I literally can't have this discussion with you if you're going to refuse to even look into any of your own premises.
This cuts both ways. Your entire argument is based on the assumption that there will always be enough jobs to go around. I just don't see that as the case.
Take somebody who is a quadriplegic and is mentally retarded. What kind of job can they ever get (aside from some kind of subsidized make-work program)? Now, explain what difference there is between that person and you or I other than a matter of degree. If the person could twitch one finger, would he be better off? If he could say his name, would he be better off? There is a continuum between somebody who is able to get a job and the cripple in my example, and somewhere along the way people just can't get jobs. Automation just has the effect of moving the threshold, and as we progress that threshold will get to a point where the majority of the population falls below it.
As far as cost of living goes - this just reflects the distribution of wealth. Sure, I guess somebody with a minimum wage job might be able to rent an unimproved lot in the middle of a desert somewhere, but there aren't any minimum wage jobs within walking distance of such a lot, so that isn't a scenario that actually exists.
Walk into an average slum sometime and tell me that you'd hire somebody who lives there without some kind of subsidy. They just don't have any skills worth hiring them for, and cracking the whip isn't going to magically make them get those skills. Most likely they'd riot first, and starve second. Of course, conservatives would never let that happen - they'd just put them in jail where they get all that free food they aren't willing to hand out to folks who aren't in prison, and they can pay to guard them as an added bonus.
Yup. Companies will often hang up if you disclose that a phone call is being recorded, and I've even had one which refused to speak to me if I was on speakerphone (I was helping out somebody who had a speech difficulty, and they insisted that I give the phone to them to authorize me to speak to them and then take the phone and speak without the other person being able to hear). I think this is all part of a strategy to ensure that if the company does something wrong it is just one person's word against another's (having another witness would complicate things).
1. Labor isn't obsolete and shall never be obsolete until robots are in all ways superior to the average person. That is unlikely to happen at any point in the near future. What is more, if that does happen... we all get personal robot slaves and we'll probably devolve into an incredibly decadent society...
So, all labor won't be obsolete until robots are in all ways superior to the average person.
However, before then various types of labor DEFINITELY will become obsolete as machines become superior to people in individual domains. It used to be that you could make a decent living as a ditch digger. Today that is impossible.
When robots can replace all labor, then anybody who can afford a robot will be able to live like a king. In the present economic system that will be unlikely for most for the same reason that most people can't afford to live in Chicago...
2. Much of the cost of living problems are the result of rising COSTS not the falling value of the labor itself. Compare the cost of living in Chicago for example with the cost of living in Anchorage Alaska...
This is actually the exact same problem. It doesn't matter whether costs go up or the value of labor goes down - the one relative to the other is all that matters. Property is capital. Robots are capital. In a sense even money is capital. Our current economy has been concentrating capital of all kinds in the hands of relatively few people, since having capital makes it easier to acquire more.
A poor person can't afford a house in Chicago for the same reason that they can't afford to buy a robot and get somebody to pay them to have their robot work an assembly line for them.
The Supremes disagree with your full stop.They have made it quite clear you can record police without their consent. So there goes your theory on some states having full stop laws on recording.
Good point. In that case it may or may not be illegal to record audio in some states, and if you get arrested for it you just have to pay to get your case reviewed by the supreme court. Hopefully you have deep pockets.
The laws on the books say that it is illegal. There is only one way to find out how a court would rule, and that is to get prosecuted for violating the letter of the law.
So, I agree with you in many ways, and I'll certainly agree that the way entitlement programs are administered in the US is poor at best, and the motives of the lawmakers who enable them are often bad.
However, I'm concerned that it just simply isn't possible for the average person to earn a self-supporting wage. The fact is that labor is rapidly becoming obsolete. We don't need able-bodied people to do jobs. At some point we probably won't need smart people to do jobs either. At that point people either own capital from which they can obtain enough income to survive, or they have to depend utterly on social benefits.
If there weren't social welfare programs, what would the recipients of these programs do for a living in a world where computers program themselves, robots can do manual labor, and so on? The steady increase in unemployment is just the start of what is likely to be a MUCH bigger problem. Sure, it will probably be at least another 20 years before computers are doing all the jobs, but the day will come at some point.
Sorry, but simply by adding "By entering this vehicle you are agreeing to be monitored" is all that is needed.
Yup. I could see the argument if you tried to do that with a fire escape, etc, but the person parking your car has no legal obligation to do business with you in general. Also, monitoring the use of your car isn't particularly egregious in any case especially when you're paying the person who is using it.
In my state recording audio without consent of all parties present is illegal, full stop. The fact that it is illegal also makes it inadmissible in court.
Of course, lots of things that are illegal aren't prosecuted, and this tends to be one of those things. However, it definitely is against the law.
The business is their client. If they were freelancing and pulled the same attitude, they would immediately be looking for another client to replace the one who just walked.
The role of an internal IT organization is not the same as the role of a freelancer. A freelancer is hired to do a job. If I am the CEO and I hire an IT team, then I want to hear about it if my IT team thinks that some other part of the organization is making a mistake, and I want to hear from the rest of the organization if they think that IT is making a mistake.
IT has to listen to the business for sure, but IT should be a part of the business as well.
And probably most important of all: reports are familiar. Never forget that IT is providing a service to the business. It's not the place of IT to dictate to the business how they do their work - it should always be the other way round.
Well, it would be more accurate to say that IT, like the rest of the business, has a role to play in providing value to the owners. All organizations in a business tend to have unique roles and perspectives, and it is important for them to work together if the business is going to be successful. Often IT tends to be in more of a service delivery role, but any business that wants to perform well is going to make sure that IT is also in a consulting role when it comes to deciding how the mission is accomplished.
If I hire somebody to mow my lawn 6 days a week, and they tell me that mowing it twice a week would be more than adequate and better for my grass, I'd be foolish to ignore their advice even if in the end they deliver whatever I'm willing to pay for.
While laziness and not wanting to wait 5 extra seconds for number crunching are certainly a factor, I've got customers who are paranoid that we might pull one over on them and retroactively change the data so when they go back to last quarter's numbers they won't be the same.
So, I get where you're coming from and I tend to be of the same mind, I have found that sometimes it really does make sense to actually archive PDF copies of stuff outside of the system that generated them. This is usually best when that report actually gets, well, reported somewhere often due to legal reasons.
Imagine you have a system that generates tax returns from a database full of financial transactions.
Option 1 - a system that always contains an up-to-date set of rules for generating a tax return for any year from inception to the present, and for legal reasons you need a high level of assurance that all those past rules are still working correctly. Option 2 - a system that just needs to generate the next return accurately, and maybe amend the last few years, but anything beyond that is just a PDF file stored in another system that just needs to store and reproduce files (which could be nothing more than a backed-up filesystem).
So, option 2 means that after every change you have to test the 2012-2015 tax generation rules. Option 1 might mean that you have to test the 1985-2015 tax generation rules. I think I'll take option 2.:) Simplifying the tax code to make your code readable just isn't an option.
So you're saying they should tax software whenever it goes via the internet?
Only if it is sold, but yes. If software is commercially sold and wasn't 100% domestically written, then it should be treated the same as anything else that is sold that wasn't 100% domestically produced. And I'm all for bilateral trade agreements when they're between countries that have similar policies.
As to social programs being the main point of the government... really? So in 1776... it was all about socialized medical care? Oh wait... it was about repelling british control... which was foreign aggression to the colonists... and since then the primary justification for federal power has always been protecting people from foreign aggression.... not social programs. So... you're wrong.
That is only true if you accept that the last word in the proper function of the government was written in 1776. The fact that the US was founded by people who weren't interested in socialism doesn't make it illegitimate.
As to paying to import goods into the US... neither Mexico nor canada pays them so why would a former US state pay them? Obviously they wouldn't. So... wrong again...
I'm well aware of how importing goods works. I am proposing that this should change - tariffs should be much higher in general than they are today. You can't have free trade and socialism at the same time, because socialism imposes HUGE costs on producing anything and free trade will just cause all the jobs to leave overnight. Trade should be free with countries that have similar sorts of social programs.
As to people that need the programs not being able to pay for them, that is fine... but do you not see the problem with those same people VOTING on whether the programs are created in the first place? When you vote on OTHER people's money it isn't really very fair is it? By all means... let everyone vote on things that we all must support. However, if you are on subsistance from the government, I think that should have some cost to you...the first and most reasonable cost is a limitation of your voting rights such that you are unable to vote yourself additional subsidies. This will also reduce the value of such people to politicians because they will be less able to buy votes with other people's money.
The problem with this sort of system is that I think it is likely that 90% of the population will be subsisting almost entirely on government benefits in the not-so-distant future. Unemployment is already at something like 12% today, and is likely to continue to rise as the need for people to do work goes down. How can you have a democracy when most of the population can't vote on the #1 government expenditure?
Absent that change, the politicians can just buy elections with other people's money which is in large part what many subsidies are entirely about. They are often not even helping people. It just gets a politician some extra numbers in some communities because they get free stuff.
That isn't a problem with socialism so much as a problem with democracy, and it happens even with things that don't involve direct social benefits, like tax breaks, government contracts, and so on. The fundamental problem is that the average person is about as good at deciding on what is a good government policy as they are at earning an income for themselves. I don't have a fix for that, unfortunately, because democracy's only real virtue is that it is better than any of the alternatives that have been tried.
The reason the middle class is targeted for taxes is because they can't escape them. The rich can. They have the lawyers, the accountants, the loopholes, the off shore accounts, etc. They often are not even breaking the law.
This is why you can't have free trade and such with socialism, and there need to be a number of other reforms as well for it to work. The nature of the economy tends to cause individuals to accumulate wealth. Simplification is probably one of the best ways to cut down on tax avoidance - such as putting a tax on any financial transfer of any kind (including between different accounts owned by the same person) - the volume is so enormous the rate could be very low, and it would be very difficult to avoid. Tariffs on intellectual property would
When big pharma patents a drug and makes it so expensive people die, or they push a drug that is useless and even dangerous.
Would fewer people die if they didn't make it at all? I'm not aware of any useless prescription drugs that are on the market that have been recently approved, either, but I'd be happy if you have a citation. There have been drugs that were demonstrated to be useful that were later demonstrated to not be useful.
I will agree that bribery of a sort is part of why we don't have the NIH doing royalty-free drug development. There is no reason that drugs can only be researched privately. However, simply getting rid of patents isn't going to make that magically happen...
Have two companies do it independently, each at 1/6th the cost of the "reliable" version. The two different probes are unlikely to fail in the same way. Even if they did both fail, you could fix the problem and build two more, while spending less than the 6X reliable approach.
There is certainly more to it than that though. If a device consists of 50 different critical components such that a failure in any one ends the mission, then it is hardly a benefit if one probe has module 2 fail and another probe has module 7 fail - the result is the same.
You still need to design for a reasonably decent failure rate.
That said, it may very well make sense to accept a 10% increase in overall failure rate if it results in a 90% reduction in cost, since if you send a few probes you'd expect one to make it through. You just can't afford to accept defects en masse.
The design parameters haven't changed (pocketable device)
Uh, where on the iPhone specifications does it say the device is designed to be pocketable? I've never seen that on the specs for any phone I've bought. It certainly might be an expectation that you have, but I'm sure the engineers did not have that as an actual constraint or it would never have gotten through testing.
I wasn't under the impression that getting rid of FICA was part of the proposal. I certainly agree that it is regressive and would love to see it go away. I don't see the need to take money from poor people just to make them feel the pain.
Third, why does increasing spending on social programs make sense if we're running a trillion dollars over budget?
Simple. Paying for social programs is the main reason for the existence of the government. The military should only exist to ensure that the government can be preserved so that it can continue to meet its obligations to the people. If the government isn't going to address the needs of those who can't address their own needs, then why should it matter whether the nation gets invaded? Are people really worse off if the only thing that changes is the flag?
I'm not saying national defense shouldn't matter. I'm saying that it should matter only so that the government can accomplish the real mission, which is to make life better for the governed.
Many portions of the country only remain part of the union because of concerns about international threats...
I don't have a problem with self-determination. If a region doesn't want to be a part of the US I don't have a big problem with that, but they'll have to pay tariffs to import their goods into the US, and I'd include intellectual property in that as well. I would definitely advocate a system where countries with things like socialized medicine and environmental controls impose significant tariffs on countries that do not.
I think we're already spending too much on social programs, honestly. The whole thing strikes me as sophisticated vote buying at this point. Because the people that vote for it are rarely the people that pay for it.
The people who need the social programs don't have any money to begin with, so of course they're not going to be the ones paying for it. Most people are incapable of supporting themselves at a decent standard of living, and that problem seems likely to only get worse. The people who will end up having to pay for it will hardly miss the money - maybe they'll have to fly first class once in a while instead of taking the private jet for recreation.
As to raising taxes... you really should talk to business owners. I'm talking small business owners. The local sandwich shop. The guy that launders clothing... the nail salon... any of them. Talk to them about taxes. Because in many parts of the country these businesses are at the breaking point.
That is like saying to talk to some poor person about raising taxes because they have nothing left to give. These aren't the folks I would raise taxes on. Taxes should be progressively rated based on income. I'd probably exempt anybody making under $100k/yr from paying any taxes at all. If you're "only" making $200k/yr maybe 20% should go to taxes. On the other hand, I'd probably make the highest marginal rate something like 99%. You can still keep an extra $10M if you squeeze out an extra $1B in income, so it isn't like you'll have to carpool to work.
It most definitely adds up, and this is why apple can do stuff like maintain 45% margins on the macbook air whilst keeping the build quality of the enclosure, fund OS X development, NOT include shitware, provide iCloud and all the other support, while the PC guys can barely clone it somewhat without providing any of the additional service/software stuff - on margins so thin that most of them are posting losses or otherwise not doing well.
You seem to be implying that HP could charge 45% margins if only they didn't give their customers 400 different options on every laptop. Most likely if they dropped all the options, most people just wouldn't buy it at all, and they'd make very little more on the ones they did sell.
Apple makes 45% margins because they control the whole experience. If HP wrote their own OS and got as many people to like it as Apple did, then they could be making 45% as well. However, most likely they'd just go out of business, like most other companies that do everything the way that Apple did. Apple is an aberration - the company that did things differently and had it pay off. The fact is that lots of companies try to do things the way Apple did them, and 99% of the time they fail. Then 1% of the time they succeed and everybody wonders why more companies don't do things that way.
Apple and HP have completely different business models - HP can't just imitate Apple and expect it to work.
And I'm saying that unless you have personally audited the source code, and the machine code for the compiler, you are trusting someone else, and that it does what it says it does. Which is not any different to running closed source software.
Your first sentence is completely true. Your second sentence does not follow from the first.
If you're running closed source software then you have to trust the folks that wrote it or choose not to buy it. If you are running open source software then you have the option of trusting the folks that wrote it, auditing/fixing it yourself, paying somebody else to audit/fix it for you and trusting them, or choosing not to buy it.
The difference is that with open source software you get a choice in who you have to trust that you don't get when you buy something closed. If you buy something that is closed your only options are to buy it or not.
well, Debian is taking that to the next level and adopting systemd which ignores serious sys admins and fucks up the whole system init thing
Uh, the "serious sys admins" all installed systemd long before their distros adopted it.:) Or do you think that the people coding a new init and service manager from scratch were all folks who couldn't figure out how to write a bash script?
That's why you can have a development team in India for a product that isn't even sold there and it still makes sense. It's not a tangible good you export.
This is the thing I don't like. Companies play both sides of the fence.
If I start selling copies of Win8, I'll be put in jail because I'm stealing MS's property.
If MS sells a copy of Win8 in the US, they have to pay a licensing fee to MS Caymans for the rights to sell Win8 in the US, so the US company doesn't make much profit but they'll happily report that profit in the Caymans at a 0% tax rate.
On the other hand, when they want to install Win8 on 10M computers and the code was written in India, well, they just FTP that over with no tariffs because it is an intangible good that has no legal value for customs purposes.
If MS had to pay duty on 10M copies of Windows (at full retail cost) to have a 3rd party install copies on 10M computers, then I bet they'd rethink their development model.
All these tech companies simply need to open a few satellite offices. Inherently some people don't want to be in San Fransisco, Redmond, etc. if you can't find the talent you need perhaps you aren't in the right area?
Agree. Either that or let people work remotely. I bet there are a lot of people who simply don't like living in big cities/etc who would be able to contribute, and at far less cost.
Amazing. Not only do we prevent them from working, we also prevent them from collecting food stamps so that they are further incentivised to resort to theft. Then if they get caught we put them in prison where they get the free food, clothing, and shelter we didn't want to give them before they resorted to theft.
Uh, you do realize that the 6+ is about as big as any Android "phone" there is? If you want to get beyond phones then I think Apple came out with their totally-inconvenient-because-it-is-unpocketable iPad quite a while ago.
Slashdot Mirror
citations needed.
http://www.aclupa.org/issues/p...
http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guid...
I literally can't have this discussion with you if you're going to refuse to even look into any of your own premises.
This cuts both ways. Your entire argument is based on the assumption that there will always be enough jobs to go around. I just don't see that as the case.
Take somebody who is a quadriplegic and is mentally retarded. What kind of job can they ever get (aside from some kind of subsidized make-work program)? Now, explain what difference there is between that person and you or I other than a matter of degree. If the person could twitch one finger, would he be better off? If he could say his name, would he be better off? There is a continuum between somebody who is able to get a job and the cripple in my example, and somewhere along the way people just can't get jobs. Automation just has the effect of moving the threshold, and as we progress that threshold will get to a point where the majority of the population falls below it.
As far as cost of living goes - this just reflects the distribution of wealth. Sure, I guess somebody with a minimum wage job might be able to rent an unimproved lot in the middle of a desert somewhere, but there aren't any minimum wage jobs within walking distance of such a lot, so that isn't a scenario that actually exists.
Walk into an average slum sometime and tell me that you'd hire somebody who lives there without some kind of subsidy. They just don't have any skills worth hiring them for, and cracking the whip isn't going to magically make them get those skills. Most likely they'd riot first, and starve second. Of course, conservatives would never let that happen - they'd just put them in jail where they get all that free food they aren't willing to hand out to folks who aren't in prison, and they can pay to guard them as an added bonus.
Yup. Companies will often hang up if you disclose that a phone call is being recorded, and I've even had one which refused to speak to me if I was on speakerphone (I was helping out somebody who had a speech difficulty, and they insisted that I give the phone to them to authorize me to speak to them and then take the phone and speak without the other person being able to hear). I think this is all part of a strategy to ensure that if the company does something wrong it is just one person's word against another's (having another witness would complicate things).
1. Labor isn't obsolete and shall never be obsolete until robots are in all ways superior to the average person. That is unlikely to happen at any point in the near future. What is more, if that does happen... we all get personal robot slaves and we'll probably devolve into an incredibly decadent society...
So, all labor won't be obsolete until robots are in all ways superior to the average person.
However, before then various types of labor DEFINITELY will become obsolete as machines become superior to people in individual domains. It used to be that you could make a decent living as a ditch digger. Today that is impossible.
When robots can replace all labor, then anybody who can afford a robot will be able to live like a king. In the present economic system that will be unlikely for most for the same reason that most people can't afford to live in Chicago...
2. Much of the cost of living problems are the result of rising COSTS not the falling value of the labor itself. Compare the cost of living in Chicago for example with the cost of living in Anchorage Alaska...
This is actually the exact same problem. It doesn't matter whether costs go up or the value of labor goes down - the one relative to the other is all that matters. Property is capital. Robots are capital. In a sense even money is capital. Our current economy has been concentrating capital of all kinds in the hands of relatively few people, since having capital makes it easier to acquire more.
A poor person can't afford a house in Chicago for the same reason that they can't afford to buy a robot and get somebody to pay them to have their robot work an assembly line for them.
The Supremes disagree with your full stop.They have made it quite clear you can record police without their consent. So there goes your theory on some states having full stop laws on recording.
Good point. In that case it may or may not be illegal to record audio in some states, and if you get arrested for it you just have to pay to get your case reviewed by the supreme court. Hopefully you have deep pockets.
The laws on the books say that it is illegal. There is only one way to find out how a court would rule, and that is to get prosecuted for violating the letter of the law.
So, I agree with you in many ways, and I'll certainly agree that the way entitlement programs are administered in the US is poor at best, and the motives of the lawmakers who enable them are often bad.
However, I'm concerned that it just simply isn't possible for the average person to earn a self-supporting wage. The fact is that labor is rapidly becoming obsolete. We don't need able-bodied people to do jobs. At some point we probably won't need smart people to do jobs either. At that point people either own capital from which they can obtain enough income to survive, or they have to depend utterly on social benefits.
If there weren't social welfare programs, what would the recipients of these programs do for a living in a world where computers program themselves, robots can do manual labor, and so on? The steady increase in unemployment is just the start of what is likely to be a MUCH bigger problem. Sure, it will probably be at least another 20 years before computers are doing all the jobs, but the day will come at some point.
Sorry, but simply by adding "By entering this vehicle you are agreeing to be monitored" is all that is needed.
Yup. I could see the argument if you tried to do that with a fire escape, etc, but the person parking your car has no legal obligation to do business with you in general. Also, monitoring the use of your car isn't particularly egregious in any case especially when you're paying the person who is using it.
In my state recording audio without consent of all parties present is illegal, full stop. The fact that it is illegal also makes it inadmissible in court.
Of course, lots of things that are illegal aren't prosecuted, and this tends to be one of those things. However, it definitely is against the law.
The business is their client. If they were freelancing and pulled the same attitude, they would immediately be looking for another client to replace the one who just walked.
The role of an internal IT organization is not the same as the role of a freelancer. A freelancer is hired to do a job. If I am the CEO and I hire an IT team, then I want to hear about it if my IT team thinks that some other part of the organization is making a mistake, and I want to hear from the rest of the organization if they think that IT is making a mistake.
IT has to listen to the business for sure, but IT should be a part of the business as well.
And probably most important of all: reports are familiar. Never forget that IT is providing a service to the business. It's not the place of IT to dictate to the business how they do their work - it should always be the other way round.
Well, it would be more accurate to say that IT, like the rest of the business, has a role to play in providing value to the owners. All organizations in a business tend to have unique roles and perspectives, and it is important for them to work together if the business is going to be successful. Often IT tends to be in more of a service delivery role, but any business that wants to perform well is going to make sure that IT is also in a consulting role when it comes to deciding how the mission is accomplished.
If I hire somebody to mow my lawn 6 days a week, and they tell me that mowing it twice a week would be more than adequate and better for my grass, I'd be foolish to ignore their advice even if in the end they deliver whatever I'm willing to pay for.
While laziness and not wanting to wait 5 extra seconds for number crunching are certainly a factor, I've got customers who are paranoid that we might pull one over on them and retroactively change the data so when they go back to last quarter's numbers they won't be the same.
So, I get where you're coming from and I tend to be of the same mind, I have found that sometimes it really does make sense to actually archive PDF copies of stuff outside of the system that generated them. This is usually best when that report actually gets, well, reported somewhere often due to legal reasons.
Imagine you have a system that generates tax returns from a database full of financial transactions.
Option 1 - a system that always contains an up-to-date set of rules for generating a tax return for any year from inception to the present, and for legal reasons you need a high level of assurance that all those past rules are still working correctly.
Option 2 - a system that just needs to generate the next return accurately, and maybe amend the last few years, but anything beyond that is just a PDF file stored in another system that just needs to store and reproduce files (which could be nothing more than a backed-up filesystem).
So, option 2 means that after every change you have to test the 2012-2015 tax generation rules. Option 1 might mean that you have to test the 1985-2015 tax generation rules. I think I'll take option 2. :) Simplifying the tax code to make your code readable just isn't an option.
So you're saying they should tax software whenever it goes via the internet?
Only if it is sold, but yes. If software is commercially sold and wasn't 100% domestically written, then it should be treated the same as anything else that is sold that wasn't 100% domestically produced. And I'm all for bilateral trade agreements when they're between countries that have similar policies.
As to social programs being the main point of the government... really? So in 1776... it was all about socialized medical care? Oh wait... it was about repelling british control... which was foreign aggression to the colonists... and since then the primary justification for federal power has always been protecting people from foreign aggression.... not social programs. So... you're wrong.
That is only true if you accept that the last word in the proper function of the government was written in 1776. The fact that the US was founded by people who weren't interested in socialism doesn't make it illegitimate.
As to paying to import goods into the US... neither Mexico nor canada pays them so why would a former US state pay them? Obviously they wouldn't. So... wrong again...
I'm well aware of how importing goods works. I am proposing that this should change - tariffs should be much higher in general than they are today. You can't have free trade and socialism at the same time, because socialism imposes HUGE costs on producing anything and free trade will just cause all the jobs to leave overnight. Trade should be free with countries that have similar sorts of social programs.
As to people that need the programs not being able to pay for them, that is fine... but do you not see the problem with those same people VOTING on whether the programs are created in the first place? When you vote on OTHER people's money it isn't really very fair is it? By all means... let everyone vote on things that we all must support. However, if you are on subsistance from the government, I think that should have some cost to you...the first and most reasonable cost is a limitation of your voting rights such that you are unable to vote yourself additional subsidies. This will also reduce the value of such people to politicians because they will be less able to buy votes with other people's money.
The problem with this sort of system is that I think it is likely that 90% of the population will be subsisting almost entirely on government benefits in the not-so-distant future. Unemployment is already at something like 12% today, and is likely to continue to rise as the need for people to do work goes down. How can you have a democracy when most of the population can't vote on the #1 government expenditure?
Absent that change, the politicians can just buy elections with other people's money which is in large part what many subsidies are entirely about. They are often not even helping people. It just gets a politician some extra numbers in some communities because they get free stuff.
That isn't a problem with socialism so much as a problem with democracy, and it happens even with things that don't involve direct social benefits, like tax breaks, government contracts, and so on. The fundamental problem is that the average person is about as good at deciding on what is a good government policy as they are at earning an income for themselves. I don't have a fix for that, unfortunately, because democracy's only real virtue is that it is better than any of the alternatives that have been tried.
The reason the middle class is targeted for taxes is because they can't escape them. The rich can. They have the lawyers, the accountants, the loopholes, the off shore accounts, etc. They often are not even breaking the law.
This is why you can't have free trade and such with socialism, and there need to be a number of other reforms as well for it to work. The nature of the economy tends to cause individuals to accumulate wealth. Simplification is probably one of the best ways to cut down on tax avoidance - such as putting a tax on any financial transfer of any kind (including between different accounts owned by the same person) - the volume is so enormous the rate could be very low, and it would be very difficult to avoid. Tariffs on intellectual property would
When big pharma patents a drug and makes it so expensive people die, or they push a drug that is useless and even dangerous.
Would fewer people die if they didn't make it at all? I'm not aware of any useless prescription drugs that are on the market that have been recently approved, either, but I'd be happy if you have a citation. There have been drugs that were demonstrated to be useful that were later demonstrated to not be useful.
I will agree that bribery of a sort is part of why we don't have the NIH doing royalty-free drug development. There is no reason that drugs can only be researched privately. However, simply getting rid of patents isn't going to make that magically happen...
Have two companies do it independently, each at 1/6th the cost of the "reliable" version. The two different probes are unlikely to fail in the same way.
Even if they did both fail, you could fix the problem and build two more, while spending less than the 6X reliable approach.
There is certainly more to it than that though. If a device consists of 50 different critical components such that a failure in any one ends the mission, then it is hardly a benefit if one probe has module 2 fail and another probe has module 7 fail - the result is the same.
You still need to design for a reasonably decent failure rate.
That said, it may very well make sense to accept a 10% increase in overall failure rate if it results in a 90% reduction in cost, since if you send a few probes you'd expect one to make it through. You just can't afford to accept defects en masse.
The design parameters haven't changed (pocketable device)
Uh, where on the iPhone specifications does it say the device is designed to be pocketable? I've never seen that on the specs for any phone I've bought. It certainly might be an expectation that you have, but I'm sure the engineers did not have that as an actual constraint or it would never have gotten through testing.
I wasn't under the impression that getting rid of FICA was part of the proposal. I certainly agree that it is regressive and would love to see it go away. I don't see the need to take money from poor people just to make them feel the pain.
Third, why does increasing spending on social programs make sense if we're running a trillion dollars over budget?
Simple. Paying for social programs is the main reason for the existence of the government. The military should only exist to ensure that the government can be preserved so that it can continue to meet its obligations to the people. If the government isn't going to address the needs of those who can't address their own needs, then why should it matter whether the nation gets invaded? Are people really worse off if the only thing that changes is the flag?
I'm not saying national defense shouldn't matter. I'm saying that it should matter only so that the government can accomplish the real mission, which is to make life better for the governed.
Many portions of the country only remain part of the union because of concerns about international threats...
I don't have a problem with self-determination. If a region doesn't want to be a part of the US I don't have a big problem with that, but they'll have to pay tariffs to import their goods into the US, and I'd include intellectual property in that as well. I would definitely advocate a system where countries with things like socialized medicine and environmental controls impose significant tariffs on countries that do not.
I think we're already spending too much on social programs, honestly. The whole thing strikes me as sophisticated vote buying at this point. Because the people that vote for it are rarely the people that pay for it.
The people who need the social programs don't have any money to begin with, so of course they're not going to be the ones paying for it. Most people are incapable of supporting themselves at a decent standard of living, and that problem seems likely to only get worse. The people who will end up having to pay for it will hardly miss the money - maybe they'll have to fly first class once in a while instead of taking the private jet for recreation.
As to raising taxes... you really should talk to business owners. I'm talking small business owners. The local sandwich shop. The guy that launders clothing... the nail salon... any of them. Talk to them about taxes. Because in many parts of the country these businesses are at the breaking point.
That is like saying to talk to some poor person about raising taxes because they have nothing left to give. These aren't the folks I would raise taxes on. Taxes should be progressively rated based on income. I'd probably exempt anybody making under $100k/yr from paying any taxes at all. If you're "only" making $200k/yr maybe 20% should go to taxes. On the other hand, I'd probably make the highest marginal rate something like 99%. You can still keep an extra $10M if you squeeze out an extra $1B in income, so it isn't like you'll have to carpool to work.
It most definitely adds up, and this is why apple can do stuff like maintain 45% margins on the macbook air whilst keeping the build quality of the enclosure, fund OS X development, NOT include shitware, provide iCloud and all the other support, while the PC guys can barely clone it somewhat without providing any of the additional service/software stuff - on margins so thin that most of them are posting losses or otherwise not doing well.
You seem to be implying that HP could charge 45% margins if only they didn't give their customers 400 different options on every laptop. Most likely if they dropped all the options, most people just wouldn't buy it at all, and they'd make very little more on the ones they did sell.
Apple makes 45% margins because they control the whole experience. If HP wrote their own OS and got as many people to like it as Apple did, then they could be making 45% as well. However, most likely they'd just go out of business, like most other companies that do everything the way that Apple did. Apple is an aberration - the company that did things differently and had it pay off. The fact is that lots of companies try to do things the way Apple did them, and 99% of the time they fail. Then 1% of the time they succeed and everybody wonders why more companies don't do things that way.
Apple and HP have completely different business models - HP can't just imitate Apple and expect it to work.
And I'm saying that unless you have personally audited the source code, and the machine code for the compiler, you are trusting someone else, and that it does what it says it does. Which is not any different to running closed source software.
Your first sentence is completely true. Your second sentence does not follow from the first.
If you're running closed source software then you have to trust the folks that wrote it or choose not to buy it. If you are running open source software then you have the option of trusting the folks that wrote it, auditing/fixing it yourself, paying somebody else to audit/fix it for you and trusting them, or choosing not to buy it.
The difference is that with open source software you get a choice in who you have to trust that you don't get when you buy something closed. If you buy something that is closed your only options are to buy it or not.
well, Debian is taking that to the next level and adopting systemd which ignores serious sys admins and fucks up the whole system init thing
Uh, the "serious sys admins" all installed systemd long before their distros adopted it. :) Or do you think that the people coding a new init and service manager from scratch were all folks who couldn't figure out how to write a bash script?
That's why you can have a development team in India for a product that isn't even sold there and it still makes sense. It's not a tangible good you export.
This is the thing I don't like. Companies play both sides of the fence.
If I start selling copies of Win8, I'll be put in jail because I'm stealing MS's property.
If MS sells a copy of Win8 in the US, they have to pay a licensing fee to MS Caymans for the rights to sell Win8 in the US, so the US company doesn't make much profit but they'll happily report that profit in the Caymans at a 0% tax rate.
On the other hand, when they want to install Win8 on 10M computers and the code was written in India, well, they just FTP that over with no tariffs because it is an intangible good that has no legal value for customs purposes.
If MS had to pay duty on 10M copies of Windows (at full retail cost) to have a 3rd party install copies on 10M computers, then I bet they'd rethink their development model.
All these tech companies simply need to open a few satellite offices. Inherently some people don't want to be in San Fransisco, Redmond, etc. if you can't find the talent you need perhaps you aren't in the right area?
Agree. Either that or let people work remotely. I bet there are a lot of people who simply don't like living in big cities/etc who would be able to contribute, and at far less cost.
Amazing. Not only do we prevent them from working, we also prevent them from collecting food stamps so that they are further incentivised to resort to theft. Then if they get caught we put them in prison where they get the free food, clothing, and shelter we didn't want to give them before they resorted to theft.
Uh, you do realize that the 6+ is about as big as any Android "phone" there is? If you want to get beyond phones then I think Apple came out with their totally-inconvenient-because-it-is-unpocketable iPad quite a while ago.