Here's the root of the problem: "paid enough to make the job worth their while". The right attitude is, any job you get paid to do is by definition worth your while. If it isn't, you can leave, or you can expect to get fired. Immigrants tend to appreciate their jobs and work hard. It's the same thing I was taught: "whatever you do, do it with all your might." The idea that you should allow yourself to slack because you don't like what you're being paid is just stupid. How do you expect to get paid any more if you aren't doing first-rate work? It reminds me of a friend who worked at Starbucks for minimum wage 10 years ago. He liked the job environment, but he said (I quote) "for minimum wage, they aren't paying me enough to think" and thereby revealed his true calibre. I'd never hire him in a million years, and if I heard an employee say such a thing, I'd fire him.
"Voting with any large group is a statistical process, not an exact one." That's how things are now, but I still believe we should strive for perfection and can approach it. Sure there will always be opportunity for error, but in a properly designed E-voting system, if there is error, the system should provide an accurate measure of how big the error was and whether it affected the outcome. The errors that will always remain are those related to who was eligible to vote, etc. -- but once a vote is cast, it should be possible to count it accurately or, if it is lost, to know it was lost. It is unacceptable for the system to count votes inaccurately or lose them without anyone knowing it. When was the last time your bank made a mistake on your credit card statement? The volume and complexity are far higher, and yet actual mistakes are rare; fraud, when it occurs, can be traced if anybody bothers to do so.
I think you missed what was said. In Germany, you are required to carry your passport AT ALL TIMES, no matter who you are.
This is not true in the UK or the US...there, you are NOT required to carry identification except when crossing borders.
It's not a stupid complaint -- it means that, if you're not carrying ID, the police can arrest you regardless of where you are or what you're doing. It has happened to a friend of mine, too, it's not just a theoretical possibility. They were nice about it, but it was sure inconvenient.
I'll keep in mind what you said about ferries. I came across the Channel Tunnel once and I must say the British were a lot more friendly than the French were on the return. I guess capricious border guards are everywhere.
That would be the people who create products and find buyers for them. Counting stuff, while an important adjunct to business, isn't the same thing. Show me any "financial product" and I can explain how the profit margin is generated through ignorance on the buyer's part. Truly great business has a buyer and a seller, both have near-100% information about the transaction, and both go away happy. Accountants and bankers merely aid this process, they don't create it.
But that's exactly what's interesting about motion CAPTURE.
If you can capture everything in enough detail, then you can record and store the "real" expressions by doing unexpected things to the actors in real life (e.g. Alan Rickman's face at the end of Die Hard, search for "get the right reaction" on that page).
Instead of doing 20 takes to get everyone doing the right thing at the right time, the filmmaker can capture a real-life emotion and then blend it onto an animated character at any arbitrary point in the action. Eventually, actors or studios may develop libraries of such motion capture sequences. Putting it all together on a set at a specific instant in time on cue will no longer be as important.
"for the duration". That's an interesting phrase. Given what we know about the "war on terror" (sic), this is quite likely to be "for the duration of your life" if you're captured. Don't you understand anything? They are no longer just capturing jihadists carrying guns out in some foreign country, they are arresting unarmed American citizens on US soil. (And Canadians, too.) Do people have rights, or not? If most Americans don't believe they do (and it's clear you don't), then the rest of us will eventually have to leave or start a revolution.
COULD work, but won't. First, because Star Trek replicators would be enormous energy hogs, and we don't have cheap energy yet -- quite the contrary. But second, even if part replication were cheap, lawmakers and existing business interests would attempt to regulate the distribution and use of the necessary designs just as they are doing now with music and video. The regulation will be easier, though, because it will be a lot easier to detect transgressors -- those people driving around in pseudo-Ferraris or riding pseudo-Harleys would be visible and audible from a mile away, instead of infringing in their living rooms or in their headphones. This issue is coming, and it's inevitable -- and that's why today's issues with organizations like the RIAA, and copyrights that never expire, and the dysfunctional patent system are even more important than they appear: the answers we come up with will govern much of the developed physical world, not just how we choose to waste our time in personal recreation. And it will be applied worldwide, to people who don't now give a rip about Britney or even know who she is.
The great thing about electronic books is that you can gather them up and keep them, on cheap and convenient storage devices. If even a few people splurge on a $29.95 USB device and keep copies of every electronic text they're given, then changes in such things as the "official version of history" and the "current stance of the scientific establishment" can be tracked and compared with similar collections from around the world. It's a lot better than paper, which requires keeping 30-year-old copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and whatnot. Sure, it's going to be easy for authorities to change their story; but it'll also be easier for those who are interested to catch them at their game.
I was that teenager once, when my older brother had just got his license and my parents let us drive the family car to go to Disneyland by ourselves for the first time (90 minutes' drive across LA). This was way before cell phones. The only stipulation was that we call them when we arrive, so they'd know we got there without any trouble and wouldn't worry all day. Fair enough -- except we forgot to call. If we'd had a cell phone, it would have been fine -- they would have called us, chewed us out, and life would have been grand. As it was, I finally remembered a few hours later just as we were getting in the boat at the Pirates of the Caribbean...I still remember that sinking feeling, knowing that they were never gonna let us do that again. Somehow I don't enjoy anything related to the Pirates of the Caribbean, either.
It's not a problem, it's an elegant and necessary feature of their work. The FSF cannot protect peoples' freedoms by mere talk...they have to use tools that are effective in an arena that is defined by vested interests who do not play according to individual notions of fairness. The tools are laws, licenses, contracts, courts, and lawyers, and the GPL is a fine example of a sharp use of these tools. Again, it isn't a problem, it's what levels the playing field in an arena that would otherwise be strongly tilted against individual freedom.
> what's going to be the Next Big Thing in the minimum-wage kitchen? I'll tell you what. It'll be a completely automated kitchen, where the restaurant manager himself will be a minimum-wage drone who's only there to watch for vandals and call in a tech if something goes wrong. The only things we need that we don't already have are self-cleaning grills and fry vats, and uniform food inputs -- but we're pretty close to having the latter already.
"There's a reason why GM is the leader in hybrid technology." Say what? I see Toyota and Honda leading, Ford following by licensing Toyota's technology, and GM...doing nothing. Help me understand how they are the leader.
You should go read A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. It's full of this kind of stuff, in florid detail. You can even read a sample chapter at the site.
"even though you can put like 500 songs on a DVD"... That's what they should be doing with this, adding value somehow to make the DRM palatable. With what's described, people have to shell out for a new player in order to get...nothing better. Instead, they should include many stylistic versions of the same track, and software that would allow people to interactively change the music to their taste (like being in the studio at the control board). And include takes of the band talking as they create the music, and videos of the tracks played live, all the rest of that kind of stuff. If they could have the musicians do their thing, and use the staggering amount of space on a DVD to bring music lovers closer into more aspects of the process of music-making, they might have something. But I don't think the studios are really targeting music lovers any more.
I think there is a positive correlation between strong religious belief and low crime. Sure you can find counterexamples (you mention one) but however judgemental they may be, religious people tend not to engage in crime. Whether areligious people would enjoy living among them is a completely different issue. I remember being told in Singapore that its government specifically encouraged religions including Christianity, in contrast to surrounding nations, because they found that a religious population has social benefits in low crime and increased productivity. Whether you like religious people or not, I think it's a pretty obvious effect.
I'd bet all those images ARE insignificant, if your browser program has a memory budget measured in megabytes or tens of megabytes. The majority of web images you see on current web pages are very small GIF and JPEG images, with sizes measured in hundreds or a few thousands of bytes. For instance, CNN's home page has about 150 separate graphical elements ranging from 43 bytes to 21K. Altogether they take up just over 200K. If the browser did something really stupid and maintained uncompressed versions of all these images, with separate copies for every occurrence, you MIGHT see this web page require a couple of megabytes. Still not enough to be very significant, but if the browser is doing what you'd expect (caching images on disk, only pulling them into RAM to display a page) you could have tons of tabs open with pages like this and never even approach a megabyte space devoted to images.
The web has mostly changed in having larger and larger numbers of elements on a page, with more complex layouts, and having the elements be more complex things (like embedded Flash objects). There is no good reason a browser needs more than a few megabytes of RAM if all it's doing is showing text and images. I think the reason the memory budgets have gone through the roof is because the browsers marshall so many different software components in order to be ready to handle the various objects (Java applets, ActiveX controls, whatever) they may encounter. That, and general code bloat.
You use your political capital and public relations tools to convince the public to go along with your policy, yes.
And then, after the chips have fallen, if the public sees that you lied and cheated solely to advance your personal ambitions and had no care at all for the nation and its soldiers, you get dragged off to prison.
This is precisely what Bush did with his WMD's in Iraq, except he hasn't been hauled off yet. He's hauling off his opponents instead.
When the Prez says "trust us", and abuses that trust, it should only work once. But the American sheeple re-elected him! Idiots.
I don't have any inside information, but it's obvious to me that if you give information, they will take it and use it. The only way to avoid that is not to give it. By using your credit card with a loyalty card, even once, you are making it possible for them to associate the two. If they aren't doing it already, they will be as soon as someone figures out it's possible. It's all one system in that the same machine reads both cards, so if they're separating the data, it's because they decided to do so.
Actually I think literacy in America was about as high 200 years ago as it is now. People saw that it was part of civic life in a free society, and also necessary for religious instruction (that is, reading the Bible).
See a reference to Cremin's American Education: The Colonial Experience.
I think more people could become programming-literate, perhaps even the majority of people, but I don't think it's going to happen. It takes levels of time and interest that most people don't have, with our culture leaning heavily to lazy consumption rather than vigorous production. There will always be certain people who are fascinated by computers and teach themselves if they can't find anyone to teach them; but there will also be a vast majority of people who don't care how their computer works.
There is also a difference in what it means to be "literate". Someone who can read the newspaper and fill out a job application is "literate", but very few people are authors -- very few spend hours at a time expressing thoughts through the written word. To be a programmer (and have the ability to change a complex system to your liking, or improve it for others) is primarily an exercise of creation, not of consumption. I would venture to guess there aren't that many more people involved in creative generation of ideas in natural language than there are programmers. (You make the call whether most blogs fall into the category of creative expression.)
Yes, and when accidents occur over 90mph, they are horrific. The amount of extra kinetic energy you're packing at 100mph vs. 60mph is huge.
Not to mention the amount of fuel you waste, which is also huge. I drive a car that routinely gets over 50 miles per gallon, but when I first bought it back in 1989 I tried driving at its maximum speed for a while (coincidentally not far from Bakersfield, CA although I live in WA) and it got under 30mpg at that speed.
But to go back to the danger: I once witnessed a traffic backup due to an accident where a car had gone off the left side, ridden up a 45-degree embankment, went airborne and landed upside down on top of other cars going the other way. Ugly.
You cannot escape the fact that going 100mph makes everything much worse when something goes wrong. American drivers are not educated to drive at those speeds, nor to deal with the situations that arise when OTHER people (who fancy themselves race-car drivers, or who may actually be race-car drivers) drive at high speeds. Doing it routinely is stupid, rude, illegal, and cannot be excused.
You'll learn this when you get older, and have a family that cares about you.
The content being requested via AJAX could certainly be static. The point the other two are missing is they think AJAX requires server-side logic to execute to process what the client is sending, probably because the examples they've seen do just that. But the point behind AJAX isn't only to enable a web page to call into server-side logic; you could do this with a page refresh, too.
The point of AJAX is to either send info to the server without refreshing the client page, or to update only a portion of the client page instead of the whole thing, by downloading just the additional/changed content. In either case, AJAX should be more efficient both in bandwidth and in server-side compute resources than reloading entire pages. This is the point you were making, I think, but whether or not the server is producing static content or a dynamically-generated response to the request doesn't make any difference.
The way I read it, 15 companies had to foot real bills from real companies, and the largest of these 15 bills was $300,000. The other companies all paid less, but the total may have been up to (or even more than) $1 million. (Oops, I went and read the article before posting again. Silly me.)
I used to think the same, before Bush was elected a SECOND time. Given all the things he and Cheney pulled in the preceding four years, the fact that the majority of plain Americans would vote for the slimeballs again tells me all I need to know about my fellow citizens. Sure, there are a few shining lights, but they are not the majority. I say this as one who supported Bush over Gore the first time around in 2000 (big mistake).
"Sales taxes, while voluntary, are still taxes." Yes, that occurred to me as I wrote it. When I choose to buy some luxury item like a TV, the taxes are significant and I can choose not to make the transaction -- but they're still taxes. I guess what was in my mind is that, if I categorically disagree with the way the money is being spent, I can find a way around those taxes...through barter, shopping at garage sales, or driving to Canada to buy something. Most of the other taxes I listed, I can't control at all except by, say, choosing not to have a job or choosing not to dwell in a structure.
"fabulous prizes will be funded by taxes". Yes, exactly. I believe the energy issue is the largest one facing us today, and I would support a large fuel tax increase if it could fund alternatives effectively instead of being sunk into boondoggles. In fact, I'm almost to the point of supporting a gas tax even DESPITE knowing that the politicians will waste most of it and pocket the rest. I believe our driving habits are the biggest thing that need to change, and doubling the price of gas (even artificially) is the one sure way of changing them. But of course, nobody I know sees it my way. They think gas prices are too high and taxes should be reduced. I've always thought differently from everyone else, no use changing now.
Yes, it includes medicare/medicaid tax. It doesn't include embedded taxes, no. I was only computing taxes that I pay directly.
Although I'm as concerned as anyone about tax breaks for oil companies and bridges to nowhere, my view is more abstract: if I'm required to pay something whether I like it or not, it's a tax. If it's something I can choose not to pay, it isn't so much.
I view indirect taxes the same way I view the yacht that belongs to the CEO of the company that sells me soap: sure I wish I didn't have to pay for it, but in the end I get to make a value judgement on things I buy. It's either worth it (with all the hidden costs that are unrelated to the real cost of producing it) or it isn't. If I tried to calculate all the unnecessary costs in everything I buy, I'd go crazy.
The original reason for doing the computation was to compare with a relative that lives in Germany. Boy, do they pay taxes. I feel lucky, really. And that's why I posted, because I don't believe any American that says they paid 50% in federal taxes. It just doesn't wash, taxes in this country just aren't that painful. We should be worrying a lot more about real problems like energy consumption and health-care costs than about our tax burden.
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Here's the root of the problem: "paid enough to make the job worth their while".
The right attitude is, any job you get paid to do is by definition worth your while. If it isn't, you can leave, or you can expect to get fired.
Immigrants tend to appreciate their jobs and work hard. It's the same thing I was taught: "whatever you do, do it with all your might."
The idea that you should allow yourself to slack because you don't like what you're being paid is just stupid. How do you expect to get paid any more if you aren't doing first-rate work?
It reminds me of a friend who worked at Starbucks for minimum wage 10 years ago. He liked the job environment, but he said (I quote) "for minimum wage, they aren't paying me enough to think" and thereby revealed his true calibre. I'd never hire him in a million years, and if I heard an employee say such a thing, I'd fire him.
"Voting with any large group is a statistical process, not an exact one."
That's how things are now, but I still believe we should strive for perfection and can approach it.
Sure there will always be opportunity for error, but in a properly designed E-voting system,
if there is error, the system should provide an accurate measure of how big the error was and whether it affected the outcome.
The errors that will always remain are those related to who was eligible to vote, etc. -- but once a vote is cast, it should be possible to count it accurately or, if it is lost, to know it was lost. It is unacceptable for the system to count votes inaccurately or lose them without anyone knowing it. When was the last time your bank made a mistake on your credit card statement? The volume and complexity are far higher, and yet actual mistakes are rare; fraud, when it occurs, can be traced if anybody bothers to do so.
I'll keep in mind what you said about ferries. I came across the Channel Tunnel once and I must say the British were a lot more friendly than the French were on the return. I guess capricious border guards are everywhere.
That would be the people who create products and find buyers for them.
Counting stuff, while an important adjunct to business, isn't the same thing. Show me any "financial product" and I can explain how the profit margin is generated through ignorance on the buyer's part.
Truly great business has a buyer and a seller, both have near-100% information about the transaction, and both go away happy. Accountants and bankers merely aid this process, they don't create it.
But that's exactly what's interesting about motion CAPTURE. If you can capture everything in enough detail, then you can record and store the "real" expressions by doing unexpected things to the actors in real life (e.g. Alan Rickman's face at the end of Die Hard, search for "get the right reaction" on that page). Instead of doing 20 takes to get everyone doing the right thing at the right time, the filmmaker can capture a real-life emotion and then blend it onto an animated character at any arbitrary point in the action. Eventually, actors or studios may develop libraries of such motion capture sequences. Putting it all together on a set at a specific instant in time on cue will no longer be as important.
"for the duration". That's an interesting phrase. Given what we know about the "war on terror" (sic), this is quite likely to be "for the duration of your life" if you're captured.
Don't you understand anything? They are no longer just capturing jihadists carrying guns out in some foreign country, they are arresting unarmed American citizens on US soil. (And Canadians, too.) Do people have rights, or not? If most Americans don't believe they do (and it's clear you don't), then the rest of us will eventually have to leave or start a revolution.
COULD work, but won't. First, because Star Trek replicators would be enormous energy hogs, and we don't have cheap energy yet -- quite the contrary.
But second, even if part replication were cheap, lawmakers and existing business interests would attempt to regulate the distribution and use of the necessary designs just as they are doing now with music and video. The regulation will be easier, though, because it will be a lot easier to detect transgressors -- those people driving around in pseudo-Ferraris or riding pseudo-Harleys would be visible and audible from a mile away, instead of infringing in their living rooms or in their headphones.
This issue is coming, and it's inevitable -- and that's why today's issues with organizations like the RIAA, and copyrights that never expire, and the dysfunctional patent system are even more important than they appear: the answers we come up with will govern much of the developed physical world, not just how we choose to waste our time in personal recreation. And it will be applied worldwide, to people who don't now give a rip about Britney or even know who she is.
The great thing about electronic books is that you can gather them up and keep them, on cheap and convenient storage devices.
If even a few people splurge on a $29.95 USB device and keep copies of every electronic text they're given, then changes in such things as the "official version of history" and the "current stance of the scientific establishment" can be tracked and compared with similar collections from around the world. It's a lot better than paper, which requires keeping 30-year-old copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and whatnot.
Sure, it's going to be easy for authorities to change their story; but it'll also be easier for those who are interested to catch them at their game.
I was that teenager once, when my older brother had just got his license and my parents let us drive the family car to go to Disneyland by ourselves for the first time (90 minutes' drive across LA). This was way before cell phones.
The only stipulation was that we call them when we arrive, so they'd know we got there without any trouble and wouldn't worry all day. Fair enough -- except we forgot to call. If we'd had a cell phone, it would have been fine -- they would have called us, chewed us out, and life would have been grand.
As it was, I finally remembered a few hours later just as we were getting in the boat at the Pirates of the Caribbean...I still remember that sinking feeling, knowing that they were never gonna let us do that again.
Somehow I don't enjoy anything related to the Pirates of the Caribbean, either.
It's not a problem, it's an elegant and necessary feature of their work.
The FSF cannot protect peoples' freedoms by mere talk...they have to use tools that are effective in an arena that is defined by vested interests who do not play according to individual notions of fairness.
The tools are laws, licenses, contracts, courts, and lawyers, and the GPL is a fine example of a sharp use of these tools.
Again, it isn't a problem, it's what levels the playing field in an arena that would otherwise be strongly tilted against individual freedom.
> what's going to be the Next Big Thing in the minimum-wage kitchen?
I'll tell you what. It'll be a completely automated kitchen, where the restaurant manager himself will be a minimum-wage drone who's only there to watch for vandals and call in a tech if something goes wrong.
The only things we need that we don't already have are self-cleaning grills and fry vats, and uniform food inputs -- but we're pretty close to having the latter already.
"There's a reason why GM is the leader in hybrid technology."
Say what? I see Toyota and Honda leading, Ford following by licensing Toyota's technology, and GM...doing nothing. Help me understand how they are the leader.
You should go read A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram.
It's full of this kind of stuff, in florid detail. You can even read a sample chapter at the site.
"even though you can put like 500 songs on a DVD"...
That's what they should be doing with this, adding value somehow to make the DRM palatable. With what's described, people have to shell out for a new player in order to get...nothing better.
Instead, they should include many stylistic versions of the same track, and software that would allow people to interactively change the music to their taste (like being in the studio at the control board). And include takes of the band talking as they create the music, and videos of the tracks played live, all the rest of that kind of stuff. If they could have the musicians do their thing, and use the staggering amount of space on a DVD to bring music lovers closer into more aspects of the process of music-making, they might have something.
But I don't think the studios are really targeting music lovers any more.
I think there is a positive correlation between strong religious belief and low crime.
Sure you can find counterexamples (you mention one) but however judgemental they may be, religious people tend not to engage in crime. Whether areligious people would enjoy living among them is a completely different issue.
I remember being told in Singapore that its government specifically encouraged religions including Christianity, in contrast to surrounding nations, because they found that a religious population has social benefits in low crime and increased productivity. Whether you like religious people or not, I think it's a pretty obvious effect.
I'd bet all those images ARE insignificant, if your browser program has a memory budget measured in megabytes or tens of megabytes. The majority of web images you see on current web pages are very small GIF and JPEG images, with sizes measured in hundreds or a few thousands of bytes. For instance, CNN's home page has about 150 separate graphical elements ranging from 43 bytes to 21K. Altogether they take up just over 200K. If the browser did something really stupid and maintained uncompressed versions of all these images, with separate copies for every occurrence, you MIGHT see this web page require a couple of megabytes. Still not enough to be very significant, but if the browser is doing what you'd expect (caching images on disk, only pulling them into RAM to display a page) you could have tons of tabs open with pages like this and never even approach a megabyte space devoted to images.
The web has mostly changed in having larger and larger numbers of elements on a page, with more complex layouts, and having the elements be more complex things (like embedded Flash objects). There is no good reason a browser needs more than a few megabytes of RAM if all it's doing is showing text and images. I think the reason the memory budgets have gone through the roof is because the browsers marshall so many different software components in order to be ready to handle the various objects (Java applets, ActiveX controls, whatever) they may encounter. That, and general code bloat.
When the Prez says "trust us", and abuses that trust, it should only work once. But the American sheeple re-elected him! Idiots.
I don't have any inside information, but it's obvious to me that if you give information, they will take it and use it. The only way to avoid that is not to give it. By using your credit card with a loyalty card, even once, you are making it possible for them to associate the two.
If they aren't doing it already, they will be as soon as someone figures out it's possible. It's all one system in that the same machine reads both cards, so if they're separating the data, it's because they decided to do so.
I think more people could become programming-literate, perhaps even the majority of people, but I don't think it's going to happen. It takes levels of time and interest that most people don't have, with our culture leaning heavily to lazy consumption rather than vigorous production. There will always be certain people who are fascinated by computers and teach themselves if they can't find anyone to teach them; but there will also be a vast majority of people who don't care how their computer works.
There is also a difference in what it means to be "literate". Someone who can read the newspaper and fill out a job application is "literate", but very few people are authors -- very few spend hours at a time expressing thoughts through the written word. To be a programmer (and have the ability to change a complex system to your liking, or improve it for others) is primarily an exercise of creation, not of consumption. I would venture to guess there aren't that many more people involved in creative generation of ideas in natural language than there are programmers. (You make the call whether most blogs fall into the category of creative expression.)
Not to mention the amount of fuel you waste, which is also huge. I drive a car that routinely gets over 50 miles per gallon, but when I first bought it back in 1989 I tried driving at its maximum speed for a while (coincidentally not far from Bakersfield, CA although I live in WA) and it got under 30mpg at that speed.
But to go back to the danger: I once witnessed a traffic backup due to an accident where a car had gone off the left side, ridden up a 45-degree embankment, went airborne and landed upside down on top of other cars going the other way. Ugly.
You cannot escape the fact that going 100mph makes everything much worse when something goes wrong. American drivers are not educated to drive at those speeds, nor to deal with the situations that arise when OTHER people (who fancy themselves race-car drivers, or who may actually be race-car drivers) drive at high speeds. Doing it routinely is stupid, rude, illegal, and cannot be excused. You'll learn this when you get older, and have a family that cares about you.
The point of AJAX is to either send info to the server without refreshing the client page, or to update only a portion of the client page instead of the whole thing, by downloading just the additional/changed content. In either case, AJAX should be more efficient both in bandwidth and in server-side compute resources than reloading entire pages. This is the point you were making, I think, but whether or not the server is producing static content or a dynamically-generated response to the request doesn't make any difference.
The way I read it, 15 companies had to foot real bills from real companies, and the largest of these 15 bills was $300,000. The other companies all paid less, but the total may have been up to (or even more than) $1 million.
(Oops, I went and read the article before posting again. Silly me.)
I used to think the same, before Bush was elected a SECOND time. Given all the things he and Cheney pulled in the preceding four years, the fact that the majority of plain Americans would vote for the slimeballs again tells me all I need to know about my fellow citizens. Sure, there are a few shining lights, but they are not the majority.
I say this as one who supported Bush over Gore the first time around in 2000 (big mistake).
"fabulous prizes will be funded by taxes". Yes, exactly. I believe the energy issue is the largest one facing us today, and I would support a large fuel tax increase if it could fund alternatives effectively instead of being sunk into boondoggles. In fact, I'm almost to the point of supporting a gas tax even DESPITE knowing that the politicians will waste most of it and pocket the rest. I believe our driving habits are the biggest thing that need to change, and doubling the price of gas (even artificially) is the one sure way of changing them. But of course, nobody I know sees it my way. They think gas prices are too high and taxes should be reduced. I've always thought differently from everyone else, no use changing now.
Although I'm as concerned as anyone about tax breaks for oil companies and bridges to nowhere, my view is more abstract: if I'm required to pay something whether I like it or not, it's a tax. If it's something I can choose not to pay, it isn't so much. I view indirect taxes the same way I view the yacht that belongs to the CEO of the company that sells me soap: sure I wish I didn't have to pay for it, but in the end I get to make a value judgement on things I buy. It's either worth it (with all the hidden costs that are unrelated to the real cost of producing it) or it isn't. If I tried to calculate all the unnecessary costs in everything I buy, I'd go crazy.
The original reason for doing the computation was to compare with a relative that lives in Germany. Boy, do they pay taxes. I feel lucky, really. And that's why I posted, because I don't believe any American that says they paid 50% in federal taxes. It just doesn't wash, taxes in this country just aren't that painful. We should be worrying a lot more about real problems like energy consumption and health-care costs than about our tax burden.