Saying you shouldn't make changes in area A because people will still die in area B is a bit disingenous. It's like saying we shouldn't bother having breaker boxes on the electrical system in a house because people will still die in car crashes.
The United States has on the order of 10,000 gun murders a year. No other Western country (that has strict gun control) gets even close to this murder rate (by any means, let alone firearms).
I've always found it extremely disingenous to focus on "gun crime" and "gun murders", by the way your number is wrong, when I'm pretty sure you're just as dead, raped or otherwise harmed if a gun wasn't involved in the least. The only logical reason to attempt to focus only on "gun crime" is to be able to cite misleading, at best, statistics to try and justify failed policies.
Honestly it isn't surprising that there may be a minor dip in "gun crime" relative for a given location after a total ban. What usually isn't mentioned is that total crime almost always goes up or in the best case doesn't go down. Tool B is substituted for tool A and the law abiding is left hanging in the wind. Good job gun control! You created more victims!
You do realize that of all the treaties that you are condeming the United States for not signing have in fact all been signed except the Mine Ban Treaty? What they haven't been is ratified. Without going through every one of them the likely reasons for them not getting ratified is either that they are incompatible with American values or the system of government or that they are frankly stupid.
I can't say I feel too bad about the US not ratifying whatever random stuff the UN General Assembly spits out. The US is not governed from the UN and nor should it ever be.
Being unfamiliar with the legal and political systems in the US, can anyone enlighten me: if a senator says vaccines are bad, a parent decides not to vaccinate their kids, and people then die as a result, can the senator be sued? In the UK we have parliamentary privilege which offers a degree of immunity to our politicians.
Doubtful. If a parent decided not to vaccinate their kids because they think it causes autism, whether some Senator said anything or not, then they're blithering idiots anyway.
You \have to be an idiot to hear someone say 'death panel' and actually believe it means someone is killing you.
I don't believe that is what they think. What they think, and are absolutely correct about, is that medical care is a finite resource. In the end it ultimately doesn't matter whether it is paid for with tax money or private money there must be some level of rationing or it runs out. That's not politics, it's math.
The difference is that with private insurance you can switch companies and try for a better policy and better service. It is also far more likely to be efficiently run, and therefore not go out of business or suddenly cut benefits like government run programs will have to do when the money runs out. With the government you've got exactly zero choices and if you don't like what they did what are you going to do? Sue them? Good luck with that.
How in the world did everyone survive before 1970 when the EPA started regulating things? I
By having a much smaller economy.
Do you want to live poorer? Then be a libertarian. You get to live like a stone-aged Somalian. The rest of us will be socialist and live wealthy instead.
Libertarianism and individualism is a sign of weakness. Strength can only come from groups.
All hail the mighty Collective then, huh? How'd that work out the last few dozen times such logic was tried?
Your phone is going to be pretty busy with the hundred million victims of Communism and related stupidity wanting to talk to you about why exactly it'll work "this time."
Also, how did the United States become the largest economy in the world and by far the most powerful nation in the world when for most of its history it didn't have the all powerful top down magic of socialism?
You know, one point that has been brought up is the bankrupting nature of massive social programs. Among Greece's major problems is no doubt corruption, but having an extremely government heavy economy sure isn't helping any.
The debt problem you mention. Funny thing about that too. Why would all those countries be going so heavily in debt? Far beyond sustainable levels. I can't speak for European countries but the US can pay for all of its legitimate, Constitutionally mandated and limited, functions without a lick of debt. So where is it all coming from?
Have you ever considered that the massive rise of social programs and socialism has tended to accompany that massive rise of debt? People here always want to blame the military while ignoring the elephant in the room of entitlement programs. The military doesn't give us over a hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities (aside from military pensions, which are entitlements). Entitlement programs on the other hand does.
It is not possible to continually provide any service which has an ever increasing cost to everyone for "free" without eventually running out of money or having to limit that service. Because math.
The CEO's pay had exactly nothing to do with the demise of the company and is nothing but a red herring.
Riiiiiight,
CEO's have nothing to do with companies failing.
Unless they're sucking up so much money that the company is actually unable to function, it has exactly nothing to do with the failure. For instance, in a 100 billion dollar company if the CEO is making 10 - 100 million bucks it isn't likely to cause a failure of the company. On the other hand, one of the most critical sets of employees throwing a hissy fit and walking of the job even when they're told that doing so will kill the company is just a bit different and is far more likely the direct cause.
They were giving exec's pay rises when they couldn't sort out a labour dispute. That has everything to do with why the company failed. Not unions, it demonstrates a culture of corruption and ignorance at the highest levels.
But nice try to blame unions.
The executives received a pay raise near the same time. Whether it was exactly the same time or not I don't know off hand. What I do know for an absolute fact is that those pay raises aren't what killed the company. The bakers walking off the job and striking, even when the Teamsters had enough sense to make a deal, killed the company. When the bloody Teamsters are saying that your, the Bakers, union just hosed it up for everyone I'm pretty sure we can blame them.
But no, insist that the union who was warned of impending doom had little to nothing to do with the demise of the company. It was all because of the evil CEOs and their evil evil actions.
Judging by what happened to Hostess, anyone who actually wants to keep that job.
You mean how Hostess tripled their CEO's pay and raised other exec's salaries, while cutting worker's pay and benefits?
Stop drinking the far right's Kool Aid. It's not unions that are killing companies like Hostess, it's vulture capitalists.
Perhaps you should stop drinking your own Kool Aid. The Baker's Union was told that if they continued to strike the company would fail. Not "we don't want to pay you more" but "the company will close and everyone will be out of work". Their response, even after the Teamsters agreed, was "up yours". Shockingly, the company closed. The Baker's Union was greedy and assumed the owners were lying to them. They weren't. End of Story.
The CEO's pay had exactly nothing to do with the demise of the company and is nothing but a red herring.
On the other hand, recent tests of current-generation (desktop) processors showed Intel processors to be twice as fast and four times as energy-efficient on a per-core basis.
Even if it really is twice as fast, which I admit I doubt, if you're talking desktop CPUs then you're not likely going to 16 cores or even 8. So even if your point is accurate, it isn't relevant to this thread.
And the terrible thing about that is that if you want a high density server, 16 cores per socket for instance, your choices are AMD for a reasonableish price, or Intel... oh.. wait... no.. no you can't. Because there don't seem to be any 8+ core Intel CPUs.
That's a shock, because I have a bunch of them here, bought over the counter from a server OEM. They run sixteen threads per CPU and they're stonkingly fast.
Unless you've got a magic source, you've got an 8 core CPU which runs 16 threads in softcores. Hardly the same thing. As a bonus for those not 16 cores, you got to pay twice as much as the AMD solution. I hope you're twice as happy.:)
Measuring $/core or $/CPU Cycle is not a very accurate way to gauge price/performance.
When you're looking to build up a virtualization environment I'd wager the cost per core will tend to beat most other metrics. After all, what you want most to avoid is core contention. They do make 10 core CPUs, but even if you can get them the cost of one of them will likely outweigh the cost of the rest of the an entire blade. In fact, I know some people who are standing up an ESX system with AMD based blade servers. Each blade server, the entire thing with 16cores and gobs of RAM cost less than Intel CPU alone.
So if you want lots of cores, you're only practical option is AMD unless you absolutely need peak performance per core and throwing more cores at the problem won't help you.
AMD wasnt "doing well independently", why do you suppose they spun off GlobalFoundries? Theyve been getting stomped since ~2006 when the core2 came out and dominated AMD's lineup.
One should also remember that wasn't it about that same time that Intel was paying server manufactures not to use AMD chips?
...intel processors soundly trump AMD in almost every conceivable metric that matters...
I am a big fan of AMD. I really don't want to see them disappear. The/one market/ they have is cheap, high core density servers and they fucked that up when they laid off their Linux kernel devs.
I was in the process of speccing out some new 32-core (dual socket, 16-core CPUs) 1U servers and when I heard that I shifted gears... now I am lost trying to figure out what to do now...
And the terrible thing about that is that if you want a high density server, 16 cores per socket for instance, your choices are AMD for a reasonableish price, or Intel... oh.. wait... no.. no you can't. Because there don't seem to be any 8+ core Intel CPUs.
So, AMD 16 core part for $519 per socket for Intel for over $1000 for an 8 core. Plus far more expensive motherboards and such. AMD going down will likely end up a disaster for anyone wanting lots of cores and not wanting to spend $1000 - $2000 per socket.
I'm moving out of stocks and into government securities. No real return but as safe as anything is nowadays. No gold option I'm afraid or I'd take that. Three years left before I can cash out and run.
Every time Ron Paul started talking about this stuff on the campaign trail he got booed and everyone promptly stuck their hands over their ears and went "lalalalalalalalala............." I hope it holds together 3 more years so I can cash my 401K out before it's gone. A lifetime of savings and those fuckers are going to cheat me out of it. The sad thing is it's all the fault of the American people who only listen to what they want to hear. This two party shell game is going to end soon and the public will discover that no matter which shell you flip there is nothing under any of them.
Is it too late for you to move your 401k to dollar independent funds? More into commodities and hard metals?
No more tax evasion if everyone pays a consumption tax.
That does solve the profit off-shoring problem up to a point, but it creates another problem because consumption taxes are heavily regressive. I tend to think you're right that it's worth exploring the idea of dramatically shifting where the tax burden falls, but the entire tax system would need dramatically rebalancing to avoid screwing everyone on relatively low incomes in the process.
Don't charge a consumption tax on food, clothing, utilities or housing. Problem solved.
A consumption tax has the non-trivial advantage of encouraging saving. If you don't spend money you don't get taxed on it. It also removes the discouragement to strive for success that a so called progressive tax system imposes. Bonus, the IRC would cease to be useful and could be largely eliminated.
For a private citizen, taxes are just a cost of business (living) as well. Just as I need to buy or grow food to survive, I must pay taxes to avoid being shot or jailed. It is more efficient today than in previous centuries, as rather than guessing how many thugs I'll have to pay for my life,I know in advance how much I need to remit to a central clearinghouse.
Interesting, and true, way of putting it. Of course, there is the difference that you cannot just raise your pay to compensate for a sudden increase in tax rates. A company, limited by what the market will pay, can and will certainly do so. Depending on how well liked the company is by their client base they could even point the finger at government for the higher prices and not have to deal with the negative impact of the price increase, or at least not as much of it.
Lol you can apply this reasoning to every tax paying entity, individuals included. "You don't pay any taxes, your employer pays them for you"
No, no you cannot. I know you're an AC and won't see this response anyway, but still. For a corporation, or any type of business really, a tax is just another cost of doing business. This is the core problem with those special people who demand higher corporate taxes. If you raise corporate taxes all the corporations, quite reasonably I might add, are going to do is raise their prices to compensate. They are not going to lower their profits because government decided they wanted a bigger piece of the pie.
The end result is either higher prices, fewer jobs or both. High taxes kill private sector jobs which are not dependent on government.
what we do know is that the intent of his efforts were to try and improve things[...]
No, no you do not know that. He got in office on a bunch of promises and falsehoods (nothing new there) that huge numbers of highly gullible people bought wholesale. Once in office he did exactly nothing to make anything better and in fact has made things far worse.
See here for an easy example. After reading that do not come back with "Well Bush started it!" because that excuses exactly nothing.
more importantly his policies have not directly led to the deaths of thousands of Americans and others around the world.
Ask Pakistan and other locations about near constant drone strikes before you say that. The difference between this and the former president is there, but not in the way you're thinking.
If by "just works" you mean you install it on 1.- A desktop a couple of years old,so you don't have to deal with the mess that is wireless 2.- You idea of "work" only involves a browser, an IDE, and LO, 3.- you don't actually update it EVAR so you don't have to deal with "update foo broke my driver"...then yes it does work.
The problem is you just eliminated a good 85% of the planet with that list. there is a REASON why the ONLY inroads Linux has made is because of Google Android, where they took the kernel away from Torvalds, its because Torvalds and his old guard clic simply will never change the way they do things.
Heck even one of the developers of Red Hat says Torvalds "top down let the devs control everything" approach is WRONG and has made the desktop "suckage" and that if anything Linux should be copying Android in just concentrating on the kernel and let the makers of the hardware deal with the drivers, certainly more open than the way its done now and he does have some really good points to make.
Huh, this is marked +5 Insightful?
What you're saying may have been true in 2003 or so. Not so much now. Anecdote isn't the plural of evidence, so take this for what you will but I don't know of anyone who's had all those terrible terrible problems you've gone on about.
Most people I know fire up the installer, install it and done. Everything works. Hell, usually works better than Windows out of the box since with Windows you're almost certainly going to have to come back and start loading drivers for this and that to get everything working properly.
I keep seeing this comparison of computers with cars and it's just not a valid one. What has changed with cars other than the manufacturing processes and the technologie that lies in them? The answer is NOTHING. - You can still choose through many options such as color, packages and add-ons. - You still have to get it serviced regularly and you can have the shop repair it when it's broken
Computers are handing more the way of calculators where you'll buy one and dispose of it when it doesn't work or doesn't do what you want. Currently we can still buy parts and assemble our own but eventually you will get to shop for a computer the same way you do a cell phone.
Only if all the video and sound card makers, not to mention custom motherboard makers, pretty much go out of business. For off the shelf computers we're already at the point you're speaking of and have been for a long time now. Hopefully it never gets that way for everyone nor to the point when the only way to buy a computer is off the shelf with whatever the manufacturer decided you should have...
For now. There is clearly a very very strong push to make all, or basically all, devices locked down and cloud dependent. Would we even have free/open source software if things had started out the way things seem to be going? Will those OSes continue to grow and be able to innovate in a world where the vast vast vast majority of machines are locked down terminals? What would be the point of working on such OSes? Are the pure hobbyists that would likely be left be enough?
Why else would someone carry a loaded handgun? Handguns in general are for killing people, if he was hunting deer or such he'd have a rifle and hunting in a residential neighbourhood is heavily frowned upon. If he was going to the target range, why have the gun loaded? Same with transporting it for other reasons. He was carrying a loaded gun, the only sane reason to carry a loaded gun is so you can use it.
Given I carry one every day and have no desire to kill anyone I'm sure you'll be surprised when I say your statement is incorrect. I acknowledge my bias, I believe in the right of self-defense and having the best tools at hand to exercise that right. You on the other hand clearly do not believe in self-defense and only see evil where I see being prepared. Perhaps you should check your prejudices and approach things with a bit more of an open mind. My beliefs impose nothing at all on anyone else, yours appear to impose defenselessness.
Would you say "the only sane reason to carry a loaded gun is so you can use it" to the 100 pound woman who carries or is your prejudice only reserved for men? Do you also believe that someone else should be responsible for your safety? If that is how you choose to live your life, that's your choice. Not everyone chooses to shirk the responsibility for keeping themselves and their family safe. Hundreds of thousands of people, or more, feel that it isn't necessary or even right to foist that responsibility on a police man who likely won't arrive in time to do the job anyway.
TLDR: I carry a gun because carrying a police man would be too heavy.
> Are you a lawyer or other legal expert, or just some guy making stuff up?
No. I am just someone that might sit on a jury and somone that doesn't want a jackass like Zimmerman prowling through the neighborhood. With my own HOA we had a nice visit from the local police asking all present to never engage in that kind of nonsense.
Dirty Harry is both a fictional character and well trained.
You are neither.
I hope for the sake of justice that you're never on a jury for any case of importance. Your prejudice is showing.
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Saying you shouldn't make changes in area A because people will still die in area B is a bit disingenous. It's like saying we shouldn't bother having breaker boxes on the electrical system in a house because people will still die in car crashes.
The United States has on the order of 10,000 gun murders a year. No other Western country (that has strict gun control) gets even close to this murder rate (by any means, let alone firearms).
I've always found it extremely disingenous to focus on "gun crime" and "gun murders", by the way your number is wrong, when I'm pretty sure you're just as dead, raped or otherwise harmed if a gun wasn't involved in the least. The only logical reason to attempt to focus only on "gun crime" is to be able to cite misleading, at best, statistics to try and justify failed policies.
Honestly it isn't surprising that there may be a minor dip in "gun crime" relative for a given location after a total ban. What usually isn't mentioned is that total crime almost always goes up or in the best case doesn't go down. Tool B is substituted for tool A and the law abiding is left hanging in the wind. Good job gun control! You created more victims!
You do realize that of all the treaties that you are condeming the United States for not signing have in fact all been signed except the Mine Ban Treaty? What they haven't been is ratified. Without going through every one of them the likely reasons for them not getting ratified is either that they are incompatible with American values or the system of government or that they are frankly stupid.
I can't say I feel too bad about the US not ratifying whatever random stuff the UN General Assembly spits out. The US is not governed from the UN and nor should it ever be.
Being unfamiliar with the legal and political systems in the US, can anyone enlighten me: if a senator says vaccines are bad, a parent decides not to vaccinate their kids, and people then die as a result, can the senator be sued? In the UK we have parliamentary privilege which offers a degree of immunity to our politicians.
Doubtful. If a parent decided not to vaccinate their kids because they think it causes autism, whether some Senator said anything or not, then they're blithering idiots anyway.
You \have to be an idiot to hear someone say 'death panel' and actually believe it means someone is killing you.
I don't believe that is what they think. What they think, and are absolutely correct about, is that medical care is a finite resource. In the end it ultimately doesn't matter whether it is paid for with tax money or private money there must be some level of rationing or it runs out. That's not politics, it's math.
The difference is that with private insurance you can switch companies and try for a better policy and better service. It is also far more likely to be efficiently run, and therefore not go out of business or suddenly cut benefits like government run programs will have to do when the money runs out. With the government you've got exactly zero choices and if you don't like what they did what are you going to do? Sue them? Good luck with that.
It is far less prevalent in nations with Universal Health Care.
As are governments going broke...
How's that European Debt Crisis working out anyway?
How in the world did everyone survive before 1970 when the EPA started regulating things? I
By having a much smaller economy.
Do you want to live poorer? Then be a libertarian. You get to live like a stone-aged Somalian. The rest of us will be socialist and live wealthy instead.
Libertarianism and individualism is a sign of weakness. Strength can only come from groups.
All hail the mighty Collective then, huh? How'd that work out the last few dozen times such logic was tried?
Your phone is going to be pretty busy with the hundred million victims of Communism and related stupidity wanting to talk to you about why exactly it'll work "this time."
Also, how did the United States become the largest economy in the world and by far the most powerful nation in the world when for most of its history it didn't have the all powerful top down magic of socialism?
You know, one point that has been brought up is the bankrupting nature of massive social programs. Among Greece's major problems is no doubt corruption, but having an extremely government heavy economy sure isn't helping any.
The debt problem you mention. Funny thing about that too. Why would all those countries be going so heavily in debt? Far beyond sustainable levels. I can't speak for European countries but the US can pay for all of its legitimate, Constitutionally mandated and limited, functions without a lick of debt. So where is it all coming from?
Have you ever considered that the massive rise of social programs and socialism has tended to accompany that massive rise of debt? People here always want to blame the military while ignoring the elephant in the room of entitlement programs. The military doesn't give us over a hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities (aside from military pensions, which are entitlements). Entitlement programs on the other hand does.
It is not possible to continually provide any service which has an ever increasing cost to everyone for "free" without eventually running out of money or having to limit that service. Because math.
The CEO's pay had exactly nothing to do with the demise of the company and is nothing but a red herring.
Riiiiiight,
CEO's have nothing to do with companies failing.
Unless they're sucking up so much money that the company is actually unable to function, it has exactly nothing to do with the failure. For instance, in a 100 billion dollar company if the CEO is making 10 - 100 million bucks it isn't likely to cause a failure of the company. On the other hand, one of the most critical sets of employees throwing a hissy fit and walking of the job even when they're told that doing so will kill the company is just a bit different and is far more likely the direct cause.
They were giving exec's pay rises when they couldn't sort out a labour dispute. That has everything to do with why the company failed. Not unions, it demonstrates a culture of corruption and ignorance at the highest levels.
But nice try to blame unions.
The executives received a pay raise near the same time. Whether it was exactly the same time or not I don't know off hand. What I do know for an absolute fact is that those pay raises aren't what killed the company. The bakers walking off the job and striking, even when the Teamsters had enough sense to make a deal, killed the company. When the bloody Teamsters are saying that your, the Bakers, union just hosed it up for everyone I'm pretty sure we can blame them.
But no, insist that the union who was warned of impending doom had little to nothing to do with the demise of the company. It was all because of the evil CEOs and their evil evil actions.
You mean how Hostess tripled their CEO's pay and raised other exec's salaries, while cutting worker's pay and benefits?
Stop drinking the far right's Kool Aid. It's not unions that are killing companies like Hostess, it's vulture capitalists.
Perhaps you should stop drinking your own Kool Aid. The Baker's Union was told that if they continued to strike the company would fail. Not "we don't want to pay you more" but "the company will close and everyone will be out of work". Their response, even after the Teamsters agreed, was "up yours". Shockingly, the company closed. The Baker's Union was greedy and assumed the owners were lying to them. They weren't. End of Story.
The CEO's pay had exactly nothing to do with the demise of the company and is nothing but a red herring.
On the other hand, recent tests of current-generation (desktop) processors showed Intel processors to be twice as fast and four times as energy-efficient on a per-core basis.
Even if it really is twice as fast, which I admit I doubt, if you're talking desktop CPUs then you're not likely going to 16 cores or even 8. So even if your point is accurate, it isn't relevant to this thread.
And the terrible thing about that is that if you want a high density server, 16 cores per socket for instance, your choices are AMD for a reasonableish price, or Intel... oh.. wait... no.. no you can't. Because there don't seem to be any 8+ core Intel CPUs.
That's a shock, because I have a bunch of them here, bought over the counter from a server OEM. They run sixteen threads per CPU and they're stonkingly fast.
Unless you've got a magic source, you've got an 8 core CPU which runs 16 threads in softcores. Hardly the same thing. As a bonus for those not 16 cores, you got to pay twice as much as the AMD solution. I hope you're twice as happy. :)
Measuring $/core or $/CPU Cycle is not a very accurate way to gauge price/performance.
When you're looking to build up a virtualization environment I'd wager the cost per core will tend to beat most other metrics. After all, what you want most to avoid is core contention. They do make 10 core CPUs, but even if you can get them the cost of one of them will likely outweigh the cost of the rest of the an entire blade. In fact, I know some people who are standing up an ESX system with AMD based blade servers. Each blade server, the entire thing with 16cores and gobs of RAM cost less than Intel CPU alone.
So if you want lots of cores, you're only practical option is AMD unless you absolutely need peak performance per core and throwing more cores at the problem won't help you.
AMD wasnt "doing well independently", why do you suppose they spun off GlobalFoundries? Theyve been getting stomped since ~2006 when the core2 came out and dominated AMD's lineup.
One should also remember that wasn't it about that same time that Intel was paying server manufactures not to use AMD chips?
...intel processors soundly trump AMD in almost every conceivable metric that matters...
I am a big fan of AMD. I really don't want to see them disappear. The /one market/ they have is cheap, high core density servers and they fucked that up when they laid off their Linux kernel devs.
I was in the process of speccing out some new 32-core (dual socket, 16-core CPUs) 1U servers and when I heard that I shifted gears... now I am lost trying to figure out what to do now...
And the terrible thing about that is that if you want a high density server, 16 cores per socket for instance, your choices are AMD for a reasonableish price, or Intel... oh.. wait... no.. no you can't. Because there don't seem to be any 8+ core Intel CPUs.
So, AMD 16 core part for $519 per socket for Intel for over $1000 for an 8 core. Plus far more expensive motherboards and such. AMD going down will likely end up a disaster for anyone wanting lots of cores and not wanting to spend $1000 - $2000 per socket.
I'm moving out of stocks and into government securities. No real return but as safe as anything is nowadays. No gold option I'm afraid or I'd take that. Three years left before I can cash out and run.
Good luck. I'm afraid we'll all need that.
Every time Ron Paul started talking about this stuff on the campaign trail he got booed and everyone promptly stuck their hands over their ears and went "lalalalalalalalala............." I hope it holds together 3 more years so I can cash my 401K out before it's gone. A lifetime of savings and those fuckers are going to cheat me out of it. The sad thing is it's all the fault of the American people who only listen to what they want to hear. This two party shell game is going to end soon and the public will discover that no matter which shell you flip there is nothing under any of them.
Is it too late for you to move your 401k to dollar independent funds? More into commodities and hard metals?
No more tax evasion if everyone pays a consumption tax.
That does solve the profit off-shoring problem up to a point, but it creates another problem because consumption taxes are heavily regressive. I tend to think you're right that it's worth exploring the idea of dramatically shifting where the tax burden falls, but the entire tax system would need dramatically rebalancing to avoid screwing everyone on relatively low incomes in the process.
Don't charge a consumption tax on food, clothing, utilities or housing. Problem solved.
A consumption tax has the non-trivial advantage of encouraging saving. If you don't spend money you don't get taxed on it. It also removes the discouragement to strive for success that a so called progressive tax system imposes. Bonus, the IRC would cease to be useful and could be largely eliminated.
For a private citizen, taxes are just a cost of business (living) as well. Just as I need to buy or grow food to survive, I must pay taxes to avoid being shot or jailed. It is more efficient today than in previous centuries, as rather than guessing how many thugs I'll have to pay for my life,I know in advance how much I need to remit to a central clearinghouse.
Interesting, and true, way of putting it. Of course, there is the difference that you cannot just raise your pay to compensate for a sudden increase in tax rates. A company, limited by what the market will pay, can and will certainly do so. Depending on how well liked the company is by their client base they could even point the finger at government for the higher prices and not have to deal with the negative impact of the price increase, or at least not as much of it.
Lol you can apply this reasoning to every tax paying entity, individuals included. "You don't pay any taxes, your employer pays them for you"
No, no you cannot. I know you're an AC and won't see this response anyway, but still. For a corporation, or any type of business really, a tax is just another cost of doing business. This is the core problem with those special people who demand higher corporate taxes. If you raise corporate taxes all the corporations, quite reasonably I might add, are going to do is raise their prices to compensate. They are not going to lower their profits because government decided they wanted a bigger piece of the pie.
The end result is either higher prices, fewer jobs or both. High taxes kill private sector jobs which are not dependent on government.
what we do know is that the intent of his efforts were to try and improve things[...]
No, no you do not know that. He got in office on a bunch of promises and falsehoods (nothing new there) that huge numbers of highly gullible people bought wholesale. Once in office he did exactly nothing to make anything better and in fact has made things far worse.
See here for an easy example. After reading that do not come back with "Well Bush started it!" because that excuses exactly nothing.
more importantly his policies have not directly led to the deaths of thousands of Americans and others around the world.
Ask Pakistan and other locations about near constant drone strikes before you say that. The difference between this and the former president is there, but not in the way you're thinking.
If by "just works" you mean you install it on 1.- A desktop a couple of years old,so you don't have to deal with the mess that is wireless 2.- You idea of "work" only involves a browser, an IDE, and LO, 3.- you don't actually update it EVAR so you don't have to deal with "update foo broke my driver"...then yes it does work.
The problem is you just eliminated a good 85% of the planet with that list. there is a REASON why the ONLY inroads Linux has made is because of Google Android, where they took the kernel away from Torvalds, its because Torvalds and his old guard clic simply will never change the way they do things.
Heck even one of the developers of Red Hat says Torvalds "top down let the devs control everything" approach is WRONG and has made the desktop "suckage" and that if anything Linux should be copying Android in just concentrating on the kernel and let the makers of the hardware deal with the drivers, certainly more open than the way its done now and he does have some really good points to make.
Huh, this is marked +5 Insightful?
What you're saying may have been true in 2003 or so. Not so much now. Anecdote isn't the plural of evidence, so take this for what you will but I don't know of anyone who's had all those terrible terrible problems you've gone on about.
Most people I know fire up the installer, install it and done. Everything works. Hell, usually works better than Windows out of the box since with Windows you're almost certainly going to have to come back and start loading drivers for this and that to get everything working properly.
I keep seeing this comparison of computers with cars and it's just not a valid one. What has changed with cars other than the manufacturing processes and the technologie that lies in them? The answer is NOTHING.
- You can still choose through many options such as color, packages and add-ons.
- You still have to get it serviced regularly and you can have the shop repair it when it's broken
Computers are handing more the way of calculators where you'll buy one and dispose of it when it doesn't work or doesn't do what you want. Currently we can still buy parts and assemble our own but eventually you will get to shop for a computer the same way you do a cell phone.
Only if all the video and sound card makers, not to mention custom motherboard makers, pretty much go out of business. For off the shelf computers we're already at the point you're speaking of and have been for a long time now. Hopefully it never gets that way for everyone nor to the point when the only way to buy a computer is off the shelf with whatever the manufacturer decided you should have...
All totally accessible.
For now. There is clearly a very very strong push to make all, or basically all, devices locked down and cloud dependent. Would we even have free/open source software if things had started out the way things seem to be going? Will those OSes continue to grow and be able to innovate in a world where the vast vast vast majority of machines are locked down terminals? What would be the point of working on such OSes? Are the pure hobbyists that would likely be left be enough?
Why else would someone carry a loaded handgun? Handguns in general are for killing people, if he was hunting deer or such he'd have a rifle and hunting in a residential neighbourhood is heavily frowned upon. If he was going to the target range, why have the gun loaded? Same with transporting it for other reasons. He was carrying a loaded gun, the only sane reason to carry a loaded gun is so you can use it.
Given I carry one every day and have no desire to kill anyone I'm sure you'll be surprised when I say your statement is incorrect. I acknowledge my bias, I believe in the right of self-defense and having the best tools at hand to exercise that right. You on the other hand clearly do not believe in self-defense and only see evil where I see being prepared. Perhaps you should check your prejudices and approach things with a bit more of an open mind. My beliefs impose nothing at all on anyone else, yours appear to impose defenselessness.
Would you say "the only sane reason to carry a loaded gun is so you can use it" to the 100 pound woman who carries or is your prejudice only reserved for men? Do you also believe that someone else should be responsible for your safety? If that is how you choose to live your life, that's your choice. Not everyone chooses to shirk the responsibility for keeping themselves and their family safe. Hundreds of thousands of people, or more, feel that it isn't necessary or even right to foist that responsibility on a police man who likely won't arrive in time to do the job anyway.
TLDR: I carry a gun because carrying a police man would be too heavy.
> Are you a lawyer or other legal expert, or just some guy making stuff up?
No. I am just someone that might sit on a jury and somone that doesn't want a jackass like Zimmerman prowling through the neighborhood. With my own HOA we had a nice visit from the local police asking all present to never engage in that kind of nonsense.
Dirty Harry is both a fictional character and well trained.
You are neither.
I hope for the sake of justice that you're never on a jury for any case of importance. Your prejudice is showing.