I'd love to know just how many people actually paid out 95% of their income to taxes. Not just how many fell into that tax bracket, but how many of those who did so actually paid that much. I'm sure there were enough loop holes and deductions and credits and stuff that almost nobody did so. That's exactly the reason the "Alteranative Minimum Tax" was enacted - the richest people in the country were finding ways to reduce their tax liabilities to zero, or almost zero!
Hey, if you want to go with a tax structure that produces economic booms, let's look at China. While the rest of the world was tanking a few years ago, China was experiencing double digit growth (or nearly double digit growth), and they continue to do so today.
Curiously enough, the chinese government is slashing income tax rates these days...
Of course, you might suggest that much of the growth has to do with an underemployed work force and prior lack of industralization, but hey! In 1945, there were a lot of people coming back to the USA from the war, plus all the women who now wanted to continue working on top of that (a large underemployed work force), plus there were a lot more farms then than there are now - we were industralized, but we became a LOT more so from the 1950s onward.
The point is - tax structures have to make sense for the environment in which they exist, for the environment that existed 50 years ago. I hate to say it, but: Duh.
Take a look at an electoral college map (i.e., a list of states with electoral votes per state.) It's frightening to realize just how badly a candidate could lose overall, but still take the White House with a few key victories in large swing states.
Presidential candidates currently only need to target roughly 30% of the voters as it is. The real number may be smaller depending on actual percentages of people who vote - I assumed it was the same percentage everywhere which clearly isn't the case.
Without the electoral college, candidates would have to focus on even less than 30% of the voters.
The problem with the electoral college is the popular election of electors. The problems associated with slates of electors and first-past-the-post occur ONLY because electors are popularly elected.
Ultimately, it's up to the state legislatures to decide how electors are choosen, so it doesn't make sense to talk about the inequity of the situation. The system was never meant to work by way of popular voting, and anyways it was intentionally never meant to be equitable even between states (ignoring the popular vote issue for a moment) - that's the whole point as you note in reply - to give smaller states a little bit more leverage over the larger ones, so that politicians wouldn't ignore the smaller states.
So all that statistical analysis is nice and dandy and all, but it COMPLETELY ignores the fundamental reason of why the system was created the way it was in the first place.
People should get a clue as to why it is the way it is before they rush off insisting it be changed.
Further, they might well consider why it wasn't setup from the start to use popular election of electors, and it wasn't just because of issues of communication and transportation...
There hasn't been a substantial discovery in 80 years.
That doesn't mean there can't or won't be any more substantial discoveries.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for new discoveries to be followed by decades of refinement and exploitation before the next big round of discoveries. We're approaching the point where we are due for some new discoveries.
Of course, a lot depends on how you define knowledge discoveries. DNA hasn't been known, even in theory, for 80 years, so one might argue we have discovered new knowledge more recently than that.
All you need is just one breakthrough discovery to open up a whole new world of possibilities for new knowledge.
But truly wierd shit does happen in the universe, at least wierd in so far as we expect things to behave.
Hell, we still haven't even found most of the mass of the universe yet, and you're saying we have such a wonderful grasp of things that we can be confident that what we already know is universally true? *boggle*
First let's find the missing mass, than we can talk about how right or wrong our current understanding is.
The progress of science has gradually reduced the number of entities/objects/forces required to explain all existence. If you don't think electromagnetism is appropriate, then there are exactly two other choices: gravity or "strong" (atomic cohesion bonds, aka physical matter).
Based on our current understanding of the universe, you mean. 1000 years ago they thought they had a pretty good grasp on how the universe worked. Just because we can explain and predict things better than they could 1000 years ago doesn't really guarantee we are any more right than they were. 1000 years from now they will probably laugh at our understanding of the universe and how simplistic and wrong it was.
Personally, I think we're in for some radical changes in our understanding of the universe in the next 50 years.
Dr. S. Fred Singer is an atmospheric physicist who served as the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, chief scientist of the U.S. Department of Transportation; deputy assistant administrator for policy in the Environmental Protection Agency; and deputy assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior. He wrote the books "Global Climate Change," "The Greenhouse Debate Continued," and "Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate."
He was asked the following question: Tell me about global warming. Is there a consensus? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it clearly damaging the environment?
His answer: I think the simplest way to talk about it is to look at it, ask questions: Is the climate actually warming? And then you have to look at the data. And the data that I'm most familiar with, and I think the best data that we have, come from weather satellites because they make observations of the whole globe every day and they're good instruments. They tell us the climate is not warming significantly. So this is not a problem. To attack a non-problem with a measure that would really damage our economy, I think would just be completely irresponsible.
In the past 7 years, I've known four IT workers who got laid off. One found a job right away, another (myself) in two months, the other two took less than six months.
However, I also know a bunch who quit their jobs for various reasons (to travel in Europe, hated coworkers, the job just sucked, moved back to hometown to be closer to family, got a better offer), and one who was outright fired for inappropriate conduct.
But then, I'm not in California and the southeast market apparently didn't get hit quite as bad as the left coast.
So my experience is quite in contradiction to yours and more in line with the earlier post. See, anecdotal evidence is basically useless, you have to go by the numbers for a discussion like this. The problem is, where to get reliable numbers? Apparently not the article linked to...
Actually, there are psychologists and psychiatrists out there who say it is a myth. They are a minority, but it isn't necessarily as dogmatically accepted as you'd have it.
It was, after all, obvious to everyone for millenia that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun orbited the earth.
Just because everybody agrees that something is so doesn't actually make it so. Not even if the experts all agree.
I've never heard of civilization being defined in terms of agriculture. The definitions of civilization that I'm familiar with (and I took a lot of cultural geography classes, so I've got a good background for this) are concerned with urbanization. The tie-in, however, is pretty obvious in that agriculture is what makes cities trivially possible. (Other possibilities exist for the creation of cities, but agriculture is most common and is the easiest one)
Of course, defining civilization in terms of urbanization is really rather a western thing. In China civilization is defined in terms of written language (wen2 hua4 or wen2 ming2, where wen = writing or literacy).
Writing is what defines a people as civilized to the Chinese mind, not cities. Historically, almost every government bureaucrat was a passable poet, and all the most famous poets were goverment officials. That's no coincidence! But such a thing is virtually unheard of in the west.
Larger profile (on the scale we're talking about) is basically irrelevent, since weapons in space will be computer targetted anyways. Whether a ship has a "broadside" of 20 meters or 50 meters isn't going to matter very much to a computer.
Atmospheric landing issues probably won't come into play very often, since space ships will generally dock at space stations, not scramble from the planet surface into space. So that's not a big deal.
Cost may be very well be an issue, but the main reason why fighters in space will not be spherical or any shape other than something similar to current atmospheric fighter shape is because fighter jocks want something that looks cool!
In the Fading Suns universe, it is not uncommon for starship captains to "dump the atmosphere" when preparing for battle, but it has nothing to do with mass and everything to do with unexpected hull ruptures (if you are already suited up for vacuum conditions anyways a hull rupture isn't as problematic) and combustability (no oxygen = no fires).
Even if we did send it, there's no guanatee it would reach those who need it. Look at Somalia. We tried and failed because local warlords wanted to control the distribution, and they absolutely did not want the US to get the food to everybody.
The problem, again, is distribution. Frequently for political reasons. If they would clean up their own politics so delivery was possible then we might just send more to them. But as long as their governments seek to control distribution for political reasons, there's just no point.
And it's not just Africa - look at Iraq or North Korea, where food was sent, but the leaders hoarded it and used it to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. Food as a weapon! And you want we should just blindly send more food to such reigmes? I don't think so...
Huh? Today, in 2004, the USA alone has the potential to grow more than enough food to feed every single person on the planet. The problem is one of distribution.
Distribution problems are 100% unrelated to destruction of wildlife and forest, either as cause or effect.
From the original: Take a rubber sheet that is infinite in size. Expand it. It is no more infinite than before expanding it.
Well, that may be, but given that there are different sizes of infinity, it's not obvious to me that that would necessarily be the case. But, as I said, I'm not a mathematician, so it may very well be true. But if this hypothetical plane is more infinite after stretching than it is before stretching, then the analogy fails.
Now imagine your rubber sheet started out as an infinite plane: it is no more infinite after stretching than before, yet all distances have increased.
Except that there are different sizes of infinity.
There are infinite number of integers, yes? Now map the real numbers to integers on a one-to-one basis. Oops, a one-to-one mapping is not possible! There are more real numbers then there are integers!
So it's not quite as trivial as you suggest.
But them, I'm neither mathematician nor astrophysicist...:-p
It sure is a joke. You have to approach it with a very un-serious attitude, or you won't enjoy it. It's key that the players understand that, too. If they're not backstabbing each other every other second in an attempt to be the only one left in the debriefing room, something is wrong. After all, debriefings always go much smoother if there's no one else there to contradict you:-)
My most cherised memory of Paranoia was when, as GM, I managed to kill off all the characters before the players even finished character creation! w00t! Well, only one clone each, but the players found it both mildly frustrating yet oddly hilarious.
It's best used as one-shot breaks from a regular campaign in another system.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to know just how many people actually paid out 95% of their income to taxes. Not just how many fell into that tax bracket, but how many of those who did so actually paid that much. I'm sure there were enough loop holes and deductions and credits and stuff that almost nobody did so. That's exactly the reason the "Alteranative Minimum Tax" was enacted - the richest people in the country were finding ways to reduce their tax liabilities to zero, or almost zero!
Hey, if you want to go with a tax structure that produces economic booms, let's look at China. While the rest of the world was tanking a few years ago, China was experiencing double digit growth (or nearly double digit growth), and they continue to do so today.
9 _78732.html c ations/pdf/China_Taxation-FAQ.pdf t ion03.htm
Curiously enough, the chinese government is slashing income tax rates these days...
http://english.people.com.cn/200108/29/eng2001082
http://www.kpmg.de/library/english_language_publi
http://www.chinabig.com/en/market/investment/taxa
etc.
Google on the subject if you're interested.
Of course, you might suggest that much of the growth has to do with an underemployed work force and prior lack of industralization, but hey! In 1945, there were a lot of people coming back to the USA from the war, plus all the women who now wanted to continue working on top of that (a large underemployed work force), plus there were a lot more farms then than there are now - we were industralized, but we became a LOT more so from the 1950s onward.
The point is - tax structures have to make sense for the environment in which they exist, for the environment that existed 50 years ago. I hate to say it, but: Duh.
If a volcano erupted in your backyard, what would you do to try and save your house?
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
:-p
My how times change
What I want to know is to what extent do the various climate models take into account variations in solar energy output?
Er, brain fart.
Never mind that part of the comment!
Move along here, nothing to see!
The proper approach is to eliminate popular election of electors. It wasn't the intended method of choosing electors in the first place.
While we're at it, toss the 17th and once again give the state governments a say in the federal government!
Take a look at an electoral college map (i.e., a list of states with electoral votes per state.) It's frightening to realize just how badly a candidate could lose overall, but still take the White House with a few key victories in large swing states.
I did this analysis already:
http://slashdot.org/~eglamkowski/journal/66227
Presidential candidates currently only need to target roughly 30% of the voters as it is. The real number may be smaller depending on actual percentages of people who vote - I assumed it was the same percentage everywhere which clearly isn't the case.
Without the electoral college, candidates would have to focus on even less than 30% of the voters.
The problem is not that the system didn't scale, but that the system was used in a manner for which it was never intended in the first place.
:-p
It wasn't until 1860 that all states finally allowed for popular election of electors, and we all know what happened shortly thereafter
It's been all downhill ever since.
The problem with the electoral college is the popular election of electors. The problems associated with slates of electors and first-past-the-post occur ONLY because electors are popularly elected.
Ultimately, it's up to the state legislatures to decide how electors are choosen, so it doesn't make sense to talk about the inequity of the situation. The system was never meant to work by way of popular voting, and anyways it was intentionally never meant to be equitable even between states (ignoring the popular vote issue for a moment) - that's the whole point as you note in reply - to give smaller states a little bit more leverage over the larger ones, so that politicians wouldn't ignore the smaller states.
So all that statistical analysis is nice and dandy and all, but it COMPLETELY ignores the fundamental reason of why the system was created the way it was in the first place.
People should get a clue as to why it is the way it is before they rush off insisting it be changed.
Further, they might well consider why it wasn't setup from the start to use popular election of electors, and it wasn't just because of issues of communication and transportation...
There hasn't been a substantial discovery in 80 years.
That doesn't mean there can't or won't be any more substantial discoveries.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for new discoveries to be followed by decades of refinement and exploitation before the next big round of discoveries. We're approaching the point where we are due for some new discoveries.
Of course, a lot depends on how you define knowledge discoveries. DNA hasn't been known, even in theory, for 80 years, so one might argue we have discovered new knowledge more recently than that.
All you need is just one breakthrough discovery to open up a whole new world of possibilities for new knowledge.
But truly wierd shit does happen in the universe, at least wierd in so far as we expect things to behave.
Hell, we still haven't even found most of the mass of the universe yet, and you're saying we have such a wonderful grasp of things that we can be confident that what we already know is universally true?
*boggle*
First let's find the missing mass, than we can talk about how right or wrong our current understanding is.
The progress of science has gradually reduced the number of entities/objects/forces required to explain all existence. If you don't think electromagnetism is appropriate, then there are exactly two other choices: gravity or "strong" (atomic cohesion bonds, aka physical matter).
Based on our current understanding of the universe, you mean. 1000 years ago they thought they had a pretty good grasp on how the universe worked. Just because we can explain and predict things better than they could 1000 years ago doesn't really guarantee we are any more right than they were. 1000 years from now they will probably laugh at our understanding of the universe and how simplistic and wrong it was.
Personally, I think we're in for some radical changes in our understanding of the universe in the next 50 years.
Dr. S. Fred Singer is an atmospheric physicist who served as the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, chief scientist of the U.S. Department of Transportation; deputy assistant administrator for policy in the Environmental Protection Agency; and deputy assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior. He wrote the books "Global Climate Change," "The Greenhouse Debate Continued," and "Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate."
0 040422.shtml
He was asked the following question:
Tell me about global warming. Is there a consensus? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it clearly damaging the environment?
His answer:
I think the simplest way to talk about it is to look at it, ask questions: Is the climate actually warming? And then you have to look at the data. And the data that I'm most familiar with, and I think the best data that we have, come from weather satellites because they make observations of the whole globe every day and they're good instruments. They tell us the climate is not warming significantly. So this is not a problem. To attack a non-problem with a measure that would really damage our economy, I think would just be completely irresponsible.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/le2
So here we have a definite expert telling us everything is alright. Who to believe?
In the past 7 years, I've known four IT workers who got laid off. One found a job right away, another (myself) in two months, the other two took less than six months.
However, I also know a bunch who quit their jobs for various reasons (to travel in Europe, hated coworkers, the job just sucked, moved back to hometown to be closer to family, got a better offer), and one who was outright fired for inappropriate conduct.
But then, I'm not in California and the southeast market apparently didn't get hit quite as bad as the left coast.
So my experience is quite in contradiction to yours and more in line with the earlier post. See, anecdotal evidence is basically useless, you have to go by the numbers for a discussion like this. The problem is, where to get reliable numbers? Apparently not the article linked to...
Oh well.
Actually, there are psychologists and psychiatrists out there who say it is a myth. They are a minority, but it isn't necessarily as dogmatically accepted as you'd have it.
It was, after all, obvious to everyone for millenia that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun orbited the earth.
Just because everybody agrees that something is so doesn't actually make it so. Not even if the experts all agree.
http://www.adhdfraud.com/
I've never heard of civilization being defined in terms of agriculture. The definitions of civilization that I'm familiar with (and I took a lot of cultural geography classes, so I've got a good background for this) are concerned with urbanization. The tie-in, however, is pretty obvious in that agriculture is what makes cities trivially possible. (Other possibilities exist for the creation of cities, but agriculture is most common and is the easiest one)
Of course, defining civilization in terms of urbanization is really rather a western thing. In China civilization is defined in terms of written language (wen2 hua4 or wen2 ming2, where wen = writing or literacy).
Writing is what defines a people as civilized to the Chinese mind, not cities. Historically, almost every government bureaucrat was a passable poet, and all the most famous poets were goverment officials. That's no coincidence! But such a thing is virtually unheard of in the west.
Larger profile (on the scale we're talking about) is basically irrelevent, since weapons in space will be computer targetted anyways. Whether a ship has a "broadside" of 20 meters or 50 meters isn't going to matter very much to a computer.
Atmospheric landing issues probably won't come into play very often, since space ships will generally dock at space stations, not scramble from the planet surface into space. So that's not a big deal.
Cost may be very well be an issue, but the main reason why fighters in space will not be spherical or any shape other than something similar to current atmospheric fighter shape is because fighter jocks want something that looks cool!
In the Fading Suns universe, it is not uncommon for starship captains to "dump the atmosphere" when preparing for battle, but it has nothing to do with mass and everything to do with unexpected hull ruptures (if you are already suited up for vacuum conditions anyways a hull rupture isn't as problematic) and combustability (no oxygen = no fires).
All of them.
Even if we did send it, there's no guanatee it would reach those who need it. Look at Somalia. We tried and failed because local warlords wanted to control the distribution, and they absolutely did not want the US to get the food to everybody.
The problem, again, is distribution. Frequently for political reasons. If they would clean up their own politics so delivery was possible then we might just send more to them. But as long as their governments seek to control distribution for political reasons, there's just no point.
And it's not just Africa - look at Iraq or North Korea, where food was sent, but the leaders hoarded it and used it to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. Food as a weapon! And you want we should just blindly send more food to such reigmes? I don't think so...
Huh? Today, in 2004, the USA alone has the potential to grow more than enough food to feed every single person on the planet. The problem is one of distribution.
Distribution problems are 100% unrelated to destruction of wildlife and forest, either as cause or effect.
I believe you mean gorilla warfare - the galatic enemies of cows are, of course, gorillas.
Tsk tsk, what a huge number of moderation points for what is really a rather minor transgression. Rather amazing to me.
And not the spirit of the moderation system either - the moderation guidelines (as if anybody reads them) encourages moderators to mod good posts up, rather than spending a lot of points modding other posts down:
Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check.
Oh well.
This is why I generally avoid the main pages and stick to the journals...
From the original:
Take a rubber sheet that is infinite in size.
Expand it.
It is no more infinite than before expanding it.
Well, that may be, but given that there are different sizes of infinity, it's not obvious to me that that would necessarily be the case.
But, as I said, I'm not a mathematician, so it may very well be true.
But if this hypothetical plane is more infinite after stretching than it is before stretching, then the analogy fails.
Now imagine your rubber sheet started out as an infinite plane: it is no more infinite after stretching than before, yet all distances have increased.
:-p
Except that there are different sizes of infinity.
There are infinite number of integers, yes?
Now map the real numbers to integers on a one-to-one basis. Oops, a one-to-one mapping is not possible! There are more real numbers then there are integers!
So it's not quite as trivial as you suggest.
But them, I'm neither mathematician nor astrophysicist...
It sure is a joke. You have to approach it with a very un-serious attitude, or you won't enjoy it. It's key that the players understand that, too. If they're not backstabbing each other every other second in an attempt to be the only one left in the debriefing room, something is wrong. After all, debriefings always go much smoother if there's no one else there to contradict you :-)
My most cherised memory of Paranoia was when, as GM, I managed to kill off all the characters before the players even finished character creation! w00t! Well, only one clone each, but the players found it both mildly frustrating yet oddly hilarious.
It's best used as one-shot breaks from a regular campaign in another system.