I've been saying this for years. It's fun to dream about, and it's fun to talk about, and while exploring the surface of Mars will probably happen at some point, there will never ever be permanent human habitation of Mars.
... or more like "Mars Direct". Thank goodness. I may not be a huge fan of the idea of permanent settlement on Mars, or this "terraforming" nonsense, but basic exploration has to solve these problems and Bob was writing about the solutions a long time ago. He gets dismissed as a crank from time to time, but it's nice to see something he laid out getting a little push.
Having just escaped from job-hunting hell, I can say that the keyword-matching tricks you have to jump through are a real pain in the ass. There were several jobs that I knew I could do where my keyword-match score probably excluded me. The flip side is that many role descriptions are written by hiring managers (or the hiring manager from years back) and they are frequently not relevant to the role. I am a hiring manager and I write my own job descriptions fresh for each role that I'm hiring for and I validate my assumptions and tech skills with my team before I submit. The interview (first phone, then in-person) is where the best fit can be ascertained. Surrendering the filtering to a bot at the front end seems counterproductive. I've made great hires that were not an exact match on paper but were the best fit when talking and discussing experiences and approaches to problems and solutions.
For my part, I found if I copied the entire text of the job description into my resume (at the end) and changed the font color to invisible, I had a much better chance of matching.
The humanities teaches nothing accept discrimination and indoctrination because it has now relegated itself to an "in crowd" echo chamber and is becoming more and more anti-science as time has gone by.
To be fair, the humanities could have taught you things like "what words mean" and "how to arrange words into coherent sentences", but you've made it abundantly clear that you opted to not show up on those days.
It's a pity. You could have been worth listening to, but now there's just no point, is there?
Yesterday I hacked my lentil soup by drinking it straight from the bowl. I saved water resources and time by being able to consume the soup faster and not having to wash a spoon. Haxx0rRulz.
... of reference phone options at Project Fi. At one time, the HTC One was the Fi reference phone, and I had one, and it was pretty good, but not nearly as good as what they put together with the Motorola Nexus... my current handset. I'm actually pretty happy to get this news. I hope they're able to evolve the Pixel line forward and continue to demonstrate what pure Android can do.
Well, everyone likes having choices, but the problem I see is that when there's something on hulu that I want to see, then something on Amazon, and then something on RedTube, then something on Netflix and then something on (insert streaming service name here), I end up having to buy $15 subscriptions to each one and suddenly I'm paying the going rate for cable all over again.
Your waters are muddy, but since I'm not sure if it's intentional, I'll assume the best of intentions. You left out the cost of service on the national debt, which is something like 200 Billion this year (I think I'm close), and that comes out of the general fund. SocSec and Medicare do not come out of the general fund, and are (in essence, and occasionally adjusted) paid by separately-funded income streams. Your fixation on the word "entitlement" is interesting, because these are the social safety net programs that see that those people who cannot provide sufficiently for themselves (or at all) are not burdening the earning power of their families or costing us all more by addressing that poverty in other ways... crime, unpaid bills, etc.
If you want to see the sick, old and severely disabled also suffer the indignities of absolute, irrevocable suffering, abject poverty and starvation, then by all means fight these "entitlements", but you'll be fighting the working people by encouraging unhealthy living conditions, and less social and economic mobility as they have to shoulder those costs by themselves in an environment where wages have been stagnant for 30 years.
I'll grant you that there must absolutely be people who are on SocSec disability who can and should be working, and any number of crooked ways that medicaid and medicare money is mis-spent or scammed away, but we also have a lot of old people in the country and a lot of them spent their money on their kids and their homes and cars and college all along the way through their earning years, and it's that long-term contribution to the economy in general that "entitles" them to the reassurance that the safety net brings.
So, yeah, "entitlements" account for a lot of spending, but that spending comes into being because of our social contract and because of the economic investment that citizens have made, more than the actual value of the specific payroll deductions that feed or have fed those funding streams.
Those same people in that 40% still pay social security and medicare taxes and all the regular fees of banking (if they have enough money for a bank account) are not discounted for them. Many in that same group have higher cost of capital in the event they need to borrow, and in the event that they don't have access to banking services, they have to use check-cashing or payday lending that takes away even more money in fees.
The people in that group frequently work for hourly wages at or slightly above the minimum wage, making something like an illness or injury even more costly in terms of lost income. Practically speaking, there is a tax on poverty. It helps sustain the cycle of poverty by reducing the ability to save money, develop assets and endure the economic effects of adversities that everyone experiences.
What's more, that same 40% is likely to have taxes withheld even if they are totally refunded, but they are also denied access to that capital throughout the year until they get their refund. Lack of access to their earned money denies that 40% the ability to use that money in more productive ways.
If the social fabric of the country could moderate the effects of these other economic factors, then perhaps something like a "fair tax" would be a lot more fair than it is. For example, re-opening the postal banking system such that cheap-or-no-fee accounts and low-interest (or subsidized interest) lending for postal accounts, and mandatory paid sick days for all wage-earners might be low-cost ways of growing services, reducing earning risk and the cost of capital.
Also, this notion that the very wealthy are more avid consumers the more they make just doesn't bear out. There are only so many houses, cars, boats and planes one can buy. Unused assets like houses, cars, boats and planes cost money simply to keep, and consumption hits a ceiling because one only has one ass to park in any one of those categories at a time. Wealthy households have fewer children, so there are fewer people in the family to spend asset money on in the first place. The relative utility of multiple physical assets drops away, which reduces the inclination to spend further. After that desire to spend goes away, the money sits in the bank or in semi-liquid securities where it does nothing for the economy. Philanthropy can take the place of traditional consumption spending, but it's not at the same scale as you see in the day-to-day consumption of a middle-class household. While wealthy households may demand more in services than poor households, they don't tend to buy services of increasing cost when their income grows. Proportionally, from an income-to-taxable-spending standpoint, the rich spend less than households at the poverty line, incur less risk and have an incredibly low cost of capital when they need to borrow. My point is that even if we were to strengthen the social fabric for those at the poverty line, the very wealthy would still not shoulder the same proportional burden as the lower income-earners under a "fair tax" scheme.
Two points to Hufflepuff for uninspiring use of wikipedia in a slashdot comment!
So, yes, the nominal tax rate is pretty high when compared with the nominal rates of other nations. The effective tax rate (that is, the one that companies actually pay) is nowhere near that. No company files their taxes and pays the full ticket -- there's an endless swath of depreciation schemes, ways to recognize revenue, corporate structuring, deductions and credits that get leveraged throughout.
Not kidding. It's hard to know what tech blueprints are left, though, because you don't have any in-game list of them to refer to. I know I have all the ones for suit and ship and tool, but materials and some of the other ship components are more mysterious. Example: I had Atlas Pass 1 and 3, but not 2. I got 2 last night. You're right, I do have a lot of grind tolerance, and I do like crafting games. In a way, this game is a great grinder because there's a lot to see along the way, but grinding without an outlet (like making and selling) reaches a point of stale-ness. It might be cool if one could re-hab derelict spacecraft and sell them on the galactic market, maybe, as an outlet for the grind.
I've got about 140 hours in on PC, and I may be at the crest of what I can do. I've got my suit and tool and ship maxed out for inventory, with suit and ship maxed out with upgrades. Some 20,000,000 units in the bank. Learned 2 of the 3 alien languages (halfway through the last one, by now). I'm pretty much down to achievements at this point, and jumping from system to system. Visually, it's got a lot of appeal. It's pretty soothing to play -- a bit like "Endless Ocean". I didn't really expect to get great spaceflight mechanics or anything like that. I pretty much grind out on burglarizing Operations Centers and Manufacturing Facilities, looking for new tech blueprints to make a handful of technologies and materials I don't already have... and learn that last language. It's beginning to get a little dull.
So what's it missing?
Well, the NPC aliens are pretty much finger-puppets that iterate through a set of 4-5 interaction templates and then repeat them. They don't walk around anywhere or appear outside of the stock set of buildings.
The economy is pretty simple and even though it is nominally "galactic", you can't find or buy everything at trade terminals. There is seemingly no influence of supply or demand in it.
The animal life is kinda cool to watch and interact with. There ware some truly bizarre creatures out there. But, your only interaction paths seem to be feed and or shoot 'em. It gets tiresome just running around scanning them to 'collect them all'. I've only seen worlds with about a dozen or so animals, so it's not terribly rich.
The flora is pretty much static, but there are some grassy worlds where there's a lot of movement in the terrain, but it's simplified down to just the grass that moves, and everything moves together at the same time in a somewhat unsettling rocking oscillation that I can't handle for more than 5 minutes at a time. There are other games like Crysis where the wind will move leaves in the trees, or your shots will blow away branches on the trees, but we have no detail like that.
There's a flimsy-yet-huge quest string (Atlas) that is casually interesting, but it seems to crop up randomly to remind you that it's there. There's no notion of one thing or achievement or activity that leads you to seek out the next. There are no real side paths and the NPCs don't seem to be involved in any quest activity. It'd do well to have a bunch of quest strings, like a hundred per planet and a hundred per system (maybe rated by difficulty?) that you could sink into.
Each planet is a starter-world. That is, if you started the game afresh, everything you need to max everything out is pretty much right there on that first planet. Yeah, there are variations that force you to leave for other worlds (like toxic atmospheres and/or aggressive sentinels) to advance completely or get new materials, but once you have everything maxed out, 80 percent of all buildings and their loot or capabilities become so useless that they can be ignored. I don't even pick up random loot anymore to sell, because I don't have any way to spend the money and no use for the random crap, regardless. When you have all the upgrades, there's nothing left to build.
It just seems to lack a lot of rich creative content. I'd like to see more ship types, to have the ability to customize the appearance of the ships, too. I'd like to see and maybe build unique buildings. It would be great if I could build my own settlement or compound and be able to advertise it for visitors. Crafting for different types of suit skins and color schemes or ship types would be welcome.. anything you could sell as a finished thing. There just need to be more aliens, everywhere... outside walking around, harvesting resources, sleeping under trees, hunting creatures, visiting monoliths and ruins, shopping at trading posts, drinking in pubs, playing holographic monopoly or something. I've never run into a settlement that has more than three aliens and each on
I have had three Google reference phones, and all have performed pretty well. I like having bone-stock vanilla Android A LOT, and it eventually let me to adopting Project Fi (which has been pretty good, altogether!). So, naturally, I'm a bit bummed that the days of reference Andriod phones are coming to an end. I hope that there's still some kind of Google-preferred offering to upgrade to when my Nexus 6 gets tired, with a reasonably stock flavor of ANdriod. Since Google is my cell provider, I'll just go to whatever they are pointing to. All the same, I can see how having to keep competitive in the handset space was probably not something they were prepared to do, so I understand it.
This thing could do the NYC-London trip at a comfortable speed in about three days. At top speed, two days. I wonder what the operating costs are. It might be a great way to travel with amenities.
Well, the VP role has evolved along with modern politics and foreign policy, too. The VP stands in for the president in ceremonial and diplomatic functions at home and abroad, and is usually the bridge to advice and consent in the senate. The VP frequently gets to say things that the president wants to say, but cannot. The VP is frequently the closest executive sounding-board for decision making that the president has. GWB relied very strongly on Cheney, in the first term for guidance, for example. The VP can (and has been, from time to time) be used as the more direct supervisor of the agencies (the bureaucracy) under the executive branch. Al Gore played that kind of role for Clinton, for example, and was able to make a lot of cost-cutting measures that helped create the projected surplus that we enjoyed when Clinton left the WH. What I'm getting at is the role can be fairly wide open to interpretation and has fewer constraints than that of the chief executive.
Funny, that "ramming" took 18 months, and I recall the GOP whinging about fictitious "death panels", "job-killing (didn't happen), "deficit exploding" (actually reduced the deficit) all along the way and for dozens of months afterwards... no constructive GOP contributions, no new or different ideas to add except "no change, not now, not ever" from the GOP. The PPACA was a total concession from the start to the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Inst, as an alternative to universal gov't health care. Obama stood back and let it happen and constantly invited GOP voices to the conversation. It's still a private health care system, but with some guard rails, some negotiated rules of cost and fair play and some requirements for infrastructure improvements. To this very day, the only GOP proposal has been to repeal the whole thing and no proposals have been made to address the problems the PPACA was passed to address. It's not perfect, by any means. My state has some real problems with making it work, but it can be improved, and it probably will be.
Pedantically, you cite Pelosi who said that "we have to pass the [health care bill] so that you can find out what's in it", and it's a great quote. Pelosi was trying to say that people needed to see it in action and how it worked in order to understand what it does in a practical sense. The neat thing about what people say and write is that we can each interpret the remarks from our own point of view. You certainly took what best fit your worldview, but Pelosi did a good job of clarifying her remark, so I'll take her words for what it meant, thanks.
I usually don't reply to AC posts, but something here needs to be cleared up. Bulk-rate "junk mail" is exactly what is keeping the postal service in the black, given that the number of letters has fallen off dramatically with the advent of electronic communications. Incidentally, bills go via bulk rate postage, too.
If you don't want junk mail in your box, you can contact the people that send it and get taken off their mailing lists. I do this every five years or so. It's a bit time consuming, but it does work.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been saying this for years. It's fun to dream about, and it's fun to talk about, and while exploring the surface of Mars will probably happen at some point, there will never ever be permanent human habitation of Mars.
... or more like "Mars Direct". Thank goodness. I may not be a huge fan of the idea of permanent settlement on Mars, or this "terraforming" nonsense, but basic exploration has to solve these problems and Bob was writing about the solutions a long time ago. He gets dismissed as a crank from time to time, but it's nice to see something he laid out getting a little push.
Having just escaped from job-hunting hell, I can say that the keyword-matching tricks you have to jump through are a real pain in the ass. There were several jobs that I knew I could do where my keyword-match score probably excluded me. The flip side is that many role descriptions are written by hiring managers (or the hiring manager from years back) and they are frequently not relevant to the role. I am a hiring manager and I write my own job descriptions fresh for each role that I'm hiring for and I validate my assumptions and tech skills with my team before I submit. The interview (first phone, then in-person) is where the best fit can be ascertained. Surrendering the filtering to a bot at the front end seems counterproductive. I've made great hires that were not an exact match on paper but were the best fit when talking and discussing experiences and approaches to problems and solutions.
For my part, I found if I copied the entire text of the job description into my resume (at the end) and changed the font color to invisible, I had a much better chance of matching.
Had I the points, I would mod this insightful.
The humanities teaches nothing accept discrimination and indoctrination because it has now relegated itself to an "in crowd" echo chamber and is becoming more and more anti-science as time has gone by.
To be fair, the humanities could have taught you things like "what words mean" and "how to arrange words into coherent sentences", but you've made it abundantly clear that you opted to not show up on those days.
It's a pity. You could have been worth listening to, but now there's just no point, is there?
Yesterday I hacked my lentil soup by drinking it straight from the bowl. I saved water resources and time by being able to consume the soup faster and not having to wash a spoon. Haxx0rRulz.
... of reference phone options at Project Fi. At one time, the HTC One was the Fi reference phone, and I had one, and it was pretty good, but not nearly as good as what they put together with the Motorola Nexus... my current handset. I'm actually pretty happy to get this news. I hope they're able to evolve the Pixel line forward and continue to demonstrate what pure Android can do.
Well, everyone likes having choices, but the problem I see is that when there's something on hulu that I want to see, then something on Amazon, and then something on RedTube, then something on Netflix and then something on (insert streaming service name here), I end up having to buy $15 subscriptions to each one and suddenly I'm paying the going rate for cable all over again.
Your waters are muddy, but since I'm not sure if it's intentional, I'll assume the best of intentions. You left out the cost of service on the national debt, which is something like 200 Billion this year (I think I'm close), and that comes out of the general fund. SocSec and Medicare do not come out of the general fund, and are (in essence, and occasionally adjusted) paid by separately-funded income streams. Your fixation on the word "entitlement" is interesting, because these are the social safety net programs that see that those people who cannot provide sufficiently for themselves (or at all) are not burdening the earning power of their families or costing us all more by addressing that poverty in other ways... crime, unpaid bills, etc.
If you want to see the sick, old and severely disabled also suffer the indignities of absolute, irrevocable suffering, abject poverty and starvation, then by all means fight these "entitlements", but you'll be fighting the working people by encouraging unhealthy living conditions, and less social and economic mobility as they have to shoulder those costs by themselves in an environment where wages have been stagnant for 30 years.
I'll grant you that there must absolutely be people who are on SocSec disability who can and should be working, and any number of crooked ways that medicaid and medicare money is mis-spent or scammed away, but we also have a lot of old people in the country and a lot of them spent their money on their kids and their homes and cars and college all along the way through their earning years, and it's that long-term contribution to the economy in general that "entitles" them to the reassurance that the safety net brings.
So, yeah, "entitlements" account for a lot of spending, but that spending comes into being because of our social contract and because of the economic investment that citizens have made, more than the actual value of the specific payroll deductions that feed or have fed those funding streams.
Thank you for making this point.
Those same people in that 40% still pay social security and medicare taxes and all the regular fees of banking (if they have enough money for a bank account) are not discounted for them. Many in that same group have higher cost of capital in the event they need to borrow, and in the event that they don't have access to banking services, they have to use check-cashing or payday lending that takes away even more money in fees.
The people in that group frequently work for hourly wages at or slightly above the minimum wage, making something like an illness or injury even more costly in terms of lost income. Practically speaking, there is a tax on poverty. It helps sustain the cycle of poverty by reducing the ability to save money, develop assets and endure the economic effects of adversities that everyone experiences.
What's more, that same 40% is likely to have taxes withheld even if they are totally refunded, but they are also denied access to that capital throughout the year until they get their refund. Lack of access to their earned money denies that 40% the ability to use that money in more productive ways.
If the social fabric of the country could moderate the effects of these other economic factors, then perhaps something like a "fair tax" would be a lot more fair than it is. For example, re-opening the postal banking system such that cheap-or-no-fee accounts and low-interest (or subsidized interest) lending for postal accounts, and mandatory paid sick days for all wage-earners might be low-cost ways of growing services, reducing earning risk and the cost of capital.
Also, this notion that the very wealthy are more avid consumers the more they make just doesn't bear out. There are only so many houses, cars, boats and planes one can buy. Unused assets like houses, cars, boats and planes cost money simply to keep, and consumption hits a ceiling because one only has one ass to park in any one of those categories at a time. Wealthy households have fewer children, so there are fewer people in the family to spend asset money on in the first place. The relative utility of multiple physical assets drops away, which reduces the inclination to spend further. After that desire to spend goes away, the money sits in the bank or in semi-liquid securities where it does nothing for the economy. Philanthropy can take the place of traditional consumption spending, but it's not at the same scale as you see in the day-to-day consumption of a middle-class household. While wealthy households may demand more in services than poor households, they don't tend to buy services of increasing cost when their income grows. Proportionally, from an income-to-taxable-spending standpoint, the rich spend less than households at the poverty line, incur less risk and have an incredibly low cost of capital when they need to borrow. My point is that even if we were to strengthen the social fabric for those at the poverty line, the very wealthy would still not shoulder the same proportional burden as the lower income-earners under a "fair tax" scheme.
Tart, technical, and terse. I think you won the internet, today. Well-done!
Had I the points, I would mod you up.
Very well-said, and thank you for saying it. The only true job creator is demand.
Two points to Hufflepuff for uninspiring use of wikipedia in a slashdot comment!
So, yes, the nominal tax rate is pretty high when compared with the nominal rates of other nations. The effective tax rate (that is, the one that companies actually pay) is nowhere near that. No company files their taxes and pays the full ticket -- there's an endless swath of depreciation schemes, ways to recognize revenue, corporate structuring, deductions and credits that get leveraged throughout.
Excellent comment. Thank you for making these points.
... because I am pretty sure my GF's mom has already printed out the whole internet.
Not kidding. It's hard to know what tech blueprints are left, though, because you don't have any in-game list of them to refer to. I know I have all the ones for suit and ship and tool, but materials and some of the other ship components are more mysterious. Example: I had Atlas Pass 1 and 3, but not 2. I got 2 last night. You're right, I do have a lot of grind tolerance, and I do like crafting games. In a way, this game is a great grinder because there's a lot to see along the way, but grinding without an outlet (like making and selling) reaches a point of stale-ness. It might be cool if one could re-hab derelict spacecraft and sell them on the galactic market, maybe, as an outlet for the grind.
I've got about 140 hours in on PC, and I may be at the crest of what I can do. I've got my suit and tool and ship maxed out for inventory, with suit and ship maxed out with upgrades. Some 20,000,000 units in the bank. Learned 2 of the 3 alien languages (halfway through the last one, by now). I'm pretty much down to achievements at this point, and jumping from system to system. Visually, it's got a lot of appeal. It's pretty soothing to play -- a bit like "Endless Ocean". I didn't really expect to get great spaceflight mechanics or anything like that. I pretty much grind out on burglarizing Operations Centers and Manufacturing Facilities, looking for new tech blueprints to make a handful of technologies and materials I don't already have ... and learn that last language. It's beginning to get a little dull.
So what's it missing?
I have had three Google reference phones, and all have performed pretty well. I like having bone-stock vanilla Android A LOT, and it eventually let me to adopting Project Fi (which has been pretty good, altogether!). So, naturally, I'm a bit bummed that the days of reference Andriod phones are coming to an end. I hope that there's still some kind of Google-preferred offering to upgrade to when my Nexus 6 gets tired, with a reasonably stock flavor of ANdriod. Since Google is my cell provider, I'll just go to whatever they are pointing to. All the same, I can see how having to keep competitive in the handset space was probably not something they were prepared to do, so I understand it.
This thing could do the NYC-London trip at a comfortable speed in about three days. At top speed, two days. I wonder what the operating costs are. It might be a great way to travel with amenities.
Well, the VP role has evolved along with modern politics and foreign policy, too. The VP stands in for the president in ceremonial and diplomatic functions at home and abroad, and is usually the bridge to advice and consent in the senate. The VP frequently gets to say things that the president wants to say, but cannot. The VP is frequently the closest executive sounding-board for decision making that the president has. GWB relied very strongly on Cheney, in the first term for guidance, for example. The VP can (and has been, from time to time) be used as the more direct supervisor of the agencies (the bureaucracy) under the executive branch. Al Gore played that kind of role for Clinton, for example, and was able to make a lot of cost-cutting measures that helped create the projected surplus that we enjoyed when Clinton left the WH. What I'm getting at is the role can be fairly wide open to interpretation and has fewer constraints than that of the chief executive.
Funny, that "ramming" took 18 months, and I recall the GOP whinging about fictitious "death panels", "job-killing (didn't happen), "deficit exploding" (actually reduced the deficit) all along the way and for dozens of months afterwards... no constructive GOP contributions, no new or different ideas to add except "no change, not now, not ever" from the GOP. The PPACA was a total concession from the start to the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Inst, as an alternative to universal gov't health care. Obama stood back and let it happen and constantly invited GOP voices to the conversation. It's still a private health care system, but with some guard rails, some negotiated rules of cost and fair play and some requirements for infrastructure improvements. To this very day, the only GOP proposal has been to repeal the whole thing and no proposals have been made to address the problems the PPACA was passed to address. It's not perfect, by any means. My state has some real problems with making it work, but it can be improved, and it probably will be.
Pedantically, you cite Pelosi who said that "we have to pass the [health care bill] so that you can find out what's in it", and it's a great quote. Pelosi was trying to say that people needed to see it in action and how it worked in order to understand what it does in a practical sense. The neat thing about what people say and write is that we can each interpret the remarks from our own point of view. You certainly took what best fit your worldview, but Pelosi did a good job of clarifying her remark, so I'll take her words for what it meant, thanks.
I usually don't reply to AC posts, but something here needs to be cleared up. Bulk-rate "junk mail" is exactly what is keeping the postal service in the black, given that the number of letters has fallen off dramatically with the advent of electronic communications. Incidentally, bills go via bulk rate postage, too.
If you don't want junk mail in your box, you can contact the people that send it and get taken off their mailing lists. I do this every five years or so. It's a bit time consuming, but it does work.
You're making an excellent point, here. Thank you for doing so.