax Act, it too would have given you $900 refund.
Filing taxes:
Part 1: Knowing what things you did last year were tax events.
Part 2: Knowing how to apply those tax events to the tax code.
Part 3: Simple math.
The HR Block person, if you used an HR Block person, helped you with parts 1 and 2. If you meant HR Block software, then their software asked a question of you in a way that you understood better or differently than Tax Act. If you know where the $1100 difference comes from, go back into Tax Act and find the question you answered differently and its results will match.