[H]ow to decide which people are allowed to vote. People who own property ? People who own businesses ? People who are descendants of nobility ?
How about people who understand the electoral process?
Q1: True or False: If you don't vote on each and every ballot item, your entire ballot will not be counted.
Q2: In a 3-way race in a plurality voting system, what percent of the votes is always required to win? A) 100%, B) at least 50%, C) at least 50% plus one, D) Other
Q3: True or False: The United States elects a President by direct popular election.
Except when you subtract 4 during DST, or when you're talking about Australian eastern time when you add 10, or 11 during DST. The issue of when DST starts and ends adds even more variables to the question.
That's all a little complicated, so let's just say the debate will start at 19:00 UTC-05:00. Slashdot editors, take note.
Until someone sends every car a rogue "Look out you're about to crash!" signal, and every car hits the brakes as hard as they can. Then you get to find who has sub-par brakes...
And by making fewer mistakes, driverless cars would elicit less honking from other drivers, except when they drive at or below the speed limit, which will be all the time. So it's hard to say what the overall result would be in the USA, at least until humans are banned, for safety concerns, from operating motor vehicles on public roads.
Does anyone think that the Interstate Highway System (an analogy, maybe not the best, for the Internet) would have been built through "competition"?
I think so, if the Federal government had acted as a facilitator, bringing neighboring states to the same table to talk about joint transportation ventures.
A chatty avatar version of me that keeps people on the phone as long as possible without committing to anything would be a great way to get telemarketers to stop calling. Maybe even better than Lenny. As a bonus, it would be seamless: just push a button in the middle of a conversation and the avatar would take over without the caller knowing.
Would you post links to Google maps pointing people to houses in your neighbourhood that are not locked?
A better analogy would be a map of unsecured WiFi access points, because taking advantage of this information does not involve burglary. And yes, wardriving maps exist.
The downside to this approach...is that the people who would use the equipment access to work on real projects are going to be stuck waiting in line behind 1,000 stay-at-home moms...
Maybe they should auction off some of the timeslots to use the equipment. The other timeslots would be free, either a waiting list or a lottery. Everyone who can afford a timeslot would get one quickly, and everyone who can't afford one would just wait their turn. Nobody would be overcharged because it's an auction, the equipment would never go idle unless nobody wants to use it, more people would get to use the equipment because everybody will always be in a hurry to finish up before the end of their timeslot, and taxpayers won't have to foot the whole bill for the equipment.
Everybody wins when we get out of the mindset that everything at public libraries must be free all of the time.
If people are getting forced out by rising rents, it's only because they are prohibited by the city to take in more roommates. So the Nazi analogy is actually quite relevant--an economic system where the means of production are privately owned but government controlled is dirigism, which is closely associated with fascim.
Like... what?... they don't pay for their groceries enough/at all? Or are they able to avoid sale taxes on those groceries?
The sales tax is a regressive tax, so they don't have to avoid it. In fact, it's quite the opposite. All they have to do is work to replace taxes that are less regressive, such as tolls, with taxes that are more regressive, like San Francisco's Proposition K half cent transportation sales tax, hoping the poor won't realize it will leave them worse off.
Why would you tie CS education to visas for those who will compete with those same students receiving that education?
Because it makes the H1B visas a dollar more expensive and CS education a dollar cheaper. Each of these alone gives U.S. students a dollar's worth of advantage over H1B workers. Tying CS education to H1B visas is therefore twice as effective as not.
during the day, when your solar rig is producing the most power, is also when you're most like to be out with your car, i.e. not charging it.
Your solar panels will be at home feeding electricity into the grid and your car will be at work getting electricity from the grid, so it all balances out nicely.
Therefore, if we want the roads to start paying for themselves, we'll need to raise the gas tax, increase other taxes or fees, and/or allow some roads to return to nature so we no longer have to maintain them.
Because air pollution is proportional to the amount of fuel burned, the gas tax is a good way to pay for air pollution, which costs us up to $1,600 per person annually in medical costs, lost days of work, and so on. It's also the least bad way to pay for global warming. Ideally, the gas tax should also vary according to the quality of the vehicle's emissions system, because older cars pollute more per gallon of gasoline than newer cars.
But the gas tax isn't a good way to pay for road wear, which is proportional to the 4th power of the axle weight. For that we'd need a mileagefee that varies according to vehicle type or weight.
And the gas tax also isn't an effective way to manage traffic congestion, which varies by the hour and the location. For that, we would need some kind of congestion pricing such as variable express tolls or a mileage fee coupled with information about when and where you drove (but there are privacy concerns with that option).
So if the goal is for the roads to pay for themselves, then the most efficient and equitable way to achieve this goal in a capitalist society where people pay each according to the benefit they receive and the burden they place on the system, is with not just a gas tax but also some kind of mileage fee and congestion pricing. Then we could lower transportation sales taxes such as Prop K in San Francisco or Measure R in Los Angeles.
But at 1 kw/m^2 at noon on a cloudless day, times whatever percentage efficiency of the cells... it isn't going to be the whole solution. Not even in California.
A roof with an area of 100 square meters, covered with photovoltaic (PV) panels that are 16% efficient (so a 16 kW system), will generate 44 to 110 kWh of electricity per day in Los Angeles.
A Nissan Leaf will go 66 to 84 miles on a 24 kWh charge. Therefore, the PV system described above is good enough for 120 to 390 electric vehicle miles per day.
...property taxes start going up and the established population...possibly can't afford their current residence anymore and will be forced to move potentially far from where they currently live.
Luckily, they're able to afford it with their real estate windfall and still have plenty of money left over to put away for retirement. This isn't such a bad problem to have for someone on a fixed income.
But it would be better if property taxes were proportional to the property's actual burden on government services and not proportional to the assessed value of the property. Then these bubbles would have little to no effect on property taxes. California's Prop 13 attempts to achieve the same effect by limiting real estate assessment increases (for tax purposes) below the normal rate of inflation, but this makes the problem worse by pricing young people out of the real estate market. For example, as a recent homebuyer, I pay almost exactly five times as much in property taxes as my next-door neighbor who moved in 37 years ago.
They've been protesting Google buses because this has put gentrification onto the fast track by making areas more attractive to Google employees that otherwise wouldn't have been due to transportation headaches.
Gentrification occurs when a neighborhood in decline sees a lot of investment quickly. When a community invests in itself, outside investment has less of a gentrifying effect. Therefore, a person who protests against something because it might cause gentrification was probably part of the problem to begin with.
Re:Consider your Audience when writing code
on
Code Is Not Literature
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Your audience is another human being who will be maintaining that code a few years later.
Or yourself a few weeks later, if you're getting old like me and can't remember why you did what you did. This is also why I make an extra effort to ensure the code works the first time, with the fewest possible side effects, so I don't have to maintain it later.
With the inter-library loan system, there doesn't really need to be a physical copy of every book in every library, because it's expensive to house so many books, especially in areas with high land prices. But instead of shutting down libraries, they should be downsizing them so they're still local, and moving to digital copies of books. A neighborhood library could be nothing more than a shelf full of holds, a drop box for returns, and a few terminals to request holds and check out physical and digital books. A kiosk at the local mall might be big enough for all that.
If, for some reason, you think that those you've personally chosen to lead the country won't do as you've requested by using your tax money to reduce the public debt, then you might favor a revenue-neutral carbon tax. If the tax is $1 per gallon of gas, and if the average person uses 500 gallons per year, then the everyone would receive a $500 check from the government every year, no matter how much gas they've used. Again, it would encourage people to emit less carbon while creating no hardship for the average person, so it would reduce carbon emissions without costing the average person anything, Who doesn't like a deal that benefits everybody while costing nobody anything?
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How about people who understand the electoral process?
Q1: True or False: If you don't vote on each and every ballot item, your entire ballot will not be counted.
Q2: In a 3-way race in a plurality voting system, what percent of the votes is always required to win? A) 100%, B) at least 50%, C) at least 50% plus one, D) Other
Q3: True or False: The United States elects a President by direct popular election.
Then we should eliminate crop subsidies so people who live out in the country can afford the true cost of their Internet.
I wouldn't mind paying a little more for vegetables if it means less tax money is needed to subsidize farmers.
Except when you subtract 4 during DST, or when you're talking about Australian eastern time when you add 10, or 11 during DST. The issue of when DST starts and ends adds even more variables to the question.
That's all a little complicated, so let's just say the debate will start at 19:00 UTC-05:00. Slashdot editors, take note.
It's perfectly safe to drive with sub-par brakes if you don't tailgate. Remember: Tailgating is the practice of driving on a road too close to a frontward vehicle, at a distance which does not guarantee that stopping to avoid collision is possible. That means if you crash into the car in front, you were, by definition, tailgating.
Therefore, that "you're about to crash" signal will not tell you who has sub-par brakes, It will tell you who's tailgating.
And by making fewer mistakes, driverless cars would elicit less honking from other drivers, except when they drive at or below the speed limit, which will be all the time. So it's hard to say what the overall result would be in the USA, at least until humans are banned, for safety concerns, from operating motor vehicles on public roads.
I think so, if the Federal government had acted as a facilitator, bringing neighboring states to the same table to talk about joint transportation ventures.
A chatty avatar version of me that keeps people on the phone as long as possible without committing to anything would be a great way to get telemarketers to stop calling. Maybe even better than Lenny. As a bonus, it would be seamless: just push a button in the middle of a conversation and the avatar would take over without the caller knowing.
MIT, please make it happen.
A better analogy would be a map of unsecured WiFi access points, because taking advantage of this information does not involve burglary. And yes, wardriving maps exist.
Maybe they should auction off some of the timeslots to use the equipment. The other timeslots would be free, either a waiting list or a lottery. Everyone who can afford a timeslot would get one quickly, and everyone who can't afford one would just wait their turn. Nobody would be overcharged because it's an auction, the equipment would never go idle unless nobody wants to use it, more people would get to use the equipment because everybody will always be in a hurry to finish up before the end of their timeslot, and taxpayers won't have to foot the whole bill for the equipment.
Everybody wins when we get out of the mindset that everything at public libraries must be free all of the time.
Unless, of course, the court finds the law to be unconstitutional, or it reaches a verdict contrary to the weight of evidence.
And there's some evidence that rising property values have the opposite effect.
If people are getting forced out by rising rents, it's only because they are prohibited by the city to take in more roommates. So the Nazi analogy is actually quite relevant--an economic system where the means of production are privately owned but government controlled is dirigism, which is closely associated with fascim.
The sales tax is a regressive tax, so they don't have to avoid it. In fact, it's quite the opposite. All they have to do is work to replace taxes that are less regressive, such as tolls, with taxes that are more regressive, like San Francisco's Proposition K half cent transportation sales tax, hoping the poor won't realize it will leave them worse off.
It's all quite devious.
Because it makes the H1B visas a dollar more expensive and CS education a dollar cheaper. Each of these alone gives U.S. students a dollar's worth of advantage over H1B workers. Tying CS education to H1B visas is therefore twice as effective as not.
Also, it's kind of poetic.
Company prohibitions against employees sharing salary information are also anti-capitalistic because they create information asymmetry.
Your solar panels will be at home feeding electricity into the grid and your car will be at work getting electricity from the grid, so it all balances out nicely.
Because the $14,000 per year in combined fuel and other highway taxes does not come close to paying for the damage to roads and bridges caused by trucks, we all have to pay the difference in taxes. Eliminating that subsidy would encourage shipping companies to move more freight by rail in order to save money. This incentive doesn't exist today, and so we're all paying more taxes than we need to, and that puts a damper on the economy.
And musical instruments, seeds, cake pans, 3D printers, and slide/negative scanners. And make heavy use of the inter-library loan system to increase the number of titles available and/or reduce the physical size of your library.
"[E]ven if [fuel tax] funds were fully devoted to highways, total user fee revenue accounted for only 65 percent of all funds set aside for highways in 2007."
Therefore, if we want the roads to start paying for themselves, we'll need to raise the gas tax, increase other taxes or fees, and/or allow some roads to return to nature so we no longer have to maintain them.
Because air pollution is proportional to the amount of fuel burned, the gas tax is a good way to pay for air pollution, which costs us up to $1,600 per person annually in medical costs, lost days of work, and so on. It's also the least bad way to pay for global warming. Ideally, the gas tax should also vary according to the quality of the vehicle's emissions system, because older cars pollute more per gallon of gasoline than newer cars.
But the gas tax isn't a good way to pay for road wear, which is proportional to the 4th power of the axle weight. For that we'd need a mileage fee that varies according to vehicle type or weight.
And the gas tax also isn't an effective way to manage traffic congestion, which varies by the hour and the location. For that, we would need some kind of congestion pricing such as variable express tolls or a mileage fee coupled with information about when and where you drove (but there are privacy concerns with that option).
So if the goal is for the roads to pay for themselves, then the most efficient and equitable way to achieve this goal in a capitalist society where people pay each according to the benefit they receive and the burden they place on the system, is with not just a gas tax but also some kind of mileage fee and congestion pricing. Then we could lower transportation sales taxes such as Prop K in San Francisco or Measure R in Los Angeles.
Let's do the math.
Los Angeles gets an average of 2.72 to 7.00 hours of sunlight per day, depending on the month, measured on the horizontal (meaning no sun tracking).
A roof with an area of 100 square meters, covered with photovoltaic (PV) panels that are 16% efficient (so a 16 kW system), will generate 44 to 110 kWh of electricity per day in Los Angeles.
A Nissan Leaf will go 66 to 84 miles on a 24 kWh charge. Therefore, the PV system described above is good enough for 120 to 390 electric vehicle miles per day.
Luckily, they're able to afford it with their real estate windfall and still have plenty of money left over to put away for retirement. This isn't such a bad problem to have for someone on a fixed income.
But it would be better if property taxes were proportional to the property's actual burden on government services and not proportional to the assessed value of the property. Then these bubbles would have little to no effect on property taxes. California's Prop 13 attempts to achieve the same effect by limiting real estate assessment increases (for tax purposes) below the normal rate of inflation, but this makes the problem worse by pricing young people out of the real estate market. For example, as a recent homebuyer, I pay almost exactly five times as much in property taxes as my next-door neighbor who moved in 37 years ago.
Gentrification occurs when a neighborhood in decline sees a lot of investment quickly. When a community invests in itself, outside investment has less of a gentrifying effect. Therefore, a person who protests against something because it might cause gentrification was probably part of the problem to begin with.
Or yourself a few weeks later, if you're getting old like me and can't remember why you did what you did. This is also why I make an extra effort to ensure the code works the first time, with the fewest possible side effects, so I don't have to maintain it later.
There could still be librarians. Add a telephone to each terminal that dials directly to a call center in India.
With the inter-library loan system, there doesn't really need to be a physical copy of every book in every library, because it's expensive to house so many books, especially in areas with high land prices. But instead of shutting down libraries, they should be downsizing them so they're still local, and moving to digital copies of books. A neighborhood library could be nothing more than a shelf full of holds, a drop box for returns, and a few terminals to request holds and check out physical and digital books. A kiosk at the local mall might be big enough for all that.
Sure it is. You can saturate a network switch.
Carter and Clinton both reduced the public debt.
If, for some reason, you think that those you've personally chosen to lead the country won't do as you've requested by using your tax money to reduce the public debt, then you might favor a revenue-neutral carbon tax. If the tax is $1 per gallon of gas, and if the average person uses 500 gallons per year, then the everyone would receive a $500 check from the government every year, no matter how much gas they've used. Again, it would encourage people to emit less carbon while creating no hardship for the average person, so it would reduce carbon emissions without costing the average person anything, Who doesn't like a deal that benefits everybody while costing nobody anything?