Re:The IRS is not a *kind* organization...
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 2, Interesting
And if you're not spending it, what are you doing? Investing it -- either directly or putting it in a bank, and they're investing it for you....and what are your investments doing? Buying goods and services (on which sales taxes are paid) while funding ventures intended to make a return.
Also, think of it this way: What's better social policy, encouraging people to spend, or encouraging people to save? Taxing only money that's spent (the former approach) encourages saving, something which has long since been forgotten.
Also, the official FairTax proposal (which the grandparent was not promoting, as their post implied that some items would be "tax free") provides for absolutely no tax-free goods, but includes a refund based on poverty-line cost-of-living for one's family size in one's area; thus, if you're living below the poverty line, you're getting more money back from taxes than you put in -- and people spending far more than the basic cost of necessities on food don't freeload with cheap fillet mignon purchased with tax breaks intended to protect the poor.
It's probably going to cost more because when we say that employers are "part of the transaction", that means they are paying for a large part of the transaction.
A few items:
Individuals cannot be turned down (in the US) for membership in an employer-sponsored group. They can be turned down for individual insurance, and between 20 and 40% are.
See "risk pooling", and its impact on pricing; for "high-risk" individuals (like me, for having a 100% benign growth removed five years ago), this has far more impact than the presence or lack of an employer's partial payment into a plan.
Of my four years of formal education, two classes stand out:
Database design - If you don't know the formal procedure for database normalization, you shouldn't be designing a schema -- not because you'll necessarily use that procedure, but because you know the factors to take into consideration.
System architecture - I think the one most useful class I ever took was the one that stopped the CPU from being a black box. I had an old-school professor, and he went deep -- we started off with digital logic, Karnaugh maps and the like, and by our final could draw the extra data paths needed to be able to implement a new instruction on a MIPS chip.
...and then there are the opportunities one gets access to as a result of having been at school; much of what I know I learned at my internship (being one of the few userspace developers in MontaVista Software's sea of Linux kernel programmers around the tail end of the boom), not an opportunity I'd have acquired on my own.
The system is not at all limited to what one initially thinks of as biowaste; things made from plant materials (including ancient forests, through the intermediate step of being oil) are still organic.:)
Food accounts for much more than you would think of landfill contents (and those are the most conservative numbers I've found; others claim up to 27%). (And if I recall correctly from prior arguments, this system is not at all limited to biowaste; think rubbers, plastics, and the like).
I haven't told Foursquare about my Twitter account, or about my Facebook account, or about anything else. I use it because some places I frequent offer discounts to customers who do; that's it.
So -- by default, Foursquare can't talk to anything else; it's your friends who hook it up to Twitter and such who are being the asses.
Just because someone knows when I'm away from home doesn't mean they know when my German Shepherd is away from home, or my brother-in-law, or my wife -- every one of us keeps different hours, all of us (except the dog) know where the shotgun is, and one of us is a privacy enthusiast who quite certainly doesn't use Twitter. (Also, we live in Texas, where both laws and juries tend to be sympathetic to individuals defending their households with force).
As such, I'm perfectly comfortable being free with my location data -- as if someone tries to use this app's indication that _I_ am away from home as reason to believe that _my house_ is undefended, that person is likely in for a surprise. (Yes, even when I'm out-of-town; we rarely go on vacations together, either).
Now, I'm not saying that everyone's circumstances match mine -- but what I am saying is that the decision on what tools it is or isn't safe for an individual to use is best made by that individual alone, in full consideration of their own personal circumstances.
Eye-strain can often cause temporary headaches and such, but show us solid evidence of permanent effects.
Why? I don't believe that permanent effects exist, and I don't read the phrase "melt your eyes" to imply permanent effects in its colloquial use -- if I'm going to be reading from a device for an extended period of time, I don't want temporary headaches either.
You aren't forced to write in Java, you're forced to write for the JVM
...though in this case it's not quite a standard JVM.
Not all those languages are compatible with Dalvik out-of-the-box, and some of those that do work are known not to work well. (Clojure, for instance, suffers heavily from Dalvik's poor garbage collection performance).
Android doesn't rely on Dalvik doing sandboxing as much as it relies on the OS to handle security constraints; each application gets their own UNIX user and group created, and these are automatically managed to give applications access only to what the user approved for them on install.
This is why availability of the Android NDK doesn't compromise security.
Abso-fucking-lutely not in the spirit of the collection.
Asimov's robots could in almost all cases harm an individual human only at the cost of their own self-destruction, if even then; being in a position to save only one of two humans would destroy them. In the case where the "zeroth law" does make its way into the original stories, the cost of violating the First Law remains severe.
The movie did not respect Asimov's Three Laws, as originally imagined, beyond mere lip service.
Umm. I wouldn't call paper ballots alone a "solution" to the issue of voting security.
There are means for generating cryptographically secured paper ballots -- see PunchScan, for instance, which allows you to take a (paper) receipt with you which you can use to prove that your vote was correctly recorded, but which can't be used to prove how you voted to others.
I think there's no question that a paper voting system which incorporates those features is better than one that does not, so claiming that using paper ballots on its own causes the problem to be "solved" is fallacious.
Frankly, I'd much rather work in a field where I can make enough money to afford MORE than a bicycle as my main form of transportation.
People don't necessarily ride bikes because they're cheap. I'm pretty sure my nice one is worth more than my car right now (no question it's worth more than the motorcycle I'm getting ready to sell), and until I got hooked on one of these I frickin' loved that car. Hell, my bicycle cargo trailer cost more than twice what my first car did... but if it gives me an excuse to go out for a ride with my wife every week, that's money well spent. (Yes, there are lots of cheaper ones... but this one's American-made, has a no-questions-asked lifetime warranty, uses full-sized wheels so the trailer and bikes can share spare tires and tubes... and nobody else has brakes).
I ride because it keeps me in shape both physically and mentally, and (with the electric assist making me faster while still letting me offset time at the gym) doesn't take me away from other things. I turn into a serious grouch when I'm driving, whereas when I'm cycling I show up where I'm going alert and with a sense of accomplishment. Also, I tend to eventually get lazy and fall off a gym regimen, but short of working from home it's harder to stop commuting.
I don't doubt the main point that's being made in this thread, that not everyone's life is set up to make cycling convenient -- but the "cyclists are a bunch of cheapskates" meme is one I've gotten a bit tired of hearing lately; it's part of what some local businesses here are using to fight designation of a bicycle boulevard downtown, though similar projects elsewhere have resulted in massive increases in land value for residential and retail use (and pretty much break even on non-retail commercial values).
I understand the difference. I am (and was in my prior post) intentionally oversimplifying because I believe that the simplification is, in the common case, more useful for making day-to-day decisions.
[...]we have stories here on slashdot infrequently about various published peer-reviewed journals which loudly espouse things which would require the laws of physics to be set on their head with a lasy susan stuck in their ass and spun about until they reached china.
Whereas nutcases posting in forums on the Internet happens so frequently as to fail to be newsworthy whatsoever.
As evidence against the widely accepted wisdom, published in multiple peer-reviewed studies, you point me to... an Internet discussion forum, and then expect me to read all 28 pages (or whatever it takes to get to the meat of the matter) to find whatever supposedly-damning content is supposed to be within?
I don't have the time. If you're going to argue statistics, let your critiques be peer-reviewed and published, please.
Just because something on average will increase your lifespan does not mean that activity is safe! All it means is that the benefits outweigh the probability of incident.
What better metric than "does this increase or decrease my anticipated life expectancy" at which to draw the line? The point of safety, after all, is its impact on longevity -- and choosing not to cycle is a lifestyle choice which clearly has its own risks attached as well.
Seriously though, 100 pounds of weigh behind an unassisted bicycle? I've never ridden a bike with a trailer attached, but doesn't the inertia alone make this a pretty dangerous thing to do? I can't imagine having that sort of weight trailing behind me.
With respect to the inertia, one word: Brakes.
The trailer attaches to a seatpost hitch; on the trailer side of the hitch, there's a ball joint (to let bike and trailer lean separately from each other) and a mechanism with a spring in it which, when compressed, activates hub brakes in both the trailer's wheels. Thus, when the bike is slowing or when the trailer is trying to outrun it going downhill, the brakes activate just enough to keep the trailer in its place.
Beyond that... the trailer really does ride surprisingly well; it's superbly balanced (very little tongue weight) and if not on a climb or starting from a stop, it's almost possible to forget that it's there... at least when it's holding groceries, as opposed to my 75lb Shepherd mix. He has a tendency to shift around enough (turning around to look out the back, I suspect) that while his movement doesn't pose a stability concern, I'm often reminded of his presence.
Just looked it up on Google Maps; the route I took comes to 5.4 miles each way.
Traffic was light in the residential areas I cut through, and moderate on the main road (there's a major highway which needs to be crossed; the bridges over it act as choke points, and are the only part of the ride I'd call difficult).
Frankly, I think the trailer makes things easier rather than harder in most respects -- starting from a complete stop feels a little different (overcoming the initial inertia, or maybe the moment before the trailer's brakes disengage), but cars give more leeway to someone towing a bright yellow reflective trailer with an orange flag waving above it (and for good reason; with the cover on, the cargo and child-carrying models don't necessarily look all that different from a distance), and as this is one of the units with a separate braking system, it didn't have an appreciable impact on stopping distance.
Next weekend will be my first time doing the Costco run with the e-bike (which I'm picking up from the shop tomorrow after some upgrades), and I look forward to seeing how it goes.
I'd like to see you try biking 15-20 miles (each way) through 100+-degree heat without breaking a sweat. Throw in some hills while you're at it, too.
Since we're talking about electric assist, it's a fairly germane challenge.:)
Okay, no, I can't avoid breaking a sweat in the middle of the Texas summer, electric assist or no... though I found that by the end of my first summer commuting my heat tolerance had increased pretty significantly. Fortunately, my employer (in Round Rock; I'm in Austin) provides showers (and unlike the last several places I worked with showers, also free dispensers for conditioner, shampoo and body wash) for use by cycle commuters (and for folks who pay to use the company gym). For companies with such facilities (and I can only think of two buildings I've worked in that didn't provide them... one of which had a gym across the street), the cyclists-as-smelly meme is overblown even in the Texas heat. For those who work downtown, there's also a local bike shop (co-owned by a rather famous cyclist) which offers cycle commuters a place to shower and lock up their bikes for $1/day.
Doesn't work for everyone, certainly, but it works well for me; the extra time I spend on two wheels is stress-relieving (rather than stress-inducing, as is more typically the case on four), and with my higher speeds on the e-bike is fully offset by the time I don't need to spend at the gym.
My point? Just because some parts of the world require additional facilities to make cycle commuting easier doesn't mean that people and companies can't rise to the challenge and get those facilities built. My employer self-insures its health plan; encouraging even partially human-powered commuting among employees is thus very much in the best interest of the corporate pocketbook.
My last haul from Costco consisted of a 55lb bag of dog food, two gallons of orange juice, four gallons of milk, various meats, and quite a lot of miscellany besides. Yes, on a bicycle. My trick? A trailer. Other folks do the same thing with a cargo bike (the Bakfiets and the Xtracycle are two well-respected designs).
People carry all kinds of crazy things on Xtracycles -- I've seen photos of people carrying ladders, planters, other bicycles, etc.
You said that, but you also said that you can actually see in car mirrors. If I say the moon is made of green cheese, are you going to trust me when I invite you for a tasting?
Cutting back on the levity -- it may be that you can see through car mirrors, but with my speeds, posture and lane positioning, I can't. Moreover, there are folks whose day jobs involve studying and teaching best practices for cycling safety, and I've never heard one of them support guidelines in line with your "advice". As such, regardless of your claims as to personal status, it's hard for me to take you seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you're not spending it, what are you doing? Investing it -- either directly or putting it in a bank, and they're investing it for you. ...and what are your investments doing? Buying goods and services (on which sales taxes are paid) while funding ventures intended to make a return.
Also, think of it this way: What's better social policy, encouraging people to spend, or encouraging people to save? Taxing only money that's spent (the former approach) encourages saving, something which has long since been forgotten.
Also, the official FairTax proposal (which the grandparent was not promoting, as their post implied that some items would be "tax free") provides for absolutely no tax-free goods, but includes a refund based on poverty-line cost-of-living for one's family size in one's area; thus, if you're living below the poverty line, you're getting more money back from taxes than you put in -- and people spending far more than the basic cost of necessities on food don't freeload with cheap fillet mignon purchased with tax breaks intended to protect the poor.
A few items:
Of my four years of formal education, two classes stand out:
Database design - If you don't know the formal procedure for database normalization, you shouldn't be designing a schema -- not because you'll necessarily use that procedure, but because you know the factors to take into consideration.
System architecture - I think the one most useful class I ever took was the one that stopped the CPU from being a black box. I had an old-school professor, and he went deep -- we started off with digital logic, Karnaugh maps and the like, and by our final could draw the extra data paths needed to be able to implement a new instruction on a MIPS chip.
...and then there are the opportunities one gets access to as a result of having been at school; much of what I know I learned at my internship (being one of the few userspace developers in MontaVista Software's sea of Linux kernel programmers around the tail end of the boom), not an opportunity I'd have acquired on my own.
Perhaps better put as:
The system is not at all limited to what one initially thinks of as biowaste; things made from plant materials (including ancient forests, through the intermediate step of being oil) are still organic. :)
Food accounts for much more than you would think of landfill contents (and those are the most conservative numbers I've found; others claim up to 27%). (And if I recall correctly from prior arguments, this system is not at all limited to biowaste; think rubbers, plastics, and the like).
I haven't told Foursquare about my Twitter account, or about my Facebook account, or about anything else. I use it because some places I frequent offer discounts to customers who do; that's it.
So -- by default, Foursquare can't talk to anything else; it's your friends who hook it up to Twitter and such who are being the asses.
Just because someone knows when I'm away from home doesn't mean they know when my German Shepherd is away from home, or my brother-in-law, or my wife -- every one of us keeps different hours, all of us (except the dog) know where the shotgun is, and one of us is a privacy enthusiast who quite certainly doesn't use Twitter. (Also, we live in Texas, where both laws and juries tend to be sympathetic to individuals defending their households with force).
As such, I'm perfectly comfortable being free with my location data -- as if someone tries to use this app's indication that _I_ am away from home as reason to believe that _my house_ is undefended, that person is likely in for a surprise. (Yes, even when I'm out-of-town; we rarely go on vacations together, either).
Now, I'm not saying that everyone's circumstances match mine -- but what I am saying is that the decision on what tools it is or isn't safe for an individual to use is best made by that individual alone, in full consideration of their own personal circumstances.
Why? I don't believe that permanent effects exist, and I don't read the phrase "melt your eyes" to imply permanent effects in its colloquial use -- if I'm going to be reading from a device for an extended period of time, I don't want temporary headaches either.
If you're referring to the XKCD I think you are, I hope you realize that it in turn was a pop culture reference itself.
Not all those languages are compatible with Dalvik out-of-the-box, and some of those that do work are known not to work well. (Clojure, for instance, suffers heavily from Dalvik's poor garbage collection performance).
Well -- not so much, really.
Android doesn't rely on Dalvik doing sandboxing as much as it relies on the OS to handle security constraints; each application gets their own UNIX user and group created, and these are automatically managed to give applications access only to what the user approved for them on install.
This is why availability of the Android NDK doesn't compromise security.
Android has a NDK (Native Development Kit); it's possible to write Android apps for the Market in languages other than Java.
You're creating a false dichotomy; for instance, it could be slang for a well-understood phenomena.
Abso-fucking-lutely not in the spirit of the collection.
Asimov's robots could in almost all cases harm an individual human only at the cost of their own self-destruction, if even then; being in a position to save only one of two humans would destroy them. In the case where the "zeroth law" does make its way into the original stories, the cost of violating the First Law remains severe.
The movie did not respect Asimov's Three Laws, as originally imagined, beyond mere lip service.
Umm. I wouldn't call paper ballots alone a "solution" to the issue of voting security.
There are means for generating cryptographically secured paper ballots -- see PunchScan, for instance, which allows you to take a (paper) receipt with you which you can use to prove that your vote was correctly recorded, but which can't be used to prove how you voted to others.
I think there's no question that a paper voting system which incorporates those features is better than one that does not, so claiming that using paper ballots on its own causes the problem to be "solved" is fallacious.
People don't necessarily ride bikes because they're cheap. I'm pretty sure my nice one is worth more than my car right now (no question it's worth more than the motorcycle I'm getting ready to sell), and until I got hooked on one of these I frickin' loved that car. Hell, my bicycle cargo trailer cost more than twice what my first car did... but if it gives me an excuse to go out for a ride with my wife every week, that's money well spent. (Yes, there are lots of cheaper ones... but this one's American-made, has a no-questions-asked lifetime warranty, uses full-sized wheels so the trailer and bikes can share spare tires and tubes... and nobody else has brakes).
I ride because it keeps me in shape both physically and mentally, and (with the electric assist making me faster while still letting me offset time at the gym) doesn't take me away from other things. I turn into a serious grouch when I'm driving, whereas when I'm cycling I show up where I'm going alert and with a sense of accomplishment. Also, I tend to eventually get lazy and fall off a gym regimen, but short of working from home it's harder to stop commuting.
I don't doubt the main point that's being made in this thread, that not everyone's life is set up to make cycling convenient -- but the "cyclists are a bunch of cheapskates" meme is one I've gotten a bit tired of hearing lately; it's part of what some local businesses here are using to fight designation of a bicycle boulevard downtown, though similar projects elsewhere have resulted in massive increases in land value for residential and retail use (and pretty much break even on non-retail commercial values).
I understand the difference. I am (and was in my prior post) intentionally oversimplifying because I believe that the simplification is, in the common case, more useful for making day-to-day decisions.
Whereas nutcases posting in forums on the Internet happens so frequently as to fail to be newsworthy whatsoever.
As evidence against the widely accepted wisdom, published in multiple peer-reviewed studies, you point me to... an Internet discussion forum, and then expect me to read all 28 pages (or whatever it takes to get to the meat of the matter) to find whatever supposedly-damning content is supposed to be within?
I don't have the time. If you're going to argue statistics, let your critiques be peer-reviewed and published, please.
What better metric than "does this increase or decrease my anticipated life expectancy" at which to draw the line? The point of safety, after all, is its impact on longevity -- and choosing not to cycle is a lifestyle choice which clearly has its own risks attached as well.
With respect to the inertia, one word: Brakes.
The trailer attaches to a seatpost hitch; on the trailer side of the hitch, there's a ball joint (to let bike and trailer lean separately from each other) and a mechanism with a spring in it which, when compressed, activates hub brakes in both the trailer's wheels. Thus, when the bike is slowing or when the trailer is trying to outrun it going downhill, the brakes activate just enough to keep the trailer in its place.
Beyond that... the trailer really does ride surprisingly well; it's superbly balanced (very little tongue weight) and if not on a climb or starting from a stop, it's almost possible to forget that it's there... at least when it's holding groceries, as opposed to my 75lb Shepherd mix. He has a tendency to shift around enough (turning around to look out the back, I suspect) that while his movement doesn't pose a stability concern, I'm often reminded of his presence.
Just looked it up on Google Maps; the route I took comes to 5.4 miles each way.
Traffic was light in the residential areas I cut through, and moderate on the main road (there's a major highway which needs to be crossed; the bridges over it act as choke points, and are the only part of the ride I'd call difficult).
Frankly, I think the trailer makes things easier rather than harder in most respects -- starting from a complete stop feels a little different (overcoming the initial inertia, or maybe the moment before the trailer's brakes disengage), but cars give more leeway to someone towing a bright yellow reflective trailer with an orange flag waving above it (and for good reason; with the cover on, the cargo and child-carrying models don't necessarily look all that different from a distance), and as this is one of the units with a separate braking system, it didn't have an appreciable impact on stopping distance.
Next weekend will be my first time doing the Costco run with the e-bike (which I'm picking up from the shop tomorrow after some upgrades), and I look forward to seeing how it goes.
Since we're talking about electric assist, it's a fairly germane challenge. :)
Okay, no, I can't avoid breaking a sweat in the middle of the Texas summer, electric assist or no... though I found that by the end of my first summer commuting my heat tolerance had increased pretty significantly. Fortunately, my employer (in Round Rock; I'm in Austin) provides showers (and unlike the last several places I worked with showers, also free dispensers for conditioner, shampoo and body wash) for use by cycle commuters (and for folks who pay to use the company gym). For companies with such facilities (and I can only think of two buildings I've worked in that didn't provide them... one of which had a gym across the street), the cyclists-as-smelly meme is overblown even in the Texas heat. For those who work downtown, there's also a local bike shop (co-owned by a rather famous cyclist) which offers cycle commuters a place to shower and lock up their bikes for $1/day.
Doesn't work for everyone, certainly, but it works well for me; the extra time I spend on two wheels is stress-relieving (rather than stress-inducing, as is more typically the case on four), and with my higher speeds on the e-bike is fully offset by the time I don't need to spend at the gym.
My point? Just because some parts of the world require additional facilities to make cycle commuting easier doesn't mean that people and companies can't rise to the challenge and get those facilities built. My employer self-insures its health plan; encouraging even partially human-powered commuting among employees is thus very much in the best interest of the corporate pocketbook.
My last haul from Costco consisted of a 55lb bag of dog food, two gallons of orange juice, four gallons of milk, various meats, and quite a lot of miscellany besides. Yes, on a bicycle. My trick? A trailer. Other folks do the same thing with a cargo bike (the Bakfiets and the Xtracycle are two well-respected designs).
People carry all kinds of crazy things on Xtracycles -- I've seen photos of people carrying ladders, planters, other bicycles, etc.
You said that, but you also said that you can actually see in car mirrors. If I say the moon is made of green cheese, are you going to trust me when I invite you for a tasting?
Cutting back on the levity -- it may be that you can see through car mirrors, but with my speeds, posture and lane positioning, I can't. Moreover, there are folks whose day jobs involve studying and teaching best practices for cycling safety, and I've never heard one of them support guidelines in line with your "advice". As such, regardless of your claims as to personal status, it's hard for me to take you seriously.