TAX CUTS DO NOT MEAN LOST TAX REVENUE. Rather than looking at forcasts, if you look at the decrease in revenues, you'll find that that after the Bush tax cuts they INCREASED! This is because of economic growth.
On the other hand, tax increases stifle economic growth and usually DECREASE revenues.
Also, there is a great deal of misinformation coming from the Left as well. Stop reading NYT Mag or Krugman Op-Eds and you might find it.
Just because there is no crisis scheduled for next year doesn't mean the system can't been changed for the good.
Changing the indexing of increases in benefits is good. The problem is using wage or price inflation to adjust. Not surprisingly, the system was changed to wage inflation in an era of large price inflation. Now, with booming productivity and the subsequent large rate of wage increases, this seems like a bad idea. If you think that this is unfair to change the rate of increase, please explain to me why I deserve 50% more in benefits, in real terms, than today's retirees? Read more about it here.
Another idea is private accounts, which make a great deal of sense in terms of rate-of-return(ROR) on investments. For someone like me (age 23), this could be a difference of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Read more about it here.
Finally, lefties should be interested in transitioning to a private system, because any temporary shortfalls will be funded by general revenues. Most people know that income taxes are progressive, but not so many know that payroll taxes are basically regressive or flat.
This thread is a bit silly in putting "crisis" in quotes. I doubt that the current system would be one devised by the right or the left if done from scratch todat. If it can be improved with changes, why not do it? Is the status quo ROR of 1% so precious?
This is interesting because it doesn't matter what Daily Kos thought it was getting into with an advisory roll. The Dean folks intended to get good, free press from it, and milked the blogs. Read more about it here.
For those who think the issues with the Dept. of Education paying off a journalist are new, it was actually more common under the Clinton administration, and equally bad.
Doesn't this show the Climate Change BoogieMan has little to do with humans, and we should focus on making people more ready, generally, to adapt to change?
I know a thing or two about computer vision, and this isn't even close to working well in a general sense.
You can match a face to an image on file, maybe, if the conditions (lighting, perspective, facial hair, glasses) are similar. Often you need the face hand cropped from the background for the training image.
You can maybe extend this for a security system that can say if someone who doesn't belong is entering the system. In this case, you can control all the elements listed above, and the ok-list is small.
We are at least a decade off from the general facial recognition problem: match the id or name to the face of 5 billion people under severe changes in the conditions mentioned above.
That said, the face detection problem is very close to being solved. Instead of classification, this is more of a clustering algorithm, "what parts of this image have faces in them". Take a security camera image, and return cropped subsections of that image with faces. This could then be fed into the yet unsolved recognition problem.
A stonewalling international community, a currupt sanctions regime, an oppressed people, a barrier to peace in Israel, one more corrupt ME regime.
vs
America & her allies, the only willing actors.
What would you have done? Waited longer? After a decade, why the hell would sanctions/inspections work?
If you showed that there weren't WMD, but that Saddam supported Palestinian bombers, continued to try to top Stalin, and tolerated al Queda opperatives, would the invasion have been a bad idea?
If you think so, then you have WMD blinders on, as if that is the only reason to go.
All I can say about the material issues is that you drastically warp the situation to act like the US stealing from the Iraqis. Actually, it is a lot closer to charity, in losing hundreds of our troops to kill people more than willing to kill and oppress Iraqis, and spending billions on reconstruction. I'm glad you appreciate the efforts.
If you can't see any benefits on the side, from out current efforts, you're pathetic. The humanitarian improvement alone should be adequate justification for those against the war.
You're so busy tracking oil contracts, you ignore all the real reasons to go into Iraq.
Besides, if the Iraqi people get 1% after we've taken everything (which we're not), that is more than they would have gotten under Saddam. You defending a fucking dictator's regime here, for Christ's sake...
so as long as you admit almost every regime in the ME is stealing their people's oil, I'm all for definition. Except there is a problem when applied to Iraq, where we took' oil from Saddam and basically gave it back to the people.
US.. which does not have sovereignty over the Iraqi people nor the international authority to administer their resources.
Your 'enemy', eh? Surely you're not referring to your own countrymen!
In this debate, you are on the other side. Does that mean you should be deported to gitmo? No. Does that mean I will vehemently disagree with you, and call a spade a spade and an opponent an enemy? Yes. After the election, I have little reason to get you on my side as you have little to offer the nation(as do I), and I hope those in charge make the right decisions despite disagreements in the populace.
Oh, the real reason is so we can steal their oil. And I do mean steal.
From your last post:
What I mean by steal is that the contracts for the oil go to western oil companies.
1) If the companies are qualified, as they appear to be, there should be no complaints. You have presented no argument that these companies are not qualified.
2) There is no stealing of oil, as your original post very clearly implies. The Iraqi government very explicitly owns the oil, and are aiding their own reconstruction by allowing other contractors to service the fields.
3) A great deal of money spent to American firms to get jobs done in Iraq goes towards other secondary firms, or Iraqis themselves.
4) Even those Americans working for American companies are doing something for Iraq, and not just for profit. You can't take the benefit of the job away from the task just because you think the wrong people are being assigned to do it.
To look at the situation with such a warped prism is nothing short of idiocy. You think the situation in Iraq is all about oil, and you are dead wrong. It is about a humanitarian mission for 25 million people. It is about a sea change, a catalyst in a region that is completely backwards. This is about winning the war on terror not by appeasing extremists, but by killing them, and changing the region so that it no longer produces them.
But please continue to call it a mistake and worry about oil contracts. Forget that whole 'vision' thing. As Napoleon once said,"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
contracts to rebuild oil wells are a form of welfare to the Iraqi people. There is a difference between operating on a piece of machinery and owning the product.
If you think it's all about contracts and evil haliburtan, they you haven't been paying attention to the meteoric recovery underway across Iraq.
I'm sure in January after successful elections, you'll be like "ohh, how did that happen". Or "it's all a fox news conspiracy".
Either way, the movers and shakers took out the worlds stinky trash, and like the cold-war, will get little thanks for it. 13 years from now, as islamofascism is on the way out, you'll know who to thank as the catalyst.
Ask yourself from the moral high ground: how long will it take the UN to secure free elections in Iran? How long before it becomes intollerable, from a humanitarian perspective, to not take action in place of those corrupt paper tigers?
Oh, the real reason is so we can steal their oil. And I do mean steal.
[flamebait] you're an idiot [/flamebait]
Who do you think owns Iraqi oil? Try the government and people of Iraq. Who owned it before? Saddam.
There is a very easy way to get oil, and it is called a free market. You pay $50, and you get a barrel of crude.
Actually, the polls show that the majority of Iraqis want the US to stay until the violence stops, most knowing that a sudden pull out would only embolden those who would like to take control, namely Baathist redoubts and those influences from Iran and Syria.
Here is a quick question: if this is all about oil, why didn't the US 'take' Kuwaiti oil in 1991?
Because that's not the way it works. Take a basic economics class for christ's sake.
My point is not that I'm an alternative to all free mainstream media, rather that I'm part of a very large system of very free media. Also, don't talk to me about "news", as if that is different than editorials. Everything has a bias. Blogs are good because the bias is obvious, rather than hidden.
I see no reasonable way that the New York Times, for instance, can have a team of editors that has never voted republican, and still claim to be unbiased in the hard news pages.
You may think you have an interesting perspective or point of view perhaps, but do not imagine yourself to ever be in the same class as the people who put thier lives on the line to actually tell the rest of the world what is happening.
Kinda like those who don't manage to leave their hotel to report the 'hard news'. I would rather get my news from soldiers & Iraqi civilian blogs, when covering that story. Also, get the stick out of your ass. What, are you a journalism prof. or something?
old media
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You have 100% freedom with blogs, and they don't have borders.
My examples here and here and in my sig. Visit them and enjoy your freedoms.
well, i'm a master's student, so you're talking about grad school, right?
for my essay, I researched a few programs, and wrote about those that interested me. I stressed those which will have a big impact on society and have a great application in transfer of tech from academia to industry, like security & health care.
I did work in graduate classes at my undergrad, NYU, related to computer vision & AI, which was positive.
I worked hard to get a decent grade(75th percentile) on the CS GRE. [not required, but a plus].
I maintained a good GPA.
I talked to a lot of progressors always, so when I asked for a recommendation, they could reference my "out-of-the-classrom" interests. For me, I picked a few toy problems, and tried to solve them, like sloyd^3. I think the search strategy discussions I had with one prof are why i got accepted.
BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO TO GET INTO GRADSCHOOL IS UNDERGRAD RESEARCH.
That really, really, helps. They want people who will be able to solve hard problems with little direction.
Been at RI for over a year now. I highly urge anyone interested in the video to apply. You can _easily_ be working on any of those projects if you just apply yourself.
The video only showed a small fraction of what is to be found at RI.
"Frustly, scientific breakthroughs of the magnitude discussed in this interview don't scale with the number of researchers in the world: otherwise we would have had many more Einsteins in the last 50 years of the 20th century than in the first.
Secondly, I don't think the usual concept of productivity works in research either. Getting more output per unit of input translates into a sicentist publising more papers per year that before. But this does not mean they discovered more breakthroughs, typically it just means they publish smaller papers and divide their results among them."
Einstein is a sociological creation. His work was built off of others, and has been built off of since. Just becuase people don't have the right spin (though a few might disagree: Linus, Hawking, anyone famous), doesn't mean our rate of discovery changes.
Also, don't map physics, whose new assertions are very hard to test in this scale of space-time, with biology or computer science, where we haven't reached as many practical limits to our rate of learning.
Finally, about the 'Einstein's, open source users should know that just because something is distributed, doesn't mean is doesn't shine brighter.
As for productivity, your view of academia is rather cynical. There are, after all, ideas in these papers, written more frequently by more people.
'thought' is not a fundamental component, but a very high order process.
part of the argumentation here is that the rate of knowledge expansion being exponential implies that you don't know most of it right up until the end.
If you have a 2^N function, doubling every minute, that takes 1 hour to reach 100 units, at what time was it at 50 units?
You're thinking that we are at 30 minutes, and so you don't see how in God's name we're gonna get to 100. In Fact, we around around 50 minutes, see only 0.1%, but only have about 20 years left to see the rest.
"Why should be dying "wrong"? Without death there is no stimultion - get it, the fact that we will die is keeping us alive. Living means having something you can die for. Without this you are really poor."
Slashdot Mirror
TAX CUTS DO NOT MEAN LOST TAX REVENUE. Rather than looking at forcasts, if you look at the decrease in revenues, you'll find that that after the Bush tax cuts they INCREASED! This is because of economic growth.
On the other hand, tax increases stifle economic growth and usually DECREASE revenues.
Also, there is a great deal of misinformation coming from the Left as well. Stop reading NYT Mag or Krugman Op-Eds and you might find it.
Just because there is no crisis scheduled for next year doesn't mean the system can't been changed for the good.
Changing the indexing of increases in benefits is good. The problem is using wage or price inflation to adjust. Not surprisingly, the system was changed to wage inflation in an era of large price inflation. Now, with booming productivity and the subsequent large rate of wage increases, this seems like a bad idea. If you think that this is unfair to change the rate of increase, please explain to me why I deserve 50% more in benefits, in real terms, than today's retirees? Read more about it here.
Another idea is private accounts, which make a great deal of sense in terms of rate-of-return(ROR) on investments. For someone like me (age 23), this could be a difference of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Read more about it here.
Finally, lefties should be interested in transitioning to a private system, because any temporary shortfalls will be funded by general revenues. Most people know that income taxes are progressive, but not so many know that payroll taxes are basically regressive or flat.
Read more about this here, here and here.
This thread is a bit silly in putting "crisis" in quotes. I doubt that the current system would be one devised by the right or the left if done from scratch todat. If it can be improved with changes, why not do it? Is the status quo ROR of 1% so precious?
This is interesting because it doesn't matter what Daily Kos thought it was getting into with an advisory roll. The Dean folks intended to get good, free press from it, and milked the blogs. Read more about it here.
For those who think the issues with the Dept. of Education paying off a journalist are new, it was actually more common under the Clinton administration, and equally bad.
Long Live Kyoto.
Doesn't this show the Climate Change BoogieMan has little to do with humans, and we should focus on making people more ready, generally, to adapt to change?
Wealth makes health, after all.
And I was worried I'd lose the name 'bearded Croat'.
Moving Part: the earth
I know a thing or two about computer vision, and this isn't even close to working well in a general sense.
You can match a face to an image on file, maybe, if the conditions (lighting, perspective, facial hair, glasses) are similar. Often you need the face hand cropped from the background for the training image.
You can maybe extend this for a security system that can say if someone who doesn't belong is entering the system. In this case, you can control all the elements listed above, and the ok-list is small.
We are at least a decade off from the general facial recognition problem: match the id or name to the face of 5 billion people under severe changes in the conditions mentioned above.
That said, the face detection problem is very close to being solved. Instead of classification, this is more of a clustering algorithm, "what parts of this image have faces in them". Take a security camera image, and return cropped subsections of that image with faces. This could then be fed into the yet unsolved recognition problem.
" I dislike both Saddam and the invasion."
the choices were quite descrete:
A stonewalling international community, a currupt sanctions regime, an oppressed people, a barrier to peace in Israel, one more corrupt ME regime.
vs
America & her allies, the only willing actors.
What would you have done? Waited longer? After a decade, why the hell would sanctions/inspections work?
If you showed that there weren't WMD, but that Saddam supported Palestinian bombers, continued to try to top Stalin, and tolerated al Queda opperatives, would the invasion have been a bad idea?
If you think so, then you have WMD blinders on, as if that is the only reason to go.
All I can say about the material issues is that you drastically warp the situation to act like the US stealing from the Iraqis. Actually, it is a lot closer to charity, in losing hundreds of our troops to kill people more than willing to kill and oppress Iraqis, and spending billions on reconstruction. I'm glad you appreciate the efforts.
If you can't see any benefits on the side, from out current efforts, you're pathetic. The humanitarian improvement alone should be adequate justification for those against the war.
You're so busy tracking oil contracts, you ignore all the real reasons to go into Iraq.
Besides, if the Iraqi people get 1% after we've taken everything (which we're not), that is more than they would have gotten under Saddam. You defending a fucking dictator's regime here, for Christ's sake...
so as long as you admit almost every regime in the ME is stealing their people's oil, I'm all for definition. Except there is a problem when applied to Iraq, where we took' oil from Saddam and basically gave it back to the people.
.. which does not have sovereignty over the Iraqi people nor the international authority to administer their resources.
... and a Stalinite dictator does have such sovereignty. Declaring 'international law' is so much fun! Death to America & Israel because... err. they violate international law!
US
Riiiiight
Your 'enemy', eh? Surely you're not referring to your own countrymen!
In this debate, you are on the other side. Does that mean you should be deported to gitmo? No.
Does that mean I will vehemently disagree with you, and call a spade a spade and an opponent an enemy? Yes. After the election, I have little reason to get you on my side as you have little to offer the nation(as do I), and I hope those in charge make the right decisions despite disagreements in the populace.
1) If the companies are qualified, as they appear to be, there should be no complaints. You have presented no argument that these companies are not qualified.
2) There is no stealing of oil, as your original post very clearly implies. The Iraqi government very explicitly owns the oil, and are aiding their own reconstruction by allowing other contractors to service the fields.
3) A great deal of money spent to American firms to get jobs done in Iraq goes towards other secondary firms, or Iraqis themselves.
4) Even those Americans working for American companies are doing something for Iraq, and not just for profit. You can't take the benefit of the job away from the task just because you think the wrong people are being assigned to do it.
To look at the situation with such a warped prism is nothing short of idiocy. You think the situation in Iraq is all about oil, and you are dead wrong. It is about a humanitarian mission for 25 million people. It is about a sea change, a catalyst in a region that is completely backwards. This is about winning the war on terror not by appeasing extremists, but by killing them, and changing the region so that it no longer produces them.
But please continue to call it a mistake and worry about oil contracts. Forget that whole 'vision' thing. As Napoleon once said,"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
contracts to rebuild oil wells are a form of welfare to the Iraqi people. There is a difference between operating on a piece of machinery and owning the product.
If you think it's all about contracts and evil haliburtan, they you haven't been paying attention to the meteoric recovery underway across Iraq.
I'm sure in January after successful elections, you'll be like "ohh, how did that happen". Or "it's all a fox news conspiracy".
Either way, the movers and shakers took out the worlds stinky trash, and like the cold-war, will get little thanks for it. 13 years from now, as islamofascism is on the way out, you'll know who to thank as the catalyst.
Ask yourself from the moral high ground: how long will it take the UN to secure free elections in Iran? How long before it becomes intollerable, from a humanitarian perspective, to not take action in place of those corrupt paper tigers?
Oh, the real reason is so we can steal their oil. And I do mean steal.
[flamebait] you're an idiot [/flamebait]
Who do you think owns Iraqi oil? Try the government and people of Iraq. Who owned it before? Saddam.
There is a very easy way to get oil, and it is called a free market. You pay $50, and you get a barrel of crude.
Actually, the polls show that the majority of Iraqis want the US to stay until the violence stops, most knowing that a sudden pull out would only embolden those who would like to take control, namely Baathist redoubts and those influences from Iran and Syria.
Here is a quick question: if this is all about oil, why didn't the US 'take' Kuwaiti oil in 1991?
Because that's not the way it works. Take a basic economics class for christ's sake.
someone capture it and make a torrent please.
i need to see the suckage ASAP
"Candidate John Kerry has said he will close the tax loophole that makes it advantageous to outsource call centers."
translation: John Kerry will make it so businesses will be punished for seeking lower prices.
trade is NOT zero-sum. We benefit from "outsourcing" even if few have lost jobs. it's better labeled "competative advantage".
Resourceful? All it takes is an unencrypted proxy that's not in a Chinese IP range. No shortage of those around
what percentage of folks with gripes about the government understand what you just said? small.
you don't need blogspot to have a blog. You don't even need a webpage, able to be blocked, to publish.
The difference with blogs is who is publishing, not just the means.
Resourceful people can and do find ways around China's firewall.
But your point is well taken. There are limits to the average person.
try this.
My point is not that I'm an alternative to all free mainstream media, rather that I'm part of a very large system of very free media. Also, don't talk to me about "news", as if that is different than editorials. Everything has a bias. Blogs are good because the bias is obvious, rather than hidden.
I see no reasonable way that the New York Times, for instance, can have a team of editors that has never voted republican, and still claim to be unbiased in the hard news pages.Kinda like those who don't manage to leave their hotel to report the 'hard news'. I would rather get my news from soldiers & Iraqi civilian blogs, when covering that story. Also, get the stick out of your ass. What, are you a journalism prof. or something?
You have 100% freedom with blogs, and they don't have borders.
My examples here and here and in my sig. Visit them and enjoy your freedoms.
well, i'm a master's student, so you're talking about grad school, right?
for my essay, I researched a few programs, and wrote about those that interested me. I stressed those which will have a big impact on society and have a great application in transfer of tech from academia to industry, like security & health care.
I did work in graduate classes at my undergrad, NYU, related to computer vision & AI, which was positive.
I worked hard to get a decent grade(75th percentile) on the CS GRE. [not required, but a plus].
I maintained a good GPA.
I talked to a lot of progressors always, so when I asked for a recommendation, they could reference my "out-of-the-classrom" interests. For me, I picked a few toy problems, and tried to solve them, like sloyd^3. I think the search strategy discussions I had with one prof are why i got accepted.
BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO TO GET INTO GRADSCHOOL IS UNDERGRAD RESEARCH.
That really, really, helps. They want people who will be able to solve hard problems with little direction.
For undergrad, I don't know much...
Kildall
Killed all
wtf?
no wonder he didn't make it. all that bad PR!
Been at RI for over a year now. I highly urge anyone interested in the video to apply. You can _easily_ be working on any of those projects if you just apply yourself.
The video only showed a small fraction of what is to be found at RI.
"Frustly, scientific breakthroughs of the magnitude discussed in this interview don't scale with the number of researchers in the world: otherwise we would have had many more Einsteins in the last 50 years of the 20th century than in the first.
Secondly, I don't think the usual concept of productivity works in research either. Getting more output per unit of input translates into a sicentist publising more papers per year that before. But this does not mean they discovered more breakthroughs, typically it just means they publish smaller papers and divide their results among them."
Einstein is a sociological creation. His work was built off of others, and has been built off of since. Just becuase people don't have the right spin (though a few might disagree: Linus, Hawking, anyone famous), doesn't mean our rate of discovery changes.
Also, don't map physics, whose new assertions are very hard to test in this scale of space-time, with biology or computer science, where we haven't reached as many practical limits to our rate of learning.
Finally, about the 'Einstein's, open source users should know that just because something is distributed, doesn't mean is doesn't shine brighter.
As for productivity, your view of academia is rather cynical. There are, after all, ideas in these papers, written more frequently by more people.
"fundamentals down"
'thought' is not a fundamental component, but a very high order process.
part of the argumentation here is that the rate of knowledge expansion being exponential implies that you don't know most of it right up until the end.
If you have a 2^N function, doubling every minute, that takes 1 hour to reach 100 units, at what time was it at 50 units?
You're thinking that we are at 30 minutes, and so you don't see how in God's name we're gonna get to 100. In Fact, we around around 50 minutes, see only 0.1%, but only have about 20 years left to see the rest.
"Why should be dying "wrong"? Without death there is no stimultion - get it, the fact that we will die is keeping us alive. Living means having something you can die for. Without this you are really poor."
...
That makes no sense.
eating, fcuking, sucking, traveling, reading, watching, playing, fighting, learning, exploring, feeling
these things are associated with living, and would stop with death.
these things would continue, if only because you want them to, if you didn't die.
Death is inevitable, so has more apologists than anything else. I'm not interested in that. I am unapologetically opposed to ceasing to exist.