I accounted for property tax and sales tax (included in their respective budget categories) and income tax should be close to $0, but I admit I forgot about social security, medicare and unemployment insurance. Still, I would expect that not to exceed the $100/month left over in the budget.
You also ignore transportation costs as you assertion that "A person in that situation would not have a car or transit pass" would also mean that a person in that situation would have no job in many areas, especially rural ones.
You have a funny definition of "ignore," considering that I explicitly considered them (and you quoted me doing so!).
Talking about rural areas, or "metro Detroit" is completely irrelevant because I was giving the specific example of where I actually live, which is Atlanta (and I mean in the city, not just the "metro area"). There's a small commercial node including a few gas stations and a dollar store within a half-mile, a medium commercial node with bars, restaurants and other stores within a mile, several large shopping centers with big-box stores within 2 miles, and Downtown and Midtown within 5 miles. There is no excuse not to be able to find a minimum-wage job (or even a good job!) within a 30-minute bike ride.
I mean, sure, you could also find a similarly-cheap house out in the suburbs and then complain that you can't get to work, but that's not a necessary trade-off and thus bringing it up is a strawman argument.
Detroit, by the way, is awash in cheap real estate (as I'm sure you know). Even avoiding high-crime areas you should still be able to find something reasonable and close to jobs for not much money. Aside from the dubious ROI buying real estate in the rust belt, I see no reason why a minimum-wage worker there couldn't do even better than my Atlanta example.
Suggesting [gun control] will be quickly shot down by people claiming you are impeding on their constitutional right to overthrow the government.
You say that as if it were a bad thing.
Now, I'll happily agree with you that people who don't secure their guns properly are idiots. But I'd much rather tolerate the consequences of idiots than remove Americans' collective ability to resist tyranny.
Full disclosure: my wife (fiance at the time) got a down-payment grant from the city when she bought our house (and it was 2009, so she got that $8000 federal tax credit). She was also making $15/hour at the time, not minimum wage. Without that subsidy, someone actually making only minimum wage would have a hard time saving up the down payment. (Such a person would also probably have a hard time qualifying for the loan, regardless of subsidy.)
However, the monthly carrying costs certainly can be afforded on minimum wage without subsidies. Minimum wage is ~$1200/month ($7.25/hour * 40 hours/week * 50 weeks/year). Of that, $700 would go to the mortgage, $200 to utilities, and $200 to food*, leaving $100 for everything else. (A person in that situation would not have a car or transit pass; minimum-wage jobs and things like grocery stores can be found within walking or biking distance.) Admittedly, that's a very tight budget and violates the "housing should be 30% of your income" rule of thumb. But still, it's doable.
A more realistic situation would either be that the house would be owned by a couple (making minimum wage each: $2400/month), or a single homeowner would get some roommates and pad his budget with rental income. (The two extra bedrooms would easily rent for $300-$400 each.)
(*Yes, $200/month is a reasonable food budget. My actual food budget is around $300/month for two adults ($150 each), and we eat quite well. Plus, that doesn't even count the extra income from food stamps that a minimum wage earner would (I think?) qualify for.)
Uh, this isn't advanced technology you're talking about. This is pretty basic technology that every developer in every field should be comfortable with using.
OF COURSE IT IS! But it doesn't fucking matter how "comfortable" (let alone "competent") you might feel with it; unless you can claim you've actually used it your application gets round-filed.
Four years of Java? "Well, I've been working at a.NET shop..." NOPE.
Hadoop? "My company did 'Big Data,' but used a different framework." WRONG ANSWER.
Linux administration? "I've been a BSD admin for 10 years." BZZZT.
REST web services? "I spent half my life working with Tim Berners-Lee, but I've never heard of that particular buzzword before." APPLICATION BALEETED!
And of course, this part of the job listing is just fucking insulting:
Location: Nashville, TN
Duration: 6 months Contract to Hire
Rate: 30/hr on W2
I made more than that in my first programming job after college, as a direct hire, in an equally Southern and LCOL city! And they want to pay that little for somebody with four years of (buzzword-compliant) experience?!
LOLWUT? I could afford my three-bedroom house on minimum wage if I had to. And it's a decent house in a nice neighborhood, too. You need to wise up and GTFO of whatever high cost-of-living shithole you're in, especially if you can't make the high salary to justify it.
The blue light protects women by being attached to a phone that calls the campus police. The point of the light is so that no matter where on campus you are, at least one is always in view so that if you need the police you know which way to run.
In the 80s, utility companies in the US just gave up on building new nuclear plants entirely. The two reactors currently under construction at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are the first new reactors to be approved in over 30 years. They're currently over budget and behind schedule, but how much of the problem can be attributed to regulatory meddling vs. other causes (such as the fact that the last engineers who could possibly have experience building a reactor in the US have surely long since retired) remains to be seen.
what I find funny is that here some people are unhappy. Make up your mind slashdot, you finally got what you wan
Nobody changed their mind; the Slashdotters who wanted ISPs to be common carriers a decade ago still do. It's an entirely different set of users [industry shills and teabagging nutjobs] that have come out of the woodwork to bitch and moan now.
The libertarian solution would outright abolish such government-enforced monopolies.
The libertarian solution would have Comcast and all other utilities pay every property owner for permission to run lines through their property (which is clearly unworkable -- if a single property owner at the entrance of a street refuses, everybody else on the street would be screwed). That's why even people who normally lean libertarian (such as the GP) realize that government regulation is a better alternative in this case.
If only we have software that we could trust, that we could see the code.
That's necessary, but not sufficient. Even Free Software can get bundled with malware if you don't obtain it from a reputable source (e.g., the first-party website or your Linux distro's package management tool). Even previously-reputable download sites like Sourceforge have been guilty of bundling shit.
See, that's exactly what I mean by "doing it wrong!" The proverbial "real WTF" is that you didn't have backup servers handling the load so that you could reboot as leisurely as you like without downtime.
As to data not being made available, there were many situations where raw data was denied or was actually said to have been destroyed. So I don't know what you think you're talking about. That is absolutely an issue.
As to evidence, no one is asking for what you're saying they're asking for.
1. What is being asked for is that a study be reproducible.
2. That the data a study is based on be available for audit.
That's it.
No, you're wrong.
1. The kind of studies Republicans want to be "reproducible" are ones which are based on analysis of historical record, and "reproducing" historical record is fundamentally impossible. Reproducing the analysis using the same historical data is possible and is already done, but that's not good enough for them.
Since when have the data the studies are based on not been available for audit? As far as I can tell, you're making that accusation up out of whole cloth.
A corporation is property. Like your house. I don't get to bulldoze your house because "science"... I have to explain what law I'm doing it under and then I need to justify that. And I don't get to bulldoze your house before you can even defend yourself. You can't just say that no government policy can be subjected to challenge until they've actually done it. Would it be reasonable for me to say you can't complain about me bulldozing your house until AFTER I've done it? So If you know I'm going to do it, if I've got the bulldozer right there, and I'm just waiting for the moment when you're looking paying attention... you apparently have no right complain about what I will absolutely do the instant you turn your back? Get real.
That's a poor analogy. The real analogy is that you're wanting to build a new house (in a wetland, for the sake of argument), and trying to claim that the government should have no ability to protect the wetland by stopping you until after you've already destroyed it.
And that's all this bill is asking for, sport. Proper justification.
BULLSHIT! The EPA already requires "proper justification" in order to act! What these bills do is require impossible justification in a naked attempt to destroy the EPA entirely.
I'm so fucking dumb I'm really incapable of having this discussion.
FTFY. And I completely agree, so please feel free to fuck off.
You are quite clearly suggesting that the EPA should be able to operate without due process.
I am not. I am suggesting that the standard of evidence for EPA regulations should be "preponderance of evidence" (i.e., how issues are decided in civil cases) and not "proof" (similar to the standard for criminal cases) which would hamstring the EPA and cause harm by allowing industry to pollute with impunity because "proof" is impossible. The "preponderance of evidence" standard still counts as due process.
As to things being challengeable in court now, are they? Many government agencies have shown reluctance to provide evidence for their actions.
We're talking about the EPA. Has the EPA done that?
And really, you have no business enacting any policy on scientific grounds unless that science has been tested and the entirety of the study is open to public audit.
Okay, so what counts as "tested?" If "testing" requires waiting until the harm has already occurred and then saying "yep, there's the harm" then you can fuck right off because that's not reasonable. And that unreasonable standard is what the assholes pushing these bills want.
And saying this is all about "corporations" etc is complete tribalistic horseshit. You should be ashamed of yourself. Civil rights and civil rights indifferent to whomever they refer to. You're not going to tell me that people you don't like are not entitled to civil right are you?
Corporations are not people. And if you disagree, you can fuck right off about that too.
Corporations are property. And property is owned by people with rights.
And people give up some of those rights in return for the limited liability afforded by incorporation. You don't like it? Then don't fucking incorporate!
What, you thought incorporating was a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of situation, with no downside? That incorporating lets you reap all the benefits of your actions, while shedding all the responsibility for them? Well isn't that just a nice little pile of fascist horseshit.
Nobody's stopping anyone from forming (regular, i.e., not "limited") partnerships and exercising their civil rights all they want. Of course, if they don't want to do that because they're afraid of being held accountable for their sociopathic actions, then that's just too damn bad for them and I have no sympathy at all.
Sure! And it only took 10 seconds of Googling to find. This book chapter explains how public hysteria forced the NRC to repeatedly tighten regulations, which drastically increased costs not only due to the sheer increase in materials and increased labor to design things to comply (what the author calls "regulatory racheting"), but also the need to repeatedly re-engineer things as the regulations changed mid-construction (what the author calls "regulatory turbulence").
You're assuming the government only does good things. The NSA actions alone render that position laughable.
Apparently, you fail to understand that the NSA and the EPA are different things. What does that say about your intelligence?
So your argument is a strawman where you suggest that expecting basic civil rights and due process means I want a corporate oligarchy to rule with impunity over everyone.
First, your statement is a strawman: I did NOT suggest that "expecting basic civil rights and due process means [you] want a corporate oligarchy!" I suggested that allowing corporations to dominate the EPA means you want a corporate oligarchy.
Second, these bills are absolutely not designed to preserve "due process." They just use Orwellian doublespeak to claim that while actually doing exactly the opposite. They are, in fact, designed to cause regulatory capture and therefore corporate oligarchic rule. That is their purpose.
Your claim that these bills uphold civil rights and due process, or that opposition to them is opposition to civil rights or due process, is a vicious lie!
Never mind that what I actually asked for was that the government present evidence for why it does things and be open to challenge in court.
Regulations can be challenged in court now; the only difference is that they currently aren't subject to prior restraint by corporations before the court cases are completed.
Now... imagine that there were at least three stories a day about people being killed by malfunctioning Toyotas and then we found out that Toyota was using its onboard electronics to record everything everybody who rides in them is saying, to be used against them in the future, and remotely detonating a few of them every few days. Most people still get from point A to point B, but still a bunch of people are getting killed because they own a Toyota.
A car analogy, eh? Alright then, try this one on for size:
Let's pretend the company in your analogy were Mitsubishi instead of Toyota. Mitsubishi is a huge conglomerate that makes bunches of different things; automobile manufacturing is only about 10% (by revenue) of what it does.
We'll continue to imagine that Mitsubishi Automotive is still doing all the nefarious things listed above -- being really, really pissed off at Mitsubishi Automotive would still be perfectly valid.
There's also a division of Mitsubishi that makes pharmaceuticals (Kyowa Kirin). Let's imagine for a moment that Kyowa Kirin does something really great -- maybe it makes revolutionary vaccines that cure all the worst diseases, and then distributes them worldwide for free, for example.
Would you also be justified in being pissed off at Kyowa Kirin for Mitsubishi Automotive's actions, even though Kyowa Kirin had no control over them and the work it was doing itself was valuable, just because they had the same corporate ownership? Of course not!
And condemning the FCC just because the US Marshals fucked up makes just as little sense.
We support the government when it acts in the interest of the public, and oppose it when it acts against the interest of the public. Is that really so goddamn hard to understand?!
Slashdot Mirror
I accounted for property tax and sales tax (included in their respective budget categories) and income tax should be close to $0, but I admit I forgot about social security, medicare and unemployment insurance. Still, I would expect that not to exceed the $100/month left over in the budget.
You have a funny definition of "ignore," considering that I explicitly considered them (and you quoted me doing so!).
Talking about rural areas, or "metro Detroit" is completely irrelevant because I was giving the specific example of where I actually live, which is Atlanta (and I mean in the city, not just the "metro area"). There's a small commercial node including a few gas stations and a dollar store within a half-mile, a medium commercial node with bars, restaurants and other stores within a mile, several large shopping centers with big-box stores within 2 miles, and Downtown and Midtown within 5 miles. There is no excuse not to be able to find a minimum-wage job (or even a good job!) within a 30-minute bike ride.
I mean, sure, you could also find a similarly-cheap house out in the suburbs and then complain that you can't get to work, but that's not a necessary trade-off and thus bringing it up is a strawman argument.
Detroit, by the way, is awash in cheap real estate (as I'm sure you know). Even avoiding high-crime areas you should still be able to find something reasonable and close to jobs for not much money. Aside from the dubious ROI buying real estate in the rust belt, I see no reason why a minimum-wage worker there couldn't do even better than my Atlanta example.
Indeed; confusopolies are evil.
You say that as if it were a bad thing.
Now, I'll happily agree with you that people who don't secure their guns properly are idiots. But I'd much rather tolerate the consequences of idiots than remove Americans' collective ability to resist tyranny.
Full disclosure: my wife (fiance at the time) got a down-payment grant from the city when she bought our house (and it was 2009, so she got that $8000 federal tax credit). She was also making $15/hour at the time, not minimum wage. Without that subsidy, someone actually making only minimum wage would have a hard time saving up the down payment. (Such a person would also probably have a hard time qualifying for the loan, regardless of subsidy.)
However, the monthly carrying costs certainly can be afforded on minimum wage without subsidies. Minimum wage is ~$1200/month ($7.25/hour * 40 hours/week * 50 weeks/year). Of that, $700 would go to the mortgage, $200 to utilities, and $200 to food*, leaving $100 for everything else. (A person in that situation would not have a car or transit pass; minimum-wage jobs and things like grocery stores can be found within walking or biking distance.) Admittedly, that's a very tight budget and violates the "housing should be 30% of your income" rule of thumb. But still, it's doable.
A more realistic situation would either be that the house would be owned by a couple (making minimum wage each: $2400/month), or a single homeowner would get some roommates and pad his budget with rental income. (The two extra bedrooms would easily rent for $300-$400 each.)
(*Yes, $200/month is a reasonable food budget. My actual food budget is around $300/month for two adults ($150 each), and we eat quite well. Plus, that doesn't even count the extra income from food stamps that a minimum wage earner would (I think?) qualify for.)
He didn't say "I have to," he said "I have." Meaning that he voluntarily chose to, past tense.
To be fair, instead of being severely underpaid he might just be badass.
OF COURSE IT IS! But it doesn't fucking matter how "comfortable" (let alone "competent") you might feel with it; unless you can claim you've actually used it your application gets round-filed.
Four years of Java? "Well, I've been working at a .NET shop..." NOPE.
Hadoop? "My company did 'Big Data,' but used a different framework." WRONG ANSWER.
Linux administration? "I've been a BSD admin for 10 years." BZZZT.
REST web services? "I spent half my life working with Tim Berners-Lee, but I've never heard of that particular buzzword before." APPLICATION BALEETED!
And of course, this part of the job listing is just fucking insulting:
I made more than that in my first programming job after college, as a direct hire, in an equally Southern and LCOL city! And they want to pay that little for somebody with four years of (buzzword-compliant) experience?!
LOLWUT? I could afford my three-bedroom house on minimum wage if I had to. And it's a decent house in a nice neighborhood, too. You need to wise up and GTFO of whatever high cost-of-living shithole you're in, especially if you can't make the high salary to justify it.
That makes me want to apply for jobs with Knuth's CV and see how many interviews it gets as an experiment.
The blue light protects women by being attached to a phone that calls the campus police. The point of the light is so that no matter where on campus you are, at least one is always in view so that if you need the police you know which way to run.
You do realize that by calling Windows 3.x "flat" you've lost all credibility, right? The '90s were the heyday of the "beveled" fake-3D look!
I'm glad you liked it.
In the 80s, utility companies in the US just gave up on building new nuclear plants entirely. The two reactors currently under construction at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are the first new reactors to be approved in over 30 years. They're currently over budget and behind schedule, but how much of the problem can be attributed to regulatory meddling vs. other causes (such as the fact that the last engineers who could possibly have experience building a reactor in the US have surely long since retired) remains to be seen.
Nobody changed their mind; the Slashdotters who wanted ISPs to be common carriers a decade ago still do. It's an entirely different set of users [industry shills and teabagging nutjobs] that have come out of the woodwork to bitch and moan now.
The libertarian solution would have Comcast and all other utilities pay every property owner for permission to run lines through their property (which is clearly unworkable -- if a single property owner at the entrance of a street refuses, everybody else on the street would be screwed). That's why even people who normally lean libertarian (such as the GP) realize that government regulation is a better alternative in this case.
That's necessary, but not sufficient. Even Free Software can get bundled with malware if you don't obtain it from a reputable source (e.g., the first-party website or your Linux distro's package management tool). Even previously-reputable download sites like Sourceforge have been guilty of bundling shit.
See, that's exactly what I mean by "doing it wrong!" The proverbial "real WTF" is that you didn't have backup servers handling the load so that you could reboot as leisurely as you like without downtime.
If you have any reason to care how long it takes for your server to boot, you're already doing it wrong.
Citation needed.
No, you're wrong.
1. The kind of studies Republicans want to be "reproducible" are ones which are based on analysis of historical record, and "reproducing" historical record is fundamentally impossible. Reproducing the analysis using the same historical data is possible and is already done, but that's not good enough for them.
Since when have the data the studies are based on not been available for audit? As far as I can tell, you're making that accusation up out of whole cloth.
That's a poor analogy. The real analogy is that you're wanting to build a new house (in a wetland, for the sake of argument), and trying to claim that the government should have no ability to protect the wetland by stopping you until after you've already destroyed it.
BULLSHIT! The EPA already requires "proper justification" in order to act! What these bills do is require impossible justification in a naked attempt to destroy the EPA entirely.
FTFY. And I completely agree, so please feel free to fuck off.
I am not. I am suggesting that the standard of evidence for EPA regulations should be "preponderance of evidence" (i.e., how issues are decided in civil cases) and not "proof" (similar to the standard for criminal cases) which would hamstring the EPA and cause harm by allowing industry to pollute with impunity because "proof" is impossible. The "preponderance of evidence" standard still counts as due process.
We're talking about the EPA. Has the EPA done that?
Okay, so what counts as "tested?" If "testing" requires waiting until the harm has already occurred and then saying "yep, there's the harm" then you can fuck right off because that's not reasonable. And that unreasonable standard is what the assholes pushing these bills want.
Corporations are not people. And if you disagree, you can fuck right off about that too.
And people give up some of those rights in return for the limited liability afforded by incorporation. You don't like it? Then don't fucking incorporate!
What, you thought incorporating was a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of situation, with no downside? That incorporating lets you reap all the benefits of your actions, while shedding all the responsibility for them? Well isn't that just a nice little pile of fascist horseshit.
Nobody's stopping anyone from forming (regular, i.e., not "limited") partnerships and exercising their civil rights all they want. Of course, if they don't want to do that because they're afraid of being held accountable for their sociopathic actions, then that's just too damn bad for them and I have no sympathy at all.
Sure! And it only took 10 seconds of Googling to find. This book chapter explains how public hysteria forced the NRC to repeatedly tighten regulations, which drastically increased costs not only due to the sheer increase in materials and increased labor to design things to comply (what the author calls "regulatory racheting"), but also the need to repeatedly re-engineer things as the regulations changed mid-construction (what the author calls "regulatory turbulence").
Apparently, you fail to understand that the NSA and the EPA are different things. What does that say about your intelligence?
First, your statement is a strawman: I did NOT suggest that "expecting basic civil rights and due process means [you] want a corporate oligarchy!" I suggested that allowing corporations to dominate the EPA means you want a corporate oligarchy.
Second, these bills are absolutely not designed to preserve "due process." They just use Orwellian doublespeak to claim that while actually doing exactly the opposite. They are, in fact, designed to cause regulatory capture and therefore corporate oligarchic rule. That is their purpose.
Your claim that these bills uphold civil rights and due process, or that opposition to them is opposition to civil rights or due process, is a vicious lie!
Regulations can be challenged in court now; the only difference is that they currently aren't subject to prior restraint by corporations before the court cases are completed.
Now, go fuck yourself.
Interesting. I guess I just don't hear enough about Quebec to have been exposed to the word before.
It still sounds weird to me, though (as an English-speaking American). I'm surprised it isn't something more like "Quebecan" instead.
A car analogy, eh? Alright then, try this one on for size:
Let's pretend the company in your analogy were Mitsubishi instead of Toyota. Mitsubishi is a huge conglomerate that makes bunches of different things; automobile manufacturing is only about 10% (by revenue) of what it does.
We'll continue to imagine that Mitsubishi Automotive is still doing all the nefarious things listed above -- being really, really pissed off at Mitsubishi Automotive would still be perfectly valid.
There's also a division of Mitsubishi that makes pharmaceuticals (Kyowa Kirin). Let's imagine for a moment that Kyowa Kirin does something really great -- maybe it makes revolutionary vaccines that cure all the worst diseases, and then distributes them worldwide for free, for example.
Would you also be justified in being pissed off at Kyowa Kirin for Mitsubishi Automotive's actions, even though Kyowa Kirin had no control over them and the work it was doing itself was valuable, just because they had the same corporate ownership? Of course not!
And condemning the FCC just because the US Marshals fucked up makes just as little sense.
We support the government when it acts in the interest of the public, and oppose it when it acts against the interest of the public. Is that really so goddamn hard to understand?!