Maybe a tad cheesy, but the point is pretty simple.
The point is also almost completely mythical: Of the people who are thoroughly devoted employees, only a tiny fraction of them will ever come remotely close to being the president of a major corporation. For example, if you figure that 1 out of every 100 employees is working all-out in a large corporation, then that's a pool of about 1000 people. We'll assume that each of these people has a 50-year career with the company, and the average president is in charge for about 5 years, and that the company only promotes executives from within. So, mathematically speaking, of those 1000 people, under very favorable conditions, only 10 of them will be president, while 990 of them will have simply given up their family life, free time, potential earnings from switching jobs, etc for absolutely nothing.
Actually, the authors (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner) didn't spend time with the gang, a graduate student named Sudhir Venkatesh was the one that figured that out.
As the story goes, Venkatesh was going around doing a sociological survey in Chicago, knocked on some apartment door, saw a bunch of drug dealers, and was thinking "well, that was a nice life" when to his surprise the drug dealers were happy to talk to him and eventually let him see the books.
These senators are quite brave compared to those senators that are going on talk shows defending spying on everybody.
Also, this kind of measure is not completely useless: It would inundate the agency with extra paperwork, meaning they'd have less time and money to spend on spying on all of us.
Your passenger, like you, has a significant interest in surviving your trip, and will tend to react by quieting down when you're in a tough spot, or help you out with a "Watch out!" if you're about to, say, pull into an occupied lane next to you.
The person on the other end of the phone, by contrast, isn't there with you and has no understanding of your current situation.
The basic thing to understand, though, about why hands-free makes no significant difference is that it's not the driver's hands or eyes that are the limiting factor, it's the driver's brain.
Last time I checked I could get to almost anywhere interesting in the EU with 2-4 changes (starting in the UK outside London soaks up 2 of them), often faster than the plane.
And you'd be somewhat wrong: For example, Cork, Ireland to Heraklion, Greece. Unless you don't count those as "anywhere interesting". The European rail system is pretty awesome, but there are some limitations, and bodies of water are high on that list.
The queues are there for a reason: To create the impression of safety.
Also, to present a highly populated and completely unsecured target to any bad guy who decides to exploit it. That's one of the many ways in which US-style airport security is sheer idiocy.
Of course, for mentioning this, I'm sure I'll end up on somebody's watchlist somewhere. Hi NSA!
Why exactly do you want to shut down the BBC? My understanding is that the existence of the BBC is widely supported by people living in Britain, despite serious incidents (e.g. Jimmy Savile) and grumbling about licensing fees, because it has a world-wide reputation for accurate, relatively unbiased, and high quality reporting.
The alternative to the BBC is Rupert Murdoch's News International, who's most recent claim to fame was hacking the phones of murder victims and politicians in order to break stories about the murder victims and to blackmail the politicians. I take it you're a fan?
With the exception of reducing pollutants and increasing oxygen, what do any of those have to do with human health? Humans can be reasonably healthy in high-wind, low-biodiversity, temperature-volatile environments.
My criticism is not "All hypotheses are dumb". It's more of "Hypotheses should be the product of observation and educated guessing, rather than wild guessing." Otherwise, you spend a lot of time and effort testing stupid hypotheses.
"Well my basic hypothesis was that trees improve people's health."
There's no particular reason why that hypothesis would be true. And I say that as someone who enjoys walking around in the woods. In fact, for those with nasty allergies, trees can be positively bad for your health.
I'd want Mr Donovan to produce, at the very least, some sort of proposed mechanism behind "trees => health".
It's a matter of definition: Peter King is the sort of bigot who uses the word "terrorist" to mean "member of an Islamic fighting force". To those who think that way, the IRA doesn't qualify because it was a Christian group.
The burden has nothing to do with the rate, but with the code.
Then what is the rate you personally would be willing to pay? You've declared somewhere between 33% and 50% to be too high. What's not too high?
Most of the "solutions" you mention after 1913 were to address problems that didn't exist before then.
We were much better off before people started relying on the benevolence of faceless bureaucracies.
- Current historical research places poverty (defined as being unable to afford food, clothing, or housing) at somewhere around 30% of the population in 1910. Even if that figure is significantly off, it's completely untrue to claim that poverty didn't exist: Newspapers were writing about it, political groups were organizing to try to deal with it, charitable organizations were regularly overwhelmed by requests. For a look at urban life in this period, I suggest reading about Jane Addams and Hull House in Chicago. - In 1915, a woman could expect to live 57 years. In 1935, when Social Security was created, she could expect to live 64 years, or gaining on average 0.3 years of life per year. By 1955, that same woman could expect to live 73 years, gaining 0.5 years of life per year. That certainly suggests that elders were probably better off with Social Security than without it. - If you read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, you can learn about how dangerous workplaces were in that period. And yes, it's a work of fiction, but when the plant owners sued Sinclair for defamation, they lost because Sinclair was able to produce research backing up his descriptions of what was going on.
I'll say this: You're certainly living up to your sig. If you really think that all problems are caused by government intervention, then you would do well to move from the United States (where I'm pretty sure you live) to a country that doesn't have all that government intervention. There are plenty of places to choose from: much of Africa, South America, and Asia has government that only barely functioning at all, and definitely won't interfere with you.
Also, it didn't pay for any of the things the OP mentioned - it was a temporary tax used only for killing 700,000 Americans.
1. Actually, the tax was to pay for killing about 260,000 people - the other 365,000 or so weren't people that the US wanted to kill. It's never been US government policy to kill a large percentage of its own military. 2. The answer regarding those 260,000 people depends on whether you think the South had a right to secede from the United States. - If you think secession was illegitimate, then those 260,000 people were an extremely well-funded and well-organized group of criminals, and thus killing them falls into "Investigation of and punishment of crimes" - If you think secession was legitimate, then those 260,000 people were the army of a foreign government who had attacked the United States, so (a) they weren't American citizens and (b) killing them falls under "military protection".
Ok then: 1. What is an overall tax rate that does not qualify as "overly burdensome"? 2. Your claim that "we had all of that before 1913" seems questionable: - The EPA didn't exist until 1970, and rivers were catching on fire right up until the late 1960's due to pollution. - Social Security was created in 1935, because elderly and disabled people were starving and freezing to death without it. - The VA was founded in 1930, veterans of WWI weren't getting medical care, and were desperate for cash. Even after its creation, there were still serious issues about it, most notably the Bonus Army. - Welfare as we know it was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. Before then, if your parents couldn't afford to feed or house you, tough luck. - The Interstate Highway System was built in the 1950's. The earlier U.S. routes were created in 1925. Before then, there was a hodgepodge of state efforts, but nothing remotely similar to what we have now. - OSHA was created in 1970. MSHA was created in 1977. The Department of Labor only came into existence in 1913, and the first significant federal labor regulations were passed in 1926. Many state labor laws before then were getting struck down by the US Supreme Court. - The National Science Board was created in 1950. There was research under military auspices in the 1930's and 1940's, for obvious reasons. There wasn't much by way of government-funded research before WWI though.
Yes, but you should not have a right to anyones labor in order for you to live. As soon as you decide that you have the right to someones labor, that's called slavery.
I claim other people's labor all the time. And so do you.
An example from today: I walked into a sub shop, handed somebody a piece of paper with the magic words "Five Dollars" on it, and demanded that person make me a sub. That person did some work and handed me my sandwich in exchange for my piece of paper. I got the $5 not from working, but from capital gains, in other words the fruits of someone else's labor. And the guy who made the sub is getting paid $8 an hour, and took about 5 minutes to make my sub, so he only got $0.67 for his labor, and the sub itself is only worth about $1 in materials and about $1 worth of shop upkeep, so his boss got $2.33 for someone else's labor.
You might argue that the guy who's working in the sub shop is voluntarily doing that. But how voluntary is it if he will lose his home and 3 square meals a day if he doesn't do the job?
You might also argue that I'm just trading the fruits of my labor for the fruits of his labor. But I didn't do any work to get my capital gains - I just gained a portion of the profits of someone else's work by virtue of holding a piece of paper that says that I own a tiny sliver of that someone else's company.
That's what the warlords told their slaves, and what the kings told their serfs, what the Aztecs told the parents of the children they sacrificed.
If you don't pay taxes to fund a government, how do you propose having a government? If you don't want to have a government, how do you propose handling (or alternately, choosing to completely ignore) all the things that modern government typically does on its citizens' behalf, including but not limited to: - Military protection - Investigation of and punishment of crimes (we'll assume, for the sake of argument, only those crimes that we probably both agree are crimes, like murder and robbery) - Roads and traffic safety - Water supply - Sanitation - Fire prevention - Food poisoning prevention - Environmental protection - Care for elderly, disabled people, veterans, and children who can't care for themselves - Workplace safety (e.g. OSHA and MSHA) - Pharmaceutical safety - Pure scientific research
That's not even Martin Luther King's idea originally: A weirdo named Henry David Thoreau wrote a famous essay on the concept of disobeying unjust laws, right before refusing to pay his taxes (due to his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War) and getting thrown in jail for it.
Another reason this stuff is kept secret is to prevent courts from evaluating its legality. For instance, Anwar al-Awlaki's father sued in federal court to not have his son (a US citizen) killed in a drone strike. The Obama administration argued, in part, that they couldn't defend it in court because to do so would make public the existence of US drones in Yemen. This despite the fact that the existence of US drones in Yemen had been reported in the media.
It kind of reminds me of this classic exchange:
Ambassador DeSadaskyOur Doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a Doomsday gap. President Murkey Muffley: This is preposterous! I've never approved of anything like that! DeSadasky: Our source was the New York Times.
What about those members of Congress that have been actively opposing these sorts of activities? Take, for example, Senator Bernie Sanders: He's consistently voted against the USA Patriot Act, organized efforts to de-fund past versions of this exact spying effort, and regularly spoken against it on the stump.
I'm someone who's been involved in firing a couple of my immediate supervisors for being morons, and here's some steps that work. For purposes of illustration, the incompetent person will be named "Mr Dunce". 1. Get to know Mr Dunce's boss. You don't have to be best buddies, but make sure that the people 2 steps above you on the ladder know who you are and respect you. (This is always a good move whether or not you have an incompetent boss, actually.) 2. Assuming Mr. Dunce isn't getting caught obviously failing, you'll need to create it. A potentially good method: (1) Have a subordinate (or yourself if you are his subordinate) give Dunce slightly vague or incomplete answers to his questions. (2) Prime his boss before a meeting to discuss whatever it is with something like "I'd really like to know what you think - we want to make sure this is well thought-out." (3) In the meeting, Mr Dunce will promptly get peppered with questions that he can't answer with anything other than "err, I'll have to get back to you". (4) After a few rounds of that, information will start going around Dunce rather than through Dunce, because they realize that Dunce is slowing them down. (5) After a while of that, eventually people will start questioning what value Mr Dunce provides to the company. 3. Be patient about it. Depending on how popular Mr Dunce is, or how much the upper management had invested in Mr Dunce, it could take months to go from step 3 to Dunce being fired or shunted off to a powerless position.
(3) Blackmailed (4) In some cases, opposed to it (at least publicly). Of course, one could argue that just because they're senators and such doesn't mean they're part of "Those in power".
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe a tad cheesy, but the point is pretty simple.
The point is also almost completely mythical: Of the people who are thoroughly devoted employees, only a tiny fraction of them will ever come remotely close to being the president of a major corporation. For example, if you figure that 1 out of every 100 employees is working all-out in a large corporation, then that's a pool of about 1000 people. We'll assume that each of these people has a 50-year career with the company, and the average president is in charge for about 5 years, and that the company only promotes executives from within. So, mathematically speaking, of those 1000 people, under very favorable conditions, only 10 of them will be president, while 990 of them will have simply given up their family life, free time, potential earnings from switching jobs, etc for absolutely nothing.
Actually, the authors (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner) didn't spend time with the gang, a graduate student named Sudhir Venkatesh was the one that figured that out.
As the story goes, Venkatesh was going around doing a sociological survey in Chicago, knocked on some apartment door, saw a bunch of drug dealers, and was thinking "well, that was a nice life" when to his surprise the drug dealers were happy to talk to him and eventually let him see the books.
2) Take away your sense of reason and accountability.
Also, make sure that you measure your moral worth in dollars. The ideal guy in finance thinks like this.
Obviously, pick something that hasn't been written about before, but you can find a niche and become the definitive book on the subject.
Alternately, get into creative writing - poetry, novels, short stories, etc. Even if it never gets published.
These senators are cowards of the highest order.
These senators are quite brave compared to those senators that are going on talk shows defending spying on everybody.
Also, this kind of measure is not completely useless: It would inundate the agency with extra paperwork, meaning they'd have less time and money to spend on spying on all of us.
It's completely logical.
Your passenger, like you, has a significant interest in surviving your trip, and will tend to react by quieting down when you're in a tough spot, or help you out with a "Watch out!" if you're about to, say, pull into an occupied lane next to you.
The person on the other end of the phone, by contrast, isn't there with you and has no understanding of your current situation.
The basic thing to understand, though, about why hands-free makes no significant difference is that it's not the driver's hands or eyes that are the limiting factor, it's the driver's brain.
Move to SA (either one).
San Antonio?
South Africa?
Saudi Arabia?
Sexaholics Anonymous?
Ok, I give up, which 2 were you thinking of?
I'm just pointing out that GGP's view of what's in the EU doesn't include the farther-flung areas of it.
What does that mean?
Eruditionis legere Latine.
Last time I checked I could get to almost anywhere interesting in the EU with 2-4 changes (starting in the UK outside London soaks up 2 of them), often faster than the plane.
And you'd be somewhat wrong: For example, Cork, Ireland to Heraklion, Greece. Unless you don't count those as "anywhere interesting". The European rail system is pretty awesome, but there are some limitations, and bodies of water are high on that list.
The queues are there for a reason: To create the impression of safety.
Also, to present a highly populated and completely unsecured target to any bad guy who decides to exploit it. That's one of the many ways in which US-style airport security is sheer idiocy.
Of course, for mentioning this, I'm sure I'll end up on somebody's watchlist somewhere. Hi NSA!
Why exactly do you want to shut down the BBC? My understanding is that the existence of the BBC is widely supported by people living in Britain, despite serious incidents (e.g. Jimmy Savile) and grumbling about licensing fees, because it has a world-wide reputation for accurate, relatively unbiased, and high quality reporting.
The alternative to the BBC is Rupert Murdoch's News International, who's most recent claim to fame was hacking the phones of murder victims and politicians in order to break stories about the murder victims and to blackmail the politicians. I take it you're a fan?
With the exception of reducing pollutants and increasing oxygen, what do any of those have to do with human health? Humans can be reasonably healthy in high-wind, low-biodiversity, temperature-volatile environments.
My criticism is not "All hypotheses are dumb". It's more of "Hypotheses should be the product of observation and educated guessing, rather than wild guessing." Otherwise, you spend a lot of time and effort testing stupid hypotheses.
"Well my basic hypothesis was that trees improve people's health."
There's no particular reason why that hypothesis would be true. And I say that as someone who enjoys walking around in the woods. In fact, for those with nasty allergies, trees can be positively bad for your health.
I'd want Mr Donovan to produce, at the very least, some sort of proposed mechanism behind "trees => health".
It's a matter of definition: Peter King is the sort of bigot who uses the word "terrorist" to mean "member of an Islamic fighting force". To those who think that way, the IRA doesn't qualify because it was a Christian group.
The burden has nothing to do with the rate, but with the code.
Then what is the rate you personally would be willing to pay? You've declared somewhere between 33% and 50% to be too high. What's not too high?
Most of the "solutions" you mention after 1913 were to address problems that didn't exist before then.
We were much better off before people started relying on the benevolence of faceless bureaucracies.
- Current historical research places poverty (defined as being unable to afford food, clothing, or housing) at somewhere around 30% of the population in 1910. Even if that figure is significantly off, it's completely untrue to claim that poverty didn't exist: Newspapers were writing about it, political groups were organizing to try to deal with it, charitable organizations were regularly overwhelmed by requests. For a look at urban life in this period, I suggest reading about Jane Addams and Hull House in Chicago.
- In 1915, a woman could expect to live 57 years. In 1935, when Social Security was created, she could expect to live 64 years, or gaining on average 0.3 years of life per year. By 1955, that same woman could expect to live 73 years, gaining 0.5 years of life per year. That certainly suggests that elders were probably better off with Social Security than without it.
- If you read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, you can learn about how dangerous workplaces were in that period. And yes, it's a work of fiction, but when the plant owners sued Sinclair for defamation, they lost because Sinclair was able to produce research backing up his descriptions of what was going on.
I'll say this: You're certainly living up to your sig. If you really think that all problems are caused by government intervention, then you would do well to move from the United States (where I'm pretty sure you live) to a country that doesn't have all that government intervention. There are plenty of places to choose from: much of Africa, South America, and Asia has government that only barely functioning at all, and definitely won't interfere with you.
Also, it didn't pay for any of the things the OP mentioned - it was a temporary tax used only for killing 700,000 Americans.
1. Actually, the tax was to pay for killing about 260,000 people - the other 365,000 or so weren't people that the US wanted to kill. It's never been US government policy to kill a large percentage of its own military.
2. The answer regarding those 260,000 people depends on whether you think the South had a right to secede from the United States.
- If you think secession was illegitimate, then those 260,000 people were an extremely well-funded and well-organized group of criminals, and thus killing them falls into "Investigation of and punishment of crimes"
- If you think secession was legitimate, then those 260,000 people were the army of a foreign government who had attacked the United States, so (a) they weren't American citizens and (b) killing them falls under "military protection".
Ok then:
1. What is an overall tax rate that does not qualify as "overly burdensome"?
2. Your claim that "we had all of that before 1913" seems questionable:
- The EPA didn't exist until 1970, and rivers were catching on fire right up until the late 1960's due to pollution.
- Social Security was created in 1935, because elderly and disabled people were starving and freezing to death without it.
- The VA was founded in 1930, veterans of WWI weren't getting medical care, and were desperate for cash. Even after its creation, there were still serious issues about it, most notably the Bonus Army.
- Welfare as we know it was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. Before then, if your parents couldn't afford to feed or house you, tough luck.
- The Interstate Highway System was built in the 1950's. The earlier U.S. routes were created in 1925. Before then, there was a hodgepodge of state efforts, but nothing remotely similar to what we have now.
- OSHA was created in 1970. MSHA was created in 1977. The Department of Labor only came into existence in 1913, and the first significant federal labor regulations were passed in 1926. Many state labor laws before then were getting struck down by the US Supreme Court.
- The National Science Board was created in 1950. There was research under military auspices in the 1930's and 1940's, for obvious reasons. There wasn't much by way of government-funded research before WWI though.
Yes, but you should not have a right to anyones labor in order for you to live. As soon as you decide that you have the right to someones labor, that's called slavery.
I claim other people's labor all the time. And so do you.
An example from today: I walked into a sub shop, handed somebody a piece of paper with the magic words "Five Dollars" on it, and demanded that person make me a sub. That person did some work and handed me my sandwich in exchange for my piece of paper. I got the $5 not from working, but from capital gains, in other words the fruits of someone else's labor. And the guy who made the sub is getting paid $8 an hour, and took about 5 minutes to make my sub, so he only got $0.67 for his labor, and the sub itself is only worth about $1 in materials and about $1 worth of shop upkeep, so his boss got $2.33 for someone else's labor.
You might argue that the guy who's working in the sub shop is voluntarily doing that. But how voluntary is it if he will lose his home and 3 square meals a day if he doesn't do the job?
You might also argue that I'm just trading the fruits of my labor for the fruits of his labor. But I didn't do any work to get my capital gains - I just gained a portion of the profits of someone else's work by virtue of holding a piece of paper that says that I own a tiny sliver of that someone else's company.
That's what the warlords told their slaves, and what the kings told their serfs, what the Aztecs told the parents of the children they sacrificed.
If you don't pay taxes to fund a government, how do you propose having a government? If you don't want to have a government, how do you propose handling (or alternately, choosing to completely ignore) all the things that modern government typically does on its citizens' behalf, including but not limited to:
- Military protection
- Investigation of and punishment of crimes (we'll assume, for the sake of argument, only those crimes that we probably both agree are crimes, like murder and robbery)
- Roads and traffic safety
- Water supply
- Sanitation
- Fire prevention
- Food poisoning prevention
- Environmental protection
- Care for elderly, disabled people, veterans, and children who can't care for themselves
- Workplace safety (e.g. OSHA and MSHA)
- Pharmaceutical safety
- Pure scientific research
That's not even Martin Luther King's idea originally: A weirdo named Henry David Thoreau wrote a famous essay on the concept of disobeying unjust laws, right before refusing to pay his taxes (due to his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War) and getting thrown in jail for it.
Another reason this stuff is kept secret is to prevent courts from evaluating its legality. For instance, Anwar al-Awlaki's father sued in federal court to not have his son (a US citizen) killed in a drone strike. The Obama administration argued, in part, that they couldn't defend it in court because to do so would make public the existence of US drones in Yemen. This despite the fact that the existence of US drones in Yemen had been reported in the media.
It kind of reminds me of this classic exchange:
Ambassador DeSadaskyOur Doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a Doomsday gap.
President Murkey Muffley: This is preposterous! I've never approved of anything like that!
DeSadasky: Our source was the New York Times.
Not just Obama - ALL of both houses of Congress.
What about those members of Congress that have been actively opposing these sorts of activities? Take, for example, Senator Bernie Sanders: He's consistently voted against the USA Patriot Act, organized efforts to de-fund past versions of this exact spying effort, and regularly spoken against it on the stump.
I'm someone who's been involved in firing a couple of my immediate supervisors for being morons, and here's some steps that work. For purposes of illustration, the incompetent person will be named "Mr Dunce".
1. Get to know Mr Dunce's boss. You don't have to be best buddies, but make sure that the people 2 steps above you on the ladder know who you are and respect you. (This is always a good move whether or not you have an incompetent boss, actually.)
2. Assuming Mr. Dunce isn't getting caught obviously failing, you'll need to create it. A potentially good method: (1) Have a subordinate (or yourself if you are his subordinate) give Dunce slightly vague or incomplete answers to his questions. (2) Prime his boss before a meeting to discuss whatever it is with something like "I'd really like to know what you think - we want to make sure this is well thought-out." (3) In the meeting, Mr Dunce will promptly get peppered with questions that he can't answer with anything other than "err, I'll have to get back to you". (4) After a few rounds of that, information will start going around Dunce rather than through Dunce, because they realize that Dunce is slowing them down. (5) After a while of that, eventually people will start questioning what value Mr Dunce provides to the company.
3. Be patient about it. Depending on how popular Mr Dunce is, or how much the upper management had invested in Mr Dunce, it could take months to go from step 3 to Dunce being fired or shunted off to a powerless position.
(3) Blackmailed
(4) In some cases, opposed to it (at least publicly). Of course, one could argue that just because they're senators and such doesn't mean they're part of "Those in power".