No, people making $25K per year are NOT paying 40% of their income in taxes.
Even with no dependents, and no standard deduction (you're being treated as a dependent on someone else's return), you're not not paying more than 20% taxes, unless you live in a State with a truly colossal State Income Tax.
Note that with a standard deduction for yourself, you're going to be paying less than 15% taxes (again, unless you live in a State with a colossal State Income Tax).
And yes, I'm including SSA and Medicare taxes in that estimate.
A quick googling shows several articles that match up with what the AC described. Including the one in the Chicago Tribune. It's not hard to check on this sort of thing, really.
What needs to be done is to pass legislation that actually makes these activities illegal
Which can be superseded by...you guessed it...a new law later. Just like this one can be superseded by a new law (read: new budget bill).
The only conceivable way to make this go away permanently is a Supreme Court Ruling that this sort of thing is unconstitutional. If you're really interested in making the problem go away, that's what you need to be bending your efforts toward - test cases in two different Appeal districts with contradictory results will almost always get the Supremes to look at the subject.
And then there's a 50:50 chance they'll decide your way....
Set caps on campaign spending or set limits on the amount of TV/radio based ad time that can be spent on a campaigner.
So, you advocate censoring the newspapers, TV news, etc? Because there's nothing to stop an incumbent from getting publicity during an electoral cycle just by doing his job and making the news.
Note that ALL spending limits favor the incumbent. HE/SHE has easy access to all sorts of free publicity (propose a popular bill to get free publicity, for instance) that the challenger can't match.
It only covers THIS appropriations bill. They'll just sneak funding into another one to make it up.
That's because new law automagically supersedes old law. And since an appropriations bill is, in fact, a law, next year's appropriations bill will automagically supersede this bill.
Of course, realistically, this bill will go nowhere, since the Senate doesn't seem terribly inclined to rein in the NSA.
1) Want to be increase the chance it gets read, as opposed to thrown away.
Oddly, I am more likely to just toss snail-mail unopened than not. I generally go through it on the way from the mailbox to the house, and stop and toss stuff when I reach the garbage can.
Sometimes I wonder if Japan surrendered so unconditionally because they thought that we had a lot more of them ready to drop.
Quite possibly. It's certainly an article of faith in come circles. Note, by the by, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined did less damage than the Tokyo firebombings. And it's not like we were in danger of running out of incendiaries.
Had they known that we pretty much exhausted our supply of weapons with those two then perhaps they would have kept on fighting.
Unlikely, actually. The Emperor had been looking for an excuse to quit fighting for some time, but the Generals were running the country. Note that the Tokyo firebombings (we keep coming back to those) did more damage than the nuclear bombings, but weren't so shocking mostly due to the large number of bombers required to inflict the damage.
I'm also curious when exactly it became general knowledge that we were essentially bluffing.
Sometime in the early '50s. Note that we were NOT bluffing. Lacking another Bomb (we had one more), we'd have just kept dropping incendiaries until Japan surrendered. The issue was never one of "we can't beat Japan without the Bomb", it was more a matter of "we really don't want to deal with millions of American casualties invading the Home Islands, so we'll have to bomb them into submission, and that'll take until '48 or so".
Note that, absent their surrender, we were already planning that invasion of the Home Islands for 1946. Though it is unlikely we would have gone through with it rather than just raining conventional explosives down on Japan 24-7 until they gave up.
Note, finally, that in the last irony of the whole atomic bomb business, there were three cities in Japan that were never bombed, and two more that were only bombed the once. As a direct result of the atomic bomb development, we put five (potential target) cities on a "Do Not Bomb" list so we could assess the effects of an Atomic Bomb without data being obscured by previous conventional bombings. Three of the target cities were never used, and the last two (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) were spared the fate of Tokyo (bombing about once a week for a year or two) and most other major industrial cities as a result....
Actually, both cities are inhabited now, and have been continuously inhabited for centuries.
Those parks you mention are in the center of the cities in question - they're not the locations of the explosions (air-bursts), nor are they "ground zero" in more than symbolic ways.
No, the trouble is that the jurisdiction of the Patriot Act (and all other US laws) ends at the US border; regardless of what agencies like the NSA like to believe.
Got bad news for you. It is NOT illegal for the NSA to spy on foreigners.
Any more than it is illegal for the espionage agencies in your country to spy on foreigners.
That is, in fact, what espionage agencies are for - to spy on people.
So what you're saying is that we can have a monopoly of greedy corporate bastards, or we can have a government-run monopoly that charges a price that's regulated by voters.
As to the first case, nonsense! YOU can start up a competitive service if you'd like.
As to the second case, good luck on getting that price "regulated by voters", instead of "regulated by the Mayor".
While the whole world may not have flooded, there was most likely a large enough flood to be worth telling stories about.
Yeah, like when the ice sheets melted at the end of the last glaciation - several hundred meters of sea level rise world-wide, and any human group near what had been the coast would have experienced something that looked a helluva lot like Noah's Flood. Probably several times.....
We can??? For every physically possible drive system? I'd never have imagined that we'd developed detectors for forces we can't even conceive of yet.....
Slashdot Mirror
The only short stories are a lot of money or to hide???
I trust you really meant "antidotes"?
Wild guess - they don't consider "human" to be equivalent to "homo sapiens sapiens"....
I find myself confused. I thought the subject was athletic scholarships, not the US Postal Service.
One third? Where I live in the USA, 80% of the cost of solar installations is covered by tax credits.
Umm, no. 4000 acres or so (1600 hectares or so), best case (which includes 100% efficient conversion of sunlight to electricity, no clouds, noon)
No, people making $25K per year are NOT paying 40% of their income in taxes.
Even with no dependents, and no standard deduction (you're being treated as a dependent on someone else's return), you're not not paying more than 20% taxes, unless you live in a State with a truly colossal State Income Tax.
Note that with a standard deduction for yourself, you're going to be paying less than 15% taxes (again, unless you live in a State with a colossal State Income Tax).
And yes, I'm including SSA and Medicare taxes in that estimate.
The Soyuz had two loss of crew accidents in 120 flights. And ten more mission failures.
Shuttle had two loss of crew accidents in 135 flights. And no extra mission failures.
I fail to see the reliability advantage of the Soyuz.
A quick googling shows several articles that match up with what the AC described. Including the one in the Chicago Tribune. It's not hard to check on this sort of thing, really.
Assuming the "pile of rubble" is pretty much solid iron, a six meter pile masses around 860 tons.
Which would give the "pile of rubble" about 6 micro-G surface acceleration.
Which, effectively, means it's a bunch of rocks falling in the same direction at the same place....
Which can be superseded by...you guessed it...a new law later. Just like this one can be superseded by a new law (read: new budget bill).
The only conceivable way to make this go away permanently is a Supreme Court Ruling that this sort of thing is unconstitutional. If you're really interested in making the problem go away, that's what you need to be bending your efforts toward - test cases in two different Appeal districts with contradictory results will almost always get the Supremes to look at the subject.
And then there's a 50:50 chance they'll decide your way....
So, you advocate censoring the newspapers, TV news, etc? Because there's nothing to stop an incumbent from getting publicity during an electoral cycle just by doing his job and making the news.
Note that ALL spending limits favor the incumbent. HE/SHE has easy access to all sorts of free publicity (propose a popular bill to get free publicity, for instance) that the challenger can't match.
So, you're going to get rid of the corrupting influence of money by...spending money to buy politicians?
That's what PACs do, you know - they buy politicians to counter the other guy's bought politicians....
That's because new law automagically supersedes old law. And since an appropriations bill is, in fact, a law, next year's appropriations bill will automagically supersede this bill.
Of course, realistically, this bill will go nowhere, since the Senate doesn't seem terribly inclined to rein in the NSA.
Oddly, I am more likely to just toss snail-mail unopened than not. I generally go through it on the way from the mailbox to the house, and stop and toss stuff when I reach the garbage can.
For those who were unaware, the Cardinal is an American bird, so named because of its resemblance to the Catholic Cardinal's "standard uniform".
But, rather than nail the Cardinals, we should obviously nail the Braves.
Quite possibly. It's certainly an article of faith in come circles. Note, by the by, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined did less damage than the Tokyo firebombings. And it's not like we were in danger of running out of incendiaries.
Unlikely, actually. The Emperor had been looking for an excuse to quit fighting for some time, but the Generals were running the country. Note that the Tokyo firebombings (we keep coming back to those) did more damage than the nuclear bombings, but weren't so shocking mostly due to the large number of bombers required to inflict the damage.
Sometime in the early '50s. Note that we were NOT bluffing. Lacking another Bomb (we had one more), we'd have just kept dropping incendiaries until Japan surrendered. The issue was never one of "we can't beat Japan without the Bomb", it was more a matter of "we really don't want to deal with millions of American casualties invading the Home Islands, so we'll have to bomb them into submission, and that'll take until '48 or so".
Note that, absent their surrender, we were already planning that invasion of the Home Islands for 1946. Though it is unlikely we would have gone through with it rather than just raining conventional explosives down on Japan 24-7 until they gave up.
Note, finally, that in the last irony of the whole atomic bomb business, there were three cities in Japan that were never bombed, and two more that were only bombed the once. As a direct result of the atomic bomb development, we put five (potential target) cities on a "Do Not Bomb" list so we could assess the effects of an Atomic Bomb without data being obscured by previous conventional bombings. Three of the target cities were never used, and the last two (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) were spared the fate of Tokyo (bombing about once a week for a year or two) and most other major industrial cities as a result....
Actually, both cities are inhabited now, and have been continuously inhabited for centuries.
Those parks you mention are in the center of the cities in question - they're not the locations of the explosions (air-bursts), nor are they "ground zero" in more than symbolic ways.
Got bad news for you. It is NOT illegal for the NSA to spy on foreigners.
Any more than it is illegal for the espionage agencies in your country to spy on foreigners.
That is, in fact, what espionage agencies are for - to spy on people.
As to the first case, nonsense! YOU can start up a competitive service if you'd like.
As to the second case, good luck on getting that price "regulated by voters", instead of "regulated by the Mayor".
"powering per month"??
Note also that the units of 35w per month reduces to joules per second^2. Accelerating energy usage??
That's one long day there, Butch. Do you live on Venus?
I wish people would stop using the word "arial" unless they're referring to a font.
They're going to regulate my cell's mapping app, eh?
Not to worry, I can still open the old Rand-McNally while driving if I really need to find a route.
Yeah, like when the ice sheets melted at the end of the last glaciation - several hundred meters of sea level rise world-wide, and any human group near what had been the coast would have experienced something that looked a helluva lot like Noah's Flood. Probably several times.....
We can??? For every physically possible drive system? I'd never have imagined that we'd developed detectors for forces we can't even conceive of yet.....