Warren Buffett pays a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary because he uses dishonest math -- he lumps the tax that his company pays for her into her tax number, but excludes most of the tax that Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiaries pay for him. (If he wants to claim that the employer part of payroll tax really comes out of the employee's pocket, fine, but the same logic applies to corporate income tax.)
Two things: First, your link says that health care is a slightly larger budget slice than pensions; second, approximately 92% of the pensions slice is Social Security (disability and old age/survivors benefits). You can complain about civil service pensions if you like, but they're a rather small part of this massive direct transfers problem.
If people think their time is worth more than their current salary, they should go find a new job that pays them what their time is worth. Most people don't, so we have a revealed preference: While they might like complaining that their time is worth more than they get paid, they don't really believe that.
In most cases, spending a percent or two of the main CPU's cycles will have lower latency than a dedicated DSP, thanks to less communication overhead and a much higher effective clock rate.
Or to women who seek "an alternative arrangement" to carrying every pregnancy to term?
Really? You really went there? Why don't you explain to our viewers why you think that's congruent, and why you're not just being an asshole. We're talking explicitly about contracts for the care of children and disposition of property, as illustrated by this example. Try to focus.
Your explanation for why the sperm donor should be on the hook for support was that it was "the default, traditional, de facto state of affairs". There is nothing in there to suggest the argument can't -- or shouldn't -- apply to pregnancy vs abortion. Maybe you should be more careful before you throw out arguments based on unthinking, blind conservatism. That is what conservatism really is: A belief that we should leave things as they are because that is how they have been. When conservatism is the only rationale you offer, don't be surprised when someone asks if you apply the same logic to other conservative bugaboos.
But there's no justification to argue that only the people who support a certain thing should be taxed for it.
Sure there is. They're the people who want the thing (government support for the children of the poor), so they should pay for the thing. That's not a new idea. Maybe you've heard of this thing called charity, where people who believe in a cause that doesn't benefit them give money to support that cause. As an added bonus, they can give as much money to the cause as they choose.
So you think a permissible, and perhaps good, policy is to impose special burdens -- including requiring third-party approval? -- on couples who seek "an alternative arrangement" to the default, traditional, de facto state of affairs of "parents = 1 man + 1 woman". Does the same logic apply to marriage? Or to women who seek "an alternative arrangement" to carrying every pregnancy to term?
The rest of your post is just arguing for a second parent to be required to pay child support, not why a sperm donor should be recognized as the second parent. You might just as sensibly -- and more fairly -- argue that the mother's parents should be on the hook for support because they clearly raised an irresponsible and marginally productive daughter, or that there should be a surtax on all the people who think that the state should be providing services to children in these cases.
Why do prospective parents need permission from the state (or a doctor) if they are using a sperm donor, but don't need permission if they use their own gametes?
The most common one for contracts is being able to bill on hours spent (either T&M or a cost-plus-whatever contract structure) rather than one deliverables. Inside the government, it's career civil service with little ability to fire people who suck at their jobs (as opposed to breaking bright line rules). Fundamentally, the government itself cannot go out of business, so it lacks the basic motivation of citizens and private enterprise to do things efficiently and effectively.
The Federal government cannot order states to do much, and what they can mandate must be funded. Don't blame the states for refusing to signing up to build expensive, complicated systems to meet poorly specified requirements on an aggressive schedule on their own dollars.
Bit of a selection bias there, isn't there? You probably never got to take over the work products from a successful contract -- either the contract was extended (or the work continued under a different contract) or it worked well enough that government developers were hardly involved in continuing support. You would end up spending most of your effort on the ones that failed.
What is the minimum income required to qualify for subsidies? I have heard lots about the step function at the maximum (4x Federal poverty level) but have not heard of a minimum.
You haven't done much contract work, have you? The government illegally exempted this web site from the usual security checks and procedures, and prioritized some aspects of development so it would "meet schedule" with a less-than-fully-working site. They very much did direct the contractors how to spend resources, and security and quality were nowhere near the top of that list.
No, you smell a variant of the "government is generally incompetent because it tries to do a lot of things where it builds in incentives that encourage shitty performance" mantra.
Is this what makes American healthcare as affordable as it is today? Between Medicare and private insurance, the intermediaries who pay for most of the care pretty effectively control the prices that they pay.
I would guess because a spreadsheet makes dealing with variables -- both scalars and arrays -- easy, where "dealing with" includes data reduction, visualization and editing. Derived values are updated automatically, you can trivially pull up at least a few common visualizations, and the software includes a solid library of basic statistical and other mathematical functions. I am a professional programmer, proficient in GNU Octave in addition to various compiled languages, but the reasons I listed are why I use a spreadsheet for most of my one-off analyses of small(-ish) data sets.
Maybe you haven't ever observed agricultural businesses, but "spraying the seeds into the wind" is just about the last thing they want to do.
The person who made the issue excessively black and white is the one who claimed, without qualifications, that releasing GMOs into the environment was immoral. (To anti-GMO activists, that means "outdoors".) Maybe D1G1T likes to spend other peoples' money on expensive forms of mental masturbation, using expensive labs to develop GMOs that will never see the light of day, but serious scientists and engineers know that ethical issues involve weighing issues, and just about the only things that are that black-and-white are the things that are tantamount to murder.
Yeah, I guess you are unfamiliar with how the Internet treats software. Once you release something on the Internet, you can't put it back in the bottle, but you always think it will scratch some itch. It just might have the opposite effect that you expect -- which is why actually applying the precautionary principle boils down to "never try anything for the first time".
What course of study was that? Did it also apply the precautionary principle to writing software, along the lines of "you never know for sure that oppressors or terrorists won't use it to kill people, so don't even try"?
Any reputable cite for the claim of 10x worse health problems? The coverage I've seen says health problems are not worse near the GMO research and growing fields.
Clearly the solution is mandatory labeling for Hawaiian-origin products, so that consumers can be educated about the terribly destructive effects of producing those products.
Anti-GMO activists have done things like destroy golden rice fields. Golden rice is currently just about the best bet for combatting vitamin A deficiency. It certainly seems like these rich yuppies prefer that brown people be malnourished to having GMO foods even tried.
Unless there is significant screening of participants -- in which case it isn't really a "MOOC" in the usual sense -- most of them will have little or no business taking the course. They may pick up a thing or two, but they won't get anything like the full benefit.
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Warren Buffett pays a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary because he uses dishonest math -- he lumps the tax that his company pays for her into her tax number, but excludes most of the tax that Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiaries pay for him. (If he wants to claim that the employer part of payroll tax really comes out of the employee's pocket, fine, but the same logic applies to corporate income tax.)
Two things: First, your link says that health care is a slightly larger budget slice than pensions; second, approximately 92% of the pensions slice is Social Security (disability and old age/survivors benefits). You can complain about civil service pensions if you like, but they're a rather small part of this massive direct transfers problem.
If people think their time is worth more than their current salary, they should go find a new job that pays them what their time is worth. Most people don't, so we have a revealed preference: While they might like complaining that their time is worth more than they get paid, they don't really believe that.
In most cases, spending a percent or two of the main CPU's cycles will have lower latency than a dedicated DSP, thanks to less communication overhead and a much higher effective clock rate.
Your explanation for why the sperm donor should be on the hook for support was that it was "the default, traditional, de facto state of affairs". There is nothing in there to suggest the argument can't -- or shouldn't -- apply to pregnancy vs abortion. Maybe you should be more careful before you throw out arguments based on unthinking, blind conservatism. That is what conservatism really is: A belief that we should leave things as they are because that is how they have been. When conservatism is the only rationale you offer, don't be surprised when someone asks if you apply the same logic to other conservative bugaboos.
Sure there is. They're the people who want the thing (government support for the children of the poor), so they should pay for the thing. That's not a new idea. Maybe you've heard of this thing called charity, where people who believe in a cause that doesn't benefit them give money to support that cause. As an added bonus, they can give as much money to the cause as they choose.
So you think a permissible, and perhaps good, policy is to impose special burdens -- including requiring third-party approval? -- on couples who seek "an alternative arrangement" to the default, traditional, de facto state of affairs of "parents = 1 man + 1 woman". Does the same logic apply to marriage? Or to women who seek "an alternative arrangement" to carrying every pregnancy to term?
The rest of your post is just arguing for a second parent to be required to pay child support, not why a sperm donor should be recognized as the second parent. You might just as sensibly -- and more fairly -- argue that the mother's parents should be on the hook for support because they clearly raised an irresponsible and marginally productive daughter, or that there should be a surtax on all the people who think that the state should be providing services to children in these cases.
Yeah, lesbians are really likely to have hooked up with so many men in the time period in question that they don't know who the father is....
The state hounded the biological mother to name the father precisely because "I don't know" would have been pretty implausible.
Why do prospective parents need permission from the state (or a doctor) if they are using a sperm donor, but don't need permission if they use their own gametes?
The most common one for contracts is being able to bill on hours spent (either T&M or a cost-plus-whatever contract structure) rather than one deliverables. Inside the government, it's career civil service with little ability to fire people who suck at their jobs (as opposed to breaking bright line rules). Fundamentally, the government itself cannot go out of business, so it lacks the basic motivation of citizens and private enterprise to do things efficiently and effectively.
The Federal government cannot order states to do much, and what they can mandate must be funded. Don't blame the states for refusing to signing up to build expensive, complicated systems to meet poorly specified requirements on an aggressive schedule on their own dollars.
Bit of a selection bias there, isn't there? You probably never got to take over the work products from a successful contract -- either the contract was extended (or the work continued under a different contract) or it worked well enough that government developers were hardly involved in continuing support. You would end up spending most of your effort on the ones that failed.
What is the minimum income required to qualify for subsidies? I have heard lots about the step function at the maximum (4x Federal poverty level) but have not heard of a minimum.
You haven't done much contract work, have you? The government illegally exempted this web site from the usual security checks and procedures, and prioritized some aspects of development so it would "meet schedule" with a less-than-fully-working site. They very much did direct the contractors how to spend resources, and security and quality were nowhere near the top of that list.
No, you smell a variant of the "government is generally incompetent because it tries to do a lot of things where it builds in incentives that encourage shitty performance" mantra.
Is this what makes American healthcare as affordable as it is today? Between Medicare and private insurance, the intermediaries who pay for most of the care pretty effectively control the prices that they pay.
I would guess because a spreadsheet makes dealing with variables -- both scalars and arrays -- easy, where "dealing with" includes data reduction, visualization and editing. Derived values are updated automatically, you can trivially pull up at least a few common visualizations, and the software includes a solid library of basic statistical and other mathematical functions. I am a professional programmer, proficient in GNU Octave in addition to various compiled languages, but the reasons I listed are why I use a spreadsheet for most of my one-off analyses of small(-ish) data sets.
ALL tooth problems are caused by having teeth, as simple as that. There is only one sure way to avoid having tooth problems!
Maybe you haven't ever observed agricultural businesses, but "spraying the seeds into the wind" is just about the last thing they want to do.
The person who made the issue excessively black and white is the one who claimed, without qualifications, that releasing GMOs into the environment was immoral. (To anti-GMO activists, that means "outdoors".) Maybe D1G1T likes to spend other peoples' money on expensive forms of mental masturbation, using expensive labs to develop GMOs that will never see the light of day, but serious scientists and engineers know that ethical issues involve weighing issues, and just about the only things that are that black-and-white are the things that are tantamount to murder.
Yeah, I guess you are unfamiliar with how the Internet treats software. Once you release something on the Internet, you can't put it back in the bottle, but you always think it will scratch some itch. It just might have the opposite effect that you expect -- which is why actually applying the precautionary principle boils down to "never try anything for the first time".
What course of study was that? Did it also apply the precautionary principle to writing software, along the lines of "you never know for sure that oppressors or terrorists won't use it to kill people, so don't even try"?
Any reputable cite for the claim of 10x worse health problems? The coverage I've seen says health problems are not worse near the GMO research and growing fields.
Clearly the solution is mandatory labeling for Hawaiian-origin products, so that consumers can be educated about the terribly destructive effects of producing those products.
Anti-GMO activists have done things like destroy golden rice fields. Golden rice is currently just about the best bet for combatting vitamin A deficiency. It certainly seems like these rich yuppies prefer that brown people be malnourished to having GMO foods even tried.
Unless there is significant screening of participants -- in which case it isn't really a "MOOC" in the usual sense -- most of them will have little or no business taking the course. They may pick up a thing or two, but they won't get anything like the full benefit.
Have you ever watched a badly pan-and-scanned movie? Aspect ratio matters for a lot more than one-time OpenGL configuration!