Says you. Try having the IRS owe you a few grand. Still waiting on that check from several years back.
In the IRS' defense, the mailman could have cashed it, since banks rarely do pesky stuff like read anymore.
I've also had them unilateraly apply tax credits that I wasn't legally eligible for (thank heaven I can't be held liable for their mistakes... yet).
That said, it was a big tax giveaway (making work pay act) in an election year so I can't say I'm too surprised.
Their behavior can appear quite baffling unless you have looked deeply at the history of their actions.
Seriously, read a few Inspector General's reports before you defend an organization that you know little about. They regularly violate their own rules; especially the ones about not keeping an "enemies list" of tax protestors and not auditing because of RO's personal vendettas. Practically every administration since (and including) FDR have used them as a political weapon against their opponents. Judges and Jurors who decide against them get singled out for audit. Repeated studies by lawyers have shown the Revenue Code to be so self-contradictory that prosecution is effectively discretionary. As such "following the law" is basically whatever they feel like at the moment. Oh, and there's a special tax court that is exempt from due process if they so choose to subject you to it (usually reserved for aformentioned protestors).
But, you are right in saying it's not about the money. It's mostly about Revenue Officers and their self-aggrandizement. The way to get promoted is to maximize seizures, and that has been the case from the beginning. The money comes naturally with those incentives. The frequent strong-arm tactics they use to achieve said siezures (and the above bending of rules) is why they are considered little different from a private criminal organization running a protection racket. The things the tax money is spent on (international murder, political blackmail, crony arrangements) is also little different in practice, so you can forgive why a person could mistake the IRS for a mafia organization. Duck rule and all that.
Now I know some 'a youse are thinking -- "but the government does X charitable thing! They're not all bad, they're compartmentalized, blah blah..." Well, the Mafia runs charities too. Both organizations rely on the forebearance of their victims, so they gotta have some way to paint a positive image over the majority of their activities being rotten. And there will always be fools that believe they can join the Mafia to do good -- however, they will not achieve influence because of the incentive structure (the most rapacious get promoted).
Get over yourselves, people. It's a tough world out there, and a government funded by invoulntary contribution doesn't make any of that go away. Doing Evil that Good May Come (TM) doesn't work out in the long run, so either get used to doing things the hard way, or living in a world dominated by evil. By and large, we've chosen the latter, and we need to accept that rather than getting Stockholm Syndrome about the whole affair. Quit defending people who would kill you with your own money without thinking twice about it.
So, I hope you guys reading TFA realize what this is really about: A bunch of ROs got together and figured out a plausible enough justification to pull in more siezures (and hence more promotions/$$$). They win, the taxpayer loses, the Bureacracies doesn't really care because at the end of the day they have a printing press and whole lots of trigger-pullers. The politicians will continue to try and avoid the subject of the IRS altogether, as that makes people think too much about how the sausage is made rather than the delicious *free* sausage they want to offer up. The courts can be relied upon not to rein in the IRS, as they would prefer not to bite the hand that feeds them. The people (in general) cannot be relied upon because they are widely bamboozled that voting can somehow dislodge such ingrained corruption of incentives. The only person you can rely on is yourself -- If you want this to change, you have to be the change you want to see in others.
If I leave a story page open for a while, I expect the filters to update like a good little AJAXY wob 2.0 thingy that this appears to be. Yet in the time it took to write this post, I saw no 'funny' comments until I opened it in a new tab to check.
That said, I like the new filtering options, except that I can't filter for troll and flamebait comments. I mean, how else am I going to keep up with the latest GNAA spam?
I don't like not seeing UIDs -- how am I supposed to be bigoted against new users?
Also, I can only read the first page of comments for this story in lynx. Add some GET param that allows you to get the different filters/pages by default and have the links to see that stuff degrade gracefully. I also don't like not being able to middle-click a thread title and have the thread open in a new tab.
Wow, the style for p tags is wack. Way too much space between them; I'm having to be a dweeb and use double <br>s here.
Seriously though, I think it's a good sign that so many users are getting worked up about this. Slashdot's biggest danger isn't a boycott, it's being so boring that people wouldn't even care enough to boycott. Lord knows there have been some LONG stretches in the last few years where I couldn't care less about the topic discussed in this here tarted up IRC channel. Been picking up a bit lately though; otherwise I would have just lurked on by today.
The original slashdot interface was way crappier than this beta, folks. We used it because the stories were worth commenting on -- so I understand why the admins appear less than concerned about this whole 'fuck beta' business. If they can keep the post quality up, the quality of the software used for commenting is not really a deal-breaker.
One can make a similar argument about paper moneies, as they all have hyperinflations built-in. This conclusion is easily reached by simply looking at history; no fiat system has ever survived the abuses politics subject it to, not to mention fractional-reserves being abused to the point of fraud.
Bitcoin won't necesarily enrich the early adopters. It would be more accurate to say that it enriches savers at the expense of spenders. To be fair, unlimited monies (practically all fiat monies) with their inflations do the opposite; they reward spenders and borrowers by undercutting rates of interest, and punish savers by making their savings lose purchasing power. By this measure, if bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, then all other money is at least a pyramid scheme.
I don't see bitcoin as being bad from an economic point of view. The people who want a store of value *can* use this (so long as SHA-256 is safe), as it would benefit them; though they'll probably hold on to their gold instead. They can then use the inflating government money for their loans, and get a good deal both places.
Also, don't be playa hatin' on the money launderers. It's a crime that doesn't exist without income taxation, which is to say not really a crime in the classic sense, as nobody is harmed; it's really just tax evasion -- which itself was not criminal until fairly recently (it was only a tort).
And good luck stamping out stores of value from existence. People have tried outlawing gold, silver, and nearly all other forms of capital; all it has ever accomplished is impoverishing the society that tries. Maybe that's why your post is so heavy on pejoratives, like "buttcoin".
Yeah, but bitcoin is infinitely sub-dividable, so that argument is irrelevant. Everyone will always be able to get enough to transact.
The instabilities in hard money economies are due to fractional reserves creating inflations, or centralized debasement (coin clipping, etc).
In reality, all economies are difficult to grow. Inflationary economies just front-load the prosperity, which is popular, as we are impatient.
The real weakness of bitcoin is that it is only as strong as SHA-256. When that is broken, your bitcoins become basically worthless.
Too bad our patriotic freedom soldiers of love 'accidentally' made the Afghanis 'leak' some material, clearly and presently endangering their health. Surely that must have been Saddam's fault, not those glorious administrators doing 'god's work' in the pentagram.. er pentagon!
When I first saw this story I said to myself: "But wait! I thought that the USA (whoo whoo) already does this! Jack Bauer used one to get the terrorists in NYC!" Then I remembered that 24 wasn't real life. *sigh*
Or we could make the other assumption that most people happily agree on: That the people representing us in the government don't mean what they say, nor do they know what they are doing! Fa fa fa!
...Unless they're in with the Federal Reserve, who I welcomed as my new overlords long ago, as they seem to be the only ones who have actually gotten things done for good or evil in some time.
It seems that the fundamental problem with financial mathematics is that most models rely on the 'efficient markets hypothesis' which assumes our market is deterministic. Until we find (which we have not) that the human decision making process IS deterministic, the results of EMH backed formulae will never produce consistent results at predicting market behavior.
Some of the most interesting research into trying to predict things that normally seem nondeterministic (like markets, human behavior, etc.) was being done by Orlin Grabbe (with fractal modeling techniques), but unfortunately, he seems to have died too early to finish that work.
Even the liberal media agrees that having ice caps at the poles is a relatively odd thing to have in earth's history. I should think that having them melt is probably a good thing.
Here's Why: Much more biomass can be supported by a hotter earth, as has been shown through the fossil record (fossil as in stones and fuel). Even if the planet obtained a climate more like it had one billion years ago, the temperatures from back then do not seem to have created a worldwide desert. Indeed, quite the opposite occurred.
Well, not really. The boomers seem to have been having negative population growth since the 1970s. The only reason we have any population growth is because our latin brothers cannot resist the lure of the American dream. Also, once here, hispanics are the only ethnic group that has over 2 children per female on average. One can find an interesting discussion here about the issue.
Indeed. The ability of a person to react quickly and manage soldiers well on the battlefield is a measure of their tactical skill, not strategic skill/vision.
Oddly, in a RTS, effective tactics is the key to victory, unlike in games that require a lot of strategic thinking (like the civilization series). More strategy can be put into these games if some technologies, when researched, preclude access to other technologies or a more advanced tech structure (but with their own benefits). Also, just having a way larger tech tree (like in empire earth) can also make a game more strategic. Though, as an RTS becomes more complex in those ways, the manageability factor eventually would become so large that one would have to go to a turn-based system much like civ.
"I can eat my cheese burger in the same room as you and it won't have the slightest impact on you."
What if I'm hungry, and the odor of the hamburger makes me want one? I'd say that's an impact on my health, as it greatly increases the risk of my eating a hamburger (whether the health impact is negative or positive is irrelevant, I'm just making a point here.)
"Not everyone gets addicted to cheese burgers, but everyone who smokes ends up addicted."
Bull. I smoke maybe 2-3 times a YEAR. Does that mean I'm addicted? Certainly not as much as I'm addicted to hamburgers (2-3 times weekly):D
"I can eat a cheese burger now and then and it does me no harm, where there's no such thing as a harmless smoke."
Technically, there are situations where the opposite could be seen. You could eat the E-coli burger from hell and die, immediately after enjoying a blood-thinning cigarette which prevented a stroke you didn't know about.
"3 very good reasons it's being cracked down on."
I can think of a LOT of things more harmful for public health that nobody gives a shit about, much less "cracks down" on. Besides, there's no point on cracking down on anything whatsoever. The addiction rate actually increases with the amount it is attempted to be suppressed. Just take a look at the data on the US prohibition on alcohol. You will find all these efforts to crack down in the end cause more harm than good. So, maybe the thing harmful to public health we should be "cracking down" on is counterproductive regulation.
The prices are skyrocketing because population rates still explode upwards while farmland is being converted to service sector use in some countries like Mexico, causing shortages. This "global economy" model only works for countries with near 0 net population growth (a condition most "first world" countries experience). Agricultural economies can accept expanding populations, as the educational component is minimal for operation, and the physical labor component quickly wears out workers. Service economies need to expand lifespans more than agricultural economies, as education requirements are costly in time and $$$. Living longer seems to correlate to low population growth.
These starving countries are trying to emulate the success of their first world neighbors by expanding into services, while ignoring a condition for being successful. Thus they predictably fail, leading to shortages.
Well, if Linux users/vendors become persona non grata in the USA, there's always BSD... Until M$ decides to make the old saying "BSD is dying" come true.
Either that or there's simply going to another country that isn't becoming a fascistic corporation whore.
I've found that the best way to convert people in less than five minutes to a *nix system is to replace their machine with one running icewm themed to look like windows 95 or XP (without the target's prior knowledge). Most don't even realize the difference until it is too late!
The data referred to by the parent post doesn't seem entirely accurate, as I recall that (in Texas at least) many of the high school dropout rates have been mixed in with the middle school drop rates, which heavily jiggers the data toward a reduction in dropouts.
It would appear to me that the dropout rate has remained around a healthy 40% for the last 30 years, though it appears to be declining due to creative accounting.
Slashdot Mirror
Says you. Try having the IRS owe you a few grand. Still waiting on that check from several years back. In the IRS' defense, the mailman could have cashed it, since banks rarely do pesky stuff like read anymore. I've also had them unilateraly apply tax credits that I wasn't legally eligible for (thank heaven I can't be held liable for their mistakes... yet). That said, it was a big tax giveaway (making work pay act) in an election year so I can't say I'm too surprised. Their behavior can appear quite baffling unless you have looked deeply at the history of their actions.
Seriously, read a few Inspector General's reports before you defend an organization that you know little about. They regularly violate their own rules; especially the ones about not keeping an "enemies list" of tax protestors and not auditing because of RO's personal vendettas. Practically every administration since (and including) FDR have used them as a political weapon against their opponents. Judges and Jurors who decide against them get singled out for audit. Repeated studies by lawyers have shown the Revenue Code to be so self-contradictory that prosecution is effectively discretionary. As such "following the law" is basically whatever they feel like at the moment. Oh, and there's a special tax court that is exempt from due process if they so choose to subject you to it (usually reserved for aformentioned protestors).
But, you are right in saying it's not about the money. It's mostly about Revenue Officers and their self-aggrandizement. The way to get promoted is to maximize seizures, and that has been the case from the beginning. The money comes naturally with those incentives. The frequent strong-arm tactics they use to achieve said siezures (and the above bending of rules) is why they are considered little different from a private criminal organization running a protection racket. The things the tax money is spent on (international murder, political blackmail, crony arrangements) is also little different in practice, so you can forgive why a person could mistake the IRS for a mafia organization. Duck rule and all that.
Now I know some 'a youse are thinking -- "but the government does X charitable thing! They're not all bad, they're compartmentalized, blah blah..." Well, the Mafia runs charities too. Both organizations rely on the forebearance of their victims, so they gotta have some way to paint a positive image over the majority of their activities being rotten. And there will always be fools that believe they can join the Mafia to do good -- however, they will not achieve influence because of the incentive structure (the most rapacious get promoted).
Get over yourselves, people. It's a tough world out there, and a government funded by invoulntary contribution doesn't make any of that go away. Doing Evil that Good May Come (TM) doesn't work out in the long run, so either get used to doing things the hard way, or living in a world dominated by evil. By and large, we've chosen the latter, and we need to accept that rather than getting Stockholm Syndrome about the whole affair. Quit defending people who would kill you with your own money without thinking twice about it.
So, I hope you guys reading TFA realize what this is really about: A bunch of ROs got together and figured out a plausible enough justification to pull in more siezures (and hence more promotions/$$$). They win, the taxpayer loses, the Bureacracies doesn't really care because at the end of the day they have a printing press and whole lots of trigger-pullers. The politicians will continue to try and avoid the subject of the IRS altogether, as that makes people think too much about how the sausage is made rather than the delicious *free* sausage they want to offer up. The courts can be relied upon not to rein in the IRS, as they would prefer not to bite the hand that feeds them. The people (in general) cannot be relied upon because they are widely bamboozled that voting can somehow dislodge such ingrained corruption of incentives. The only person you can rely on is yourself -- If you want this to change, you have to be the change you want to see in others.
If I leave a story page open for a while, I expect the filters to update like a good little AJAXY wob 2.0 thingy that this appears to be. Yet in the time it took to write this post, I saw no 'funny' comments until I opened it in a new tab to check.
That said, I like the new filtering options, except that I can't filter for troll and flamebait comments. I mean, how else am I going to keep up with the latest GNAA spam?
I don't like not seeing UIDs -- how am I supposed to be bigoted against new users?
Also, I can only read the first page of comments for this story in lynx. Add some GET param that allows you to get the different filters/pages by default and have the links to see that stuff degrade gracefully. I also don't like not being able to middle-click a thread title and have the thread open in a new tab.
Wow, the style for p tags is wack. Way too much space between them; I'm having to be a dweeb and use double <br>s here.
Seriously though, I think it's a good sign that so many users are getting worked up about this. Slashdot's biggest danger isn't a boycott, it's being so boring that people wouldn't even care enough to boycott. Lord knows there have been some LONG stretches in the last few years where I couldn't care less about the topic discussed in this here tarted up IRC channel. Been picking up a bit lately though; otherwise I would have just lurked on by today.
The original slashdot interface was way crappier than this beta, folks. We used it because the stories were worth commenting on -- so I understand why the admins appear less than concerned about this whole 'fuck beta' business. If they can keep the post quality up, the quality of the software used for commenting is not really a deal-breaker.
One can make a similar argument about paper moneies, as they all have hyperinflations built-in. This conclusion is easily reached by simply looking at history; no fiat system has ever survived the abuses politics subject it to, not to mention fractional-reserves being abused to the point of fraud.
Bitcoin won't necesarily enrich the early adopters. It would be more accurate to say that it enriches savers at the expense of spenders. To be fair, unlimited monies (practically all fiat monies) with their inflations do the opposite; they reward spenders and borrowers by undercutting rates of interest, and punish savers by making their savings lose purchasing power. By this measure, if bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, then all other money is at least a pyramid scheme.
I don't see bitcoin as being bad from an economic point of view. The people who want a store of value *can* use this (so long as SHA-256 is safe), as it would benefit them; though they'll probably hold on to their gold instead. They can then use the inflating government money for their loans, and get a good deal both places.
Also, don't be playa hatin' on the money launderers. It's a crime that doesn't exist without income taxation, which is to say not really a crime in the classic sense, as nobody is harmed; it's really just tax evasion -- which itself was not criminal until fairly recently (it was only a tort).
And good luck stamping out stores of value from existence. People have tried outlawing gold, silver, and nearly all other forms of capital; all it has ever accomplished is impoverishing the society that tries. Maybe that's why your post is so heavy on pejoratives, like "buttcoin".
Yeah, but bitcoin is infinitely sub-dividable, so that argument is irrelevant. Everyone will always be able to get enough to transact. The instabilities in hard money economies are due to fractional reserves creating inflations, or centralized debasement (coin clipping, etc). In reality, all economies are difficult to grow. Inflationary economies just front-load the prosperity, which is popular, as we are impatient. The real weakness of bitcoin is that it is only as strong as SHA-256. When that is broken, your bitcoins become basically worthless.
Too bad our patriotic freedom soldiers of love 'accidentally' made the Afghanis 'leak' some material, clearly and presently endangering their health. Surely that must have been Saddam's fault, not those glorious administrators doing 'god's work' in the pentagram.. er pentagon!
24
When I first saw this story I said to myself: "But wait! I thought that the USA (whoo whoo) already does this! Jack Bauer used one to get the terrorists in NYC!" Then I remembered that 24 wasn't real life. *sigh*
That'd be an awesome formatting option when installing Windows 7.
Or we could make the other assumption that most people happily agree on: That the people representing us in the government don't mean what they say, nor do they know what they are doing!
...Unless they're in with the Federal Reserve, who I welcomed as my new overlords long ago, as they seem to be the only ones who have actually gotten things done for good or evil in some time.
Fa fa fa!
It seems that the fundamental problem with financial mathematics is that most models rely on the 'efficient markets hypothesis' which assumes our market is deterministic. Until we find (which we have not) that the human decision making process IS deterministic, the results of EMH backed formulae will never produce consistent results at predicting market behavior. Some of the most interesting research into trying to predict things that normally seem nondeterministic (like markets, human behavior, etc.) was being done by Orlin Grabbe (with fractal modeling techniques), but unfortunately, he seems to have died too early to finish that work.
Even the liberal media agrees that having ice caps at the poles is a relatively odd thing to have in earth's history. I should think that having them melt is probably a good thing.
Here's Why:
Much more biomass can be supported by a hotter earth, as has been shown through the fossil record (fossil as in stones and fuel). Even if the planet obtained a climate more like it had one billion years ago, the temperatures from back then do not seem to have created a worldwide desert. Indeed, quite the opposite occurred.
So... why is global warming a bad thing again?
Well, not really. The boomers seem to have been having negative population growth since the 1970s. The only reason we have any population growth is because our latin brothers cannot resist the lure of the American dream. Also, once here, hispanics are the only ethnic group that has over 2 children per female on average. One can find an interesting discussion here about the issue.
Viva America!
Indeed. The ability of a person to react quickly and manage soldiers well on the battlefield is a measure of their tactical skill, not strategic skill/vision.
Oddly, in a RTS, effective tactics is the key to victory, unlike in games that require a lot of strategic thinking (like the civilization series). More strategy can be put into these games if some technologies, when researched, preclude access to other technologies or a more advanced tech structure (but with their own benefits). Also, just having a way larger tech tree (like in empire earth) can also make a game more strategic. Though, as an RTS becomes more complex in those ways, the manageability factor eventually would become so large that one would have to go to a turn-based system much like civ.
Hopefully their security guards are from the reputable contracting service firm "Smashe & Grabbe."
"JUST BANGED A HAWT GURL BEHIND THE CLUB!!!!!" Location: Mom's basement
So, we've finally found B1FF. The only sane solution is to nuke it from orbit.
Only if it was implemented in INTERCAL.
"I can eat my cheese burger in the same room as you and it won't have the slightest impact on you." What if I'm hungry, and the odor of the hamburger makes me want one? I'd say that's an impact on my health, as it greatly increases the risk of my eating a hamburger (whether the health impact is negative or positive is irrelevant, I'm just making a point here.) "Not everyone gets addicted to cheese burgers, but everyone who smokes ends up addicted." Bull. I smoke maybe 2-3 times a YEAR. Does that mean I'm addicted? Certainly not as much as I'm addicted to hamburgers (2-3 times weekly) :D
"I can eat a cheese burger now and then and it does me no harm, where there's no such thing as a harmless smoke."
Technically, there are situations where the opposite could be seen. You could eat the E-coli burger from hell and die, immediately after enjoying a blood-thinning cigarette which prevented a stroke you didn't know about.
"3 very good reasons it's being cracked down on."
I can think of a LOT of things more harmful for public health that nobody gives a shit about, much less "cracks down" on. Besides, there's no point on cracking down on anything whatsoever. The addiction rate actually increases with the amount it is attempted to be suppressed. Just take a look at the data on the US prohibition on alcohol. You will find all these efforts to crack down in the end cause more harm than good. So, maybe the thing harmful to public health we should be "cracking down" on is counterproductive regulation.
Wonder what kind of recursive acronym that would make.
The prices are skyrocketing because population rates still explode upwards while farmland is being converted to service sector use in some countries like Mexico, causing shortages. This "global economy" model only works for countries with near 0 net population growth (a condition most "first world" countries experience). Agricultural economies can accept expanding populations, as the educational component is minimal for operation, and the physical labor component quickly wears out workers. Service economies need to expand lifespans more than agricultural economies, as education requirements are costly in time and $$$. Living longer seems to correlate to low population growth. These starving countries are trying to emulate the success of their first world neighbors by expanding into services, while ignoring a condition for being successful. Thus they predictably fail, leading to shortages.
Russian Roulette.
I would love to see a nintendo Wii covered in woad. But only if it came with a 'braveheart' game.
They bought vista! I can't wait for some M$ guy to say that. Like it will ever happen...
Well, if Linux users/vendors become persona non grata in the USA, there's always BSD... Until M$ decides to make the old saying "BSD is dying" come true. Either that or there's simply going to another country that isn't becoming a fascistic corporation whore.
I've found that the best way to convert people in less than five minutes to a *nix system is to replace their machine with one running icewm themed to look like windows 95 or XP (without the target's prior knowledge). Most don't even realize the difference until it is too late!
Or did you start to slouch the moment you read this?
The data referred to by the parent post doesn't seem entirely accurate, as I recall
that (in Texas at least) many of the high school dropout rates have been mixed in with
the middle school drop rates, which heavily jiggers the data toward a reduction in
dropouts.
It would appear to me that the dropout rate has remained around a healthy 40% for the
last 30 years, though it appears to be declining due to creative accounting.