Ah, yes, our minds are closed because we reject ideas like trickle-down economics and intelligent designs. Except that these ideas have been refuted time and again. Fair consideration of a subject does not require equal time to paid to all possible alternative theories; only the viable ones.
Demanding equal weight for unequal ideas erodes our ability to think rationally about the problems we face, and puts us in a kind of intellectual stupor that can then be exploited by established powers to the detriment of everyone else. That's precisely what's happened to economics over the past 30 years with this monetarism bullshit that's infected our thinking.
"The White Man's Burden" describes, albeit with education replacing race
Kipling's heart was in the right place. The problem was his notion that there is an innate hierarchy of race, which is factually incorrect. However, educated societies are clearly better than ignorant ones. They have less political turmoil, and their inhabitants are happier and live longer.
Education isn't an innate characteristic like race; anyone can receive an education, and it is certainly the responsibility of the educated to ensure that everyone has access to education. There is nothing morally questionable about that notion.
From where I stand it seems that a number of people lost faith in God and the Church and replaced it with faith in another set of organizations with inscrutable political infighting, priests, priestly robes (lab coats), dogma, and so forth. It's not clear to me that it's been much of a change for the better.
Why are you bringing religion into this? Frankly, if you can't see the difference between the rigor of science and the dogma of religion, why are you on a technology-oriented site?
Science allows us to have the kind of lifestyle to which we are accustomed. Religion has no produced a shred of tangible progress in our knowledge of the world. While responsible for some charity, granted, it hasn't done a bit to improve our overall standard of living. There are overwhelming reasons to trust science in situations religion can't handle, and if you claim otherwise, there's no hope for you.
Allegations of "leftist bias" are almost always specious. An inclusive worldview and a fact-based decision-making methodology are embedded in the foundation of progressivism. On the other hand, modern conservative politics are almost entirely built on deceiving a large ignorant group to vote against its economic interests. Conservative bias has been far more common during the last 30 years than anything else. In short, "reality has a well-known liberal bias". Stop whining.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn's magnum opus, should be required reading before engaging in a debate on science. There's an aphorism that goes "all theories are wrong, but some are useful." We can and do use theories we know have flaws because in the vast majority of cases, they predict and explain what happens in nature. When a better theory comes along to explain the observations, we begin to use that one instead.
It's absolutely useless to say "this theory is wrong!" as long as the theory, however flawed in some cases, works well in the general case. What do you propose to replace it? Does your replacement make specific, verifiable assertions about nature that are more correct or accurate than those of the prevailing theory? I thought not.
(On the off chance that it does, and you can provide evidence, please, submit an article to Science or Nature; you'll be famous for generations.)
Why not just continue conventional copyright protection for commercial use -- restaurants, television commercials, and so on -- while allowing unlimited personal use? Even without non-commercial use, there's still a revenue stream, albeit a smaller one, and still an incentive for artists to create popular music.
Plus, artists will always have live events and merchandise.
It's far worse to punish an innocent man than to let a guilty one go. Someone who habitually drives drunk will be caught eventually, even with a high standard of proof. On the other hand, an innocent, responsible man's life could be entirely ruined by a false conviction.
If we were determined, we could get 100% of all criminals off the streets; but in doing so, we'd jail so many innocent people that the whole program would be a travesty.
Your statement is simply not true. The poor live paycheck-to-paycheck. Inflation increases the value of wages relative to savings. The poor have no savings, almost by definition.
Really, FDR was wrong? His plan was a complete disaster? Get real. If you think that, you would have been opposed to fire and the wheel too.
Inflating the currency is good for common people. It acts like a tax on savings, which encourages spending and investment in real goods. The reason deflation is so terrible is that it encourages savings, so money doesn't circulate and the economy does not grow.
Second, why should income tax only affect the top 1%? Income tax (if you include capital gains as income) is the fairest way to tax the population. What's wrong with extending it to everyone?
And again, stop using emotionally-charged words like "soak". Our government doesn't rob people and build palaces. It puts that money back into circulation, and in doing so, creates public goods. It's a good thing! This whole "big government is bad" meme is crap.
End the bullshit - one simple tax law: 10% of any income. No fucking loopholes.
The vast majority of the complexity in the tax code comes from figuring out what exactly qualifies as income. Flat tax proposals like yours address none of the complexity issues.
I can't wait when money disappears...and people learn to put TRUE stock in something that only increases in value -- themselves
I think prostitution ought to be legal, but it'd be foolhardy to base all exchange on sexual favors. Actually, on the second thought...
What's wrong with you? You're not part of the trust fund crowd. Why are you continuing to argue against your own interests?
Leave morally-loaded words like "punish" out of this. The question is whether a given policy creates a desired result. Progressive taxation has historically produced societies that are happier and more productive in general. Is the abstract idea of a billionare keeping all his unfathomable wealth more important to you than the health, happiness, and dreams of millions?
Where does the Constitution of any State guarantee the RIGHT to low cost public transportation, health care or schools?
The US constitution doesn't guarantee any of these things. It does, however, create a legislature empowered to raise funds and spend them for the general welfare. And as we live in a democracy, and the vast majority of us support the programs you mention, you're going to just have to suck it up. Or convince us to change our minds: good luck with that.
Re:And who says governments do not profit?
on
My Genome, My Self?
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You're confused. You seem to think taxes are "blown" on nothing and the money is shredded and scattered into thin air. It's not.
Government takes and spends money, and yes, tjstork, the government can sometimes allocate that money better than the private sector would have. For starters, it doesn't have a three-quarter bottom line in mind.
Government spending is a good thing.
Re:This will actually reverse the cost of health c
on
My Genome, My Self?
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· Score: 1
The insurance company raises its rates to $1.25 and runs ads about the "recent increase in the cost of medicine". Even more people sign up. The insurance company goes to the doctors and tells them that they have 2/3rds of the patients in the country on the insurance plan, and now they're going to pay the doctor $0.30 to treat them.
This mechanism is insufficient barring a monopoly in health insurance. Can't I, a separate insurer, simply offer to charge people only $0.90, and pay doctors $0.35? At some point, equilibrium is reached.
Through competition, the kind of spread you're talking about should be reduced to zero. Either there's rampant collusion (which I'm not dismissing), actual costs are increasing, or there's some other mechanism at work.
I truly cannot express how vile, dangerous, pernicious, and inhumane this idea is. Either you didn't think this idea through clearly, or you want to create as much misery as possible.
1. Prenatal genetic testing.
2. Genetic counseling for prospective parents.
I'm with you so far.
3. Actuarial estimate of lifetime healthcare costs at birth.
Here is where your plan starts to smell fishy. How are you supposed to predict lifetime healthcare costs for an individual? We can do it very well statistically, but any given member of a population can differ wildly from the mean. If you try to force an estimate anyway, most of these estimates well be wrong.
We can predict the average error based on the statistical distribution, but the error in any one sample is unknown, and that's a huge problem when we consider the rest of your vile plan:
4. Mandatory front-loaded health savings accounts, funded by income withholding, until the amount saved in the account is equal to the amount necessary until end-of-life medical care, based on actuarial estimates.
5. Parents pay into the account until the child reaches adulthood, then the person covered continues until the account is fully funded.
First of all, "cost" is a fuzzy target. The value of currency is subject to wild flings, and unless you index this cost continuously to inflation, the value of this account becomes progressively more divorced from reality, even more than it was in the first place. If you do index the outstanding balance to inflation, you'll end up causing vast economic damage. The total amount of money going through this system would be huge. To index that to inflation would in turn drive inflation change itself, greatly magnifying the normal fluctuations in the value of money. That economic instability would decrease the efficiency of the system as whole. We already see this problem to some extent in social security payments.
This item has major, negative effects on society too: first, it creates a large disincentive to have children. Government ought to create an incentive to have children, since not only does childrearing perform the obvious function of propagating the next generation, but it promotes healthy, stable societies. Among families that did have children, it'd push many of them into poverty. Do we really need children raised that way? And before you say that parents just won't have children: fact is, they do anyway. And the "do it anyway" crowd belongs to the group that needs the most financial assistance anyway.
Again, your plan magnifies negative phenomena we already see in society.
Another major negative effect of your rotten plan is to grossly skew the income distribution of young people. Not only do you tax what must be a significant portion of their income, but that taxation is regressive: everyone pays the same nominal amount, since (predicted) health does not depend on income. Therefore, the poorer you are, the larger the percentage of your income is paid in health fees. You drive middle class people into the working poor, and you drive the working poor into poverty, and you drive those in poverty to die on the streets. The rich are unaffected.
It's no defense to say that the regressive taxation disappears after some period of adulthood. Social mobility decreases sharply with age, and by the time the taxation disappears, class lines made far sharper by your proposal will already have been drawn.
If you want an analogy, look at student loans. Their often crippling costs act as a drag on the economy is precisely the same way, except that student loans might be progressive: the rich go to more expensive schools, after all.
6. Account holders can use their health savings account on any recognized treatment required, but reimbursement is limited to
Two points. First, let me address the substance of your idea: there will always be ways of distinguishing advertising from content. They may be made more complicated by obfuscating the URLs, but as long as a human being can distinguish an ad from the content, a program will almost certainly be able to do it too. And if a human being can't distinguish the advertising from the content, the content is almost certainly no good anyway.
Second, you have no idea what you're talking about technically. This is a pet peeve, especially in reference to web developers. Your post exhibits a lack of abstraction. Why do you cast your ideas in terms of specific coding constructs in particular language instead of more general ideas that can be implemented in many ways? Thinking of solving general problems in terms of "include" and "write access to a folder" hurts your programming by making your thoughts more brittle and your ideas less flexible. Does your idea not work if you use Perl? Or Python? Or how about if you serve flash (ugh) or XML instead of HTML? What if instead of "write access to a folder", hypothetical EvilSite uses a SOAP web service to fetch ads from EvilAdvertiser? See what I mean?
It's a battle you cannot hope to win in the medium to long term; ad-blocking software can always, in principle, deceive the site itself in the same way that a television viewer can get up and make a sandwich. Ad-blocking software can just ensure the client looks and acts, from the server's point of view, like any non-blocking client.
So why bother trying? You'll simply force ad blockers to actually download ads the user will never see, increasing costs for everyone.
Pity. After all, you are occupied with such noble pursuits as mocking poor drunken women in compromising positions, and mentally consoling yourself with the knowledge that you can pummel anyone who might think there's something wrong with that.
You, sir, are a great American, and someone whom we should all aspire to imitate.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes, our minds are closed because we reject ideas like trickle-down economics and intelligent designs. Except that these ideas have been refuted time and again. Fair consideration of a subject does not require equal time to paid to all possible alternative theories; only the viable ones.
Demanding equal weight for unequal ideas erodes our ability to think rationally about the problems we face, and puts us in a kind of intellectual stupor that can then be exploited by established powers to the detriment of everyone else. That's precisely what's happened to economics over the past 30 years with this monetarism bullshit that's infected our thinking.
Kipling's heart was in the right place. The problem was his notion that there is an innate hierarchy of race, which is factually incorrect. However, educated societies are clearly better than ignorant ones. They have less political turmoil, and their inhabitants are happier and live longer.
Education isn't an innate characteristic like race; anyone can receive an education, and it is certainly the responsibility of the educated to ensure that everyone has access to education. There is nothing morally questionable about that notion.
Why are you bringing religion into this? Frankly, if you can't see the difference between the rigor of science and the dogma of religion, why are you on a technology-oriented site?
Science allows us to have the kind of lifestyle to which we are accustomed. Religion has no produced a shred of tangible progress in our knowledge of the world. While responsible for some charity, granted, it hasn't done a bit to improve our overall standard of living. There are overwhelming reasons to trust science in situations religion can't handle, and if you claim otherwise, there's no hope for you.
Good point. But I bet the OP meant "liberal", as that's what a lot of people like him complain about.
Ah, The Princess Bride.
Allegations of "leftist bias" are almost always specious. An inclusive worldview and a fact-based decision-making methodology are embedded in the foundation of progressivism. On the other hand, modern conservative politics are almost entirely built on deceiving a large ignorant group to vote against its economic interests. Conservative bias has been far more common during the last 30 years than anything else. In short, "reality has a well-known liberal bias". Stop whining.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn's magnum opus, should be required reading before engaging in a debate on science. There's an aphorism that goes "all theories are wrong, but some are useful." We can and do use theories we know have flaws because in the vast majority of cases, they predict and explain what happens in nature. When a better theory comes along to explain the observations, we begin to use that one instead.
It's absolutely useless to say "this theory is wrong!" as long as the theory, however flawed in some cases, works well in the general case. What do you propose to replace it? Does your replacement make specific, verifiable assertions about nature that are more correct or accurate than those of the prevailing theory? I thought not.
(On the off chance that it does, and you can provide evidence, please, submit an article to Science or Nature; you'll be famous for generations.)
Why not just continue conventional copyright protection for commercial use -- restaurants, television commercials, and so on -- while allowing unlimited personal use? Even without non-commercial use, there's still a revenue stream, albeit a smaller one, and still an incentive for artists to create popular music.
Plus, artists will always have live events and merchandise.
It's far worse to punish an innocent man than to let a guilty one go. Someone who habitually drives drunk will be caught eventually, even with a high standard of proof. On the other hand, an innocent, responsible man's life could be entirely ruined by a false conviction.
If we were determined, we could get 100% of all criminals off the streets; but in doing so, we'd jail so many innocent people that the whole program would be a travesty.
According to the inflation calculator, that'd be $1846.03. Big, but not devastating.
Your statement is simply not true. The poor live paycheck-to-paycheck. Inflation increases the value of wages relative to savings. The poor have no savings, almost by definition.
Really, FDR was wrong? His plan was a complete disaster? Get real. If you think that, you would have been opposed to fire and the wheel too.
Inflating the currency is good for common people. It acts like a tax on savings, which encourages spending and investment in real goods. The reason deflation is so terrible is that it encourages savings, so money doesn't circulate and the economy does not grow.
Second, why should income tax only affect the top 1%? Income tax (if you include capital gains as income) is the fairest way to tax the population. What's wrong with extending it to everyone?
And again, stop using emotionally-charged words like "soak". Our government doesn't rob people and build palaces. It puts that money back into circulation, and in doing so, creates public goods. It's a good thing! This whole "big government is bad" meme is crap.
What the fuck was that?
Thank you. I knew I could find a supporter around here.
The vast majority of the complexity in the tax code comes from figuring out what exactly qualifies as income. Flat tax proposals like yours address none of the complexity issues.
I think prostitution ought to be legal, but it'd be foolhardy to base all exchange on sexual favors. Actually, on the second thought...
What's wrong with you? You're not part of the trust fund crowd. Why are you continuing to argue against your own interests?
Leave morally-loaded words like "punish" out of this. The question is whether a given policy creates a desired result. Progressive taxation has historically produced societies that are happier and more productive in general. Is the abstract idea of a billionare keeping all his unfathomable wealth more important to you than the health, happiness, and dreams of millions?
The US constitution doesn't guarantee any of these things. It does, however, create a legislature empowered to raise funds and spend them for the general welfare. And as we live in a democracy, and the vast majority of us support the programs you mention, you're going to just have to suck it up. Or convince us to change our minds: good luck with that.
You're confused. You seem to think taxes are "blown" on nothing and the money is shredded and scattered into thin air. It's not.
Government takes and spends money, and yes, tjstork, the government can sometimes allocate that money better than the private sector would have. For starters, it doesn't have a three-quarter bottom line in mind.
Government spending is a good thing.
This mechanism is insufficient barring a monopoly in health insurance. Can't I, a separate insurer, simply offer to charge people only $0.90, and pay doctors $0.35? At some point, equilibrium is reached.
Through competition, the kind of spread you're talking about should be reduced to zero. Either there's rampant collusion (which I'm not dismissing), actual costs are increasing, or there's some other mechanism at work.
I truly cannot express how vile, dangerous, pernicious, and inhumane this idea is. Either you didn't think this idea through clearly, or you want to create as much misery as possible.
I'm with you so far.
Here is where your plan starts to smell fishy. How are you supposed to predict lifetime healthcare costs for an individual? We can do it very well statistically, but any given member of a population can differ wildly from the mean. If you try to force an estimate anyway, most of these estimates well be wrong.
We can predict the average error based on the statistical distribution, but the error in any one sample is unknown, and that's a huge problem when we consider the rest of your vile plan:
First of all, "cost" is a fuzzy target. The value of currency is subject to wild flings, and unless you index this cost continuously to inflation, the value of this account becomes progressively more divorced from reality, even more than it was in the first place. If you do index the outstanding balance to inflation, you'll end up causing vast economic damage. The total amount of money going through this system would be huge. To index that to inflation would in turn drive inflation change itself, greatly magnifying the normal fluctuations in the value of money. That economic instability would decrease the efficiency of the system as whole. We already see this problem to some extent in social security payments.
This item has major, negative effects on society too: first, it creates a large disincentive to have children. Government ought to create an incentive to have children, since not only does childrearing perform the obvious function of propagating the next generation, but it promotes healthy, stable societies. Among families that did have children, it'd push many of them into poverty. Do we really need children raised that way? And before you say that parents just won't have children: fact is, they do anyway. And the "do it anyway" crowd belongs to the group that needs the most financial assistance anyway.
Again, your plan magnifies negative phenomena we already see in society.
Another major negative effect of your rotten plan is to grossly skew the income distribution of young people. Not only do you tax what must be a significant portion of their income, but that taxation is regressive: everyone pays the same nominal amount, since (predicted) health does not depend on income. Therefore, the poorer you are, the larger the percentage of your income is paid in health fees. You drive middle class people into the working poor, and you drive the working poor into poverty, and you drive those in poverty to die on the streets. The rich are unaffected.
It's no defense to say that the regressive taxation disappears after some period of adulthood. Social mobility decreases sharply with age, and by the time the taxation disappears, class lines made far sharper by your proposal will already have been drawn.
If you want an analogy, look at student loans. Their often crippling costs act as a drag on the economy is precisely the same way, except that student loans might be progressive: the rich go to more expensive schools, after all.
Walmart? No, thanks. I'd rather eat red-hot nails than shop at an establishment that's destroying America.
Err, right. No scarcity. So where do I pick up that Aston Martin that's scarce only by virtue of our monetary system?
Two points. First, let me address the substance of your idea: there will always be ways of distinguishing advertising from content. They may be made more complicated by obfuscating the URLs, but as long as a human being can distinguish an ad from the content, a program will almost certainly be able to do it too. And if a human being can't distinguish the advertising from the content, the content is almost certainly no good anyway.
Second, you have no idea what you're talking about technically. This is a pet peeve, especially in reference to web developers. Your post exhibits a lack of abstraction. Why do you cast your ideas in terms of specific coding constructs in particular language instead of more general ideas that can be implemented in many ways? Thinking of solving general problems in terms of "include" and "write access to a folder" hurts your programming by making your thoughts more brittle and your ideas less flexible. Does your idea not work if you use Perl? Or Python? Or how about if you serve flash (ugh) or XML instead of HTML? What if instead of "write access to a folder", hypothetical EvilSite uses a SOAP web service to fetch ads from EvilAdvertiser? See what I mean?
It's a battle you cannot hope to win in the medium to long term; ad-blocking software can always, in principle, deceive the site itself in the same way that a television viewer can get up and make a sandwich. Ad-blocking software can just ensure the client looks and acts, from the server's point of view, like any non-blocking client.
So why bother trying? You'll simply force ad blockers to actually download ads the user will never see, increasing costs for everyone.
When you grow up, you'll learn that two wrongs don't make a right.
Pity. After all, you are occupied with such noble pursuits as mocking poor drunken women in compromising positions, and mentally consoling yourself with the knowledge that you can pummel anyone who might think there's something wrong with that.
You, sir, are a great American, and someone whom we should all aspire to imitate.