They're not taking your money, but they're giving your kids world-class educations, they're giving you emergency health care when you lack the money for it, they're giving you roads, they're protecting you against thieves and foreign militaries...how is that not charity??
Now, if you're averse to taxes of all kind then I suggest you take a basic high school economics class. There're little things called public goods that are very poorly provided for under the market mechanism. Things like the military - if you didn't have to pay for it, would you? No. And who would? People, individually, are powerless to pay for the military, and since the marginal cost to them is extremely high and the marginal benefit is almost nothing, it wouldn't make economic sense for people to willingly pay for the military when there isn't a guarantee that everyone else won't, too.
What are you, ten? You're in an incredibly small and stupid minority if you truly believe that taxes are theft, plain and simple. If you want to argue that there is impropriety within the government, or even a lot of impropriety within the government then that's one thing, but arguing against the fundamental concept of taxes? That's a losing battle, I'm afraid to say.
Huh? The topic of discussion is why the government is being charitable by not taking your money. I.e., in instances where they don't tax you. Jesus, did you even read the thread, or were you just so eager to show off the fact that you are aware of the the basic concept of taxes and extremely basic US macroeconomic issues that you couldn't be bothered?
And do you think Oxford and the London School of Economics are representative of the European university experience? There are tons of schools just like the University of Nebraska here.
So I think that it might be possible to make something work -- the standards here are different from those in Europe, and are (unfortunately) lower. But it will help your friend.
God, I can't fucking stand it when Americans say these kinds of things. FIrst of all, American schools are among the top in the world -- definitely better than Egyptian schools, and far better than former-USSR and Eastern European schools. No, this isn't the 1970s -- the US has finally caught up to the rest of the world. If you ask any European what the best university in the world is, they'll say Harvard. If you ask them the second, they'll say Princeton. If you ask them the third, they'll say Oxford. Fourth, Yale of Cambridge. You might not like everything about the US, but Europe is not some oasis of accomplishment and scholarship.
Adevarul este, din pacate, ca nu este posibil. Universitatii americane sunt prea competitive pentru a accepta studentii din scoli pe internet. Scolii aceie nu pot sa-i teste pe studentii lor (pentru ca nu pot sa controle daca studentii insela sau nu stiu ce)...e prea complicat. Stiu ca scholii egipteane nu sunt foarte buni, dar e mai bun (si mai ieftin) sa iei o diploma egipteana si sa faci note bune.
Romana mea nu-i bun, dar e placut sa vorbesc romaneste din nou!
Yes, in July the currency is being denominated in the exact same way that the zloty was (from ~30,000 ROL to the USD to ~3 RON to the USD), although it's more just a temporary measure to make the country's economy look more attractive to investors -Romania is almost definitely going to join the EU in 2007, and a few years later (2011 is the date that people throw around) we'll move to the euro.
I think a denomination of 1000:1 would have made more sense, though -it would confuse less people (people already don't bother saying "thousand" and a lot of fancy restaurants/stores leave out the last three zeros), and it's not going to be our currency for very long, anyway. Although I guess 3 lei looks a lot nicer to foreigners than 30 lei.
Cred ca sunt banii cei mai urati din lume. Chiar dolarii americani sunt mici, cel putin!
Ai vazut banii noi? Cred ca o sa fie in circulatie iulie, dar nimeni nu-i a vazut!
I live in Romania, and until July we'll still be using the old Romanian leu - that is, ~30,000 lei to the dollar, ~40,000 to the euro, etc. All of this inflation has made coins utterly useless (the only to moderately circulated denominations are 500 and 5000, both fairly useless in a country whose prices are slowly catching up to the EU's prices), and I must say that I prefer is to the American and European systems of coins galore. So much easier to handle. You can carry as much money on you as you want (although, actually, the bills are larger and more thick, for sure, as well as being hideously covered with some plastic-esque substance) and it's never too much for your waller (not to mention that no wallets in the US have coin holders, making it a pain in the ass to keep track of coins).
The "load[ing] from within Win9x" is misleading -it was an icon that you'd click, and then that would shut down Windows and load into BeOS. Seven seconds after double-click the icon, you were exactly where you would have been if you had turned off the computer and then turned it on with the boot floppy in your floppy drive.
In an efficient market, price equals marginal cost. Marginal cost of software: zero.
Even perfectly competitive "efficient" markets take into account the total average cost to the firm. Unless the price is at or above the average total cost point at a specific quantity/price, the product will not be produced.
This is all assuming a perfectly competitive market, one of whose stipulations is that the market be a commodities market. When you factor in things like patents, innovation, and products improving over time, software is far from a commodity.
Hm, really? Because I've been looking around online for a while now and I can't find one. I found a line in the History of the Americas Wikipedia article that suggested that the US was the first ("Europe sovereignty began to unravel on July 4, 1776..."), but that's about it. So perhaps you could enlighten me as to what these countries were.
True, I did spend most of my school-age life in the US. However, I attended an amazing public school - one of the best in Pennsylvania - and graduated with an IB diploma, accredited by the International Baccalaureate Organization in Geneva. I also spent a significant amount of high school in Romania (and, when I got there, let me just say that I was miles ahead of native Romanians in many subjects).
But uh, you had a friend who lived in Texas for a few years twenty years ago. So I guess you win regarding the whole knowledge-of-American-education-systems. Oh wait no, sorry -knowledge-of-United-States-of-American-education- systems.
The American vs. US citizen crusade is tired and old. Plenty of languages have anachronisms, especially for nationalities. Most Slavic languages' word for "German" is directly related to the word "mute," the English name "Holland," in Dutch, actually refers to a place in the Netherlands, the adjective "Dutch" is a misinterpretation...
Languages evolve sometimes to mean things other than their literal and obvious meanings. In this case, the term "American" has been adopted to mean "one of the United States of America." And honestly, with good reason! The USA was the first country in America, therefore if anyone can claim that title, it should be them.
Your argument is affected and arbitrary. Go fight for a real cause.
I still live in Bucharest, just not anywhere you'd find open access points (I live in Baneasa).
As for the legal specification, you must be talking about the US, because in Romania...well...I'd expect bars to start carding minors (ha!) before I see actual strict enforcement of ISP contracts.:-P
Cand am locuit in Bucuresti (pe Bulevardul Aviatorilor, unde au fost multi romani si straini bogati), n-am putut sa gasesc nicio retea si nimeni care a avut un wireless network liber.
(Da, stiu, romana mea e groznic.)
So, I'm confused - are Marissa and Alex fucking/whatever or not?? I mean, if they're not they definitely will be, but up until they left Jody's house at the end of the last episode, I was certain that they were!
WHO THE FUCK SEARCHES FOR THOSE THINGS?? It amazes me how stupid people are - rather than type in amazon.com, bestbuy.com, or cnn.com, they actually search for them on Google.
This reads more like an advertisement - do you really need to spell out to us a "possible use" for this? Don't think you could have left that up to our imaginations?
I don't know where this man is pulling 1 in 455 from, but just assuming it's true, it just doesn't add up. He's making the mistake of assuming that everyone desperately doesn't want our civilization to die. Now, if you think you're the chosen people and have this deep, undying devotion to the human race this makes sense, but honestly, I'm fairly indifferent about earth getting destroyed - so long as it's not in my lifetime. If it is in my lifetime, it will be a little unfortunate, but I don't see any reason to try to avert it.
Call me callous, but it's just hard to care. The universe had gotten along just fine without some small species trying to alter its course of actions...and even if not...we'd all be dead...what the hell do we care? Besides everybody dying in a near-instantaneous, virtually painless event, nobody will suffer because of this.
Had you only used some context clues and read carefully, you could have saved your rhetoric. I was talking about Southern and Eastern Europe. You know, the ones that are impoverished and are just recovering from a half-century of dictatorships and Communist regimes?
I've lived in Europe for over a decade now, and have never met a single European who said he admired America for its freedoms.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a typo...it should have been "They're taking your money, but..."
They're not taking your money, but they're giving your kids world-class educations, they're giving you emergency health care when you lack the money for it, they're giving you roads, they're protecting you against thieves and foreign militaries...how is that not charity??
Now, if you're averse to taxes of all kind then I suggest you take a basic high school economics class. There're little things called public goods that are very poorly provided for under the market mechanism. Things like the military - if you didn't have to pay for it, would you? No. And who would? People, individually, are powerless to pay for the military, and since the marginal cost to them is extremely high and the marginal benefit is almost nothing, it wouldn't make economic sense for people to willingly pay for the military when there isn't a guarantee that everyone else won't, too.
What are you, ten? You're in an incredibly small and stupid minority if you truly believe that taxes are theft, plain and simple. If you want to argue that there is impropriety within the government, or even a lot of impropriety within the government then that's one thing, but arguing against the fundamental concept of taxes? That's a losing battle, I'm afraid to say.
Huh? The topic of discussion is why the government is being charitable by not taking your money. I.e., in instances where they don't tax you. Jesus, did you even read the thread, or were you just so eager to show off the fact that you are aware of the the basic concept of taxes and extremely basic US macroeconomic issues that you couldn't be bothered?
They're being charitable by giving you things like free schools, roads, emergency medical care, etc. while not charging you for it.
And do you think Oxford and the London School of Economics are representative of the European university experience? There are tons of schools just like the University of Nebraska here.
It should be colleges', not college's. And the use of parentheses are all fucked up.
Glad to be of service.
So I think that it might be possible to make something work -- the standards here are different from those in Europe, and are (unfortunately) lower. But it will help your friend.
God, I can't fucking stand it when Americans say these kinds of things. FIrst of all, American schools are among the top in the world -- definitely better than Egyptian schools, and far better than former-USSR and Eastern European schools. No, this isn't the 1970s -- the US has finally caught up to the rest of the world. If you ask any European what the best university in the world is, they'll say Harvard. If you ask them the second, they'll say Princeton. If you ask them the third, they'll say Oxford. Fourth, Yale of Cambridge. You might not like everything about the US, but Europe is not some oasis of accomplishment and scholarship.
Buna! :-)
Adevarul este, din pacate, ca nu este posibil. Universitatii americane sunt prea competitive pentru a accepta studentii din scoli pe internet. Scolii aceie nu pot sa-i teste pe studentii lor (pentru ca nu pot sa controle daca studentii insela sau nu stiu ce)...e prea complicat. Stiu ca scholii egipteane nu sunt foarte buni, dar e mai bun (si mai ieftin) sa iei o diploma egipteana si sa faci note bune.
Romana mea nu-i bun, dar e placut sa vorbesc romaneste din nou!
Yes, in July the currency is being denominated in the exact same way that the zloty was (from ~30,000 ROL to the USD to ~3 RON to the USD), although it's more just a temporary measure to make the country's economy look more attractive to investors -Romania is almost definitely going to join the EU in 2007, and a few years later (2011 is the date that people throw around) we'll move to the euro.
I think a denomination of 1000:1 would have made more sense, though -it would confuse less people (people already don't bother saying "thousand" and a lot of fancy restaurants/stores leave out the last three zeros), and it's not going to be our currency for very long, anyway. Although I guess 3 lei looks a lot nicer to foreigners than 30 lei.
Cred ca sunt banii cei mai urati din lume. Chiar dolarii americani sunt mici, cel putin! Ai vazut banii noi? Cred ca o sa fie in circulatie iulie, dar nimeni nu-i a vazut!
I live in Romania, and until July we'll still be using the old Romanian leu - that is, ~30,000 lei to the dollar, ~40,000 to the euro, etc. All of this inflation has made coins utterly useless (the only to moderately circulated denominations are 500 and 5000, both fairly useless in a country whose prices are slowly catching up to the EU's prices), and I must say that I prefer is to the American and European systems of coins galore. So much easier to handle. You can carry as much money on you as you want (although, actually, the bills are larger and more thick, for sure, as well as being hideously covered with some plastic-esque substance) and it's never too much for your waller (not to mention that no wallets in the US have coin holders, making it a pain in the ass to keep track of coins).
The "load[ing] from within Win9x" is misleading -it was an icon that you'd click, and then that would shut down Windows and load into BeOS. Seven seconds after double-click the icon, you were exactly where you would have been if you had turned off the computer and then turned it on with the boot floppy in your floppy drive.
In an efficient market, price equals marginal cost. Marginal cost of software: zero.
Even perfectly competitive "efficient" markets take into account the total average cost to the firm. Unless the price is at or above the average total cost point at a specific quantity/price, the product will not be produced.
This is all assuming a perfectly competitive market, one of whose stipulations is that the market be a commodities market. When you factor in things like patents, innovation, and products improving over time, software is far from a commodity.
Hm, really? Because I've been looking around online for a while now and I can't find one. I found a line in the History of the Americas Wikipedia article that suggested that the US was the first ("Europe sovereignty began to unravel on July 4, 1776..."), but that's about it. So perhaps you could enlighten me as to what these countries were.
True, I did spend most of my school-age life in the US. However, I attended an amazing public school - one of the best in Pennsylvania - and graduated with an IB diploma, accredited by the International Baccalaureate Organization in Geneva. I also spent a significant amount of high school in Romania (and, when I got there, let me just say that I was miles ahead of native Romanians in many subjects).
- systems.
But uh, you had a friend who lived in Texas for a few years twenty years ago. So I guess you win regarding the whole knowledge-of-American-education-systems. Oh wait no, sorry -knowledge-of-United-States-of-American-education
The American vs. US citizen crusade is tired and old. Plenty of languages have anachronisms, especially for nationalities. Most Slavic languages' word for "German" is directly related to the word "mute," the English name "Holland," in Dutch, actually refers to a place in the Netherlands, the adjective "Dutch" is a misinterpretation... Languages evolve sometimes to mean things other than their literal and obvious meanings. In this case, the term "American" has been adopted to mean "one of the United States of America." And honestly, with good reason! The USA was the first country in America, therefore if anyone can claim that title, it should be them. Your argument is affected and arbitrary. Go fight for a real cause.
I still live in Bucharest, just not anywhere you'd find open access points (I live in Baneasa). As for the legal specification, you must be talking about the US, because in Romania...well...I'd expect bars to start carding minors (ha!) before I see actual strict enforcement of ISP contracts. :-P
Cand am locuit in Bucuresti (pe Bulevardul Aviatorilor, unde au fost multi romani si straini bogati), n-am putut sa gasesc nicio retea si nimeni care a avut un wireless network liber. (Da, stiu, romana mea e groznic.)
I'm pretty sure you meant voilà.
So, I'm confused - are Marissa and Alex fucking/whatever or not?? I mean, if they're not they definitely will be, but up until they left Jody's house at the end of the last episode, I was certain that they were!
I don't know that anyone's ever explained to you exactly what a tampon is and when it is used.
a: amazon
b: best buy
c: cnn
WHO THE FUCK SEARCHES FOR THOSE THINGS?? It amazes me how stupid people are - rather than type in amazon.com, bestbuy.com, or cnn.com, they actually search for them on Google.
This reads more like an advertisement - do you really need to spell out to us a "possible use" for this? Don't think you could have left that up to our imaginations?
I don't know where this man is pulling 1 in 455 from, but just assuming it's true, it just doesn't add up. He's making the mistake of assuming that everyone desperately doesn't want our civilization to die. Now, if you think you're the chosen people and have this deep, undying devotion to the human race this makes sense, but honestly, I'm fairly indifferent about earth getting destroyed - so long as it's not in my lifetime. If it is in my lifetime, it will be a little unfortunate, but I don't see any reason to try to avert it.
Call me callous, but it's just hard to care. The universe had gotten along just fine without some small species trying to alter its course of actions...and even if not...we'd all be dead...what the hell do we care? Besides everybody dying in a near-instantaneous, virtually painless event, nobody will suffer because of this.
Had you only used some context clues and read carefully, you could have saved your rhetoric. I was talking about Southern and Eastern Europe. You know, the ones that are impoverished and are just recovering from a half-century of dictatorships and Communist regimes?
I've lived in Europe for over a decade now, and have never met a single European who said he admired America for its freedoms.
Europe extends beyond Western Europe, you know.