...or is Jef[f] using the zoom like the rest of the world uses hypertext? I'm thinking specifically of the picture of Jef with his book and pipe organ, next to which is information about both, smaller. A link could do the same thing.
Given that I started the discussion, I think I understand it. If you can provide evidence that state tax dollars are spent significantly differently from federal tax dollars, I'd love to see it. But you can't, because they aren't. It's all a handout to the wealthy.
The wealthy have a tiny tax burden, and gain the most in terms of services. The middle class have a large tax burden, but gain a fair amount in services, especially the upper end of the middle class. The poor and the lower end of the middle class also shoulder a large tax burden (even the ultra-poor who pay no income tax), but get almost nothing back. (No, a hundred a month to buy food is not comparable to the billions of dollars the Federal Government hands out to ADM stockholders each year.)
This is true regardless of the mode of taxation. State taxes go to support the wealthy just as much as federal taxes. And the fact that those people who scrape the bottom of the barrel don't pay income tax does not relieve them of tax burden.
If you're going to make distinctions, please try to have some basis for it. And no, "This is inside smaller imaginary lines" doesn't count.
So you're claiming that the only poor people who buy things live in New Hampshire and Alaska? That poor people who live in, say, Manhattan, with its 8.625% sales tax, never go to the store? Or did you just forget about sales taxes, sin taxes, excise taxes, etc.? Poor people pay all of those, and they're all regressive taxes.
Oh, I know! You did forget, because even to the middle class, sales tax is a minor fraction of doing business. That's the beauty of a regressive tax: it hammers the poor while barely inconveniencing anyone with money.
Just a factual quibble, but you cannot get refunded more money than you paid in. You can get an income tax refund that equals your income tax paid, but that's it. If you're rich, though, you can get back far more than you paid in, because you benefit from hundred of government programs (like the military contract giveaway) that line the pockets of absentee owners everywhere. (You might know absentee owners by their more common name: "stockholders." "Theives" is really the most accurate, though.)
1. You're talking about what we could do to get rid of national debt. Stop changing the topic. I'm claiming that the rich get more money than the poor, which is obvious. Whether we eliminate the military (and hurt the rich) or eliminate all social programs (and hurt nearly everyone, but the poor disproportionately) is inconsequential to my point.
2. Paying veterans is a cost of running a military. Sloughing it off onto "social welfare" is a joke.
3. No. Social security is a trust fund. It has nothing to do with income taxes.
So of course when you take half of the cost of running a military out, the percentage for the military is less. If we put bomber purchases into social welfare (because they keep us safe, I don't know, you're the master spin doctor), that would do the same thing. It doesn't change the reality: real social welfare programs are tiny compared to the vast amount of corporate welfare (most of the military budget; a huge amount of the social services budget; most discretionary spending). Consequently taxation on the rich is, for them, an investment: they make massive returns on their money, which returns are stolen from the poor. Taxation on the poor is theft.
I didn't say the poor don't pay taxes. They do. So do the middle class, where the bulk of the money comes from. (That's not, however, where most of the wealth is.) The rich pay out taxes, but more than make it back. The poor are robbed viciously. The middle classes mostly tend to break even. The fact that tax rates are higher for the rich is moot when you consider that the benefits to the rich far outweigh the tax burden.
Are you fucking crazy? Take a look at the real distribution. Defense is about half of the budget. "Human resources" is a large chunk, but most of that is education. I'm still looking for the chart I really want, but this should serve for the time being.
But the rich get them back in the form of massive corporate subsidies (FAR exceeding the tiny amount spent on social welfare), tax breaks on inheritance and stock earnings, and caps on progressive taxation. The takes paid by the poor go to paying for these tax breaks for and outright payments to the rich.
It's very difficult to take seriously someone named "FudgePackinJesus." But I'll try.:)
Should, I think we agree, is a very different matter from will. And my original predictions for Iraq ran very close to what you have just said, although a little more cynical: We invade, the Iraqis try to throw off our oppressive mantle, we use the unrest to justify our continued presence there, etc.
However, if we were going to continue down this path, we would have already postponed elections. I think the US is committed to a pullout, no matter how premature. (Yeesh, bad imagery.) I also think the government is committed to manipulating the press however necessary to avoid another fall-of-Saigon scenario. There will be no front page shots of Blackhawks being pushed off buildings by raging Shiites.
The administration has been and still is spinning Afghanistan as a success, and most Americans think it is. It's rarely in the news, except for the recent "successful" elections, and has been forgotten as a quick, surgical, successful war.
Iraq has been and still is spun the same way. A full extraction in February will, of course, follow "successful" elections (cf. Afghanistan, Cambodia, anywhere else elections have been accepted as a substitute for democracy) and, with the American people full of warm fuzzies, will immediately precede an invasion of Iran.
The elections, of course, will be successful because the NYT and CNN and ABC and whoever else will call them successful. They'll report faithfully the administration's claims that despite the hundreds or thousands of deaths on election day, democracy was enacted (translation: the new president will sell us cheap oil) and we have a new, democratic ally in the Middle East. Yay. Pull the troops out hurry-up-quick, and, since the press doesn't care when people with brown skin die, it'll never get another inch in the papers (except when the government wants to trumpet another "success").
I agree that a draft is certain, but not for a while. My bet is that it will come: a) right before the 2008 elections, if the Dems manage to muster up a decent candidate (not a Gore or Kerry) and the Republicans are worried. This way they can just dump the mess on the Dems; or b) right after the 2008 elections, when whoever is in power realizes that they need more meat to throw at the enemy of the week. I don't expect Bush to take the hit and tarnish his reputation. But since Cheney has practically no chance, I could see a late-2008 draft bill.
I don't know that it's so much of a waste as an upward funnelling. Tax the poor, then use that money to pay for government contracts for military/industrial corporations and their rich stockholders. The poor are quite literally paying the dividends of Halliburton, Hummer, etc.
There's also the matter of the new face of imperialism. By plundering other countries for their resources (i.e., invading Iraq for cheap oil, invading Afghanistan for an oil pipeline and the consequent cheap oil), the rich can continue to get richer, but also throw a bone to the poor (at, of course, the expense of other countries' poor). That helps mitigate the wholescale theft that occurs on April 15th.
You're too optimistic. Check the timeline for Iraq:
September 2001: WTC attacks. Less than 3% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was connected.
September 2003: After months of grumbling, Saddam Hussein is formally fingered as having connections with Al Qaeda. Still almost no one believes it.
March 2004: Six months of ubiquitous and furious propaganda later, just over half of Americans believe Hussein has connections to Al Qaeda and WMD, and want to invade Iraq.
Flash forward to today. After years of mumbling about Iran being part of the Axis of Evil, we have White House staff refusing to rule out military action. Shortly, you'll see the start of another huge propaganda blitz. We'll pull out of Iraq as schedule (continuing, of course, to govern by proxy), and the fact that no more Americans are dying will punt the story from the evening news. Americans will forget about Iraq and the government propaganda will replace it with Iran before people have time to think about silly things like the economy.
I'm counting on an invasion of Iran this fall, as soon as the temperatures start to drop. If we aren't there by 2006 at the latest, I'll be very surprised.
They do, however, give many damns about whether or not their new $250 music player can play all the songs they downloaded off Kazaa. And if all the new players from Sony et al. don't play the MP3s consumers have already stockpiled, not to mention the AACs and WMAs, then no one will buy them.
As Cory Doctorow pointed out in TFA, this is all about trying to sell the same content to the same people multiple times. And the average consumer won't stand for that, not when they've already downloaded the music (for free or otherwise).
Buy everything piecemeal. I just priced out a 900Gb NAS for $800, shipping included. Slap it all together, put your favorite Linux distro on it, and run Samba.
You won't be able to beat the price of the real thing by much, though: big hard drives are still expensive, and so are RAID cards (if you go that route).
Mine, too, but thankfully now the Department of Homeworld Security has introduced their new color-coded Spontaneous-Collapse-of-the-Universe Warning System. Today is yellow!
it is also believed that phishers are attempting to compromise domain name servers. If one of these go down millions could lose their security instantly, even if they themselves have maintened the security of their computers.
That's why only sissies and noobs use DNS. "Don't have to remember numbers," they cry. "Makes life easier," they whine. Hah! So does Gator!
But I've got the upper hand now! My security won't be compromised while posting on 66.35.250.150, bitches.
Didn't you realize that the state routinely acts as the private police of the wealthy at their behest? Why, a state that doesn't defend its business interests to the total exclusion of the interests of its citizens is hardly a state at all!
On the iTunes Music Store, the price per song is not $0.00. Nonetheless, people have turned to the iTMS in droves, because it offers a business model people want. That's why we're constantly raking the *AA over the coals at/.: They refuse to change their business model to reflect the changing technology, so they're trying to legislate their dying business model back into existence, just like they did in the VHS vs. Betamax days.
And, just like then, they are failing because of innovative new content delivery systems like this. Yes, some people will always steal movies because it's free. Most people -- say, those who haven't written their own BitTorrent client in the past year -- will move to a system like this, where for a small fee (less than the $20 required for two at the theatres or a purchased DVD), they can view the movie they want, and don't have to wait three days until they get it downloaded, only to find out that they got the cut-down version released in Shanghai, shot by some kid with a camcorder in his hoodie and subtitled by Altavista's babelfish.
People will happily pay for convenience; they will not, however, pay exorbitant fees for convenience. Bollywood is acknowledging that, and is hitting pirates back by competing with them. No one currently competes with pirates, which is part of why they're so successful. Now, their "z3r0-d4y \/1dZ" are getting pwn3d by Bollywood's -1-day vids. It's official: video pirates are going to be Bollywood's bitches, and it's going to hurt piracy to get screwed by that big, singing Indian cock.
End piracy? No. You're just as delusional as the *AA if you think there's a magic bullet to end piracy. A positive step towards ending it? Fuck yes.
No, really. I did it as an undergrad (the code is GPL'd if you want it), and it took very little time: I worked with one other programmer very part time for a summer, and then off and on thenceforth.
We chose a roll-your-own solution mainly to avoid bloat, but also so that we'd be more familiar with the way it worked. Since you're looking for a CMS for a school, my advice is this: spread the wealth. Your journalism students are getting experience, why not throw a bone to your computer science students as well? Look at some popular CMSs, make a list of features you want (I guarantee that most of them will have a billion features you don't want) and then get some students to write it. That's what we did, and we're very happy with the outcome.
Right, see, usually the "I for one" comments aren't funny. But since Gates was talking about open source users (like me and, presumably, you, since you're on/.), it is funny because we are the "Communist Free Culture Overlords." Get it? Get it?
I am less inclined to take their complaints seriously with the knowledge that they are out on a bender in their daddy's pickup on a week night.
I'm sure you RTFA'd, but forgot that the men were 65 and 69 years old.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter a damn bit how they broke the law; they still have freedom of speech. We don't lose all our rights when we drink, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
...or is Jef[f] using the zoom like the rest of the world uses hypertext? I'm thinking specifically of the picture of Jef with his book and pipe organ, next to which is information about both, smaller. A link could do the same thing.
The wealthy have a tiny tax burden, and gain the most in terms of services. The middle class have a large tax burden, but gain a fair amount in services, especially the upper end of the middle class. The poor and the lower end of the middle class also shoulder a large tax burden (even the ultra-poor who pay no income tax), but get almost nothing back. (No, a hundred a month to buy food is not comparable to the billions of dollars the Federal Government hands out to ADM stockholders each year.)
This is true regardless of the mode of taxation. State taxes go to support the wealthy just as much as federal taxes. And the fact that those people who scrape the bottom of the barrel don't pay income tax does not relieve them of tax burden.
If you're going to make distinctions, please try to have some basis for it. And no, "This is inside smaller imaginary lines" doesn't count.
Oh, I know! You did forget, because even to the middle class, sales tax is a minor fraction of doing business. That's the beauty of a regressive tax: it hammers the poor while barely inconveniencing anyone with money.
Just a factual quibble, but you cannot get refunded more money than you paid in. You can get an income tax refund that equals your income tax paid, but that's it. If you're rich, though, you can get back far more than you paid in, because you benefit from hundred of government programs (like the military contract giveaway) that line the pockets of absentee owners everywhere. (You might know absentee owners by their more common name: "stockholders." "Theives" is really the most accurate, though.)
2. Paying veterans is a cost of running a military. Sloughing it off onto "social welfare" is a joke.
3. No. Social security is a trust fund. It has nothing to do with income taxes.
So of course when you take half of the cost of running a military out, the percentage for the military is less. If we put bomber purchases into social welfare (because they keep us safe, I don't know, you're the master spin doctor), that would do the same thing. It doesn't change the reality: real social welfare programs are tiny compared to the vast amount of corporate welfare (most of the military budget; a huge amount of the social services budget; most discretionary spending). Consequently taxation on the rich is, for them, an investment: they make massive returns on their money, which returns are stolen from the poor. Taxation on the poor is theft.
I didn't say the poor don't pay taxes. They do. So do the middle class, where the bulk of the money comes from. (That's not, however, where most of the wealth is.) The rich pay out taxes, but more than make it back. The poor are robbed viciously. The middle classes mostly tend to break even. The fact that tax rates are higher for the rich is moot when you consider that the benefits to the rich far outweigh the tax burden.
Are you fucking crazy? Take a look at the real distribution. Defense is about half of the budget. "Human resources" is a large chunk, but most of that is education. I'm still looking for the chart I really want, but this should serve for the time being.
But the rich get them back in the form of massive corporate subsidies (FAR exceeding the tiny amount spent on social welfare), tax breaks on inheritance and stock earnings, and caps on progressive taxation. The takes paid by the poor go to paying for these tax breaks for and outright payments to the rich.
Should, I think we agree, is a very different matter from will. And my original predictions for Iraq ran very close to what you have just said, although a little more cynical: We invade, the Iraqis try to throw off our oppressive mantle, we use the unrest to justify our continued presence there, etc.
However, if we were going to continue down this path, we would have already postponed elections. I think the US is committed to a pullout, no matter how premature. (Yeesh, bad imagery.) I also think the government is committed to manipulating the press however necessary to avoid another fall-of-Saigon scenario. There will be no front page shots of Blackhawks being pushed off buildings by raging Shiites.
The administration has been and still is spinning Afghanistan as a success, and most Americans think it is. It's rarely in the news, except for the recent "successful" elections, and has been forgotten as a quick, surgical, successful war.
Iraq has been and still is spun the same way. A full extraction in February will, of course, follow "successful" elections (cf. Afghanistan, Cambodia, anywhere else elections have been accepted as a substitute for democracy) and, with the American people full of warm fuzzies, will immediately precede an invasion of Iran.
The elections, of course, will be successful because the NYT and CNN and ABC and whoever else will call them successful. They'll report faithfully the administration's claims that despite the hundreds or thousands of deaths on election day, democracy was enacted (translation: the new president will sell us cheap oil) and we have a new, democratic ally in the Middle East. Yay. Pull the troops out hurry-up-quick, and, since the press doesn't care when people with brown skin die, it'll never get another inch in the papers (except when the government wants to trumpet another "success").
I agree that a draft is certain, but not for a while. My bet is that it will come: a) right before the 2008 elections, if the Dems manage to muster up a decent candidate (not a Gore or Kerry) and the Republicans are worried. This way they can just dump the mess on the Dems; or b) right after the 2008 elections, when whoever is in power realizes that they need more meat to throw at the enemy of the week. I don't expect Bush to take the hit and tarnish his reputation. But since Cheney has practically no chance, I could see a late-2008 draft bill.
There's also the matter of the new face of imperialism. By plundering other countries for their resources (i.e., invading Iraq for cheap oil, invading Afghanistan for an oil pipeline and the consequent cheap oil), the rich can continue to get richer, but also throw a bone to the poor (at, of course, the expense of other countries' poor). That helps mitigate the wholescale theft that occurs on April 15th.
September 2001: WTC attacks. Less than 3% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was connected.
September 2003: After months of grumbling, Saddam Hussein is formally fingered as having connections with Al Qaeda. Still almost no one believes it.
March 2004: Six months of ubiquitous and furious propaganda later, just over half of Americans believe Hussein has connections to Al Qaeda and WMD, and want to invade Iraq. Flash forward to today. After years of mumbling about Iran being part of the Axis of Evil, we have White House staff refusing to rule out military action. Shortly, you'll see the start of another huge propaganda blitz. We'll pull out of Iraq as schedule (continuing, of course, to govern by proxy), and the fact that no more Americans are dying will punt the story from the evening news. Americans will forget about Iraq and the government propaganda will replace it with Iran before people have time to think about silly things like the economy.
I'm counting on an invasion of Iran this fall, as soon as the temperatures start to drop. If we aren't there by 2006 at the latest, I'll be very surprised.
Link to actual story from the BBC
As Cory Doctorow pointed out in TFA, this is all about trying to sell the same content to the same people multiple times. And the average consumer won't stand for that, not when they've already downloaded the music (for free or otherwise).
Buy everything piecemeal. I just priced out a 900Gb NAS for $800, shipping included. Slap it all together, put your favorite Linux distro on it, and run Samba.
You won't be able to beat the price of the real thing by much, though: big hard drives are still expensive, and so are RAID cards (if you go that route).
Images? What the heck are you talking about? Oh brave new Internet that has such things in it!
Didn't you realize that the state routinely acts as the private police of the wealthy at their behest? Why, a state that doesn't defend its business interests to the total exclusion of the interests of its citizens is hardly a state at all!
Hmm, you know, I might have something there....
And, just like then, they are failing because of innovative new content delivery systems like this. Yes, some people will always steal movies because it's free. Most people -- say, those who haven't written their own BitTorrent client in the past year -- will move to a system like this, where for a small fee (less than the $20 required for two at the theatres or a purchased DVD), they can view the movie they want, and don't have to wait three days until they get it downloaded, only to find out that they got the cut-down version released in Shanghai, shot by some kid with a camcorder in his hoodie and subtitled by Altavista's babelfish.
People will happily pay for convenience; they will not, however, pay exorbitant fees for convenience. Bollywood is acknowledging that, and is hitting pirates back by competing with them. No one currently competes with pirates, which is part of why they're so successful. Now, their "z3r0-d4y \/1dZ" are getting pwn3d by Bollywood's -1-day vids. It's official: video pirates are going to be Bollywood's bitches, and it's going to hurt piracy to get screwed by that big, singing Indian cock.
End piracy? No. You're just as delusional as the *AA if you think there's a magic bullet to end piracy. A positive step towards ending it? Fuck yes.
We chose a roll-your-own solution mainly to avoid bloat, but also so that we'd be more familiar with the way it worked. Since you're looking for a CMS for a school, my advice is this: spread the wealth. Your journalism students are getting experience, why not throw a bone to your computer science students as well? Look at some popular CMSs, make a list of features you want (I guarantee that most of them will have a billion features you don't want) and then get some students to write it. That's what we did, and we're very happy with the outcome.
Right, see, usually the "I for one" comments aren't funny. But since Gates was talking about open source users (like me and, presumably, you, since you're on /.), it is funny because we are the "Communist Free Culture Overlords." Get it? Get it?
Now you can buy "Backdoor Sluts 9: The Video Game." Although I hear it's not much more than tapping 'A' a lot as quickly as you can.
Why has this comment not yet been modded "+5: Fucking awesome"?
Furthermore, it doesn't matter a damn bit how they broke the law; they still have freedom of speech. We don't lose all our rights when we drink, you know.
Stupid fascist.