Limiting gun access generally affects only those people who weren't criminals in the first place, so you only impact the honest people.
What is your evidence for that statement?
If gun access is limited, how many honest people are affected?
To what degree are they affected? Count both would-be gun owners who are inconvenienced, and people who don't end up the victim of a gun crime.
How many criminals are affected?
To what degree are they affected?
I don't know the answers to those questions, but you don't either. And your statement seems to assume that gun restrictions will ONLY inconvenience honest people and have no effect on criminal's access to guns. That doesn't make much sense. It's a convenient argument, but it's unlikely to be a true one.
How were you planning to do that? Randomly search people and their houses?
The same way we enforce any other law - good police work, probable cause, search warrants. You figure out who sells guns illegally. You figure out who they sold them to. And then you go and arrest all those people. And you've arrested them before they went on to commit a violent crime - because you were able to arrest them on the basis of just getting the TOOLS to commit a violent crime.
Who says access is unfettered? Just and try to get a rifle when you're a convicted felon.
It's relatively unfettered. Getting a rifle when you're a felon is easy. You do it illegally, but since it's so easy to legally acquire a firearm and then 'lose' it, it's easy to get them illegally as well. If you make guns harder to get legally, then they also become harder to get illegally, as the dealer who is selling them illegally is going to start charging more to reflect the increased cost/risk of him being in that business.
Now, if I am a criminal, I'm going to avoid the K-marts, Wal-marts, and sporting good or gun stores for precisely those two reasons. Why buy legally and leave a paper-trail when I can just spend a little more to buy a gun that had its serial number scratched off. Or if I am really desperate, I can steal one.
Where, exactly, do you think illegal guns come from?And where are you going to steal one from?
Oh, right, the guy who bought his at K-Mart.
Why don't people understand that the VAST MAJORITY of illegal gun purchases are only possible because of a LEGAL gun purchase? You can't break into someone's house and steal a gun if they didn't have a gun in the first place. You can't get a gun with a serial number scratched off if someone didn't buy that gun in the first place. IF you have FEWER LEGAL GUNS, you NECESSARILY ALSO have fewer ILLEGAL guns. The supply of illegal guns doesn't stay the same when the supply of legal guns is reduced.
What I really hate most about this is you've gotten me to arguing the reasons guns should be illegal. I don't think guns should be illegal. But the arguments you gun nuts come up with are just so logically flawed it drives me up the wall.
"Gun control is pointless because criminals will just get guns illegally." GET THEM FROM WHERE? When you can't get guns legally, you've eliminated 99% of the supply for illegal guns. You're left with stealing shipments headed out of the country or smuggling them into the country.
No, you can't take all guns away from all criminals. But you can take away a lot of guns from a lot of criminals, and you can do it in a way that amounts to inconvenience for the rest of us.
That some criminals will always have guns is a specious argument.
Let's examine:
Some criminals will always have guns. Therefore, there is no reason to control access to guns.
Some people will always get lung cancer. Therefore, there is no reason to curb smoking.
There's another side effect of limiting access to handguns to law enforcement and criminals.
When everyone is allowed to have a gun, the criminal is the guy who uses his gun to shoot somebody.
When only criminals have guns, the criminal is the guy with the gun.
Gun control allows you to identify and arrest criminals BEFORE they commit violent crime, because you have a chance to catch the criminal when they acquire the gun, instead of having to wait until the criminal starts shooting people.
Don't get me wrong, I think citizens should be allowed to have firearms. But I also think it's silly that we put less effort into controlling who has a firearm than we do who can fix plumbing. And I especially dislike it when gun-nuts and anti-gun nuts use bullshit arguments to attempt to blindly advance their cause. Making guns illegal for the populace to have at all isn't the answer. But complete unfettered access to firearms isn't the answer either.
When you bring a gun into the situation, the chances that someone other than your intended target is going to get killed greatly increase.
That's the big problem with an armed populace. It works OK when everyone has a sword. It doesn't work so well when you're in a city, and bullets don't stop just after they pass whatever you were shooting at.
Maybe you shouldn't say anything until you know where he got his gun. If he bought it at K-Mart at 7AM and was shooting people at 7:30 AM, that might be a pretty strong indication that the problem here wasn't the availability of guns to the other students, the problem was the availability of guns to the assailant.
Also, it's premature to blame the law for the lack of guns in the possession of the students. Not only would the law have to be different, we would also need to know if there were any students present who would have been carrying a firearm themselves if it was legal to do so.
But, the reality of the situation is we're screwed either way:
Not all gun crime is the same. Some gun crime is impulsive - people who are impulsively violent are more destructive when they have ready access to a firearm. In these kinds of gun crimes, eliminating ready access to firearms would reduce the effects of gun crime. And some gun crime is premeditated - the criminal is going to get the gun they need to commit the crime. In that kind of crime, reducing ready access to firearms creates an opportunity for the criminal.
So you can't solve the gun problem, you can just favor one kind of gun violence over another.
I didn't say I would differentiate between crazy people and not crazy people. Maybe nobody gets to walk into KMart and buy a gun.
Drugs and guns arn't the same thing. Drugs are a consumable, and they're addictive. They exist because it's profitable to illegally bring them into the country.
The problem with legal gun ownership is that both law-abiding citizens and criminals have guns, so you can't tell who is who. But when guns are illegal, only the criminals have guns, so it's easier to pick them out BEFORE they commit a crime.
The tax is on the worker's wage. Whether it is paid by the employer or the employee (or half and half) is semantics. And the semantics are intentional - by having the employer pay half of the tax, it doesn't show up on the worker's paycheck, and the worker doesn't realize just how much of their wage is being taken by the government - it LOOKS like only 7.5% is being taken, but in reality, 15% is being taken.
Any economist will include both the employer and employee paid portions of SS and Medicare taxes when calculating the tax burden of the employee.
You might have a point, if the only taxes people paid were income taxes.
Income tax is progressive. But social security tax is not.
So, someone making $1 million a year may be paying 35% in income taxes, and someone making $35,000 a year may be paying 25%.
But social security tax maxes out at about $90,000. How much is social security tax? 12.4%.
So, if you're making $1 million a year, your marginal tax rate is 35%. If you make $35,000 a year, your marginal tax rate is 37.4%! (I've left out the 2.9% for medicare that everyone pays)
And that's not even the limit of federal taxes!
For example, I have a bare-bones phone plan that I pay $8 to the phone company for. But my phone bill is $18/month! Where does that extra $10 go? THE GOVERNMENT! The tax rate on a basic phone line is over 100%.
$120/year in phone line taxes is nothing for someone who makes $1 million, but a significant expense for someone who makes the minimum wage.
There's another problem - the income tax is only on EARNED income. If you make $35,000 a year, chances are you got that income by actually WORKING. But if you're making $1 million a year, chances are a good chunk of that you made from capital investments. How much tax do you pay on capital investments? 15%!! And you also pay NO Social Security and NO Medicare taxes on it! So while the guy who actually WORKS for a living is paying 40.3% taxes on each additional dollar he earns, the people who are ALREADY rich and make their money in the stock market pay well less than half of that.
Then you have to factor in things like mortgage interest deductions. If you're making $35,000 a year, you're probably paying rent. Rent isn't tax deductible. But if you're making $1 million a year, you probably have a loan on your house - tax deductible!
And god forbid you live in a state with sales tax!
Anyway, I've determined that I'm going to become rich as soon as possible - it'll really help my tax bill. Problem is, it's really hard to become rich when the government is taking half of my money.
Anyway, point of the matter is that even though the top income earners pay the vast majority of income taxes, people who make less than $90,000 a year pay almost *ALL* of the social security taxes!
A) Politicization (partisan activities) within certain Federal Agencies, such as the CIA or the Justice Department, is a felony.
B) All records relating to government business MUST be retained for investigative purposes, and later historical preservation. To destroy these documents is a felony.
And you can't see a circumstance in the course of someone's normal duties where it might be difficult for them to figure out whether something is partisan, OR official? Or where it might be both?
But, Stanzel missed the point. If people are using the gwb43 domain to send email because of the Hatch act, then they're guilty of violating the hatch act - using a different domain name doesn't change the fact that you're sitting in a federal building in front of a federal computer.
on the Wii, however, I was within only a couple of kills of them. 10-9, 15-13, that kind of thing. The controls really are that much easier to use, and that much more intuitive.
This doesn't mean the Wii controls are easier to use. It just means your stepsons are just as bad at using the Wii controls as you are.
Just wait a few months until they've spend 10x more time on the Wii than you have and I'm sure they'll be kicking your butt again. Will that mean the Wii controls have suddenly become less intuitive?
I'll start with gambling, that's the easy one. The fact that you are trying to suggest that gambling losses SHOULD be deductible leads me to believe you're probably not qualified to talk about whether internet connections and video cards should be deductible, because gambling losses *ARE* deductible, but only against gambling winnings.
Essentially, when the IRS says 'Gambling winnings are deductible', they MEAN *NET* winnings, i.e. money won minus money lost. It's not like if you play black jack and win 20 $50 hands and lose 10 $50 hands that the IRS taxes you on $1000. They only tax you on $500, your winnings. And that aggregates over the whole year, and your lifetime. So if you have one day where you win $2000 and another where you lose $2000, your gambling winnings for the year are $0. And if you ahve one year where you lose $2000, you can't deduct it - but if the next year you win $2,000, your previous year's losses offset that and your gambling taxes are still $0.
Now, going back to whether your internet connection, video card, etc, are tax deductible, the answer is, only if you are playing WoW as a business. The quickest determination of whether you're doing it as a business is if you're making money at it. So if you make a profit after your deductions, you'd have a pretty good reason to deduct those expenses.
If not, you have to otherwise show that playing WoW is a business activity, pretty much that you INTEND to make a profit. That's a lot more subjective, but not something you're likely to prove. Also, keep in mind that you have to prove that the primary purpose of those expenses is related to your business - i.e., not only would you have to use your internet connection and video card etc. to play WoW, you'd pretty much have to use them EXCLUSIVELY to play WoW (or other activities related to your business - maybe you play EVE too).
Regardless, paying $2 in taxes on sold items and deducting the cost of your computer isn't going to fly.
Remember back in elementary school, when you were doing word problems, and your teacher told you to estimate your answer to make sure the answer you calculated was reasonable? So, for example, if the problem said to multiply 10 by 12, and you got 3,000, obviously you wern't right.
Same thing here. Your answer fails the 'common sense' test miserably. 'All the money in the United States is legally owned by the United States Government' can not be true, for several obvious reasons.
First, the US government can't demand that you give it any dollars you have. A key aspect of ownership is control. Second, most money 'in' the US isn't even in the form of paper dollars - it's in bank accounts and other virtual instruments. How does the government have any ownership over that?
The US Government doesn't own US currency any more than it owns your car. It has about the same amount of control over both - it regulates them, it can take them with due process, but your money, and your car, are yours.
As for what money represents, money represents an allocation of resources. It has value because people believe it has value. In that way, it's not much different than gold, except it's easier to move around.
Slashdot Mirror
Limiting gun access generally affects only those people who weren't criminals in the first place, so you only impact the honest people.
What is your evidence for that statement?
If gun access is limited, how many honest people are affected?
To what degree are they affected? Count both would-be gun owners who are inconvenienced, and people who don't end up the victim of a gun crime.
How many criminals are affected?
To what degree are they affected?
I don't know the answers to those questions, but you don't either. And your statement seems to assume that gun restrictions will ONLY inconvenience honest people and have no effect on criminal's access to guns. That doesn't make much sense. It's a convenient argument, but it's unlikely to be a true one.
How were you planning to do that? Randomly search people and their houses?
The same way we enforce any other law - good police work, probable cause, search warrants. You figure out who sells guns illegally. You figure out who they sold them to. And then you go and arrest all those people. And you've arrested them before they went on to commit a violent crime - because you were able to arrest them on the basis of just getting the TOOLS to commit a violent crime.
Who says access is unfettered? Just and try to get a rifle when you're a convicted felon.
It's relatively unfettered. Getting a rifle when you're a felon is easy. You do it illegally, but since it's so easy to legally acquire a firearm and then 'lose' it, it's easy to get them illegally as well. If you make guns harder to get legally, then they also become harder to get illegally, as the dealer who is selling them illegally is going to start charging more to reflect the increased cost/risk of him being in that business.
Now, if I am a criminal, I'm going to avoid the K-marts, Wal-marts, and sporting good or gun stores for precisely those two reasons. Why buy legally and leave a paper-trail when I can just spend a little more to buy a gun that had its serial number scratched off. Or if I am really desperate, I can steal one.
Where, exactly, do you think illegal guns come from?And where are you going to steal one from?
Oh, right, the guy who bought his at K-Mart.
Why don't people understand that the VAST MAJORITY of illegal gun purchases are only possible because of a LEGAL gun purchase? You can't break into someone's house and steal a gun if they didn't have a gun in the first place. You can't get a gun with a serial number scratched off if someone didn't buy that gun in the first place. IF you have FEWER LEGAL GUNS, you NECESSARILY ALSO have fewer ILLEGAL guns. The supply of illegal guns doesn't stay the same when the supply of legal guns is reduced.
What I really hate most about this is you've gotten me to arguing the reasons guns should be illegal. I don't think guns should be illegal. But the arguments you gun nuts come up with are just so logically flawed it drives me up the wall.
"Gun control is pointless because criminals will just get guns illegally." GET THEM FROM WHERE? When you can't get guns legally, you've eliminated 99% of the supply for illegal guns. You're left with stealing shipments headed out of the country or smuggling them into the country.
No, you can't take all guns away from all criminals. But you can take away a lot of guns from a lot of criminals, and you can do it in a way that amounts to inconvenience for the rest of us.
and how are you determining who is crazy?
It's like running for President. If you want to run for President, you're not qualified to be president.
If you want a gun, you're crazy.
That some criminals will always have guns is a specious argument.
Let's examine:
Some criminals will always have guns. Therefore, there is no reason to control access to guns.
Some people will always get lung cancer. Therefore, there is no reason to curb smoking.
There's another side effect of limiting access to handguns to law enforcement and criminals.
When everyone is allowed to have a gun, the criminal is the guy who uses his gun to shoot somebody.
When only criminals have guns, the criminal is the guy with the gun.
Gun control allows you to identify and arrest criminals BEFORE they commit violent crime, because you have a chance to catch the criminal when they acquire the gun, instead of having to wait until the criminal starts shooting people.
Don't get me wrong, I think citizens should be allowed to have firearms. But I also think it's silly that we put less effort into controlling who has a firearm than we do who can fix plumbing. And I especially dislike it when gun-nuts and anti-gun nuts use bullshit arguments to attempt to blindly advance their cause. Making guns illegal for the populace to have at all isn't the answer. But complete unfettered access to firearms isn't the answer either.
Actually, I think the 3-14 days often has more to due with paperwork processing time than cooling-off.
or only the criminals will have guns.
Good, then we'll know exactly which people we need to arrest to stop gun crime.
When you bring a gun into the situation, the chances that someone other than your intended target is going to get killed greatly increase.
That's the big problem with an armed populace. It works OK when everyone has a sword. It doesn't work so well when you're in a city, and bullets don't stop just after they pass whatever you were shooting at.
If the students were armed...
But what if the assailant WASN'T armed?
Maybe you shouldn't say anything until you know where he got his gun. If he bought it at K-Mart at 7AM and was shooting people at 7:30 AM, that might be a pretty strong indication that the problem here wasn't the availability of guns to the other students, the problem was the availability of guns to the assailant.
Also, it's premature to blame the law for the lack of guns in the possession of the students. Not only would the law have to be different, we would also need to know if there were any students present who would have been carrying a firearm themselves if it was legal to do so.
But, the reality of the situation is we're screwed either way:
Not all gun crime is the same. Some gun crime is impulsive - people who are impulsively violent are more destructive when they have ready access to a firearm. In these kinds of gun crimes, eliminating ready access to firearms would reduce the effects of gun crime. And some gun crime is premeditated - the criminal is going to get the gun they need to commit the crime. In that kind of crime, reducing ready access to firearms creates an opportunity for the criminal.
So you can't solve the gun problem, you can just favor one kind of gun violence over another.
I didn't say I would differentiate between crazy people and not crazy people. Maybe nobody gets to walk into KMart and buy a gun.
Drugs and guns arn't the same thing. Drugs are a consumable, and they're addictive. They exist because it's profitable to illegally bring them into the country.
The problem with legal gun ownership is that both law-abiding citizens and criminals have guns, so you can't tell who is who. But when guns are illegal, only the criminals have guns, so it's easier to pick them out BEFORE they commit a crime.
Guns are just tools. The trick is to have 0 people who want to shoot others. Then it doesn't matter how many bullets they have.
You shouldn't fear people with guns, you should fear not having a gun when crazy people want to kill you.
Actually, I fear crazy people who can just walk into K-Mart and arm themselves.
You can look at this situation and say that the problem is that none of the other students had guns.
But you can just as easily look at this situation and conclude that the problem is that the nutjob DID have a gun.
So your solution is 'Give everyone a gun!'. My solution is 'Don't give crazy people guns.'
Your way the crazy guy only manages to kill 3 or 4 people before someone else shoots him. My way, nobody gets shot.
...Asians are people, and Orientals are rugs.
...and running Windows.
Running windows is acceptable, as long as it's only begrudgingly and to play games.
They advertised $8/month local service. And for the first few months, it came out to $11 or so.
Now it's nearly $18. What happened?
They gave me a $5 credit the first couple months, so I'd think I was paying what I was supposed to be paying, then took it away.
And they're also the same people who will be using social security as their retirement program.
Correction: Nobody will be using social security as their requirement program.
The tax is on the worker's wage. Whether it is paid by the employer or the employee (or half and half) is semantics. And the semantics are intentional - by having the employer pay half of the tax, it doesn't show up on the worker's paycheck, and the worker doesn't realize just how much of their wage is being taken by the government - it LOOKS like only 7.5% is being taken, but in reality, 15% is being taken.
Any economist will include both the employer and employee paid portions of SS and Medicare taxes when calculating the tax burden of the employee.
You might have a point, if the only taxes people paid were income taxes.
Income tax is progressive. But social security tax is not.
So, someone making $1 million a year may be paying 35% in income taxes, and someone making $35,000 a year may be paying 25%.
But social security tax maxes out at about $90,000. How much is social security tax? 12.4%.
So, if you're making $1 million a year, your marginal tax rate is 35%.
If you make $35,000 a year, your marginal tax rate is 37.4%! (I've left out the 2.9% for medicare that everyone pays)
And that's not even the limit of federal taxes!
For example, I have a bare-bones phone plan that I pay $8 to the phone company for. But my phone bill is $18/month! Where does that extra $10 go? THE GOVERNMENT! The tax rate on a basic phone line is over 100%.
$120/year in phone line taxes is nothing for someone who makes $1 million, but a significant expense for someone who makes the minimum wage.
There's another problem - the income tax is only on EARNED income. If you make $35,000 a year, chances are you got that income by actually WORKING. But if you're making $1 million a year, chances are a good chunk of that you made from capital investments. How much tax do you pay on capital investments? 15%!! And you also pay NO Social Security and NO Medicare taxes on it! So while the guy who actually WORKS for a living is paying 40.3% taxes on each additional dollar he earns, the people who are ALREADY rich and make their money in the stock market pay well less than half of that.
Then you have to factor in things like mortgage interest deductions. If you're making $35,000 a year, you're probably paying rent. Rent isn't tax deductible. But if you're making $1 million a year, you probably have a loan on your house - tax deductible!
And god forbid you live in a state with sales tax!
Anyway, I've determined that I'm going to become rich as soon as possible - it'll really help my tax bill. Problem is, it's really hard to become rich when the government is taking half of my money.
Anyway, point of the matter is that even though the top income earners pay the vast majority of income taxes, people who make less than $90,000 a year pay almost *ALL* of the social security taxes!
Unfortunately, I think getting perfect digital copies will be a thing of the past
But what about digital monitors? Can't you just make a device that PRETENDS to be an OLED screen but records video signal instead?
A) Politicization (partisan activities) within certain Federal Agencies, such as the CIA or the Justice Department, is a felony.
B) All records relating to government business MUST be retained for investigative purposes, and later historical preservation. To destroy these documents is a felony.
And you can't see a circumstance in the course of someone's normal duties where it might be difficult for them to figure out whether something is partisan, OR official? Or where it might be both?
But, Stanzel missed the point. If people are using the gwb43 domain to send email because of the Hatch act, then they're guilty of violating the hatch act - using a different domain name doesn't change the fact that you're sitting in a federal building in front of a federal computer.
on the Wii, however, I was within only a couple of kills of them. 10-9, 15-13, that kind of thing. The controls really are that much easier to use, and that much more intuitive.
This doesn't mean the Wii controls are easier to use. It just means your stepsons are just as bad at using the Wii controls as you are.
Just wait a few months until they've spend 10x more time on the Wii than you have and I'm sure they'll be kicking your butt again. Will that mean the Wii controls have suddenly become less intuitive?
And of course I MEANT...
"Essentially, when the IRS says 'Gambling winnings are taxable',"
I'll start with gambling, that's the easy one. The fact that you are trying to suggest that gambling losses SHOULD be deductible leads me to believe you're probably not qualified to talk about whether internet connections and video cards should be deductible, because gambling losses *ARE* deductible, but only against gambling winnings.
Essentially, when the IRS says 'Gambling winnings are deductible', they MEAN *NET* winnings, i.e. money won minus money lost. It's not like if you play black jack and win 20 $50 hands and lose 10 $50 hands that the IRS taxes you on $1000. They only tax you on $500, your winnings. And that aggregates over the whole year, and your lifetime. So if you have one day where you win $2000 and another where you lose $2000, your gambling winnings for the year are $0. And if you ahve one year where you lose $2000, you can't deduct it - but if the next year you win $2,000, your previous year's losses offset that and your gambling taxes are still $0.
Now, going back to whether your internet connection, video card, etc, are tax deductible, the answer is, only if you are playing WoW as a business. The quickest determination of whether you're doing it as a business is if you're making money at it. So if you make a profit after your deductions, you'd have a pretty good reason to deduct those expenses.
If not, you have to otherwise show that playing WoW is a business activity, pretty much that you INTEND to make a profit. That's a lot more subjective, but not something you're likely to prove. Also, keep in mind that you have to prove that the primary purpose of those expenses is related to your business - i.e., not only would you have to use your internet connection and video card etc. to play WoW, you'd pretty much have to use them EXCLUSIVELY to play WoW (or other activities related to your business - maybe you play EVE too).
Regardless, paying $2 in taxes on sold items and deducting the cost of your computer isn't going to fly.
Remember back in elementary school, when you were doing word problems, and your teacher told you to estimate your answer to make sure the answer you calculated was reasonable? So, for example, if the problem said to multiply 10 by 12, and you got 3,000, obviously you wern't right.
Same thing here. Your answer fails the 'common sense' test miserably. 'All the money in the United States is legally owned by the United States Government' can not be true, for several obvious reasons.
First, the US government can't demand that you give it any dollars you have. A key aspect of ownership is control. Second, most money 'in' the US isn't even in the form of paper dollars - it's in bank accounts and other virtual instruments. How does the government have any ownership over that?
The US Government doesn't own US currency any more than it owns your car. It has about the same amount of control over both - it regulates them, it can take them with due process, but your money, and your car, are yours.
As for what money represents, money represents an allocation of resources. It has value because people believe it has value. In that way, it's not much different than gold, except it's easier to move around.
The 50% discount for debt to be paid by your children.
Only if you play WoW as a business activity.