Allowing women and married people to be priests would increase the pool of possible recruits significantly, thus the Catholic Church wouldn't have to stick with people who aren't fit to be priests. The problem with pedophilia is that it's just the tip of the iceberg. Priests are supposed to be examples of living a life dedicated to God, but if there are that many who could become priests while capable of doing an evil as great as forcing themselves in an unnatural way on a child who trusted them and whose protection were their duty, then it means that the selection process of priests is deeply flawed. Pedophilia is a fairly rare thing, and for every pedophile priest there are thousands who, while not that bad, commit some lesser sins that makes them incapable of serving as priests. I assume that the reason why those people could be priests is that the Catholic Church is afraid that with stricter rules there wouldn't be enough of them (although in my opinion it would still be the better alternative). Allowing more people to be eligible could solve that problem.
To abuse a child, one needs access to children. Incest is far more prevalent in the US than the abuse of minors by priests. In addition, abusers often use their own children to entice other children.
Having married priests would not change one thing, if the man was still an abuser. If anything, it would give him more access. Most scout leaders were married when the boy scouts had their problems with abuse by scout leaders. It also occurs in other denominations, which do have married clergy. Likewise, in public schools, where there is no restriction on teachers not being allowed to marry.
Remember that less than 1% of priests serving over the last 40 years had anything to do with abusing children (Pew Foundation). While that number is still way too high, it does mean that the vast majority of priests are living a life dedicated to God, at least by using pedophilia as the measurement.
Pedophilia is not rare, it is practiced by over 3% of the adult population in the US. Probably higher as it very often goes unreported. Incest is the most common form. There are ancient manuscripts which talk about it and it was practiced openly by the Greeks. It has been around a long time and will be around a long time, which is why it is important to be ever vigilant.
I believe I heard that churches are statisically safer than schools or sports programs
No, churches are no less safe. It's just statistically more likely that they'll consider themselves above the law, and shuffle the pedophile priest over to the next parish, shred the memo, and move on.
The current pope was the man put in charge of shuffling the pedophiles around and keeping it out of the press. It is highly unlikely that things have grown safer for children under his watch. After all, if it had, why did the church need to get the republicans under Bush to pass a law disallowing lawsuits and legal actions? Because what we know is only the tip of the iceberg, and the idea that the pedophile priests have all been caught, or all magically stopped doing what gets them off, is laughable.
Actually, according the Pew Foundation, which actually studies things like this, churches are statistically safer than public schools and sports programs. The difference is that by law, you cannot sue the government run schools and entities when this occurs, so you don't hear about it.
There is a significant amount of data available now, particularly because of the Survivor's Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and it shows that the movement of pedophiles was not as wide spread through the US church as people think. It most definitely occurred in certain dioceses, but not everywhere.
I think your information about the Bush administration passing laws to prevent lawsuits on behalf of the church is also wrong. Those cases occurred in civil courts under state jurisdiction. Federal law didn't come into play. As a matter of fact, many states extended the statute of limitations on the cases, but only for those abused in a church setting, not a public school or any other setting.
The Pew Foundation studies also show that most of the abuse in the US was from men ordained to the priesthood in the sixties and early seventies. As such, most of them are no longer active in ministry, even if they were never caught do to age restrictions.
Just thought slashdot readers should have some accurate and verifiable information.
Why is it if something like this were done against the Jews or Muslims it would be considered a hate crime but against the Catholics people feel it is okay? Why don't all of the politically correct types denounce this? Unless it is secretly condone by them.
When the discussion becomes Should Americans be OK with BILLIONAIRES creating the products they use?...which heavily implies that theres some fundamental problem from having a lot of money, and that that, by itself, makes you unfit for certain societal roles, then yes it IS class warfare.
I make a modest living, and I dont have a problem with the fact that there are people out there much wealthier than I am: It doesnt particularly impact me. We can have great discussions about whether the money was gotten legitimately, or whether their investment vehicles are parasitic, and thats fine. But moving the discussion towards whether having money makes you a bad person doesnt seem productive to me.
That's not the issue. Let's say we both produce product X. However, you are just starting out and I've been at it a long time. You, being an upstart pay 30% of your revenue in taxes. I only pay 5%. That is the issue, except that instead of us producing something, we are paid wages for doing work. Is it right that one person should pay a greater percentage of their earned income than any other?
If we take the high moral road and say that one human life is worth the same as any other -- rich or poor. Then the amount that the government spends for protecting life is equal and doesn't figure in. However, what the government spends to protect property and possession does. As an example, a homeless person doesn't get much protection from the fire department. Likewise, the Wallstreet bailouts didn't really go to help most people, just those with large sums invested.
It seems we live in a country where it is alright for the government to subsidize an oil company or a bank, but not the people who actually work for the oil company or the bank. I am not saying that is right or wrong, but simply what the discussion is really about, versus simple class warfare.
Many people are saying that the government should not have bailed out GM and instead they should have gone through bankruptcy. That is all fine and dandy, but what about the 1.4million GM employees that would have lost their jobs? (If it sounds like I am arguing both sides of the argument, I am, because I am trying to help define what the argument is actually about).
What about the investment bankers on Wallstreet - why is it okay to bail them out for not analyzing the risk they took, but to bail out an actual homeowner is considered some type of socialist plot?
Society, or at least those who control things (the 1%, so to speak) don't like those questions to be raised or addressed. It is far easier to blame some other element of society, whether liberals or conservatives or immigrants or (fill in the blank) than to look at their/our own involvement. It is also easier for the other 99% to blame those same elements for the cause of all of their problems.
Until we drop the blame game, we will never have real discussion or a solution. Until then, we can only get trapped in fringe things like whether or not there is class warfare.
I guess, if the upper class wants the lower classes to pay more in taxes, it seems like the first thing that needs to change is that the upper classes need to pay the lower classes more in wages.
Yes, because the evil rich people want the poor workers to work for pennies a day. Wages are set by the market, if you don't like what a job pays then improve your skills to move up. Ultimately it doesn't matter what happens with the tax system, to close the deficit you would need to impose a 100% tax on incomes over $276k and this doesn't even begin to account for the extra $500b we need to find for medicare & social security over the next 8 years. Either the programs will be fixed and tax rates go down for everyone or the tax rates on the wealthy will increase so much that they will be driven out of the country,
It is a myth to think that wages are set by the market. I am pretty sure there are many, many people who are qualified to work in those high corporate jobs for a fraction of the price paid to the current executives.
As for closing the deficit, one could always return the tax rates back to the late 1990s when as a country there was no deficit and we had some of the most productive years in our history. But based on your numbers and the need to tax 100% everything over $276k, then dealing with the deficit must be hopeless as that will never occur. As for medicare, the wealthy and poor alike pay into it. The problem is the taxable wage portion never kept up with inflation. If that one change had been enacted in the late 70s, there wouldn't be a problem with social security or medicare. Remember that all of those baby boomers that are now draining social security and medicare are the same ones who paid in to support those that came before them. They aren't the generation that decided to only have 1 kid per family.
Nobody is saying to tax the rich out of existence. However, in the early 70s, CEOs made 4 times the amount of the average worker in the company. Today, it is in the neighborhood of 1,000 times.
Ours isn't the first society that had a huge disparity between the ruling class and the working class. And every single one of them led to major sociological changes. If the United States is supposed to be a land of equal opportunity and justice, then shouldn't are tax systems reflect that? What happens to the wealthy, that you want to keep from leaving the country, when the working class can no longer feed their families and there isn't any assistance to help them?
Its based on filers, returns with AGI's lower then $8,500 account for 0.77% of the total so the unemployed, students and those existing only on SS are not significantly distorting to the total.
Yes, then the number moves up to 49%. Total effective rate for the bottom 50% is 1.85% which accounts for income, capital gains and payroll..
If so, it isn't spelled out in the article. What the article does state is that the 47% figure is extremely misleading. For instance, from the article, people earning about $35,000 a year are paying 3% of their income in taxes (after deductions and credit). So if $35,000 is the cutoff, then that must mean that 47% of the workers fall below that amount if they aren't going to be paying taxes.
I guess, if the upper class wants the lower classes to pay more in taxes, it seems like the first thing that needs to change is that the upper classes need to pay the lower classes more in wages.
Then it makes an even bigger jump by equating this with billionaires "ruling" our schools (as if individual donors to this fund created this one controversial policy, or even had any idea that it existed).
And then it attempts to act as if the financial status of someone has any relevance when evaluating the worth of a school, or their ability to run it.
If Bill Gates opened up a university that started churning out top-notch MBAs who by and large ended up successful entrepeneurs, who the heck cares that Gates himself is successful?
Class warfare indeed: Aparently where it was once the practice to discriminate on other inherent characteristics, we have moved beyond that kind of prejudice to one based on someone's income, all other factors be damned.
Bill Gates is free to do with his money as he sees fit. However, there has always been class warfare in the US. Otherwise, we wouldn't have terms like poor, middle class, wealthy, etc. One may legitimately argue if any of those classes are benefiting at the expense of the others. Such a discussion is not class warfare, but what a healthy society does to protect the welfare of all of its people, not just a few.
> In an era where the rich are able to get by paying so few taxes in the U.S.,...
What, as opposed to the 47% of citizens that now net zero federal taxes at all? That the top 1% already pays 40% of the national tax burden? I'm not in either group, but even I can see that's not exactly "fair"...
Of course that 47% includes the retired on Social Security, students, unemployed people, etc. Also, those numbers do not include social security taxes which are a federal tax.
Real data suggests that the working poor - those who work 32 hours or more a week do indeed pay taxes. Of course, if they are making minimum wage and have a child or two, it is very possible that their standard deduction may negate the taxes except for social security. But then, if you want the minimum wage workers to pay more in taxes, all one would need to do is raise the minimum wage.
The whole argument is to deflect that the top few percent pay less in taxes as a percentage of their income than 95% of the country.
Schools already got all the money they need but they just used it to hire more administrators and other staff. I don't think throwing even more money at them will help without some fundamental changes in the way they operate.
In 1955, teachers constituted about 65% of local education workers; today, despite years of rapid gains in teacher ranks, they amount to only about 40% of the eight million local education workers.
Per-pupil spending in public schools has grown to $10,500 today from $2,831 (in 2010 dollars) in 1961.
Slashdot and GPL zealots rant and rave all the time about how awesome it is to use OSS because you can 'fork it'... funny how any time the situation arises where forking would get you right back to the state you desire... no one wants to do it.
Actually, OSS is helping here quite a bit. If CUPS was closed, then these changes would leave Linux users in a real bind. However, since it is open, the features being removed are being picked up by a different project. That is how OSS is supposed to work -- if the developers drop support for something, but the users want it, they have access to the code and can add it back.
Breaking compatibility for market advantage is so noble of them, clearly we all must approve.
Actually, Apple isn't breaking compatibility, the CUPS developers are on behalf of Apple. One has to wonder why, Apple's requested features couldn't have been added to CUPS instead of also having to remove others that Apple doesn't use.
So the same systems that verify if a potato chip is bad couldn't do a quick visual inspection of each pill, make sure it's the right shape, size, color, and has the correct markings?
Seems like there are already industrial systems in place that can handle this - no need to do so much as reinvent the technology!
If I work at the chip plan and accidentally pour the sour cream and onion seasoning into the vat that the cheddar cheese seasoning was supposed to go into, that sensor on the chip line won't catch that, it is looking for shape and size and color variances (ie burnt). While it is true that there are already industrial systems in place that can handle things like this, who would you suggest foot the bill for installing them in every pharmacy, hospital and clinic in the country?
Even if they are installed, unless you are going to scan every pill at the time the prescription is filled and compare a markings, shape, weight, color etc. (and what about generics, they change quite often), how will it work? Most of robotic systems rely on a human being to put the right thing into a coded container that the robot then selects from. It is much more efficient than scanning each part each time. However, get the wrong thing in the right container and the wrong thing gets dispensed, just like the seasoning in the potato chip factory.
If the summary is correct (not a given!), there are 50,000-100,000 total PAEs. But only a fraction are going to be prescription-related, so the number of lives saved is probably much lower.
Exactly right. While the discussion seems to be focused on the wrong medication being dispensed or even drug interaction, it is far more common that the correct medication, but at the wrong dosage is dispensed. Dosage errors are not going to be picked up by an e- system.
Robotic systems that are linked to the prescription and automatically fill prescriptions eliminate the pharmacy errors,.
Assuming that the human who filled the bins that the robot uses to fill the prescriptions didn't make a mistake. There is always a human element involved and usually it is cost prohibitive to eliminate it entirely.
If the doctor could log in and select the medication and have the pharmacy read the prescription it would, on it's own, prevent a lot of errors that happen from misreading prescriptions. On top of that, if there is something wrong that requires a specialist then the patient is in a fun place where no one doctor knows what all medications are prescribed so a system that did any sort of automated conflict checking could save a lot of lives.
The current system is far from perfect, I once almost lost my job because some pharmacist misread my prescription for Singulair (Asthma med) and gave me an antipsychotic instead and for a week I couldn't be motivated to do anything.
A better solution would be that if the pharmacy cannot read the prescription, then they don't fill it. It should be the doctor who has the responsibility to make sure that what he/she is ordering is clear and understandable, not their receptionist or some clerk at the pharmacy. Doctors should be held accountable for prescription mistakes that are caused by their own haphazard penmanship.
" In order of efficiency, barge (going down stream), rail, road vehicle. " completely false.
So you are saying its more efficient for a barge to get to my house, miles inland, then ti is for a truck to get to my house?
You're measure efficiency wrong.
My car can get more people to the 7/11 then a barge can.
What is the point of driving to the 7/11 if there is nothing there to purchase? Same for the truck going to your house, what is the purpose unless there are goods to be delivered?
An efficient trasnportation system would use barge (if applicable) or rail for long distances and truck for short distances (under 125 miles). There is a reason that UPS does not drive from New York to LA. They fly, which is less efficient than rail, but because of their time constraints necessary. Once at LA, they go from a big truck to the local depot and then a small truck to your house.
Going directly from the NY shipper to a house in LA using a truck the size of the UPS local delivery truck would be highly inefficient. Same with using a semi-truck. Vehicle travel is only efficient over short distances and even then, not always the most efficient (ie a bus is more efficient in moving people in the city than individual vehicles).
So, your preferred distraction prevents you from engaging in your non-preferred distractions, and thus are a better driver? That is some fancy intellectual gymnastics you have there.
Not at all. Things that are part of the actual activity that require multitasking are not distractions. For instance, if you are eating an apple, chewing and swallow are two different activities that are required, therefore they aren't distractions. Eating and apple while painting your nails are also two different activities, but one is a distraction for the other as they are unrelated.
Likewise, while driving, checking your mirrors and blind spot, checking the road ahead, checking your gauges, apply brakes, accelerating, shifting gears, etc. are all activities related to driving and are not distractions. But, eating a burger or talking on the cell phone or even fiddling with the radio are distractions as they are not germane to the task at hand -- driving.
Shifting gears falls into the category of being an activity of driving versus a distraction. Anybody who regularly drives a manual transmission will tell you that they are much more in tune with what is going on around them, because the act of driving an manual transmission efficiently and effectively requires it. Does that mean that I am a safer driver in my manual transmission car than you are in your automatic? No, of course not.
It does mean that I pay a lot more attention and am less likely to multitask with other things when I am driving my manual transmission and therefore I am more likely to be a safer driver in my manual than I am in my automatic. It is not the transmission in use that determines this, it is the amount of other distractions, or lack there of that does.
My Dad could talk on the phone, eat an ice cream cone, and drive a stick just fine. Steer with the knees, shift with the base of your hand. This was in a vehicle with no power steering, and a cell phone that was attached to something the size of a small briefcase.
It always amazes me that some people know that multitasking is bad, yet still think that adding tasks to driving will somehow make people safer drivers.
Multitasking, by itself, is not bad. Driving a car involves numerous tasks occurring simultaneously -- checking guages, mirrors, adjusting speed, etc. Adding shifting gears does not alter that equation,much, because it is all integrated with what you are doing, Traffic is slowing, I need to brake and depress the clutch is not significantly different than traffic is slowing, I need to brake. Both become automatic behaviours. Eating, talking on the phone, etc, since they are non-related tasks do add to the distraction, specifically, because they are unrelated tasks.
Because of the way a standard transmission is operated, one can very validly claim it makes the drive pay closer attention to the road and surrounding conditions. That said, one can also make the valid claim that driving an automatic frees them up to focus more closely on the road and surrounding conditions. However, once cannot make a valid claim that multitasking while driving frees them up to focus more closely on the road and surrounding conditions, and since it is easier to multitask while driving an automatic, it is more likely to occur.
For a given skill level, the auto is always safer because your attention is never distracted at a crucial moment.
(I've never driven an automatic) I'd argue having a manual forces you to pay more attention to the road as you have to anticipate gear changes, especially when approaching junctions. With an automatic your more likely to believe you can do something else whilst driving like holding a mobile, as you only need one hand.
I would concur with that. Not only do you need to pay more attention to road because of gear changes, but because of gear changes, it is next to impossible to talk on the phone, put on makeup, eat, and any number of distractions. At least that has been my experience.
Self-driving cars could fit more cars on the road. They can travel closer together as they don't have the half-second danger-response processing a human has before applying the brakes.
Given their faster response times- you need less road per car. So yes, they do deal with that problem.
If your goal is to transport more people or merchandise efficiently and economically, then highways are inefficient regardless of whether the vehicles are self-driving or not. In order of efficiency, barge (going down stream), rail, road vehicle. Granted, individual vehicles have other benefits and conveniences, but those benefits don't deal with the problem of capacity.
A lifetime of healthy food (fruits, vegetables, nuts and algae), regular exercise, no stress, meditation, happiness and joy. Achievable, but not easy.
It's possible that some of these merely improve the quality of your life (which is great of course) but do not actually add years in number. Nice list to live by anyway.
I'm not sure about that. In biology, we did an experiment with various single cell organisms where all the nutrients, temperatures, ph, salinity, and a host of other conditions were optimal. They were the control group. Then, each of the other groups had something out of balance from optimal. Over 80% of the optimal specimens perished. 65% of those specimens with something wrong with their environments flourished. One could argue that no stress would be like the optimal conditions in the experiment and that living organisms seem to do better with some stresses in their environment.
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Allowing women and married people to be priests would increase the pool of possible recruits significantly, thus the Catholic Church wouldn't have to stick with people who aren't fit to be priests. The problem with pedophilia is that it's just the tip of the iceberg. Priests are supposed to be examples of living a life dedicated to God, but if there are that many who could become priests while capable of doing an evil as great as forcing themselves in an unnatural way on a child who trusted them and whose protection were their duty, then it means that the selection process of priests is deeply flawed. Pedophilia is a fairly rare thing, and for every pedophile priest there are thousands who, while not that bad, commit some lesser sins that makes them incapable of serving as priests. I assume that the reason why those people could be priests is that the Catholic Church is afraid that with stricter rules there wouldn't be enough of them (although in my opinion it would still be the better alternative). Allowing more people to be eligible could solve that problem.
To abuse a child, one needs access to children. Incest is far more prevalent in the US than the abuse of minors by priests. In addition, abusers often use their own children to entice other children.
Having married priests would not change one thing, if the man was still an abuser. If anything, it would give him more access. Most scout leaders were married when the boy scouts had their problems with abuse by scout leaders. It also occurs in other denominations, which do have married clergy. Likewise, in public schools, where there is no restriction on teachers not being allowed to marry.
Remember that less than 1% of priests serving over the last 40 years had anything to do with abusing children (Pew Foundation). While that number is still way too high, it does mean that the vast majority of priests are living a life dedicated to God, at least by using pedophilia as the measurement.
Pedophilia is not rare, it is practiced by over 3% of the adult population in the US. Probably higher as it very often goes unreported. Incest is the most common form. There are ancient manuscripts which talk about it and it was practiced openly by the Greeks. It has been around a long time and will be around a long time, which is why it is important to be ever vigilant.
I believe I heard that churches are statisically safer than schools or sports programs
No, churches are no less safe. It's just statistically more likely that they'll consider themselves above the law, and shuffle the pedophile priest over to the next parish, shred the memo, and move on.
The current pope was the man put in charge of shuffling the pedophiles around and keeping it out of the press. It is highly unlikely that things have grown safer for children under his watch. After all, if it had, why did the church need to get the republicans under Bush to pass a law disallowing lawsuits and legal actions? Because what we know is only the tip of the iceberg, and the idea that the pedophile priests have all been caught, or all magically stopped doing what gets them off, is laughable.
Actually, according the Pew Foundation, which actually studies things like this, churches are statistically safer than public schools and sports programs. The difference is that by law, you cannot sue the government run schools and entities when this occurs, so you don't hear about it.
There is a significant amount of data available now, particularly because of the Survivor's Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and it shows that the movement of pedophiles was not as wide spread through the US church as people think. It most definitely occurred in certain dioceses, but not everywhere.
I think your information about the Bush administration passing laws to prevent lawsuits on behalf of the church is also wrong. Those cases occurred in civil courts under state jurisdiction. Federal law didn't come into play. As a matter of fact, many states extended the statute of limitations on the cases, but only for those abused in a church setting, not a public school or any other setting.
The Pew Foundation studies also show that most of the abuse in the US was from men ordained to the priesthood in the sixties and early seventies. As such, most of them are no longer active in ministry, even if they were never caught do to age restrictions.
Just thought slashdot readers should have some accurate and verifiable information.
Why is it if something like this were done against the Jews or Muslims it would be considered a hate crime but against the Catholics people feel it is okay? Why don't all of the politically correct types denounce this? Unless it is secretly condone by them.
When the discussion becomes ...which heavily implies that theres some fundamental problem from having a lot of money, and that that, by itself, makes you unfit for certain societal roles, then yes it IS class warfare.
Should Americans be OK with BILLIONAIRES creating the products they use?
I make a modest living, and I dont have a problem with the fact that there are people out there much wealthier than I am: It doesnt particularly impact me. We can have great discussions about whether the money was gotten legitimately, or whether their investment vehicles are parasitic, and thats fine. But moving the discussion towards whether having money makes you a bad person doesnt seem productive to me.
That's not the issue. Let's say we both produce product X. However, you are just starting out and I've been at it a long time. You, being an upstart pay 30% of your revenue in taxes. I only pay 5%. That is the issue, except that instead of us producing something, we are paid wages for doing work. Is it right that one person should pay a greater percentage of their earned income than any other?
If we take the high moral road and say that one human life is worth the same as any other -- rich or poor. Then the amount that the government spends for protecting life is equal and doesn't figure in. However, what the government spends to protect property and possession does. As an example, a homeless person doesn't get much protection from the fire department. Likewise, the Wallstreet bailouts didn't really go to help most people, just those with large sums invested.
It seems we live in a country where it is alright for the government to subsidize an oil company or a bank, but not the people who actually work for the oil company or the bank. I am not saying that is right or wrong, but simply what the discussion is really about, versus simple class warfare.
Many people are saying that the government should not have bailed out GM and instead they should have gone through bankruptcy. That is all fine and dandy, but what about the 1.4million GM employees that would have lost their jobs? (If it sounds like I am arguing both sides of the argument, I am, because I am trying to help define what the argument is actually about).
What about the investment bankers on Wallstreet - why is it okay to bail them out for not analyzing the risk they took, but to bail out an actual homeowner is considered some type of socialist plot?
Society, or at least those who control things (the 1%, so to speak) don't like those questions to be raised or addressed. It is far easier to blame some other element of society, whether liberals or conservatives or immigrants or (fill in the blank) than to look at their/our own involvement. It is also easier for the other 99% to blame those same elements for the cause of all of their problems.
Until we drop the blame game, we will never have real discussion or a solution. Until then, we can only get trapped in fringe things like whether or not there is class warfare.
I guess, if the upper class wants the lower classes to pay more in taxes, it seems like the first thing that needs to change is that the upper classes need to pay the lower classes more in wages.
Yes, because the evil rich people want the poor workers to work for pennies a day. Wages are set by the market, if you don't like what a job pays then improve your skills to move up. Ultimately it doesn't matter what happens with the tax system, to close the deficit you would need to impose a 100% tax on incomes over $276k and this doesn't even begin to account for the extra $500b we need to find for medicare & social security over the next 8 years. Either the programs will be fixed and tax rates go down for everyone or the tax rates on the wealthy will increase so much that they will be driven out of the country,
It is a myth to think that wages are set by the market. I am pretty sure there are many, many people who are qualified to work in those high corporate jobs for a fraction of the price paid to the current executives.
As for closing the deficit, one could always return the tax rates back to the late 1990s when as a country there was no deficit and we had some of the most productive years in our history. But based on your numbers and the need to tax 100% everything over $276k, then dealing with the deficit must be hopeless as that will never occur. As for medicare, the wealthy and poor alike pay into it. The problem is the taxable wage portion never kept up with inflation. If that one change had been enacted in the late 70s, there wouldn't be a problem with social security or medicare. Remember that all of those baby boomers that are now draining social security and medicare are the same ones who paid in to support those that came before them. They aren't the generation that decided to only have 1 kid per family.
Nobody is saying to tax the rich out of existence. However, in the early 70s, CEOs made 4 times the amount of the average worker in the company. Today, it is in the neighborhood of 1,000 times.
Ours isn't the first society that had a huge disparity between the ruling class and the working class. And every single one of them led to major sociological changes. If the United States is supposed to be a land of equal opportunity and justice, then shouldn't are tax systems reflect that?
What happens to the wealthy, that you want to keep from leaving the country, when the working class can no longer feed their families and there isn't any assistance to help them?
Its based on filers, returns with AGI's lower then $8,500 account for 0.77% of the total so the unemployed, students and those existing only on SS are not significantly distorting to the total.
Yes, then the number moves up to 49%. Total effective rate for the bottom 50% is 1.85% which accounts for income, capital gains and payroll. .
If so, it isn't spelled out in the article. What the article does state is that the 47% figure is extremely misleading. For instance, from the article, people earning about $35,000 a year are paying 3% of their income in taxes (after deductions and credit). So if $35,000 is the cutoff, then that must mean that 47% of the workers fall below that amount if they aren't going to be paying taxes.
I guess, if the upper class wants the lower classes to pay more in taxes, it seems like the first thing that needs to change is that the upper classes need to pay the lower classes more in wages.
Then it makes an even bigger jump by equating this with billionaires "ruling" our schools (as if individual donors to this fund created this one controversial policy, or even had any idea that it existed).
And then it attempts to act as if the financial status of someone has any relevance when evaluating the worth of a school, or their ability to run it.
If Bill Gates opened up a university that started churning out top-notch MBAs who by and large ended up successful entrepeneurs, who the heck cares that Gates himself is successful?
Class warfare indeed: Aparently where it was once the practice to discriminate on other inherent characteristics, we have moved beyond that kind of prejudice to one based on someone's income, all other factors be damned.
Bill Gates is free to do with his money as he sees fit. However, there has always been class warfare in the US. Otherwise, we wouldn't have terms like poor, middle class, wealthy, etc. One may legitimately argue if any of those classes are benefiting at the expense of the others. Such a discussion is not class warfare, but what a healthy society does to protect the welfare of all of its people, not just a few.
> In an era where the rich are able to get by paying so few taxes in the U.S., ...
What, as opposed to the 47% of citizens that now net zero federal taxes at all? That the top 1% already pays 40% of the national tax burden? I'm not in either group, but even I can see that's not exactly "fair"...
Of course that 47% includes the retired on Social Security, students, unemployed people, etc. Also, those numbers do not include social security taxes which are a federal tax.
Real data suggests that the working poor - those who work 32 hours or more a week do indeed pay taxes. Of course, if they are making minimum wage and have a child or two, it is very possible that their standard deduction may negate the taxes except for social security. But then, if you want the minimum wage workers to pay more in taxes, all one would need to do is raise the minimum wage.
The whole argument is to deflect that the top few percent pay less in taxes as a percentage of their income than 95% of the country.
Schools already got all the money they need but they just used it to hire more administrators and other staff. I don't think throwing even more money at them will help without some fundamental changes in the way they operate.
In 1955, teachers constituted about 65% of local education workers; today, despite years of rapid gains in teacher ranks, they amount to only about 40% of the eight million local education workers.
Per-pupil spending in public schools has grown to $10,500 today from $2,831 (in 2010 dollars) in 1961.
From: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204531404577052194234235910.html?mod=ITP_opinion_0 (paywalled)
That is one of the reason most parochial schools (not just Catholic ones) can educate students at a significantly lower cost than public schools.
Slashdot and GPL zealots rant and rave all the time about how awesome it is to use OSS because you can 'fork it' ... funny how any time the situation arises where forking would get you right back to the state you desire ... no one wants to do it.
Actually, OSS is helping here quite a bit. If CUPS was closed, then these changes would leave Linux users in a real bind. However, since it is open, the features being removed are being picked up by a different project. That is how OSS is supposed to work -- if the developers drop support for something, but the users want it, they have access to the code and can add it back.
Breaking compatibility for market advantage is so noble of them, clearly we all must approve.
Actually, Apple isn't breaking compatibility, the CUPS developers are on behalf of Apple. One has to wonder why, Apple's requested features couldn't have been added to CUPS instead of also having to remove others that Apple doesn't use.
So the same systems that verify if a potato chip is bad couldn't do a quick visual inspection of each pill, make sure it's the right shape, size, color, and has the correct markings?
Seems like there are already industrial systems in place that can handle this - no need to do so much as reinvent the technology!
If I work at the chip plan and accidentally pour the sour cream and onion seasoning into the vat that the cheddar cheese seasoning was supposed to go into, that sensor on the chip line won't catch that, it is looking for shape and size and color variances (ie burnt). While it is true that there are already industrial systems in place that can handle things like this, who would you suggest foot the bill for installing them in every pharmacy, hospital and clinic in the country?
Even if they are installed, unless you are going to scan every pill at the time the prescription is filled and compare a markings, shape, weight, color etc. (and what about generics, they change quite often), how will it work? Most of robotic systems rely on a human being to put the right thing into a coded container that the robot then selects from. It is much more efficient than scanning each part each time. However, get the wrong thing in the right container and the wrong thing gets dispensed, just like the seasoning in the potato chip factory.
If the summary is correct (not a given!), there are 50,000-100,000 total PAEs. But only a fraction are going to be prescription-related, so the number of lives saved is probably much lower.
Exactly right. While the discussion seems to be focused on the wrong medication being dispensed or even drug interaction, it is far more common that the correct medication, but at the wrong dosage is dispensed. Dosage errors are not going to be picked up by an e- system.
Robotic systems that are linked to the prescription and automatically fill prescriptions eliminate the pharmacy errors, .
Assuming that the human who filled the bins that the robot uses to fill the prescriptions didn't make a mistake. There is always a human element involved and usually it is cost prohibitive to eliminate it entirely.
If the doctor could log in and select the medication and have the pharmacy read the prescription it would, on it's own, prevent a lot of errors that happen from misreading prescriptions. On top of that, if there is something wrong that requires a specialist then the patient is in a fun place where no one doctor knows what all medications are prescribed so a system that did any sort of automated conflict checking could save a lot of lives.
The current system is far from perfect, I once almost lost my job because some pharmacist misread my prescription for Singulair (Asthma med) and gave me an antipsychotic instead and for a week I couldn't be motivated to do anything.
A better solution would be that if the pharmacy cannot read the prescription, then they don't fill it. It should be the doctor who has the responsibility to make sure that what he/she is ordering is clear and understandable, not their receptionist or some clerk at the pharmacy. Doctors should be held accountable for prescription mistakes that are caused by their own haphazard penmanship.
He (she?) said next to impossible, not impossible.
" In order of efficiency, barge (going down stream), rail, road vehicle. "
completely false.
So you are saying its more efficient for a barge to get to my house, miles inland, then ti is for a truck to get to my house?
You're measure efficiency wrong.
My car can get more people to the 7/11 then a barge can.
What is the point of driving to the 7/11 if there is nothing there to purchase? Same for the truck going to your house, what is the purpose unless there are goods to be delivered?
An efficient trasnportation system would use barge (if applicable) or rail for long distances and truck for short distances (under 125 miles). There is a reason that UPS does not drive from New York to LA. They fly, which is less efficient than rail, but because of their time constraints necessary. Once at LA, they go from a big truck to the local depot and then a small truck to your house.
Going directly from the NY shipper to a house in LA using a truck the size of the UPS local delivery truck would be highly inefficient. Same with using a semi-truck. Vehicle travel is only efficient over short distances and even then, not always the most efficient (ie a bus is more efficient in moving people in the city than individual vehicles).
So, your preferred distraction prevents you from engaging in your non-preferred distractions, and thus are a better driver? That is some fancy intellectual gymnastics you have there.
Not at all. Things that are part of the actual activity that require multitasking are not distractions. For instance, if you are eating an apple, chewing and swallow are two different activities that are required, therefore they aren't distractions. Eating and apple while painting your nails are also two different activities, but one is a distraction for the other as they are unrelated.
Likewise, while driving, checking your mirrors and blind spot, checking the road ahead, checking your gauges, apply brakes, accelerating, shifting gears, etc. are all activities related to driving and are not distractions. But, eating a burger or talking on the cell phone or even fiddling with the radio are distractions as they are not germane to the task at hand -- driving.
Shifting gears falls into the category of being an activity of driving versus a distraction. Anybody who regularly drives a manual transmission will tell you that they are much more in tune with what is going on around them, because the act of driving an manual transmission efficiently and effectively requires it. Does that mean that I am a safer driver in my manual transmission car than you are in your automatic? No, of course not.
It does mean that I pay a lot more attention and am less likely to multitask with other things when I am driving my manual transmission and therefore I am more likely to be a safer driver in my manual than I am in my automatic. It is not the transmission in use that determines this, it is the amount of other distractions, or lack there of that does.
My Dad could talk on the phone, eat an ice cream cone, and drive a stick just fine. Steer with the knees, shift with the base of your hand. This was in a vehicle with no power steering, and a cell phone that was attached to something the size of a small briefcase.
It always amazes me that some people know that multitasking is bad, yet still think that adding tasks to driving will somehow make people safer drivers.
Multitasking, by itself, is not bad. Driving a car involves numerous tasks occurring simultaneously -- checking guages, mirrors, adjusting speed, etc. Adding shifting gears does not alter that equation,much, because it is all integrated with what you are doing, Traffic is slowing, I need to brake and depress the clutch is not significantly different than traffic is slowing, I need to brake. Both become automatic behaviours. Eating, talking on the phone, etc, since they are non-related tasks do add to the distraction, specifically, because they are unrelated tasks.
Because of the way a standard transmission is operated, one can very validly claim it makes the drive pay closer attention to the road and surrounding conditions. That said, one can also make the valid claim that driving an automatic frees them up to focus more closely on the road and surrounding conditions. However, once cannot make a valid claim that multitasking while driving frees them up to focus more closely on the road and surrounding conditions, and since it is easier to multitask while driving an automatic, it is more likely to occur.
It may be that when a new boom in nuclear power comes,
Hope I'm far away when that happens.
For a given skill level, the auto is always safer because your attention is never distracted at a crucial moment.
(I've never driven an automatic) I'd argue having a manual forces you to pay more attention to the road as you have to anticipate gear changes, especially when approaching junctions. With an automatic your more likely to believe you can do something else whilst driving like holding a mobile, as you only need one hand.
I would concur with that. Not only do you need to pay more attention to road because of gear changes, but because of gear changes, it is next to impossible to talk on the phone, put on makeup, eat, and any number of distractions. At least that has been my experience.
Self-driving cars could fit more cars on the road. They can travel closer together as they don't have the half-second danger-response processing a human has before applying the brakes.
Given their faster response times- you need less road per car. So yes, they do deal with that problem.
If your goal is to transport more people or merchandise efficiently and economically, then highways are inefficient regardless of whether the vehicles are self-driving or not. In order of efficiency, barge (going down stream), rail, road vehicle. Granted, individual vehicles have other benefits and conveniences, but those benefits don't deal with the problem of capacity.
I wonder if Google's new privacy rules (or lack thereof) apply to using a Google vehicle?
A lifetime of healthy food (fruits, vegetables, nuts and algae), regular exercise, no stress, meditation, happiness and joy. Achievable, but not easy.
It's possible that some of these merely improve the quality of your life (which is great of course) but do not actually add years in number. Nice list to live by anyway.
I'm not sure about that. In biology, we did an experiment with various single cell organisms where all the nutrients, temperatures, ph, salinity, and a host of other conditions were optimal. They were the control group. Then, each of the other groups had something out of balance from optimal. Over 80% of the optimal specimens perished. 65% of those specimens with something wrong with their environments flourished. One could argue that no stress would be like the optimal conditions in the experiment and that living organisms seem to do better with some stresses in their environment.
Then they create roving squads to randomly search us on the streets and to conduct unannounced searches of our homes and cars.
For our safety, of course.
I think the Patriot Act already allows for this.