George Herbert Walker Bush (that's George H. W. Bush) has a son named George Walker Bush (George W. Bush). There are no Senior, Junior titles for people with different names!
The fact that you knew I was referring to GHW Bush indicates that whether or not I gave him a title that breaks certain naming conventions, I was successful at conveying my meaning. Understanding is the essence of language, and grammar is irrelevent so long as understanding takes place. This isn't an English paper.
Of course it is, because you are out of touch with mainstream America. Don't believe me? Look at the election results of 2000, and the current polls. Now who's the nutcase?
This looks more like a personal attack than anything else. You've offered scant evidence of *anything*. I don't know what you want me to see. That Bush won the election? The Florida fiasco? A breakdown of which states each side own? What? Current polls are trending favorably to Kerry, last I checked (admittedly it was yesterday. Mainstream America is fickle).
And of course in the process of doing these things, you've failed to actually respond to my post. Surprise surprise.
Man, there are literally no end to the problems you can solve for *any* linux flavor by browsing Gentoo forums.
I like getting into emerge/urpmi flame wars because nobody takes them seriously any more and they're great fun, but Gentoo and Mandrake forums I've found to be the ones with all the really good information when something's broke for *any* linux flavor.
By your post I'm concluding that it's harmless to let Iran develop nukes, since that's the only way they've got to prevent us from invading them. Self-preservation, then, is their goal.
If they wanted to destroy us, nukes wouldn't be their goal. If they wanted us to invade them, nukes also wouldn't be their goal. So the idea that Iran's developing nukes seems to indicate more that they just want to be left alone than anything else.
Sorry, we just haven't learned the Kaiser's lesson yet, and even after we have, we'll probably need to relearn it in much the same way.
Sad, but I think it's inevitable. We value our nation too much to let triflings like freedom, liberty, or any of that good stuff get in the way of chipping off our shoulders because we're better than the rest.
The dude that spouted all the republican party-line crap seems to have ignored the fact that Osama has a cause because of western imperialism in the region, and Osama got his startup as a terrorist organization paid in $USD.
The Bush family has a loooooong history in both the Middle East and American politics. Why we would ever elect another one of them to office is quite beyond me, but it keeps right on happening.
I liken GW Bush as the President to what would happen if Inspecter Jacques Clousseau were President. In fact, it's really too bad Peter Sellers is dead, because when it's time to make a movie about GW Bush, they need to cast Peter Sellers. Although I bet Eric Idles could do it. And with John Travolta as Osama Bin Laden, I suppose that would make it a movie that would have big name stars and still fail.
NOt to mention that having a plan to invade our allies also gives us something to work from in the case of our allies being conquered and we have to liberate them.
These plans don't get used in their existing form, they're used to determine where our weaknesses may lie, what problems we need to solve to make our strengths stronger, and as educational work to make our strategic/tactical planning better. When/if it becomes time to wage war on space, customized plans for the situation will be drawn up and executed, not off-the-shelf plans.
In the meantime, we'll develop weapons based on these hypothetical plans that are designed to determine our weaknesses and deal with them.
Now, as an exercies for the student, what information would you use to draw up a hypothetical plan to expose our weaknesses so that we can strengthen them? Would you create a fictional world whose relevance to the real world would be arguable but would definitely avoid offending people? Would you use outdated information (such as planning for Nazi nuclear strikes so the EU wouldn't think we were planning to defend against strikes they launched)? Or would you use current state of the known world?
And the missing link? Since both of your posts are spot on, but they've both left out the missing link.
The missing link is that because we're separated by two oceans from any potential front with the USSR, we had to develop a mobile military. We paid the same USSR tax in military strength as the EU, in fact it could be said we paid much more than they, considering how much of their defense in the event of Soviet invasion would have been fought by American forces stationed in Europe. In any case, both continents were developing military to fight the same enemy from their bases, it's just that our base didn't have any hostile countries advanced enough to fight us while the European continent is shared by our former mutual adversary.
Come on, I know you guys have played enough Civilization to grok this pretty easily. First you hope you're on an island big enough to support 4-6 cities. If so, then you destroy any civilizations that might be there. When that's done, you build a mobile military. Your navy is more important than your ground forces. OTOH, if you're on a large continent with multiple civilizations you have to build land-based military, and when it's time to build navy you frequently have to build the cities first, and then build them up. Starting off landlocked is the worst way to start, obviously the US has an advantage in that respect.
You know, businesses already get taxes. I see where the flaw is. You see, having owned and operated 3 businesses (so far), I've already paid a number of taxes that individuals don't have to pay. Didja know that your income gets taxes twice by the feds? Once when it's your company's income, and again when they pay you.
So, since businesses are in fact already paying taxes, if you remove taxes that the rest of us (non-businesses) pay and dump them on the businesses, you arrive at my original post.
Great, now let's get back to the point of my post.
I was trying in a non-obvious way (so that the reader would be required to think about it) that codifying into law beliefs based on Christian ideology is bad if the only reason you hold them is because you are a Christian. So, in order to codify Christian beliefs into law, you need to try to understand the belief.
How I went about it is by pointing out that Ghandi rightfully acknowledged that murder and violence leads inevitably to--guess what!--more murder and violence. If you want a society with less murder and violence, then you code it into law and enforce the law. Hence killing is illegal in this country (and many others) not because it's a religious tenet, but because we do not want a society full of murder and violence.
Does that all make sense to you, now?
Furthermore, Hammurabi predated the written Old Testament, and there is very little evidence that there were any Jews anywhere near Mesopotamia when he codified into law "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" and so forth.:)
Actually, gross profits doesn't exist. It's referred to as gross sales, gross revenue, or just revenue. Profit is always and only income-expenses. I'm being pedantic, I realize.
you would actually wind up pushing a lot of businesses right out of the country
You have no evidence of that.
You also have no evidence your hare-brained scheme will actually work. Sue me for thinking critically and analyzing your proposal, and also considering how many companies have moved from state to state or chosen to setup in specific states or other countries entirely because of tax laws involved. It's a historic and economic fact that overtaxing a group of people will drive them out of the area. A revolution was conducted in this country over that exact issue. Evidence I don't need. Not when all you need to understand what I said is a basic history lesson, a leven of education I achieved in the third grade. Don't know about you, though.
and generally do a lot more harm than good.
Nor of that.
Aha, lack of reading comprehension. I stated how it would cause more harm than good in my first post, but it appears you may not have read it. Since you managed to quote my post, that's solid evidence you did read it, so lack of reading comprehension is the obvious conclusion.
See? that's called "power of reason". Analytical reasoning and problem solving our the purposes of studying math in school. Both of those are usually skills that are established pretty early in school at least to a minimum level to understand what I said.
Aha, so I attacked you. Why would I do that? I provided a thoughtful response to your statement and received curt baseless responses. I expected meaningful dialog, and I got, well, double-standard. You ask me for evidence to criticize your proposal, but you don't provide evidence to back it up. That brings the assumption that your proposal is good. So let's pursue every single proposal anybody dreams up under the assumption it's good, without thinking about it.
Hehm, and here I thought Seattle's problems were a combination of rain, fat women, and bleeding-heart sickos.
I, too, am glad to be out of Seattle. I don't know what ever possessed me in the first place to live there. Dumbest thing I've ever done, moving there was.
It's interesting you mention DuPont. My wife's grandfather is the former CEO of DuPont, iirc. I've found that particular side of her family to be good, solid people. Not always interesting or fun, but always good.
I see that as the whole plan from day one. MS software appears to be designed to be just good enough to do the job and run on machines just good enough to keep ticking over while running the software.
How many companies whose entire focus is on making good software survive? NaN is gone. Um, let's see. SCO (the old one) is gone. Hmmmm, so many, I don't even know where to begin. Loki? Who else.....
The fact is, if you want to make money, you have to focus on making money. The other things you do need to be consistent with the goal of making money. Anything not consistent with that goal is going to be an expenditure of resources that will hurt your ability to make money.
Microsoft has many faults, and the fact that they've built such a shitty product is one of them, but the fact that they've focused on making money is *not* one of them. There are many ways to accomplish the goal of making money, some of them are "good" and some of them are "bad" and some are pure unadulterated evil.
As people who spend money in this economy and who theoretically elect our government we should be focused on guiding companies to making money by doing "good" things and punishing or obliterating them for doing "bad" things. But we should never, ever try to stop them from making money, because making money is critical to our economy. It's what defines capitalism.
You don't want capitalism? I'm willing to entertain alternatives that aren't totalitarian in nature.
Oh yeah, that's because of what we get from the Feds. My last income tax filing showed that my taxable income was so low I didn't owe any taxes, and then a combination of credits and stuff meant I still got several thousand dollars from the feds as a tax return.
The other thing people seem to consider is that thsi tax return, if you applied it to all these other taxes I pay per purchase would likely even out.
The flaws, of course, are obvious to anyone smart enough to question it in the first place. I don't know why they don't see it. I think all the taxes you cited are local taxes, local in that none of them go to the feds at all. The telco taxes might not be, but the rest are. In addition, behind some of those taxes are other taxes (tariffs, really) that get passed onto the consumer as cost of goods.
So yeah, actually, that tax return, considering that approximatley 8.6% of it wound up being spent as sales tax, actually represents a channel of state/local income from the feds. Interesting, isn't it?
I don't think my government's done such a good job keeping the invading barbarians out.
Sorry, that comment about invading barbarians just tickled me because there haven't been any invasions by "barbarians" in the US, well, ever. The US has, however, invaded many "barbarian" nations on its own.
Other than that, you're both right. Or rather, the guy that compared giving money to the government to giving keys and whiskey to a teenager, and you.
The government needs money to provide the services we need from them that would be horrendously bungled and overpriced if we had to pay private companies to provide the same services. On the other hand, giving too much money to the government does create a situation where they can use the money as power over us, and will seek to get even more money. So, a balance is what's needed, really.
Um, what's GROSS PROFITS again? Would you care to run that by me again? I always thought the profit equation my accountant told me was right, you know, profit = sales - expenses.
As someone else pointed out, you're also only suggesting taxing corporations. What about sole proprietorships, partnerships, S-cores, LLCs, and so forth?
Finally, of course, there's the issue that to tax corporations enough to replace income tax, sales tax, and so forth, you would actually wind up pushing a lot of businesses right out of the country, centralize control over all state finances, and generally do a lot more harm than good.
Slashdot Mirror
Make a MMORPG with a spell-checker and I'm there.
George Herbert Walker Bush (that's George H. W. Bush) has a son named George Walker Bush (George W. Bush). There are no Senior, Junior titles for people with different names!
The fact that you knew I was referring to GHW Bush indicates that whether or not I gave him a title that breaks certain naming conventions, I was successful at conveying my meaning. Understanding is the essence of language, and grammar is irrelevent so long as understanding takes place. This isn't an English paper.
Of course it is, because you are out of touch with mainstream America. Don't believe me? Look at the election results of 2000, and the current polls. Now who's the nutcase?
This looks more like a personal attack than anything else. You've offered scant evidence of *anything*. I don't know what you want me to see. That Bush won the election? The Florida fiasco? A breakdown of which states each side own? What? Current polls are trending favorably to Kerry, last I checked (admittedly it was yesterday. Mainstream America is fickle).
And of course in the process of doing these things, you've failed to actually respond to my post. Surprise surprise.
Yes, but Tarzan runs Linux.
Man, there are literally no end to the problems you can solve for *any* linux flavor by browsing Gentoo forums.
I like getting into emerge/urpmi flame wars because nobody takes them seriously any more and they're great fun, but Gentoo and Mandrake forums I've found to be the ones with all the really good information when something's broke for *any* linux flavor.
That's why I also think it would be totally unacceptable for the US to think of doing similar things at all.
Aha, thoughtcrime. I see it everywhere I look. "how could you even think that?"
Separate thoughts from actions, or lose one for fear of the other.
By your post I'm concluding that it's harmless to let Iran develop nukes, since that's the only way they've got to prevent us from invading them. Self-preservation, then, is their goal.
If they wanted to destroy us, nukes wouldn't be their goal. If they wanted us to invade them, nukes also wouldn't be their goal. So the idea that Iran's developing nukes seems to indicate more that they just want to be left alone than anything else.
Sorry, we just haven't learned the Kaiser's lesson yet, and even after we have, we'll probably need to relearn it in much the same way.
Sad, but I think it's inevitable. We value our nation too much to let triflings like freedom, liberty, or any of that good stuff get in the way of chipping off our shoulders because we're better than the rest.
That sounds like a Red Dwarf quote, and I recently reran the whole series and heard that quote, but I didn't watch DNA. Are you sure it's in DNA?
Was that when Bush Sr was head of the CIA?
The dude that spouted all the republican party-line crap seems to have ignored the fact that Osama has a cause because of western imperialism in the region, and Osama got his startup as a terrorist organization paid in $USD.
The Bush family has a loooooong history in both the Middle East and American politics. Why we would ever elect another one of them to office is quite beyond me, but it keeps right on happening.
I liken GW Bush as the President to what would happen if Inspecter Jacques Clousseau were President. In fact, it's really too bad Peter Sellers is dead, because when it's time to make a movie about GW Bush, they need to cast Peter Sellers. Although I bet Eric Idles could do it. And with John Travolta as Osama Bin Laden, I suppose that would make it a movie that would have big name stars and still fail.
NOt to mention that having a plan to invade our allies also gives us something to work from in the case of our allies being conquered and we have to liberate them.
These plans don't get used in their existing form, they're used to determine where our weaknesses may lie, what problems we need to solve to make our strengths stronger, and as educational work to make our strategic/tactical planning better. When/if it becomes time to wage war on space, customized plans for the situation will be drawn up and executed, not off-the-shelf plans.
In the meantime, we'll develop weapons based on these hypothetical plans that are designed to determine our weaknesses and deal with them.
Now, as an exercies for the student, what information would you use to draw up a hypothetical plan to expose our weaknesses so that we can strengthen them? Would you create a fictional world whose relevance to the real world would be arguable but would definitely avoid offending people? Would you use outdated information (such as planning for Nazi nuclear strikes so the EU wouldn't think we were planning to defend against strikes they launched)? Or would you use current state of the known world?
Go go gadget web browser!
And the missing link? Since both of your posts are spot on, but they've both left out the missing link.
The missing link is that because we're separated by two oceans from any potential front with the USSR, we had to develop a mobile military. We paid the same USSR tax in military strength as the EU, in fact it could be said we paid much more than they, considering how much of their defense in the event of Soviet invasion would have been fought by American forces stationed in Europe. In any case, both continents were developing military to fight the same enemy from their bases, it's just that our base didn't have any hostile countries advanced enough to fight us while the European continent is shared by our former mutual adversary.
Come on, I know you guys have played enough Civilization to grok this pretty easily. First you hope you're on an island big enough to support 4-6 cities. If so, then you destroy any civilizations that might be there. When that's done, you build a mobile military. Your navy is more important than your ground forces. OTOH, if you're on a large continent with multiple civilizations you have to build land-based military, and when it's time to build navy you frequently have to build the cities first, and then build them up. Starting off landlocked is the worst way to start, obviously the US has an advantage in that respect.
Lemme guess, you live in WA and I've offended you?
You know, businesses already get taxes. I see where the flaw is. You see, having owned and operated 3 businesses (so far), I've already paid a number of taxes that individuals don't have to pay. Didja know that your income gets taxes twice by the feds? Once when it's your company's income, and again when they pay you.
So, since businesses are in fact already paying taxes, if you remove taxes that the rest of us (non-businesses) pay and dump them on the businesses, you arrive at my original post.
Great, now let's get back to the point of my post.
I was trying in a non-obvious way (so that the reader would be required to think about it) that codifying into law beliefs based on Christian ideology is bad if the only reason you hold them is because you are a Christian. So, in order to codify Christian beliefs into law, you need to try to understand the belief.
How I went about it is by pointing out that Ghandi rightfully acknowledged that murder and violence leads inevitably to--guess what!--more murder and violence. If you want a society with less murder and violence, then you code it into law and enforce the law. Hence killing is illegal in this country (and many others) not because it's a religious tenet, but because we do not want a society full of murder and violence.
Does that all make sense to you, now?
Furthermore, Hammurabi predated the written Old Testament, and there is very little evidence that there were any Jews anywhere near Mesopotamia when he codified into law "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" and so forth. :)
gross profits = total sales
Actually, gross profits doesn't exist. It's referred to as gross sales, gross revenue, or just revenue. Profit is always and only income-expenses. I'm being pedantic, I realize.
you would actually wind up pushing a lot of businesses right out of the country
You have no evidence of that.
You also have no evidence your hare-brained scheme will actually work. Sue me for thinking critically and analyzing your proposal, and also considering how many companies have moved from state to state or chosen to setup in specific states or other countries entirely because of tax laws involved. It's a historic and economic fact that overtaxing a group of people will drive them out of the area. A revolution was conducted in this country over that exact issue. Evidence I don't need. Not when all you need to understand what I said is a basic history lesson, a leven of education I achieved in the third grade. Don't know about you, though.
and generally do a lot more harm than good.
Nor of that.
Aha, lack of reading comprehension. I stated how it would cause more harm than good in my first post, but it appears you may not have read it. Since you managed to quote my post, that's solid evidence you did read it, so lack of reading comprehension is the obvious conclusion.
See? that's called "power of reason". Analytical reasoning and problem solving our the purposes of studying math in school. Both of those are usually skills that are established pretty early in school at least to a minimum level to understand what I said.
Aha, so I attacked you. Why would I do that? I provided a thoughtful response to your statement and received curt baseless responses. I expected meaningful dialog, and I got, well, double-standard. You ask me for evidence to criticize your proposal, but you don't provide evidence to back it up. That brings the assumption that your proposal is good. So let's pursue every single proposal anybody dreams up under the assumption it's good, without thinking about it.
Keywords: without thinking about it.
Acutally, that looks suspiciously like RIAA's new math.
Oh my god! They didn't give me money, that means it costed me money!
Hehm, and here I thought Seattle's problems were a combination of rain, fat women, and bleeding-heart sickos.
I, too, am glad to be out of Seattle. I don't know what ever possessed me in the first place to live there. Dumbest thing I've ever done, moving there was.
It's interesting you mention DuPont. My wife's grandfather is the former CEO of DuPont, iirc. I've found that particular side of her family to be good, solid people. Not always interesting or fun, but always good.
Why does that fucking surprise you? This part:
I see that as the whole plan from day one. MS software appears to be designed to be just good enough to do the job and run on machines just good enough to keep ticking over while running the software.
How many companies whose entire focus is on making good software survive? NaN is gone. Um, let's see. SCO (the old one) is gone. Hmmmm, so many, I don't even know where to begin. Loki? Who else.....
The fact is, if you want to make money, you have to focus on making money. The other things you do need to be consistent with the goal of making money. Anything not consistent with that goal is going to be an expenditure of resources that will hurt your ability to make money.
Microsoft has many faults, and the fact that they've built such a shitty product is one of them, but the fact that they've focused on making money is *not* one of them. There are many ways to accomplish the goal of making money, some of them are "good" and some of them are "bad" and some are pure unadulterated evil.
As people who spend money in this economy and who theoretically elect our government we should be focused on guiding companies to making money by doing "good" things and punishing or obliterating them for doing "bad" things. But we should never, ever try to stop them from making money, because making money is critical to our economy. It's what defines capitalism.
You don't want capitalism? I'm willing to entertain alternatives that aren't totalitarian in nature.
In other news, Jesus Christ is now a card-carrying member of the Church of Satan. When asked, he commented "Microsofties read slashdot, why can't I?"
It could happen, really, it could. ;)
Oh yeah, that's because of what we get from the Feds. My last income tax filing showed that my taxable income was so low I didn't owe any taxes, and then a combination of credits and stuff meant I still got several thousand dollars from the feds as a tax return.
The other thing people seem to consider is that thsi tax return, if you applied it to all these other taxes I pay per purchase would likely even out.
The flaws, of course, are obvious to anyone smart enough to question it in the first place. I don't know why they don't see it. I think all the taxes you cited are local taxes, local in that none of them go to the feds at all. The telco taxes might not be, but the rest are. In addition, behind some of those taxes are other taxes (tariffs, really) that get passed onto the consumer as cost of goods.
So yeah, actually, that tax return, considering that approximatley 8.6% of it wound up being spent as sales tax, actually represents a channel of state/local income from the feds. Interesting, isn't it?
*looks around*
*hears the tejano music*
I don't think my government's done such a good job keeping the invading barbarians out.
Sorry, that comment about invading barbarians just tickled me because there haven't been any invasions by "barbarians" in the US, well, ever. The US has, however, invaded many "barbarian" nations on its own.
Other than that, you're both right. Or rather, the guy that compared giving money to the government to giving keys and whiskey to a teenager, and you.
The government needs money to provide the services we need from them that would be horrendously bungled and overpriced if we had to pay private companies to provide the same services. On the other hand, giving too much money to the government does create a situation where they can use the money as power over us, and will seek to get even more money. So, a balance is what's needed, really.
Um, what's GROSS PROFITS again? Would you care to run that by me again? I always thought the profit equation my accountant told me was right, you know, profit = sales - expenses.
As someone else pointed out, you're also only suggesting taxing corporations. What about sole proprietorships, partnerships, S-cores, LLCs, and so forth?
Finally, of course, there's the issue that to tax corporations enough to replace income tax, sales tax, and so forth, you would actually wind up pushing a lot of businesses right out of the country, centralize control over all state finances, and generally do a lot more harm than good.
You keep using that word. I wonder what your basis for comparison is.
Jared, King of the Goblin City