Here's the funny thing. If everyone's aware of what everyone else is doing, then it becomes much harder to blackmail people. Imagine if everyone knew just exactly who smoked pot, or who slept with who?
Social mores are largely about maintaining an image and an illusion, and privacy is the primary tool in that toolbox. The face we put forward vs. who we actually are can differ only by how well we manage our privacy. Blackmail only works when this difference is sufficiently large.
I imagine if we lost most of our privacy overnight (and that seems to be the direction we're going), it will take a long time for society to catch up. But, within a couple of generations, I imagine we would adapt to the new transparency and it will be harder to intimidate people due to unequal access to "private" information.
In the meantime, I'll cling to what remains of my privacy, since it's more comfortable for me than the alternative at this point.
Still a miracle of clarity compared to Credence Clearwater Revival. Why are they always singing about a bathroom on the right? And what's this about watching "Lorraine go down on me?" I guess that's better than Aerosmith. At least they're not loving an alligator.
""I'm not going to lie: I used to smoke crack in there," said one homeless woman, Veronyka Cordner, nodding toward the toilet behind Pike Place Market. "But I won't even go inside that thing now. It's disgusting.""
I don't know why, but that reminded me of this old gem.
What a brilliant shell game. Of course, they're only taxed on the portion they spend, but not what their nest egg grew by. And then, they'll only be taxed on retail expenditures, not what they spend on new investments.
Here's a simple example, though it's not perfect.
Suppose I have $1B in investments and I earn 5% a year in dividends. That's $50M in dividends. Now if I spend it all $50M on retail expenditures, then the FairTax.org argument holds. That seems unlikely.
In reality, I am more likely to spend only a fraction of that on retail expenditures, and the rest will be reinvested. From what I can tell, items such as land and houses and businesses are not retail expenditures subject to the sales tax. If I'm pulling in $50M in dividends, I'd imagine the vast majority of it goes to some form of long term investment.
Now, I used dividends in that example as opposed to capital gains to avoid arguments and handwaving about when capital gains get realized, etc. The two are largely interchangeable, since their tax rates are the same. The main point is that it's unlikely that the wealthy will spend all amount that their wealth grew by at the retail counter. They wouldn't remain wealthy if they did.
Oh really? You realize one of the richest people in the world drives a Lincoln Town Car? You'd think if you're earning billions, you might spend more than $30K on a car. (Ok, so he apparently upgraded to a Cadillac. Big spender, that guy.)
The wealthy will pay a much smaller percentage of their income in taxes with a consumption-oriented tax, because they spend a much, much smaller percentage of their income. Most of their wealth is, as it should be, tied up in investments.
Now, the people that have a bunch of money dumped on them (the newly rich) will spend a whole bunch, but they won't be rich forever, and certainly won't remain wealthy. But just how many lottery winners are there out there?
Also, FICA is a payroll tax. It taxes wages but not other sources of income. Capital gains are also subject to a much lower tax rate than ordinary income.
The short, short version is that consumption taxes (sales taxes and the like) tend to be regressive, and so a progressive income tax helps balance that out. The reason is that the more you earn, the less you spend, when expressed as a proportion of your wage. If Person B makes 10x as much as Person A, they're unlikely to buy 10x as expensive a car, nor are they likely to use 10x as much gasoline.
In fact, the more you earn, the more likely you are to invest your additional earnings back into the economy. This makes your wealth more dependent on the functioning and stability of the economy and on the infrastructure. That's where things like highways, military, police, firemen, regulatory agencies, etc. all come in. Thus, it makes sense for higher earners to pay a higher marginal rate, since they benefit more from the government's services.
If you think about it, even social services such as health care, Social Security and welfare benefit the wealthy, since it stabilizes society and provides a more stable business climate.
I'm personally not against Social Security, but calling it a fingernail's slice is perhaps disingenuous. The total rate paid into Social Security and Medicare is 15.3%. Half of it is hidden from you--the employee pays half and the employer pays half--but that's really just a shell game. If you ever self-employ, you'll realize the full sting.
The cap on the payroll tax is at $102,000 this year, so a person earning that wage or more will pay $15606 into Social Security. If this person is not self-employed, then only $7803 of that will appear on their W-2. But, really, $15606 was paid in. That's money that could have been put towards paying employees directly or funding a pension plan.
Interestingly, that's about the same as the 401(k) cap.
I happen to hit both caps every year, and I expect to get much more from my 401(k) than from Social Security. That's fine though, since they're meant for different purposes. My 401(k) is for me. Social Security is a safety net for everyone. My quality of life is better when society functions better and has a reasonable baseline standard of living, and that's the Social in Social Security.
Yep, I'm a bleeding heart liberal. Whatcha gonna make of it?
Yeah, my first computer had 256 bytes of CPU addressable memory, and 16K of VRAM. (The TI-99/4A.) Before that I learned to program the Commodore VIC-20 with a whopping 5K bytes of RAM.
(Ok, by then I had also programmed Commodore PETs (mostly 4032s), along with the Commodore 64 and a CoCo 2. But I wasn't very good at it. I was only 8. But BASIC is pretty easy to pick up. Imagine the fun when I discovered The Peanut (the PCjr).)
Re:Shell as a general-purpose language...
on
Bash Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
Further proof that Real Programmers can write FORTRAN in any language.
Not only that, but also the fact that driver code paths are traversed much less often per line of code than core code across the entire user base, by a couple orders of magnitude. Thus they get much, much less testing.
Heap on top of that the rather poor state of documentation for many peripherals, not to mention their quirkiness and bugginess, and it's surprising drivers work at all!
The Windows XP installer won't read from it. You *can* however tell the Windows XP CD-ROM installer to read SATA drivers from a floppy. Trust me, I was there a mere month ago with my wife's computer when we had to install the SATA drivers.
Unfortunately, the GP confuses power with energy efficiency. Energy usage is what matters for things like carbon footprint.
If a device uses slightly more power but over much less time, it ends up more energy efficient. Less time spent waiting for the disk makes the system overall more energy efficient even if it burns more peak power.
That said, there are some workloads that could keep an SSD from sleeping, thus increasing power without decreasing run time, and that indeed is less energy efficient.
I'm envisioning a frat-party like scene with a bunch of MS execs around him cheering him on waving their fists in the air shouting "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" as he does this...
Slashdot Mirror
They don't care. They don't have to. They're the phone company.
Here's the funny thing. If everyone's aware of what everyone else is doing, then it becomes much harder to blackmail people. Imagine if everyone knew just exactly who smoked pot, or who slept with who?
Social mores are largely about maintaining an image and an illusion, and privacy is the primary tool in that toolbox. The face we put forward vs. who we actually are can differ only by how well we manage our privacy. Blackmail only works when this difference is sufficiently large.
I imagine if we lost most of our privacy overnight (and that seems to be the direction we're going), it will take a long time for society to catch up. But, within a couple of generations, I imagine we would adapt to the new transparency and it will be harder to intimidate people due to unequal access to "private" information.
In the meantime, I'll cling to what remains of my privacy, since it's more comfortable for me than the alternative at this point.
What a novel concept! If I don't Google myself, I will never show up on any searches! I think there may be prior art.
I guess if you want to be a real ass, you can post links to everything but the final verdict.
Still a miracle of clarity compared to Credence Clearwater Revival. Why are they always singing about a bathroom on the right? And what's this about watching "Lorraine go down on me?" I guess that's better than Aerosmith. At least they're not loving an alligator.
I like to get DEVO and Gary Numan to talk to each other. Specifically, Jocko Homo vs. Conversation.
See?
I don't know why, but that reminded me of this old gem.
What a brilliant shell game. Of course, they're only taxed on the portion they spend, but not what their nest egg grew by. And then, they'll only be taxed on retail expenditures, not what they spend on new investments.
Here's a simple example, though it's not perfect.
Suppose I have $1B in investments and I earn 5% a year in dividends. That's $50M in dividends. Now if I spend it all $50M on retail expenditures, then the FairTax.org argument holds. That seems unlikely.
In reality, I am more likely to spend only a fraction of that on retail expenditures, and the rest will be reinvested. From what I can tell, items such as land and houses and businesses are not retail expenditures subject to the sales tax. If I'm pulling in $50M in dividends, I'd imagine the vast majority of it goes to some form of long term investment.
Now, I used dividends in that example as opposed to capital gains to avoid arguments and handwaving about when capital gains get realized, etc. The two are largely interchangeable, since their tax rates are the same. The main point is that it's unlikely that the wealthy will spend all amount that their wealth grew by at the retail counter. They wouldn't remain wealthy if they did.
--Joe
Oh really? You realize one of the richest people in the world drives a Lincoln Town Car? You'd think if you're earning billions, you might spend more than $30K on a car. (Ok, so he apparently upgraded to a Cadillac. Big spender, that guy.)
The wealthy will pay a much smaller percentage of their income in taxes with a consumption-oriented tax, because they spend a much, much smaller percentage of their income. Most of their wealth is, as it should be, tied up in investments.
Now, the people that have a bunch of money dumped on them (the newly rich) will spend a whole bunch, but they won't be rich forever, and certainly won't remain wealthy. But just how many lottery winners are there out there?
Also, FICA is a payroll tax. It taxes wages but not other sources of income. Capital gains are also subject to a much lower tax rate than ordinary income.
Guess what the high-earners pull in a lot of?
The short, short version is that consumption taxes (sales taxes and the like) tend to be regressive, and so a progressive income tax helps balance that out. The reason is that the more you earn, the less you spend, when expressed as a proportion of your wage. If Person B makes 10x as much as Person A, they're unlikely to buy 10x as expensive a car, nor are they likely to use 10x as much gasoline.
In fact, the more you earn, the more likely you are to invest your additional earnings back into the economy. This makes your wealth more dependent on the functioning and stability of the economy and on the infrastructure. That's where things like highways, military, police, firemen, regulatory agencies, etc. all come in. Thus, it makes sense for higher earners to pay a higher marginal rate, since they benefit more from the government's services.
If you think about it, even social services such as health care, Social Security and welfare benefit the wealthy, since it stabilizes society and provides a more stable business climate.
I'm personally not against Social Security, but calling it a fingernail's slice is perhaps disingenuous. The total rate paid into Social Security and Medicare is 15.3%. Half of it is hidden from you--the employee pays half and the employer pays half--but that's really just a shell game. If you ever self-employ, you'll realize the full sting.
The cap on the payroll tax is at $102,000 this year, so a person earning that wage or more will pay $15606 into Social Security. If this person is not self-employed, then only $7803 of that will appear on their W-2. But, really, $15606 was paid in. That's money that could have been put towards paying employees directly or funding a pension plan.
Interestingly, that's about the same as the 401(k) cap.
I happen to hit both caps every year, and I expect to get much more from my 401(k) than from Social Security. That's fine though, since they're meant for different purposes. My 401(k) is for me. Social Security is a safety net for everyone. My quality of life is better when society functions better and has a reasonable baseline standard of living, and that's the Social in Social Security.
Yep, I'm a bleeding heart liberal. Whatcha gonna make of it?
Heck... Super Mario 2 had something like this. Or if you jump to literature... there's the ring from the Lord of the Ring trilogy.
Yeah, my first computer had 256 bytes of CPU addressable memory, and 16K of VRAM. (The TI-99/4A.) Before that I learned to program the Commodore VIC-20 with a whopping 5K bytes of RAM.
(Ok, by then I had also programmed Commodore PETs (mostly 4032s), along with the Commodore 64 and a CoCo 2. But I wasn't very good at it. I was only 8. But BASIC is pretty easy to pick up. Imagine the fun when I discovered The Peanut (the PCjr).)
Further proof that Real Programmers can write FORTRAN in any language.
Not only that, but also the fact that driver code paths are traversed much less often per line of code than core code across the entire user base, by a couple orders of magnitude. Thus they get much, much less testing.
Heap on top of that the rather poor state of documentation for many peripherals, not to mention their quirkiness and bugginess, and it's surprising drivers work at all!
This is English, where just about any noun can be verbed, and Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is grammatically correct.
The Windows XP installer won't read from it. You *can* however tell the Windows XP CD-ROM installer to read SATA drivers from a floppy. Trust me, I was there a mere month ago with my wife's computer when we had to install the SATA drivers.
Or if you want to be low tech, borrow a floppy drive.
But Vista can make it on its own!
Unfortunately, the GP confuses power with energy efficiency. Energy usage is what matters for things like carbon footprint.
If a device uses slightly more power but over much less time, it ends up more energy efficient. Less time spent waiting for the disk makes the system overall more energy efficient even if it burns more peak power.
That said, there are some workloads that could keep an SSD from sleeping, thus increasing power without decreasing run time, and that indeed is less energy efficient.
I'm envisioning a frat-party like scene with a bunch of MS execs around him cheering him on waving their fists in the air shouting "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" as he does this...
*shudder*
I see they're sending Vista to the Group W bench....
Don't forget the honkin' supercharger. Gotta have that.
You realize house cats originally come from the desert, right? They like heat.
As for the newborn, fair point.