Whereas, if you are using debit for all your purchases, the moment you make a similar mistake you have actually no money and are getting hit by overdraft fees and the like anyway. Where's the upside?
How much do they learn between eighth and tenth grade? Is it actually likely that the eighth-grade one is something we should all expect to get perfect on in less time than it takes to write a post about, but the tenth-grade one is so hard that a reasonable person couldn't be expected to get a single question right?
That's just the issue: the reason that he took the test in the first place was because he was seeing many students who did well in their earlier grades fail the 10th-grade test.
If the kind of tests he failed is similar to the one linked...
Well, they're not. Not only is the test he took set by a different organisation with a tougher reputation, but it's a 10th-grade test, where as the questions on the site are grade 4 and 8.
So don't panic, you just need to do some prep for the reading comprehension portion.
Well, exactly: the tax rates and ratios to income are comparable, but they are paying more money, which means that they are making more money. What a great time to be rich!
If this was actually an argument—if what you were saying wasn't exactly the basis of my statement—I would point out the silliness of comparing to 1980 which means comparing to right after a decade marked by economic difficulties and reactionary neoconservative policies that drastically cut the rates enjoyed by these folks from their much higher rates during the sustained growth of the 50s and 60s. But I mean, it's not really worth getting into since it seems like you're mostly interested in misreading my posts to get angry.
The wealthiest 1% pay a near-record share of income taxes. And the top 5% are paying nearly 60% of all income taxes. Compare that to the time pre-Bush tax cuts - it's considerably higher. Just about record levels over the last 30 years, in fact.
Perhaps they pay a near-record share of income taxes because they enjoy a near-record share of income?
Of course my city also does leaf and tree pickup for free too. That stuff gets mulched/ composted, etc.
Like power plants and eater treatment somethings are better done on a massive scale
This sounds familiar. My home city already diverts 60% of its waste in between the bin and the landfill and is aiming, through biofuels and power generation from methane, to get that to 90% by 2013—and maybe past that soon after. Once you've built the infrastructure (which, to be fair, is huge, including the largest composting facility in North America) the costs aren't unreasonable, since the byproducts—compost, biofuels, electricity—are all worth good money to industry afterwards. Plus it gets value added through research in collaboration with the local uni.
Nor was there enough interest to enable any of the similar products from third parties to take off in a big way. AFAIK some of these are still going, but they haven't set the world alight. Actually, the closest thing to Hypercard that is a Big Thing is probably Flash - which has the huge advantage that it runs across multiple platforms.
It's worth noting that Flash's predecessor, Shockwave (well, it still exists, but...), owed a lot to hypercard in a really direct way—its scripting language basically started as a hypertalk clone.
Your dream is reality: html5 web storage already works in up-to-date browsers, and can be used with SQL. Not quite as effortless as hypercard, but it's there and it's beginning to see use.
Or perhaps the state of North Dakota could voluntarily enter into a kind of contract that spells out some ways in which the two states will aid one another as well as mechanisms to appoint representatives to modify the contract over time to account for changes of circumstances.
They posted (in paraphrase) "Let's meet behind McDonalds at 2pm and go rioting", then they turned up behind McDonalds at 2pm.
Well, except that they didn't. Not only did these two inciters not show up, but nobody else did either except for the police. Because it was meant as a joke, arguably in poor taste.
What happens if they decide to use bicycles, rollerblades, motorcycles and public transport instead?
Then the wear on the roads and the environmental damage will be considerably less and so maintenance costs will be lower, as will revenues. As a bonus, congestion will be lower and so workers will benefit from either increased productivity or increased leisure time. Where's the problem?
The money supply inflates exponentially, so yes every debt ceiling raise will tend towards being the biggest ever. Let's see them on a dimensionless scale by dividing by something of equal measure, say GDP.
Because of the recession, the numbers would still look somewhat big compared to a GDP that hasn't been growing significantly for a couple of years and spending has had to increase to pick up the slack in the job market. That doesn't mean that raising the limit is a bad idea though, on the contrary.
The great deflation was caused by increased productivity as the US industrialised. It was harmful to already established industrial economies like Great Britain.
Right now, the US and other western countries are suffering from high unemployment which suggests that their productivity is very low, and low incomes, lack of credit, and uncertainty are keeping demand down. At the same time, some commodity prices are rising (which is why people are so scared of inflation, because it's easy to assume that when food prices respond to rising oil that that's what we're seeing). This is basically the opposite of the great deflation, where demand and productivity skyrocketed and prices fell as commodities like steel dropped in price and transportation became cheaper.
Furthermore, deflation would make these issues worse as lenders would have less incentive to invest, making credit harder to get and further reducing demand. Even if deflation was beneficial to developing economies (as it was during the Great Deflation), the US would be in Great Britain's position this time around, along with Europe.
So yeah, deflation wouldn't be too great right now.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Reagan's policies are widely recognized as bringing about the second longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history, surpassed in duration only by the 1990s expansion that began under George H. W. Bush in 1991. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
Only based on an arbitrary measurement designed to support a priori assumptions. Of course Reagan presided over growth, the country was recovering from a recession. But it didn't make up for it: growth in the 1970s and 80s is dwarfed by economic growth under the high-tax postwar regime before Reagan's time. It's also much lower than in the 1990s and even the current recession. http://www.bls.gov/mfp/prodybar.htm
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
I don't spend more money than I take in. I see commercials for people like that who have credit card debt because they couldn't do some simple balancing and see that they were spending more than they made. Why on Earth are we still implementing tax cuts and deficit spending?! Have we given up any hope of ever getting out of the red as a country?
There's fairly sensible economic theory (although it seems politically unfashionable nowadays) that suggests that deficit spending is useful at certain times—and even though the household analogy is a stretch, there are times that households engage in deficit spending too. Like taking a mortgage to buy a house. Or car funding. Or a loan to start a business. Basically, it makes sense to borrow when that debt will help you in the future.
For a nation, things are different. First of all, the terms that countries borrow on (especially when they manage to keep their AAA ratings intact) are much better than us regular folk can get. Secondly, the nation ultimately has a great deal of control over just what the debt means—the US government's debt includes over $1 trillion which it owes to itself, and since the debt is measured in dollars the nation can essentially wave it away through currency manipulation (which would certainly have major side effects, making it a measure of last resort). But more to the point, the income of a nation is almost entirely unlike that of a household. Especially during a recession, increasing government spending in many areas can have a huge effect on future income, because keeping money moving in the economy increases tax revenue and encourages economic growth.
Reagan et al thought that this means that they should lower taxes to make more money in taxes. But not only does that just not make real sense, lowering taxes is, of all of the ways to cause deficits, one of the least likely to have a stimulus affect on the economy, because it encourages saving rather than spending. The central counterintuitive principle which is hidden when you use the metaphor of a household is just how powerfully the spending of a government can make everyone in a country (especially those with less money to start with) richer and better off, which quickly comes back to the government. It's the reason why the government should be running a deficit, but it seems like every politician in the US (and plenty of other countries) doesn't understand this—or is more concerned about creating short-term fear to get re-elected.
What's happening now—tax cuts that reduce revenue, cuts to some of the most beneficial programs that promote demand and growth, and at the same time a failure to accomplish even the misguided goal of short-term deficit reduction—is one of the worst things that can happen. Financial balance might inflict a toll on the economy but it wouldn't prevent future governments from fixing things. Deficit spending might cause short-term difficulties and increased debt but would result in economic growth. Instead, we get the worst of both: increasing debt, economic disaster, further reductions in income as poverty and tax cuts combine making recovery harder and harder, and even more ridiculous political and legal hoops to jump through in the future. Awesome.
If that were true, wouldn't women keep out of pretty much every industry?
But it does.
Women make up less than half of the workforce and more than half of the population: so in fact they are keeping out of "pretty much every industry", although thanks to changing attitudes (AKA less of this kind of crap) over the last century their representation is improving, as are their wages, gradually approaching men's.
That's a useful list. There certainly are a lot of improvements in that list. Two that sound bad, however:
Auto Save: Lock documents
Having a lock feature is nice. But auto-locking the document seems like a nuisance. There are lots of documents that I edit on-and-off on a monthly or yearly schedule. I don't want to have an extra click just because I haven't touched that file in awhile.
Having to click OK sounds no worse than the "old way" which was that you had to manually save your document. So for that specific use-case, it's exactly the same, and it's easy to imagine circumstances where having it set up this way would be a win. 'Course, it'd be nice to see it as a configurable option.
Other Features: Overlay scroll bars
I don't think that's a step in the right direction. Those little 'fade-away lines' make sense on a mobile phone, where space is at a premium. But on a desktop or laptop, I'd rather see the scroll-bars. It gives you something to mouse towards and grab. More importantly, it gives you constant feedback about where you are within a document, as well as information about the size of the document.
As far as I know, Lion's assumption is that you don't mouse towards and grab scroll bars ever because you are using a multitouch device to scroll, and if you aren't I think it'll use the old style (not that I know yet, of course–might be an issue on one of our machines that comes from near the end of life of Apple's nipple scroll-ball mouse but hasn't been replaced with anything less jammed to the point of failure with dust and dirt). It wouldn't surprise me at all to see this as an option in the prefs, too, and although I don't think the extra screen space is a waste I think that your document-size-clue point is a good one.
If when you go to a place where the people and property owners have developed a social contract that agrees to settle disputes in a prescribed way, you can expect to be treated according to that contract, why do you have such a problem with the way Assange has been treated as to mention it repeatedly in this thread?
Oh: your rights come from appeals to philosophy written by others and grounded in the authority of "natural law" whereby white men are always right, especially if they're balding. Perhaps people with whom you have developed a social consensus. It's only fair, since as you pointed out above, you have no innate ability to self-educate.
This "fundamentally flawed technology" includes a podcast section that includes many (presumably hundreds) episodes of Van Buren's. Not a new feature. The other mixtape could easily be added by upload, despite your incredulous second sentence. Or, if you find that the service does not suit your needs, you can just not buy it.
If it were economically feasible, we would have done it by now.
It's not economically feasible because gasoline is cheap. So it's hardly an argument that we couldn't handle gasoline being more expensive; it's just that a lot of things would change.
I'd imagine that a few millimeters of thickness, or grams of weight, will not be a tipping point that will make someone buy an iPad 2. It probably wouldn't have even crossed the minds of anyone other than current iPad owners, like some here who have said it's a bit on the heavy side for long term use
The strongest part of Apple's marketing campaign for the iPad is that people can walk into an Apple store, pick one up and be very impressed by it. All of the "magical" text that people complain about is an attempt to translate this primary moment of realisation into something that can be printed and posted online.
It's not going to be for long if we keep running up debt. Life was good for many people while they were running up tens of thousands of dollars debt on their credit cards. Then came the pain of trying to pay it off.
National finances and government debt do not work the same way as personal credit cards. Your analogy is FUD and almost completely meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
Whereas, if you are using debit for all your purchases, the moment you make a similar mistake you have actually no money and are getting hit by overdraft fees and the like anyway. Where's the upside?
How much do they learn between eighth and tenth grade? Is it actually likely that the eighth-grade one is something we should all expect to get perfect on in less time than it takes to write a post about, but the tenth-grade one is so hard that a reasonable person couldn't be expected to get a single question right?
That's just the issue: the reason that he took the test in the first place was because he was seeing many students who did well in their earlier grades fail the 10th-grade test.
If the kind of tests he failed is similar to the one linked...
Well, they're not. Not only is the test he took set by a different organisation with a tougher reputation, but it's a 10th-grade test, where as the questions on the site are grade 4 and 8.
So don't panic, you just need to do some prep for the reading comprehension portion.
Well, exactly: the tax rates and ratios to income are comparable, but they are paying more money, which means that they are making more money. What a great time to be rich!
If this was actually an argument—if what you were saying wasn't exactly the basis of my statement—I would point out the silliness of comparing to 1980 which means comparing to right after a decade marked by economic difficulties and reactionary neoconservative policies that drastically cut the rates enjoyed by these folks from their much higher rates during the sustained growth of the 50s and 60s. But I mean, it's not really worth getting into since it seems like you're mostly interested in misreading my posts to get angry.
The wealthiest 1% pay a near-record share of income taxes. And the top 5% are paying nearly 60% of all income taxes. Compare that to the time pre-Bush tax cuts - it's considerably higher. Just about record levels over the last 30 years, in fact.
Perhaps they pay a near-record share of income taxes because they enjoy a near-record share of income?
You know, math?
Of course my city also does leaf and tree pickup for free too. That stuff gets mulched/ composted, etc.
Like power plants and eater treatment somethings are better done on a massive scale
This sounds familiar. My home city already diverts 60% of its waste in between the bin and the landfill and is aiming, through biofuels and power generation from methane, to get that to 90% by 2013—and maybe past that soon after. Once you've built the infrastructure (which, to be fair, is huge, including the largest composting facility in North America) the costs aren't unreasonable, since the byproducts—compost, biofuels, electricity—are all worth good money to industry afterwards. Plus it gets value added through research in collaboration with the local uni.
But man, socialism sucks hey?
Nor was there enough interest to enable any of the similar products from third parties to take off in a big way. AFAIK some of these are still going, but they haven't set the world alight. Actually, the closest thing to Hypercard that is a Big Thing is probably Flash - which has the huge advantage that it runs across multiple platforms.
It's worth noting that Flash's predecessor, Shockwave (well, it still exists, but...), owed a lot to hypercard in a really direct way—its scripting language basically started as a hypertalk clone.
Your dream is reality: html5 web storage already works in up-to-date browsers, and can be used with SQL. Not quite as effortless as hypercard, but it's there and it's beginning to see use.
Or perhaps the state of North Dakota could voluntarily enter into a kind of contract that spells out some ways in which the two states will aid one another as well as mechanisms to appoint representatives to modify the contract over time to account for changes of circumstances.
Oh wait, that's the Federal Government.
That's not what happened though, is it?
They posted (in paraphrase) "Let's meet behind McDonalds at 2pm and go rioting", then they turned up behind McDonalds at 2pm.
Well, except that they didn't. Not only did these two inciters not show up, but nobody else did either except for the police. Because it was meant as a joke, arguably in poor taste.
Well, about 30% of commuters in the Netherlands primarily travel by bicycle. So they've got a ways to go yet if tracking is the real goal.
What happens if they decide to use bicycles, rollerblades, motorcycles and public transport instead?
Then the wear on the roads and the environmental damage will be considerably less and so maintenance costs will be lower, as will revenues. As a bonus, congestion will be lower and so workers will benefit from either increased productivity or increased leisure time. Where's the problem?
The money supply inflates exponentially, so yes every debt ceiling raise will tend towards being the biggest ever. Let's see them on a dimensionless scale by dividing by something of equal measure, say GDP.
Because of the recession, the numbers would still look somewhat big compared to a GDP that hasn't been growing significantly for a couple of years and spending has had to increase to pick up the slack in the job market. That doesn't mean that raising the limit is a bad idea though, on the contrary.
The great deflation was caused by increased productivity as the US industrialised. It was harmful to already established industrial economies like Great Britain.
Right now, the US and other western countries are suffering from high unemployment which suggests that their productivity is very low, and low incomes, lack of credit, and uncertainty are keeping demand down. At the same time, some commodity prices are rising (which is why people are so scared of inflation, because it's easy to assume that when food prices respond to rising oil that that's what we're seeing). This is basically the opposite of the great deflation, where demand and productivity skyrocketed and prices fell as commodities like steel dropped in price and transportation became cheaper.
Furthermore, deflation would make these issues worse as lenders would have less incentive to invest, making credit harder to get and further reducing demand. Even if deflation was beneficial to developing economies (as it was during the Great Deflation), the US would be in Great Britain's position this time around, along with Europe.
So yeah, deflation wouldn't be too great right now.
Reagan's policies are widely recognized as bringing about the second longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history, surpassed in duration only by the 1990s expansion that began under George H. W. Bush in 1991. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
Only based on an arbitrary measurement designed to support a priori assumptions. Of course Reagan presided over growth, the country was recovering from a recession. But it didn't make up for it: growth in the 1970s and 80s is dwarfed by economic growth under the high-tax postwar regime before Reagan's time. It's also much lower than in the 1990s and even the current recession. http://www.bls.gov/mfp/prodybar.htm
I don't spend more money than I take in. I see commercials for people like that who have credit card debt because they couldn't do some simple balancing and see that they were spending more than they made. Why on Earth are we still implementing tax cuts and deficit spending?! Have we given up any hope of ever getting out of the red as a country?
There's fairly sensible economic theory (although it seems politically unfashionable nowadays) that suggests that deficit spending is useful at certain times—and even though the household analogy is a stretch, there are times that households engage in deficit spending too. Like taking a mortgage to buy a house. Or car funding. Or a loan to start a business. Basically, it makes sense to borrow when that debt will help you in the future.
For a nation, things are different. First of all, the terms that countries borrow on (especially when they manage to keep their AAA ratings intact) are much better than us regular folk can get. Secondly, the nation ultimately has a great deal of control over just what the debt means—the US government's debt includes over $1 trillion which it owes to itself, and since the debt is measured in dollars the nation can essentially wave it away through currency manipulation (which would certainly have major side effects, making it a measure of last resort). But more to the point, the income of a nation is almost entirely unlike that of a household. Especially during a recession, increasing government spending in many areas can have a huge effect on future income, because keeping money moving in the economy increases tax revenue and encourages economic growth.
Reagan et al thought that this means that they should lower taxes to make more money in taxes. But not only does that just not make real sense, lowering taxes is, of all of the ways to cause deficits, one of the least likely to have a stimulus affect on the economy, because it encourages saving rather than spending. The central counterintuitive principle which is hidden when you use the metaphor of a household is just how powerfully the spending of a government can make everyone in a country (especially those with less money to start with) richer and better off, which quickly comes back to the government. It's the reason why the government should be running a deficit, but it seems like every politician in the US (and plenty of other countries) doesn't understand this—or is more concerned about creating short-term fear to get re-elected.
What's happening now—tax cuts that reduce revenue, cuts to some of the most beneficial programs that promote demand and growth, and at the same time a failure to accomplish even the misguided goal of short-term deficit reduction—is one of the worst things that can happen. Financial balance might inflict a toll on the economy but it wouldn't prevent future governments from fixing things. Deficit spending might cause short-term difficulties and increased debt but would result in economic growth. Instead, we get the worst of both: increasing debt, economic disaster, further reductions in income as poverty and tax cuts combine making recovery harder and harder, and even more ridiculous political and legal hoops to jump through in the future. Awesome.
If that were true, wouldn't women keep out of pretty much every industry?
But it does.
Women make up less than half of the workforce and more than half of the population: so in fact they are keeping out of "pretty much every industry", although thanks to changing attitudes (AKA less of this kind of crap) over the last century their representation is improving, as are their wages, gradually approaching men's.
That's a useful list. There certainly are a lot of improvements in that list. Two that sound bad, however:
Auto Save: Lock documents
Having a lock feature is nice. But auto-locking the document seems like a nuisance. There are lots of documents that I edit on-and-off on a monthly or yearly schedule. I don't want to have an extra click just because I haven't touched that file in awhile.
Having to click OK sounds no worse than the "old way" which was that you had to manually save your document. So for that specific use-case, it's exactly the same, and it's easy to imagine circumstances where having it set up this way would be a win. 'Course, it'd be nice to see it as a configurable option.
Other Features: Overlay scroll bars
I don't think that's a step in the right direction. Those little 'fade-away lines' make sense on a mobile phone, where space is at a premium. But on a desktop or laptop, I'd rather see the scroll-bars. It gives you something to mouse towards and grab. More importantly, it gives you constant feedback about where you are within a document, as well as information about the size of the document.
As far as I know, Lion's assumption is that you don't mouse towards and grab scroll bars ever because you are using a multitouch device to scroll, and if you aren't I think it'll use the old style (not that I know yet, of course–might be an issue on one of our machines that comes from near the end of life of Apple's nipple scroll-ball mouse but hasn't been replaced with anything less jammed to the point of failure with dust and dirt). It wouldn't surprise me at all to see this as an option in the prefs, too, and although I don't think the extra screen space is a waste I think that your document-size-clue point is a good one.
If when you go to a place where the people and property owners have developed a social contract that agrees to settle disputes in a prescribed way, you can expect to be treated according to that contract, why do you have such a problem with the way Assange has been treated as to mention it repeatedly in this thread?
Oh: your rights come from appeals to philosophy written by others and grounded in the authority of "natural law" whereby white men are always right, especially if they're balding. Perhaps people with whom you have developed a social consensus. It's only fair, since as you pointed out above, you have no innate ability to self-educate.
This "fundamentally flawed technology" includes a podcast section that includes many (presumably hundreds) episodes of Van Buren's. Not a new feature. The other mixtape could easily be added by upload, despite your incredulous second sentence. Or, if you find that the service does not suit your needs, you can just not buy it.
I guess Libya needs a proxy power to stage a terrorist or surprise attack on America to gather favour with the spineless cowards you call countrymen.
Well, it's not like former Libyan officials have said that Ghaddafi personally ordered a terrorist attack against Americans or anything.
If it were economically feasible, we would have done it by now.
It's not economically feasible because gasoline is cheap. So it's hardly an argument that we couldn't handle gasoline being more expensive; it's just that a lot of things would change.
I'd imagine that a few millimeters of thickness, or grams of weight, will not be a tipping point that will make someone buy an iPad 2. It probably wouldn't have even crossed the minds of anyone other than current iPad owners, like some here who have said it's a bit on the heavy side for long term use
The strongest part of Apple's marketing campaign for the iPad is that people can walk into an Apple store, pick one up and be very impressed by it. All of the "magical" text that people complain about is an attempt to translate this primary moment of realisation into something that can be printed and posted online.
So yes, being 30% thinner will help sell devices.
It's not going to be for long if we keep running up debt. Life was good for many people while they were running up tens of thousands of dollars debt on their credit cards. Then came the pain of trying to pay it off.
National finances and government debt do not work the same way as personal credit cards. Your analogy is FUD and almost completely meaningless.