As I said in a later post, I was not trying to turn it into a rich vs poor discussion just people of noticeably different incomes. At the same time, a teenager making $7 an hour may not think of someone making $25 as being rich but a single parent making $7 an hour would probably think of them as "rich".
It is all in the perception and thus rich and poor tend to be loaded terms.
And before you go accusing people of flunking math, you should make sure you didn't flunk economics.
In order to have any sensible discussion of tax systems with regard to income, you need to learn to think at the margins (especially considering that US income tax is actually calculated at the margins). For those who don't know, the marginal value of a good is the value of one more of those goods. For instance, if you are hungry, the marginal value of a pizza is pretty high but after you have had 9 pizzas, the value of pizza number 10 is very low (maybe you would even pay NOT to eat it).
How does this apply to taxation? For the lower income person (we don't need to turn this into a rich/poor discussion as it applies just as well to middle vs upper-middle or rich vs ultra-rich) with an income of say $50k, the marginal value of their last dollar earned is going to be less than that of the higher income person's last dollar when they make $1million. The marginal tax rate can be higher at this level and the higher income person will only feel the same cost as the lower income person (their marginal tax rate is higher but they value that money less) and this is the reasoning behind why it is considered a fair system. Of course the opinion of the system will depend on how the government sets the rates--they could easily set rates that make the marginal cost at one income level significantly outweigh the marginal costs at another level.
The flat tax that you refer to (really a flat rate tax as opposed to a lump sum-style flat tax) is said to be fair since everyone pays the same percentage. This reasoning discounts the idea of marginal values which is acceptable as a policy decision (since fairness is very subjective) although I would personally not see it as being optimal. The big benefit of a flat rate tax is the simplification of taxes which proponents say might save enough money throughout the system to allow redistribution in a way that would have the same social effects of our current tax code without the pain of taxes.
Of course the simplification argument can be taken a step further. Most economists will tell you that a lump-sum (e.g. everyone pays $4000) tax is the so called "best tax." This is a result of mass simplification of tax codes as well as the fact that lump-sum taxes are not distotionary (I'm not going to get into this other than to say that it means they do not have an effect on earning/spending choices made by the agent...a thorough discussion of this should be in any intermediate calc-based microeconomics textbook). These do already exist in the form of some licensing fees out there (for instance a flat charge you might pay for title transfer/license on a car no matter the price paid). For it to be used in an income tax setting, there would have be be post-facto redistribution by the government for it to make any sense (like how do you charge $4000 to a part-time worker with a total income of only $4000). I include this mostly as an example of a tax scheme that doesn't get a lot of coverage but that actually has its merits and has strong proponents out there. People need to better understand that the concept of fairness is not universal--equity means different things to different people. Any taxation scheme has some sort of inherent unfairness; either someone is going to pay more than someone else or someone is going to pay a greater proportion of their income and in every possible situation, someone will complain.
There's a video store where I grew up (I'm finishing up college now but the store is still there doing fine last time I was home) that does exactly this.
They don't have a huge stock of new releases with an in-stock guarantee like blockbuster but they have a BIG selection overall (much more efficient shelf space usage than a blockbuster for sure). They maintain old films, do TV seasons, have a lot of foreign/anime, and I think they even have a "back room" if you know what I mean. They don't have the advertising and chain-presense of blockbuster but they are friendly and reasonably priced. Once you have an account there for something less popular you will be more inclined to go there for *any* video rental (and in this guys mind, the tail is pretty big...a blockbuster for instance won't have more than a couple hitchcock movies so even a well-known film like vertigo can be hard to find).
By definition (in the discussion of taxes, progressive and regressive are economic terms, not political, and are thus well defined) a sales tax is regressive. You are correct in your statement that it is perfectly flat--you just forget the step where a flat tax is regressive.
A regressive tax will take a larger proportion of a poor person's income than that of a rich person in any particular exchange. If you are buying a stick of butter for $1 and there is a 10% sales tax (hey...it is almost that high here in chicago on non-food items) then the rich person pays 10c in tax and the poor person pays 10c in tax. If the poor person is making chicago minimum wage, their tax rate works out to be about 1.3% of thier income. If the rich person is making $25 an hour, the effective tax rate is.4%. They are being taxed at about 1/3 the rate of the poor person relative to their ability to pay.
"Amazon is benefitting from police and fire protection, and other services in the states where it has facilities, it ought to be collecting sales tax just like any other local business." -FTA
I disagree, they should be paying property tax for these services (which I am sure they are). They should only be paying sales tax on retail sales not on products that are merely being distributed and since this is a warehouse not a storefront, state sales tax is not the answer.
Really though, sales tax is always a regressive tax and I don't think it is a great idea in general for that reason...
Yeah, I never understand the people who go to their firefox address bar and type in 'www.google.com'
they always get snippy when you suggest that they could just click a few inches to the right and search google from the search box. Yes, change can be hard but often it is for the better.
Reminds me of the time when I first saw a post on digg titled something like "MOST USEFUL FIREFOX KEYBOARD COMMAND YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT." That command was ctrl-shift-t (reopen most recently closed tab). I tried it...said "eh...thats not that cool...if I need it right away then I won't close it...and if it was a while ago I can use history." Then one day I closed the wrong tab--scratched my head, remembered that shortcut and have been using it religiously ever since.
Also, I feel the same way about people who insist on opening a new tab before doing a new search/typing in a new address. Instead why not just do a ctrl-enter instead of enter after you type in the search...opens the results in a new foreground tab and preserves your current page
Because in all of those years where minimum wage does not go up, there is no inflation.
That aside, yes it is true that wage increases overall do lead to inflation (more money available to spend will prompt higher prices) but at the same time, inflation necesitates wage increases. When the price level increases, workers are going to need higher wages to maintain the same standard of living so wages then go up as a response to inflation.
Hopefully they fix it some day to allow different games to be played concurrently.
It was annoying when my roommate was borrowing my account to play TF2 (which he has since bought...first game he hasnt pirated in years...chalk that up to good gameplay and a bit of 'try before you buy') since it would sign me out of my steam account but I wouldnt be alerted of this until I took the time to load up a game, join a server and finally as the server finished loading to the final step, get kicked for steam authentication errors. It should only kick me out of the same game is in use somewhere else (since that is how the license agreements for each game work...they say nothing about other games).
Having met several nobel prize winners and several others who I wouldn't be surprised if they received one soon (already holding other prestigious awards such as the national medal of science and having done groundbreaking research in their fields) I would say that most of them have a *better* than average family life.
I would say that this has less to do with spawn times and more with how they count it.
A few months back they changed how team scores were counted on multisegment maps. Now instead of each segment counting, the entire run of the map is counted so either red must win or blue must win all stages (this way servers with a 5-round map limit or something won't switch maps in the middle of a teams turn to assault).
On dustbowl and especially goldrush, it is more common for red to defend successfully on at least one of the three segments which tilts the scores towards red.
I have always wanted the #19 after seeing it in an architecture magazine and researching it a bit more...not really in a college student's price range though:)
My herman miller caper task chair (the one with pneumatic lift, not the stackable kind...also mine has the solid seat rather than the net one) is great. The surfaces may be hard plastic but they are shaped just right for my ass and the holes provide good ventilation. My mom picked it up at a room and board outlet before I went to college and at first I thought it looked funny and uncomfortable but it truly is awesome.
Also I just started a new job where everybody is given a steelcase leap which while not as pretty as some other chairs out there (especially the ugly color we have) is quite nice once adjusted properly. Wish I could find a #19 though...
At home I have a herman miller caper task chair (the wheeled, height adjustable one) and I really like it. A lot of people dislike the fact that it is hard but really a well designed chair shouldnt need excessive padding to be comfortable as long as it is a good shape (sizing and proper fit in a chair is important...why do you think the aeron comes in so many sizes). The incredibly long warranty is great too, the back started to have troulbe after a move damaged it and it was replaced free of charge including shipping the chair to the local repair center...YEARS after owning it. Only complaint is the lack of a recline lockout (the aeron has this).
At work I have a steelcase leap which rocks but I only just started so I cant talk much about the chair (2 days sitting on it and counting).
As are many. My (minneapolis area) troop was very very different from the stereotypes of the boy scouts so I am always a little unsure how to feel when people start ripping on them. On one hand, even though I never bought into the system that much (I didnt do the required badges for eagle, I did a lot of camping and did the badges that interested me), the troop provided a lot of good times while I was in it and I feel sorry for all the people I meet now in college who havn't had a chance to go spend some time living in the woods with no internet in sight. On the other hand, I really don't like the central organization's handling of certain issues...it was always pretty far removed from the operation of my troop but it is hard to say that there would never be any sort of connection (and this was in liberal-as-ever minnesota, I imagine smaller towns or those down in the bible belt as mentioned by another poster would be much different).
I played wow for a while and I mostly enjoyed my time playing it (I quit when I didn't enjoy a lot of it and didnt have the time to put in for the stuff I did enjoy).
I feel like I developed some better team play skills (especially with regards to a fixed role) that have helped me a lot to be a better player in Team Fortress 2. They may not be particularly useful life skills but they helped me to do better in another activity so there is some value there. I sold the account which if I remember right came out to be approximately what I paid in monthly fees during the time I did play (play while college was in session was sparse but the monthly fees didn't change...) but it definitely gave me a feeling of the game not leaving me anything tangible (though it is sort of a joke to consider the character "yours").
All I have left in a tangible sense from the game are a few fraps captures I made. I have a few minutes of pvp from my 39 frost mage twink that I found a few days ago and enjoyed immensely in a sort of "fond memories" way (it helped that I was doing ridiculously well in those clips) and I sort of wish that I could return to that sort of a pvp experiance (I disliked the nature of pvp at 70 so I made a twink and sought out other skilled twinks and found competition to be much better). Unfortunately thats not the game works...and I checked the chars on armory to see what had been done after the idiot who bought them changed their names to misspellings of derogatory phrases--he had turned the 70 raid shadowpriest into a very mediocre pvp priest and eventually leveled the 39 mage into the mid 40's (it was at the time THE BEST 39 mage twink in the battlegroup...tons of time/gold spent gathering the perfect items without crossing the experiance threshold to level 40...what a shame). At least when I want to come back to TF2 in a year, I will still be able to pick up my trusty medigun or rocket launcher and play.
My last experiance with photoshop on linux was probably with photoshop 7 (cs was out but no support for linux yet if I remember right) and it seemed pretty speedy. I had seen comparisons online that gave photoshop faster times but there was question as to whether that was a differance in function time reporting on linux/wine vs windows.
If you do not have a master password set on firefox, all saved passwords can be recovered like this:
options: security: show passwords: show passwords
The second show passwords button will prompt for master password if it exists and then display passwords to all saved accounts. If there is no master password, even if the password database is not cleartext, this is just as good.
That sounds pretty reasonable and sounds a lot like the freebsd 6 installs I have tried work.
I've never installed a full desktop setup on FreeBSD (only a basic xserver with a single app running) but at install you chose base groupings to install. Sounds kind of like the task based deal.
Also, a lot of distros have a task based deal on top of their standard install. I remember using mandrake years ago and being able to choose things like a blanket "development" or "server" category which would install a big group of apps of the chosen type. More recently, ubuntu server comes out with a few basic options for things like LAMP or OpenSSH server that will add a grouping of apps designed to work together (though my biggest frustration with the ubuntu-server install is the default DHCP config with the inability to do any install-time network config for a static IP...even windows lets you set a static IP during install).
Granted it is a debian base so pretty similar (what about FreeBSD...you can do that with NO packages and work from there).
When it comes to the preinstalled stuff, people may complain about it in windows when its startup bloat or trial garbage but if you want linux to have any appeal on the desktop, it's got to be able to do all of the standard stuff on a fresh install. New users arent going to know that maybe they should grab gedit or kate for a simple text editor, they won't know how awesome amaroK is or that in order to play ANY kind of video, they could use a copy of VLC. Smart package choice isnt exactly a bad thing and packages are much easier to deselect then a lot of preinstalled dell bloat is (though if you've ever installed kde-desktop on top of ubuntu and left gnome in place, it gets pretty messy with about 5 of every type of program).
If enough ISPs "try new things" (see also, comcast + bittorent), people will finally pull their heads out of their asses and realize the importance of net neutrality.
Re:64 years late!
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When you think about it, it doesn't really matter how far they fall as long as it is past a certain threshold.
With a the wind resistance of a skydiver on earth, you would reach your terminal velocity of around 125MPH in about 1500ft or about the height of the sears tower.
Of course this still is pretty high and has a very high risk of death, it would result in only the same risk of death as a fall from 15,000 ft.
Slashdot Mirror
considering the gameplay demo...I would say they have been working on this for a long time already
It is all in the perception and thus rich and poor tend to be loaded terms.
In order to have any sensible discussion of tax systems with regard to income, you need to learn to think at the margins (especially considering that US income tax is actually calculated at the margins). For those who don't know, the marginal value of a good is the value of one more of those goods. For instance, if you are hungry, the marginal value of a pizza is pretty high but after you have had 9 pizzas, the value of pizza number 10 is very low (maybe you would even pay NOT to eat it).
How does this apply to taxation? For the lower income person (we don't need to turn this into a rich/poor discussion as it applies just as well to middle vs upper-middle or rich vs ultra-rich) with an income of say $50k, the marginal value of their last dollar earned is going to be less than that of the higher income person's last dollar when they make $1million. The marginal tax rate can be higher at this level and the higher income person will only feel the same cost as the lower income person (their marginal tax rate is higher but they value that money less) and this is the reasoning behind why it is considered a fair system. Of course the opinion of the system will depend on how the government sets the rates--they could easily set rates that make the marginal cost at one income level significantly outweigh the marginal costs at another level.
The flat tax that you refer to (really a flat rate tax as opposed to a lump sum-style flat tax) is said to be fair since everyone pays the same percentage. This reasoning discounts the idea of marginal values which is acceptable as a policy decision (since fairness is very subjective) although I would personally not see it as being optimal. The big benefit of a flat rate tax is the simplification of taxes which proponents say might save enough money throughout the system to allow redistribution in a way that would have the same social effects of our current tax code without the pain of taxes.
Of course the simplification argument can be taken a step further. Most economists will tell you that a lump-sum (e.g. everyone pays $4000) tax is the so called "best tax." This is a result of mass simplification of tax codes as well as the fact that lump-sum taxes are not distotionary (I'm not going to get into this other than to say that it means they do not have an effect on earning/spending choices made by the agent...a thorough discussion of this should be in any intermediate calc-based microeconomics textbook). These do already exist in the form of some licensing fees out there (for instance a flat charge you might pay for title transfer/license on a car no matter the price paid). For it to be used in an income tax setting, there would have be be post-facto redistribution by the government for it to make any sense (like how do you charge $4000 to a part-time worker with a total income of only $4000). I include this mostly as an example of a tax scheme that doesn't get a lot of coverage but that actually has its merits and has strong proponents out there. People need to better understand that the concept of fairness is not universal--equity means different things to different people. Any taxation scheme has some sort of inherent unfairness; either someone is going to pay more than someone else or someone is going to pay a greater proportion of their income and in every possible situation, someone will complain.
They don't have a huge stock of new releases with an in-stock guarantee like blockbuster but they have a BIG selection overall (much more efficient shelf space usage than a blockbuster for sure). They maintain old films, do TV seasons, have a lot of foreign/anime, and I think they even have a "back room" if you know what I mean. They don't have the advertising and chain-presense of blockbuster but they are friendly and reasonably priced. Once you have an account there for something less popular you will be more inclined to go there for *any* video rental (and in this guys mind, the tail is pretty big...a blockbuster for instance won't have more than a couple hitchcock movies so even a well-known film like vertigo can be hard to find).
A regressive tax will take a larger proportion of a poor person's income than that of a rich person in any particular exchange. If you are buying a stick of butter for $1 and there is a 10% sales tax (hey...it is almost that high here in chicago on non-food items) then the rich person pays 10c in tax and the poor person pays 10c in tax. If the poor person is making chicago minimum wage, their tax rate works out to be about 1.3% of thier income. If the rich person is making $25 an hour, the effective tax rate is .4%. They are being taxed at about 1/3 the rate of the poor person relative to their ability to pay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressive_tax
I disagree, they should be paying property tax for these services (which I am sure they are). They should only be paying sales tax on retail sales not on products that are merely being distributed and since this is a warehouse not a storefront, state sales tax is not the answer.
Really though, sales tax is always a regressive tax and I don't think it is a great idea in general for that reason...
they always get snippy when you suggest that they could just click a few inches to the right and search google from the search box. Yes, change can be hard but often it is for the better.
Reminds me of the time when I first saw a post on digg titled something like "MOST USEFUL FIREFOX KEYBOARD COMMAND YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT." That command was ctrl-shift-t (reopen most recently closed tab). I tried it...said "eh...thats not that cool...if I need it right away then I won't close it...and if it was a while ago I can use history." Then one day I closed the wrong tab--scratched my head, remembered that shortcut and have been using it religiously ever since.
Also, I feel the same way about people who insist on opening a new tab before doing a new search/typing in a new address. Instead why not just do a ctrl-enter instead of enter after you type in the search...opens the results in a new foreground tab and preserves your current page
That aside, yes it is true that wage increases overall do lead to inflation (more money available to spend will prompt higher prices) but at the same time, inflation necesitates wage increases. When the price level increases, workers are going to need higher wages to maintain the same standard of living so wages then go up as a response to inflation.
It was annoying when my roommate was borrowing my account to play TF2 (which he has since bought...first game he hasnt pirated in years...chalk that up to good gameplay and a bit of 'try before you buy') since it would sign me out of my steam account but I wouldnt be alerted of this until I took the time to load up a game, join a server and finally as the server finished loading to the final step, get kicked for steam authentication errors. It should only kick me out of the same game is in use somewhere else (since that is how the license agreements for each game work...they say nothing about other games).
Having met several nobel prize winners and several others who I wouldn't be surprised if they received one soon (already holding other prestigious awards such as the national medal of science and having done groundbreaking research in their fields) I would say that most of them have a *better* than average family life.
A few months back they changed how team scores were counted on multisegment maps. Now instead of each segment counting, the entire run of the map is counted so either red must win or blue must win all stages (this way servers with a 5-round map limit or something won't switch maps in the middle of a teams turn to assault).
On dustbowl and especially goldrush, it is more common for red to defend successfully on at least one of the three segments which tilts the scores towards red.
My herman miller caper task chair (the one with pneumatic lift, not the stackable kind...also mine has the solid seat rather than the net one) is great. The surfaces may be hard plastic but they are shaped just right for my ass and the holes provide good ventilation. My mom picked it up at a room and board outlet before I went to college and at first I thought it looked funny and uncomfortable but it truly is awesome.
Also I just started a new job where everybody is given a steelcase leap which while not as pretty as some other chairs out there (especially the ugly color we have) is quite nice once adjusted properly. Wish I could find a #19 though...
At work I have a steelcase leap which rocks but I only just started so I cant talk much about the chair (2 days sitting on it and counting).
As are many. My (minneapolis area) troop was very very different from the stereotypes of the boy scouts so I am always a little unsure how to feel when people start ripping on them. On one hand, even though I never bought into the system that much (I didnt do the required badges for eagle, I did a lot of camping and did the badges that interested me), the troop provided a lot of good times while I was in it and I feel sorry for all the people I meet now in college who havn't had a chance to go spend some time living in the woods with no internet in sight. On the other hand, I really don't like the central organization's handling of certain issues...it was always pretty far removed from the operation of my troop but it is hard to say that there would never be any sort of connection (and this was in liberal-as-ever minnesota, I imagine smaller towns or those down in the bible belt as mentioned by another poster would be much different).
I feel like I developed some better team play skills (especially with regards to a fixed role) that have helped me a lot to be a better player in Team Fortress 2. They may not be particularly useful life skills but they helped me to do better in another activity so there is some value there. I sold the account which if I remember right came out to be approximately what I paid in monthly fees during the time I did play (play while college was in session was sparse but the monthly fees didn't change...) but it definitely gave me a feeling of the game not leaving me anything tangible (though it is sort of a joke to consider the character "yours").
All I have left in a tangible sense from the game are a few fraps captures I made. I have a few minutes of pvp from my 39 frost mage twink that I found a few days ago and enjoyed immensely in a sort of "fond memories" way (it helped that I was doing ridiculously well in those clips) and I sort of wish that I could return to that sort of a pvp experiance (I disliked the nature of pvp at 70 so I made a twink and sought out other skilled twinks and found competition to be much better). Unfortunately thats not the game works...and I checked the chars on armory to see what had been done after the idiot who bought them changed their names to misspellings of derogatory phrases--he had turned the 70 raid shadowpriest into a very mediocre pvp priest and eventually leveled the 39 mage into the mid 40's (it was at the time THE BEST 39 mage twink in the battlegroup...tons of time/gold spent gathering the perfect items without crossing the experiance threshold to level 40...what a shame). At least when I want to come back to TF2 in a year, I will still be able to pick up my trusty medigun or rocket launcher and play.
My last experiance with photoshop on linux was probably with photoshop 7 (cs was out but no support for linux yet if I remember right) and it seemed pretty speedy. I had seen comparisons online that gave photoshop faster times but there was question as to whether that was a differance in function time reporting on linux/wine vs windows.
Anybody know how to turn it off? man safesearch?
options: security: show passwords: show passwords
The second show passwords button will prompt for master password if it exists and then display passwords to all saved accounts. If there is no master password, even if the password database is not cleartext, this is just as good.
free.grisoft.com --one of the first places I go after a new install. It is a few clicks to actually get to the download but it is by no means hidden.
Where do you work? I want that vacation time...
I've never installed a full desktop setup on FreeBSD (only a basic xserver with a single app running) but at install you chose base groupings to install. Sounds kind of like the task based deal.
Also, a lot of distros have a task based deal on top of their standard install. I remember using mandrake years ago and being able to choose things like a blanket "development" or "server" category which would install a big group of apps of the chosen type. More recently, ubuntu server comes out with a few basic options for things like LAMP or OpenSSH server that will add a grouping of apps designed to work together (though my biggest frustration with the ubuntu-server install is the default DHCP config with the inability to do any install-time network config for a static IP...even windows lets you set a static IP during install).
Granted it is a debian base so pretty similar (what about FreeBSD...you can do that with NO packages and work from there).
When it comes to the preinstalled stuff, people may complain about it in windows when its startup bloat or trial garbage but if you want linux to have any appeal on the desktop, it's got to be able to do all of the standard stuff on a fresh install. New users arent going to know that maybe they should grab gedit or kate for a simple text editor, they won't know how awesome amaroK is or that in order to play ANY kind of video, they could use a copy of VLC. Smart package choice isnt exactly a bad thing and packages are much easier to deselect then a lot of preinstalled dell bloat is (though if you've ever installed kde-desktop on top of ubuntu and left gnome in place, it gets pretty messy with about 5 of every type of program).
With a the wind resistance of a skydiver on earth, you would reach your terminal velocity of around 125MPH in about 1500ft or about the height of the sears tower.
Of course this still is pretty high and has a very high risk of death, it would result in only the same risk of death as a fall from 15,000 ft.
So maybe they are really checking the gay ones to make sure they are ACTUALLY gay and not terrorist gay-fakers?