The progressive tax system is precisley why it seems unfair.
Consider: a typical family earning, say 50K might pay about 10K in taxes - fed/state/fica, etc. There is a kind of floor created with standard deductions, etc, where you don't pay "much" in taxes until you reach a certain point.
On the other end, if you make a lot of money - say 500K and up, you have essentially have get flat rate. Taxpayer A makes a million dollars and pays $300K in federal taxes. Taxpayer B makes two million and pays $600K in taxes - seems fair, make twice as much, pay twice as much.
Now, back to the middle income folks. Taxpayer A makes 50K and pays 10K, taxpayer B makes 100K, but pays 30K in taxes - he made twice as much, but paid 3x as much in taxes. That doesn't seem fair. If you are in the 70-200K income bracket it becomes painfully obvious that not only is your amount of taxes going up, but your rate is going up too, the very definition of progressive taxing.
Since this progressive taxing only applies to those in the middle, how is that fair? Also note some double whammies in that range - Roth deductions go away, various credits go away, etc. Remember the child credit a few years ago? IIRC, it phased over a range - like you lose 50$ of credit for every 1000$ you made - one way of looking at that is it is an extra 5% tax, just because you happened to earn in a certain narrow range. Don't even start on the AMT, and tons of other crap in the tax code.
Enough of that rant, the way taxes are collected was not even the point.
You make it sound like government spending is only favored by people who don't pay taxes
Statistically, half of taxpayers only pay 4% or so of the taxes, The other half pay 96%, so by definition, half of the taxpayers have no incentive curb government spending.
Trust me, politicians will always offer bread and circuses and there will be plenty who take it.
The $212 million was taken from us taxpayers and given to scientists, engineers, aerospace corporations, etc.
While, I'd prefer to keep my money, if it is going to be taken from me (and legally I see no way out of it), I much prefer my money to go to something like this, than to "the poor".
I have no trouble finding charities of my own choosing. (My local homeless shelter gets most of my donations and volunteer time.)
Face it - if you make money some government is going to take some of it. That said, what do you want it to go to? Like I said, I can directly fund lots of charitable causes, but I would be hard pressed to fund real science.
I agree, in general America is not racist... however, one should chose a "culture" wisely.
To get ahead in America, you need to play the game. That game is "assimilate". Speak proper English, (optional: without a regional accent, if possible), don't stand out, "conform", stop complaining and get to work!
Disclaimer: I am "some white guy". However, my own family history is a case in point. I have none. I don't have any "culture" other than "American". My ancestors (as recently as grandparents) came from crappy Eastern European countries. They came here to be Americans. They did not want to be hyphenated-americans. Two generations in, nobody in the family speaks Ukranian, or Hungarian or whatever they spoke before we spoke American English.
I think culture is far more important than race. I am more likely to get along with a black man wearing dockers, who speaks standard English than I am with some pierced, tattoed, purple haired white kid with an attitude. But that is just me. And lots of other folks - so deal with it.
Stereo types are fun, but equal opportunity; If I say "Billy Bob lives in a trailer and shops at Wal-Mart" you know what I am talking about just as sure as "Latisha likes her fried chicken and watermelon" or "Let's go see Apu at the quicki-mart" - all are stereotypes. There are just double standards for getting insensed about it. It is ok to make fun of "white-trash", and for now, it is still funny in many quarters to assume Indians run all the hotels and 7-11's in the USA.
When you "lose your culture" what are you giving up? Face it, some cultures suck more than others. Pick one you think you will like, but if you don't pick a "white-bread" American culture, while in America, and then complain that you don't have the success in that culture the problem might not lie where you think.
Yes - working examples are usually very helpful. They greatly boost ones productivity.
Especially on the Windows platform. Microsoft documentation can blather on and on and cross-reference a plethora of other items without once giving a simple example. If a picture is "worth a thousand words", working "hello world" programs, with all the logistical hoopla for the target platform, are worth two pounds of documentation.
Many a time I have trolled the Internet for an example of something I needed to do in software. Often I would find an example that was close to what I needed. Out of dozens of "samples" only once have I been able to use what I found without completely re-writing it (lots of "example" code is not "professional" - logic tied to the UI, no error handling, just plain wrong in some cases, etc. etc.) Of course, if I do use anything even close to the original code I find, I have no problem keeping/adding proper attributions/credits/etc.
I think it would be perfectly fine to hire someone to write code for you, as an example to learn from - it's no different from hiring a tutor. But turning it in as your own work? Only if you are a business major, not a CS major:-)
There is a difference between the theoretical world of "jump thru this hoop to get result x", and the practical world of "get result x". The difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, I guess.
If you offer a woman whose children have been starving for a week her choice of a pound of food or a pound of gold, I'll bet she'll choose the food.
What's your point?
If you are going to make up straw-man (or starving woman) arguments out of thin air for off-topic rhetorical purposes, I will simply embelish the situation and say said woman and her family are standing in a well stocked market.
Now what does she do? Take the gold! It can buy a lot of food (assuming there is a "market" for gold, blah, blah blah).
A pound of something useful is "worth" more than a pound of something otherwise valuable, but not useful at the time. It is all in context.
Obviously I'd rather be stranded on an island with a knife than a gold coin, but the gold coin represents a lot more intrinsic value than a piece of sharpened steel. Precious metals are valuable because they represent a naturally scarce resource that takes a lot of work to get. A modern gold mine typically processes 20 or more TONS of ore to get an ounce of gold.
...intrinsic value, like gold and silver coins have in the past.
Pre-1982 pennies are already worth more as scrap than as currency. (Post-1982 are mostly zinc).
It takes abou 145 pre-1982 pennies to get have a pound... at the current copper price of just over $2 pound, they appear to be worth more as scrap than as money, although I suspect logistical considerations would eat into any profit making scheme based on this fact.
Zinc is worth just under $1 pound, and it takes over 160 of the current pennies to make a pound - so they are worth more as money. US Mint statistics say it costs them.81 cent to make a penny, of course there is more than raw material costs there.
By the way, I don't know what planet you are on, but gold and silver coins still have intrinsic value:-)
Fun with stats... it is a lot of copper, or not much at all.
Pennies are mostly Zinc now - only 2.5% Copper.
The US Mint makes 7.7 Billion pennies a year (2005) - so that still adds up to about 481,250 Kg of Cu, just for Pennies.
(.025 * 2.5g/penny = 16 pennies to use 1 gram of Cu, 16,000 pennies per Kg)
So is over a million pounds of copper "a lot"? There are 300 Million people in the USA, so on a per-capita basis, copper usage is only about 25 cents worth, or about 1.6 grams per person.
So - 481,000 Kilos per country / 2 grams per person - a lot or a little?
Like another poster, I too had issues with my NSLU2.
First, it was S L O W. My (Windows-only) NetDisk was over 2x as fast, but it was Windows only, needed drivers, etc... so I gave the NSLU2 a shot.
I could live with SLOW, since it was just for backups, but after the 2nd time it barfed the file system, I took it out of service... That reminds me, I need to put it up on eBay.
I don't know what happened the first time, but the 2nd time I stongly suspect it got trashed when a I was using it from Windows, doing a massive delete operation, then decided it was taking to long and aborted the operation...
I know, for sure that some companies cough HP, cough, will happily take your money for 24/7 support on machines that have been powered off for months.
Now, technically it is not their fault that they will take your fees to "service" machines you no longer use, but it seems to me that an honorable vendor ought to point out to you, once in a while, what machines are not under contract that should be, as well as which machines that are under contract that maybe should be dropped.
Example; A few years ago, when I was slumming as a sys-admin a a fortune-100 company, I (in my spare time) decided to audit what the company had contracted maintenance for... needless to say, it wasn't hard to save my annual salary's worth of maintenance contracts in un-needed maintenance. (Both hardware and software.)
A lot of posts from here on out are implicit or explict observations that it is "New Years" at different times in different time zones all accross the globe. Just ignore them.
Anyhow, for the on-topic part... the article describes what I think is reasonable follow-up to other research. E.g. Bio-tech is a science just like other, and needs to be confirmed and used as a starting point for further research.
The old joke used to be "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it!". That was a simpler time, when, thankfully, no one could do anything.
I hate to think what will happen if a committee ever did have the power to do something about it. Odds are, it would be the wrong thing.
On second thought... maybe we need more bureaus to work on this so-called problem. The way things are going, we need more bureaucracy to slow down those who think they know what should be done.
References: See "road to hell, paved with..." and "unintended consequences, law of"
If you don't enforce non-tangible property rights, then what are we left with?
Tangible property (essentially raw resources and finished goods) and labor. Labor is getting normalized to its global value of, what? A few $USD a day? There are more laborers every day and less real estate (resources). That means stuff is getting more valuable and labor less so - simple supply and demand.
But this isn't what we see in the real world (yet).
Seems to me, a lot of the wealth in the world is just "made-up". This made up stuff is "intellectual property". Trade makes both parties better off. The more stuff there is to trade, the better off everyone is.
If you reduce the worlds economy to (only) tangible items everyone will be worse off.
As long as everyone (or at least enough) plays nice and repects intellectual property, you have a larger economy with more trade and more people end up materially better off than without the extra trade. Using intellectual property without paying for it may not have direct costs to anyone, but it aguably makes the overall economy smaller.
People need food and shelter. Those are real resources. Nobody needs music.
Do you really want a world economy based entirely on supply and demand for food and shelter?
I think I will go look into some real-estate investments in farm country now... I have no idea what I am talking about.
I get all sorts of company reports, proxy voting instructions, etc...
Hopefully all of you will too when you are old enought think of retirement investing rather than the coolest set of 20-inch "dubs" or the latest hot (literally) gaming laptop.
Anyhow, for companies of any size, there are ALWAYS "whacko" shareholders who are protesting something or other, usually something environmental or labor practices in some part of the world where being "abused" a multinational corporation is better work than nothing.
I think Jack has the perfect right to protest, but I think he is barking up the wrong tree to yell at shareholders rather than "the public". The bean counters will decide if GTA, etc are worth publishing, not minority shareholders.
From my experience the shareholders have little patience for these sorts of protests.
The irony, in my estimation, is that there is more wasted paper and other resources in these efforts than is ever gained. But then again, these things are political, not practical.
Slashdot Mirror
The stock is only down 2.5%, so I suspect the alternative will be offered by RIM themselves.
Consider: a typical family earning, say 50K might pay about 10K in taxes - fed/state/fica, etc. There is a kind of floor created with standard deductions, etc, where you don't pay "much" in taxes until you reach a certain point.
On the other end, if you make a lot of money - say 500K and up, you have essentially have get flat rate. Taxpayer A makes a million dollars and pays $300K in federal taxes. Taxpayer B makes two million and pays $600K in taxes - seems fair, make twice as much, pay twice as much.
Now, back to the middle income folks. Taxpayer A makes 50K and pays 10K, taxpayer B makes 100K, but pays 30K in taxes - he made twice as much, but paid 3x as much in taxes. That doesn't seem fair. If you are in the 70-200K income bracket it becomes painfully obvious that not only is your amount of taxes going up, but your rate is going up too, the very definition of progressive taxing.
Since this progressive taxing only applies to those in the middle, how is that fair? Also note some double whammies in that range - Roth deductions go away, various credits go away, etc. Remember the child credit a few years ago? IIRC, it phased over a range - like you lose 50$ of credit for every 1000$ you made - one way of looking at that is it is an extra 5% tax, just because you happened to earn in a certain narrow range. Don't even start on the AMT, and tons of other crap in the tax code.
Enough of that rant, the way taxes are collected was not even the point.
You make it sound like government spending is only favored by people who don't pay taxes
Statistically, half of taxpayers only pay 4% or so of the taxes, The other half pay 96%, so by definition, half of the taxpayers have no incentive curb government spending.
Trust me, politicians will always offer bread and circuses and there will be plenty who take it.
Of course they want the government to pay... because THEY don't have to!
Most people don't pay their fair share. Apparently only those of us who work our butts off have to pay.
However, there ARE a lot of calculators in the world, and I don't think there is anything wrong with using one for anything remotely complicated.
Like I've always said; If you find yourself in a world without calculators, I hope you know how to kill things with pointy sticks!
While, I'd prefer to keep my money, if it is going to be taken from me (and legally I see no way out of it), I much prefer my money to go to something like this, than to "the poor".
I have no trouble finding charities of my own choosing. (My local homeless shelter gets most of my donations and volunteer time.)
Face it - if you make money some government is going to take some of it. That said, what do you want it to go to? Like I said, I can directly fund lots of charitable causes, but I would be hard pressed to fund real science.
Now try to figure out when it is unprofitable - figuring in ill-will, etc.
If cost is no consideration, you wouldn't be asking the question.
To get ahead in America, you need to play the game. That game is "assimilate". Speak proper English, (optional: without a regional accent, if possible), don't stand out, "conform", stop complaining and get to work!
Disclaimer: I am "some white guy". However, my own family history is a case in point. I have none. I don't have any "culture" other than "American". My ancestors (as recently as grandparents) came from crappy Eastern European countries. They came here to be Americans. They did not want to be hyphenated-americans. Two generations in, nobody in the family speaks Ukranian, or Hungarian or whatever they spoke before we spoke American English.
I think culture is far more important than race. I am more likely to get along with a black man wearing dockers, who speaks standard English than I am with some pierced, tattoed, purple haired white kid with an attitude. But that is just me. And lots of other folks - so deal with it.
Stereo types are fun, but equal opportunity; If I say "Billy Bob lives in a trailer and shops at Wal-Mart" you know what I am talking about just as sure as "Latisha likes her fried chicken and watermelon" or "Let's go see Apu at the quicki-mart" - all are stereotypes. There are just double standards for getting insensed about it. It is ok to make fun of "white-trash", and for now, it is still funny in many quarters to assume Indians run all the hotels and 7-11's in the USA.
When you "lose your culture" what are you giving up? Face it, some cultures suck more than others. Pick one you think you will like, but if you don't pick a "white-bread" American culture, while in America, and then complain that you don't have the success in that culture the problem might not lie where you think.
Especially on the Windows platform. Microsoft documentation can blather on and on and cross-reference a plethora of other items without once giving a simple example. If a picture is "worth a thousand words", working "hello world" programs, with all the logistical hoopla for the target platform, are worth two pounds of documentation.
Many a time I have trolled the Internet for an example of something I needed to do in software. Often I would find an example that was close to what I needed. Out of dozens of "samples" only once have I been able to use what I found without completely re-writing it (lots of "example" code is not "professional" - logic tied to the UI, no error handling, just plain wrong in some cases, etc. etc.) Of course, if I do use anything even close to the original code I find, I have no problem keeping/adding proper attributions/credits/etc.
I think it would be perfectly fine to hire someone to write code for you, as an example to learn from - it's no different from hiring a tutor. But turning it in as your own work? Only if you are a business major, not a CS major :-)
There is a difference between the theoretical world of "jump thru this hoop to get result x", and the practical world of "get result x". The difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, I guess.
What's your point?
If you are going to make up straw-man (or starving woman) arguments out of thin air for off-topic rhetorical purposes, I will simply embelish the situation and say said woman and her family are standing in a well stocked market.
Now what does she do? Take the gold! It can buy a lot of food (assuming there is a "market" for gold, blah, blah blah).
A pound of something useful is "worth" more than a pound of something otherwise valuable, but not useful at the time. It is all in context.
Obviously I'd rather be stranded on an island with a knife than a gold coin, but the gold coin represents a lot more intrinsic value than a piece of sharpened steel. Precious metals are valuable because they represent a naturally scarce resource that takes a lot of work to get. A modern gold mine typically processes 20 or more TONS of ore to get an ounce of gold.
Pre-1982 pennies are already worth more as scrap than as currency. (Post-1982 are mostly zinc).
It takes abou 145 pre-1982 pennies to get have a pound... at the current copper price of just over $2 pound, they appear to be worth more as scrap than as money, although I suspect logistical considerations would eat into any profit making scheme based on this fact.
Zinc is worth just under $1 pound, and it takes over 160 of the current pennies to make a pound - so they are worth more as money. US Mint statistics say it costs them .81 cent to make a penny, of course there is more than raw material costs there.
By the way, I don't know what planet you are on, but gold and silver coins still have intrinsic value :-)
Pennies are mostly Zinc now - only 2.5% Copper.
The US Mint makes 7.7 Billion pennies a year (2005) - so that still adds up to about 481,250 Kg of Cu, just for Pennies. (.025 * 2.5g /penny = 16 pennies to use 1 gram of Cu, 16,000 pennies per Kg)
So is over a million pounds of copper "a lot"? There are 300 Million people in the USA, so on a per-capita basis, copper usage is only about 25 cents worth, or about 1.6 grams per person.
So - 481,000 Kilos per country / 2 grams per person - a lot or a little?
First, it was S L O W. My (Windows-only) NetDisk was over 2x as fast, but it was Windows only, needed drivers, etc... so I gave the NSLU2 a shot.
I could live with SLOW, since it was just for backups, but after the 2nd time it barfed the file system, I took it out of service... That reminds me, I need to put it up on eBay.
I don't know what happened the first time, but the 2nd time I stongly suspect it got trashed when a I was using it from Windows, doing a massive delete operation, then decided it was taking to long and aborted the operation...
I can not trust it anymore.
Now, technically it is not their fault that they will take your fees to "service" machines you no longer use, but it seems to me that an honorable vendor ought to point out to you, once in a while, what machines are not under contract that should be, as well as which machines that are under contract that maybe should be dropped.
Example; A few years ago, when I was slumming as a sys-admin a a fortune-100 company, I (in my spare time) decided to audit what the company had contracted maintenance for... needless to say, it wasn't hard to save my annual salary's worth of maintenance contracts in un-needed maintenance. (Both hardware and software.)
A lot of posts from here on out are implicit or explict observations that it is "New Years" at different times in different time zones all accross the globe. Just ignore them.
Anyhow, for the on-topic part... the article describes what I think is reasonable follow-up to other research. E.g. Bio-tech is a science just like other, and needs to be confirmed and used as a starting point for further research.
But that is boring to say.
Do you cream your pants if your total bill at Wal-Mart ends in double zero?
I hate to think what will happen if a committee ever did have the power to do something about it. Odds are, it would be the wrong thing.
On second thought... maybe we need more bureaus to work on this so-called problem. The way things are going, we need more bureaucracy to slow down those who think they know what should be done.
References: See "road to hell, paved with..." and "unintended consequences, law of"
One think is for damn sure, drinking makes some people want to drink more.
I've got your nose!
Peek-a-boo! Where did I go?
Clean Room Array Processor used for Simultaneous HI-Tech applications. You know, those that require lots sitting and thinking time...
However, they might want to come up with better acronyms.
The ones implied above should only be a number 2 option.
See? PU.
Well, someone said something like that having to do with computers.
Anyhow, they started implementing every 2 character command they could think of, they just didn't start with aa and work straight through to zz.
Tangible property (essentially raw resources and finished goods) and labor. Labor is getting normalized to its global value of, what? A few $USD a day? There are more laborers every day and less real estate (resources). That means stuff is getting more valuable and labor less so - simple supply and demand.
But this isn't what we see in the real world (yet).
Seems to me, a lot of the wealth in the world is just "made-up". This made up stuff is "intellectual property". Trade makes both parties better off. The more stuff there is to trade, the better off everyone is.
If you reduce the worlds economy to (only) tangible items everyone will be worse off.
As long as everyone (or at least enough) plays nice and repects intellectual property, you have a larger economy with more trade and more people end up materially better off than without the extra trade. Using intellectual property without paying for it may not have direct costs to anyone, but it aguably makes the overall economy smaller.
People need food and shelter. Those are real resources. Nobody needs music.
Do you really want a world economy based entirely on supply and demand for food and shelter?
I think I will go look into some real-estate investments in farm country now... I have no idea what I am talking about.
People can just make stuff up!
Hopefully all of you will too when you are old enought think of retirement investing rather than the coolest set of 20-inch "dubs" or the latest hot (literally) gaming laptop.
Anyhow, for companies of any size, there are ALWAYS "whacko" shareholders who are protesting something or other, usually something environmental or labor practices in some part of the world where being "abused" a multinational corporation is better work than nothing.
I think Jack has the perfect right to protest, but I think he is barking up the wrong tree to yell at shareholders rather than "the public". The bean counters will decide if GTA, etc are worth publishing, not minority shareholders.
From my experience the shareholders have little patience for these sorts of protests.
The irony, in my estimation, is that there is more wasted paper and other resources in these efforts than is ever gained. But then again, these things are political, not practical.
What you really need are multi-threaded zombie processes!
Granted the death rate by accidental gunshot is quite small...
I just googled around a bit, and it seems your ovarall odds of an accidental death are about 2698:1 in any given year. Or 35:1 over your lifetime.
That seems kind of high, but 34/35 is 97% which doesn't sound so bad.
That leaves a 1/35 or 2.9% chance of accidental death.
So, by my slashdot(tm) calculations, you only have 97 + 2.9 = a 99.9% chance of dying (sometime in your lifetime.)