In the town I live in in England, the arithmetic mean income is £36,000, and the median income is £22,000. 40% earn less than £14,000.
So I don't think you can say that average, either median or mean income is representative of the income of the population here.
Actually it probably is. From the numbers you provided, chances are that at least another 40-50% earns somewhere between 14,000 and 30,000. So even though a large percentage is below 14,000 it is "offset" by another large group which is just above (as opposed to a few millionaires). If everyone was dirt poor and only say 1% had reasonable income or were rich, the median would have been much lower to reflect that. But you have a rather flattened income disribution curve there.
The Chinese "communist" party has as much to do with Communism as the Spanish Inquisition had to do with the supposed teachings of one Jesus H. Christ or as much as German "National Socialist Workers Party" had to do with Socialism... or workers.
Median is the value that sits in the center of your values and fits the normal distribution (bell curve) and effectively discard extremes.
Which is vastly superior to the plain average for the purpose of estimating income of the population. The disribution curve of income distribution is not bell shaped though, it is heavily shifted to the lower income brackets.
Well our system is far from utopian, but it's the best we got, and it's better to work with the current system then work on something that couldn't be used unless there were significant changes in hows things worked.
If by "work on something we got" you mean to retain the ever-expanding influence of mega-corporate wealth at the expense of citizenry (not to mention the fact that a handful of the same mega-corporations and mega-wealthy individuals own all of the media and thus control the democratic debate) then you might as well give up the pretense and simply accept Fascism as inevietable.
Still doesn't correlate for me when it comes to the numbers, they still go up despite tax cuts in the largest bracket.
That is because those GDP and the "real" compensation charts are really useless. GDP is accurate but represents merely the growth of the population. Note that it grows no matter what and the only irregular acceleration centered on 1945 when the WWII forced massive government-financed production increases of war materiel. The "real" compensation chart is meaningless since it is not indicating whose compensation it measures. If billionaires got richer much faster then workers (which is the actual case) the "real" compensation measured as the average would climb madly. Yet contrary to that chart we know that the compensation in middle class and lower levels has stagnated for close to a decade now.
For taxation levels, see this then correlate it to this.
AFAIK Bill Gates doesn't have a huge income, just huge wealth (although since a large portion is as Microsoft stock, it varies both ways), according to Wikipedia his salary last year was under a million dollars
You are probably correct in that his income is nowhere what it used to be in the years past (when it had to be huge to get to the point of the huge wealth he is at now) but I simply used Gates as one of the most recognisable of the iconic greedmongers to highlight the point I was making. It was purely a rethorical device.
Average income in the US and UK is representative of the population, whereas in China it is not.
I must point out that "average income" is never reliably representative of any population in any country. It takes only one multi-billionaire to render the whole metric useless. That is why "average income" is a darling of various economic propagandists rather then those who try to figure out the economy seriously. That is of course why "average income" is very frequently and breathlessly being talked about by the brainless press which is probably the very reason the GP is so upset with me for daring to go against the "wisdom" Mr. Murdoch's employees.
Therefore the average is closer to the median and is still a good representation of the annual income.
Which of course makes no sense whatsoever. Why use a deeply flawed metric of "average income" at all, if it is only good when it reasonably aproximates the real metric of "median income"? Why not simply use the median?
1. GP first brought up the point that the average income was less than the cost of a copy of Vista. You should've directly replied to GP instead of parent. You replied to parent hoping to get more attention, since parnet was modded higher
They are both wrong except that the GP is (by accident) closer to the truth.
Also your accusation of my replies being based on Slahsdot moderation is comical. First of all when I did reply the post was not moderated at all. Two, the whole point of moderation is to bring posts to one's attention. And thus to guarantee they get red more and get more replies. Or has that part escaped you?
2. Average income is used throughout the world to gauge the poverty levels of a society, including US and UK. And I do believe they have sane economists.
Averages (when it comes to income) are used by various dishonest propagandists to fool the arithmetically challenged voters into believing that various economic scenarious represent the exact opposite of what they represent. Subsequently you can find the so-called "mainstream" media bloviating about "average" incomes all over the place. Actual researchers do no such thing because they do have a grasp of mathematics. I even gave you a practical example to illustrate how the averages are a completely useless metric when it comes to vastly diverging incomes, but then again you missed that part too.
Coincidence with the post-war boom, strong unions, etc... ? I would think so.
I say that the taxation curves were in a major way a contributing factor to the post-war boom... and he comes back and announces that the very post-war boom I was talking about was responsible for... the post-war boom.
You win the Golden Pretzel of Circular Logic. Congratulations.
Your model still gives the government gobs of money from the private sector. Where is their threshold?
There is none per se. The curve starts increasing from low taxation levels at the median of middle class income (that way most middle class pays less taxes then today) and starts to increase progressively from there. The idea is to make sure that the taxation income is reasonable but that pathological greed (which the avarice-afflicted can't resist - its their warped nature) is converted to public good as they desperately (and insanely) struggle to make "billions". The actual steepness of the curve is something to be computed based on mathematical models of the economy and optimised based on multiple factors. Note that most small businesses, if the curve is sensible, would pay taxes comparable or moderately lesser (as the number of small businesses increases and mega-corporations fall apart) to those of present levels. Remeber, the system is designed to consume (and convert to common good) Gates', Carnegie's, Rockefeller's etc type of insanity but not block much smaller scale personal enterprise since, sadly, a significant chunk of the population seems to be motivated by their base lizard brain instincts to a degree. That is why Capitalism can be such a successful trick to be played on that primordial brain circuitry.
Regardless of what it does to the private sector, you now have a government with a large surplus of funds, which is not a good idea methinks.
That of course depends on the kind of government one has. If it is a truly enlightened representative democracy, with full transparency and strong checke-and-balances on its power held in the hands of the common citizens, there is litte fear. If it is a mega-corporate kleptocracy full of "lobbyists" whose source of financing comes from the coffers of multi-national feudal fiefdoms more wealthy then most nations, then of course the citizens stand no chance. Does that second description sound familiar?
Oh yeah that'll spur innovation, take away the incentive to become successful by giving all your profits to the government. Then we'll only have 1 monopoly.
You are mistaken. The objective is not to remove the ability to earn more then the average member of the middle class, it is to make it progressively harder to climb the wealth scale, which is the exact oposite to the natural state of affairs in which wealth accumulation past certain point results in the sheer volume of capital in one's control creating ever more opportunities for more profit. Making it impractical for a single individual to expand his business exponentially by definition opens room for competition from other individuals in the same marketplace. This results in a multitude of smaller companies being created as long as the demand exceeds supply as opposed to the current mechanism of mergers and acquisitions which reduces competition drastically until oligopolies and monopolies are all that remains.
As a matter of fact this very system was in place in the USA during its most prosperous for most of its citizens time, that is in 1950s and 1960s when the middle class expanded rapidly and innovation bloomed like in no time before.
Yet at that very time top bracket tax rates were around 90%.
It is actually better for a country if the wealth is transfered to the most capable members of society, because, as they are more capable, they do a better job of generating new wealth from that money.
The problem, which you obviously have missed from my previous post, is that there appears to be no relationship between the transferring and the "capability".
This is one of the reasons why productivity growth in the US is so much higher than Europe, the wealth is distributed to individuals more by merit in the US.
This of course is one of the funnier non-sequiturs. An ultimately "productive" worker is one which operates fully-automated, 100% efficient factory which employs exactly zero other employees. Furthermore, an ultimately efficient enterprise (owned by that last Capitalist who now nears 99% of ownership of everything if current trends continue) would promptly fire that last worker and replace him with more automation. Ponder that when you espouse virtues of "productivity" and "efficiency".
The point of societies is not efficiency. It is happiness of its members. There is no race to be won by being more "efficient" then the some other lifeform on Pluto. But our lives are short and filled with problems and pain in no small part because of the fact that some people managed to pervert the society to put precedence of "efficiency" ahead of well being of the majority of its members for the sake of stroking egos and enriching very few of them.
In the long run the discrepancy in salaries is more than made up for by the increased growth rate, and so it is better for all members of society, including those in the lower brackets.
That green little man on Pluto must be getting ahead because you are concerned about how fast we "grow" our output of plastic lawn chairs from China and other worthless crap, while creating completely unsustainable energy and environmental (not to mention social and financial) nightmare so that we can outpace his "growth". Why else would you and the other nutcases be concerned with increasing the growth rate as opposed to general well being of individuals? USA is "growing" faster then Europe and yet there are 40 million medically uninsured people here to... zero in Europe or Canada. What the fuck is the point of all this growth then?!!
You you think "richer" == "better" and "money" == "worth"
You sound like a bitchy philosophy major with no real job skills and who can't find a real job.
You seem to have missed the entire point of Capitalism.
Well, in respect to Microsoft (and other mega-multi-national-oligo/mono-polies) it only goes to show that the system is broken.
If the economic rules were set up properly creation of such a monopoly would be impossible -- regardless of the megalomaniac dreams of the CEO -- by simply making the cost prohibitive (i.e. progressive taxation curve reaching 99.999% at the levels of Microsoft revenue).
Was he misplaced in his feeling that Lincoln was going to institute the eventual destruction of this country?
I am in awe of your insight. One can only speculate about what would have happened if Booth's ideology was successful. Why, the present hostilities at the Canadian - Mexican border would never have happened for one. But one cannot bemoan spilled milk. What, what! By Jove, those chaps do have to keep stiff upper lip over there in Her Majesty's Canadian Province of Ohio or we will be all speaking Spanish!
Overall, I agree that tasting is not a "good thing", but I think the "strained DNS" argument is bunk.
Please take a look at the argument I made in the other post below. Even if Verisign is slowing down only their own DNS lookups of the.com domain, they are still messing around with the public good since they are de-facto custodians of the publicly owned.com domain itself. So Joe Sixpack who wants to go to his hockey site will get a slowdown of his legitimate lookup of hockey.com even though both the domain owner and Joe are not part of the spam domain "tasting" scheme and both he and hockey.com owners are likely to be extorted by Verisgin (and through them by the squatters/spammers) by allowing Verisign an excuse to jack up registration fees (or alternatively to reduce further the performance of the.com domain).
Well this theory has been around for a long time, most famously advanced by Hobbes. And his silly recipe to address that problem was... monarchy. Go figure.
I personally view human society as an evolution-induced struggle of older animalistic instincts with newer higher order reasoning and logic. Subsequently the individuals within it vary in world-views ranging from lizard-brained "winner takes all", "reproduce at all costs" strategies you and Mr.Hobbes agree on to that of gentle phillosophers and visionary scientists, more to the liking of Mr. Rousseau. So both were right in a sense.
I see a further differntiation occuring between individuals and societies as time goes on, resulting in division of those who value reason and those who wish for existence more akin to locusts or maggots. You can guess which I am likely to root for.
That does not mean that the more advanced societies which attact more enlightened individuals will be in the majority. In fact they are likely to constitute a tiny fraction of humanity at first. But sooner or later their influence must expand to that of the whole globe... or humanity is simply not worth the trouble and should wither away.
I personally still haven't seen a true proto-society of that sort where dogmatic, organized religion is only considered as a punch-line in a joke and where personal avarice, instead of personal ambition to help the fellow citizens and to advance the understanding of the Universe, is an aliment to be cured by the psychiatrists.
The North American experiments in constitutional democracy and capitalism represent great advances over monarchies and feudalism but they, as you can plainly see, are a mere first step in the right direction and a constant danger of being subsumed back by the forces of greed, ignorance and mindless tribal authoritarianism.
Capitalism for example is a brilliant trick (when working properly) to be played on the most greedy: the idea is to rig the rules so that by pursuing their primordial greed they end up advancing society for all its members. The avarice-afflicted are fitted with snuggly-fitting collars of competition and taxation which, when their animalistic instincts force them to push forward, straining and wheezing with foam at their snouts, drag the payload of civilization behind them, something which in their natural animal state they would never do. This of course only works when the collars and chains are in place. Otherwise it is no longer useful to allow the clinically greedy to run dangerously amok.
So you can now understand why I think capitalism is a workable, useful, albait temporary tool, as long as those basic principles are followed.
Also I realized that there is another flaw in your reasoning: the.com (and all the other TLDs) are in fact public resources. Just because their maintenance was (unwisely in my view) farmed out to some corporate crooks does not change this.
Consider the fact that by allowing all those spam domains Verisign is slowing down their own operations for all users of the Internet not just those jackals who paid for spam domains. So average users who are not customers of Verisign, but who must access the public property of the.com domain through Verisign, end up being impacted by Verisign's mis-managment of that public property which Verisign have been entrusted to care for. Your very own links show the Verisgn's crooked activity clearly. So in the long term the public loses here because some corporate hyenas managed to use an inane right-wing political ideology to position themselves as gatekeepers of public property so that they can make profit by abusing the commons which belong to all of us.
For ".com" DNS it's Verisign. The DNS system is only communal at the root level. You run a query for any.com domain and the root servers are going to refer to you VeriSign's DNS servers.
But all of the lookup requests for those spam domains must go through the root servers. As all lookups start at the TLD, more useless spam domains there are (pushed by spam emails for example) more spam lookups occur to the TLDs, right? (I am exluding caching here).
Furthermore the other "public" resource at stake here is the pool of unused domain names in the sense that if all the possible words in all possible useful combinations are squatted at, the whole DNS system comes to a grinding halt as the only possible new domains one can register without being subject to gangland extortion are of the type of "1255ajjsay.com".
Which is under assault by mass domain registrations and re-registrations. The very topic of the Slashdot article. Or do you imagine that those DNS zone databases, which are now heading towards 90% spam contents, reside on a magical cloud and update by magic? Not to mention that cost-free, completely magical little winged fairies are involved in retrieving useful data out of heaps of spam every milisecond of every day, no?
but the Name Registry systems used for registration of domain names are not. These registries are usually run by for-profit corporations (e.g. VeriSign for.com) and these companies are anything BUT community resources. It doesn't matter to VeriSign if their $6.00 cut for each registration comes from squatters or legitimate sites.. In fact, they favor the squatters that bring them thousands in annual revenues.
No, they favor squatters because they (along with the squatters) can profit from abusing the communal resource: the DNS servers.
Also I would like you to explain to me the benefit to the society the squatters represent. Focus your effort particularly on the wonderfully stimulating and helpful extortion applied by the squatters to any legitimate startup company wishing to register their new domain.
My point is that the system is failing miserably, although most head-up-the-ass promoters of "unrestricted capitalism" probably haven't figured it out yet so the social unrest which is on its way will be a real surprise to them.
Probably because they think of watching 24/7 "news" of Paris Hilton while cherishing their ability to buy truckloads of useless plastic crap from China for their "interest-only" financed 6000 sqft paper and sticks house, while having no savings and a negative net worth in general as "success".
Communism is dead, it died because the will of the people is not enough to out way the desire for extraordinary success.
Communism is alive and well in many places where it was always alive and well: Quaker and Mennonite communes. Oh you meant the State Capitalism / Totalitarian Governance combo which the Soviet Union practiced? That one croaked indeed. But not because because it could not out way desire for "extraordinary success". One set of supreme jerks simply lost to another set of supreme jerks. Oligarchs replaced Politburo appointees and then got replaced by ex-KGB "businessmen" who conduct business via 9mm pistol rounds.
I have news for you: the governing principle of our supposed Capitalist society, the very reason it appears acceptable for the general populace, is that one's wealth is supposed to be proportional to one's merit to society. You break that rule badly enough, long enough and you will end up with Feudalism, Corporatism or some other Fascist abomination.
...you however, seem to be shooting for extreme moderation in self made success. A theory that should never be accepted on the net.
No I am "shooting" for proportionality of reward to merit. That is all.
No man or woman is 1000 times (or more) "smarter" then even the dumbest of janitors. No fashion model is more meritous then a productive cancer researcher or an accomplished researcher in quantuum physics. No CEO is worth 400 times the average worker in salary and 1000 times in bonuses when the very company he is heading is going bankrupt. No trust fund kid is "better" then that of a minimum-wage diner waitress just because he inhereited $2 billion from papa. And so on.
... but is it really a major issue? And if so, for who?
Yes, for the DNS infrastructure and therefore for all the useful sites/services on the Internet.
As a web browser, I almost never encounter these pages and as soon as I do I leave that page again immediately. If someone is willing to pay for my eyeballs for that one second it takes me to process that the site is a fraud, so be it.
One problem is that jerks like that original poster abuse the system to the point of breakage of all the other useful sites. Not to mention the resulting extortion that is going on for all the legitimate domain names which people want to register their actual startup businesses at.
And systemic destruction of some communal resource is always a result of their smug abuse of one "loophole" or another.
As a web publisher I acknowledge that it's annoying to have so many names taken, but does it really matter if they're taken legitimately or fraudulently? What's the real objection here?
See above. Furthermore the GP is advocating, with glee may I add, general attitude of abuse of "loopholes", not just that restricted to cybersquatting. Tax evasion, pollution of the environment, investment scams, fraudulent advertising, sham companies, etc and so on. All can be accomplished via "loopholes" in the system.
Is it just that we don't like these people on a moral level?
If so, I don't really care. They impact me so little that I have no problem with them peddling their back-room ways in the dark corners of the stale-link internet. I don't see them, I don't care what they're doing. If they make a little bit of money, how does that negatively impact me?
I already mentioned the ways how they impact the net in this case.
But your approach in general is extremely dangerous because it is precisely what the jerks want. In most cases their scams affect only small percentage of the population and they count on you to have this incredibly naive and anti-social attitude of "it does not imapct me, I got mine, let all the others fend for themselves, not my problem".
This is the very mindset that results in old ladies getting mugged in broad daylight in the middle of a busy street during rush hour, with hundreds of passer-bys turning their eyes away and thinking "I am not getting mugged, so I don't give a fuck".
Is that a complaint or something?
It's one of the many ways how smart people make some money you hippie.
Actually it is.
And no, it is not how "smart" people make money, it is how sociopathic jerks make money. Enough people with your attitude and Capitalism would turn into a kleptocratic dog-eat-dog anyting-goes nightmare where top 1% owns 90% of everything with no relationship of wealth-to-merit of any sort while the rest does not even have health-care... oh wait there appears to be enough of jerks in charge already!
The results of such activities by you jerks are of course in the long term counter-productive as your messing up of the society sooner or later results in your findng yourselves up against the wall (either figuratively or literally), which is usually when you discover that your smug jerkiness ceases to be an "asset".
Which I was not, since clearly there are major domains where "domain.com" and "www.domain.com" are not one and the same.
Then you tried to defend your position, but instead provided an example of a case I explicitly covered already.
Since my position was only that such sites do exist, existence of even one example is sufficient. You did not "cover" anything since your rambling had nothing to do whatsoever with my point. And still does not.
So I pointed that out to you, using sound technical methodology.
Again, you tried to concoct some fake "evidence" in support of the various strawmen you have created by escaping a telnet session and hoping I won't notice. And then called the process of such fakery and pretense a "sound technical methodology".
Then you repeated my own point back to me, claiming it as your own.
You are losing it. My point is up there at the top of this thread, well above your rant. One would hope you did notice that this establishes the precedence quite clearly. Otherwise you need to take your medication now.
Then I pointed that out to you, using exact and contextually relavent quotes from our previous exchanges.
Err, you quoted yourself again, clearly hoping that by repeating your nonsense over and over you will somehow give it more weight. I do understand that you like the sound of your own voice and reading of your own scribblings but I have to break the sad news to you: neither does constitute "contextually relevant".
Finally, the last threads of sanity left you flailing crazily at me, rather than at any point that I've made.
I simply dismissed the whole of your pretentious, vacuous, self-centered, pointless and completely off-topic ramblings. And that of pathetic fakery. Which naturally would constitute "flailing crazily at you" in your delusional state. I am sure your doctor is also "flailing crazily at you" when he gently tries to talk you out of calling yourself Julius Caesar and out of demanding that your centurions report to you. As a matter of fact I strongly suspect that the entire universe is "flailing crazily" at poor, misunderstood you.
Here's the salient facts:
1) Unless the 2LD has NS records for "www", it's a host--not a 3LD. Usually it's a host.
Something I never denied but which would never stop you from manufacturing such a wonderful strawman out of. I mentioned a '"www" sub-domain' in passing as a reference to another point. I could have called it '"www" host'. Both irrelevant to the actual point I was discussing since the exact classification of the "www" was never part of the discussion and only served as something that you could latch on to dispense spittle. Or point out where I did otherwise. You cannot but yet your first post was "proving" me horribly "wrong".
2) Usually a responsive webserver fronting a 2LD responds with the same content as the "www" host for that 2LD.
More straw for men of straw. You do love them so. Remember, before you showed up to burn straw, I only claimed that "domain.com" and "www.domain.com" are not always one and the same. No mention of any "responsive servers" and the like. Or point out where I claim otherwise. You cannot but yet your first post was "proving" me horribly "wrong".
3) Your example didn't contradict (1) or (2) above.
It did not because... wait for it... I never claimed otherwise. Or perhaps you are having difficulty reading my original post? Or point out where I claim otherwise. You cannot but yet your first post was "proving" me horribly "wrong".
4) Your original claim--that (2) is untrue is itself the falsehood.
The entire point of my original post was to contradict a dude who was claiming that "example.com" and "www.example.com" are always synonymous.
Following which I gave examples why they are, in many cases, not.
Then you roll in spewing spittle all over about how horribly wrong I am, moaning and bitching incoherently about third level domains being always host names and HTTP redirect requests.
So I show you a rather prominent site which does precisely what I was claiming.
Then you pretend it is not so.
So I demosntrate that beyond any doubt, leaving no room for you to wiggle,
And so in your desperation you now turn to some ridiculous sophistry about the meaning of "if". Something along the lines of: "If hosts do not fall into the frequently occuring cases which you described... then.... then.... they do not fall into the frequently occuring cases you described!!! Aha!!! You failed to contradict me!! Gotcha!!! Be in awe of my towering intellect!! All look at my gigiantic intellect!!"
I must be a glutton for punishment even replying to this tedious drivel.
Klinton fired them all just because they had been appointed by the previous Bush Administration.
That is what I meant by indiscriminately. As opposed to keeping some and firing some, based on some unknown murky criteria.
Instead of commending the current Bush Administration for maintaining Klinton appointees based on their job performance and not their politics
You gotta be kidding. After all of these years of evidence to the contrary you pretend that Bush administration was basing anything on performance instead of politics? What planet are you from?!
I am not sure what scheme was employed with the attorneys originally but it sure as hell was not "performance"-based. More like trying to keep one's options open in case they "misbehave". Unless of course that is what you meant by "performance".
, you people have to whine about a handful of people that were fired for performance.
Again, an example of "performance problems" would be getting caught accepting bribes or losing 100% of one's cases. None of that occured here. The "performance-based replacements" were completely inexperienced bible-thumping home-schooled wackos whose "law" credentials involve attending fundie "law" schools run by megalomaniac Christianists and a career of ass-licking, slavish servitude to the top neo-con gangsters. Performance my ass.
And if you followed the Washington state gubernatorial election, you would have seen blatant voter fraud that allowed a Democrat to be made Governor although she lost 2 out of 3 vote counts. This clearly was a case of incompetence that required a firing.
Riiight. So GOP sued over this and lost with prejudice in court. And how is the Attorney General is supposed to be involved in this? Investigating what? The judges? Or by the same logic the 2000 Florida election results should have been investigated to death by the Florida AG, over and over until Gore came up winner?
"Voter fraud" is the catch-all excuse for losing elections. I expect any closely contested election (and many which are not) being subject to whining about "voter fraud". And as soon some GOP stooge wins, the Diebold boxes will be "foolproof" and "extremely reliable" etc. A Democrat wins and suddenly there are "hordes of triple-voting illegals" everywhere.
And inferring that this had anything to do with current investigations is idiotic. How stupid can you people be
While Democrats are not immune from partisan hackery and far from being infallible, they are complete amateurs when compared to the filth the GOP and its supporters like you have visited on the USA and the rest of the planet. And your baseless assumptions are showing. I am not a Democrat. And I cannot be, since I am a Canadian observing this idiocy as a spectator from abroad.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it probably is. From the numbers you provided, chances are that at least another 40-50% earns somewhere between 14,000 and 30,000. So even though a large percentage is below 14,000 it is "offset" by another large group which is just above (as opposed to a few millionaires). If everyone was dirt poor and only say 1% had reasonable income or were rich, the median would have been much lower to reflect that. But you have a rather flattened income disribution curve there.
The Chinese "communist" party has as much to do with Communism as the Spanish Inquisition had to do with the supposed teachings of one Jesus H. Christ or as much as German "National Socialist Workers Party" had to do with Socialism ... or workers.
Which is vastly superior to the plain average for the purpose of estimating income of the population. The disribution curve of income distribution is not bell shaped though, it is heavily shifted to the lower income brackets.
If by "work on something we got" you mean to retain the ever-expanding influence of mega-corporate wealth at the expense of citizenry (not to mention the fact that a handful of the same mega-corporations and mega-wealthy individuals own all of the media and thus control the democratic debate) then you might as well give up the pretense and simply accept Fascism as inevietable.
That is because those GDP and the "real" compensation charts are really useless. GDP is accurate but represents merely the growth of the population. Note that it grows no matter what and the only irregular acceleration centered on 1945 when the WWII forced massive government-financed production increases of war materiel. The "real" compensation chart is meaningless since it is not indicating whose compensation it measures. If billionaires got richer much faster then workers (which is the actual case) the "real" compensation measured as the average would climb madly. Yet contrary to that chart we know that the compensation in middle class and lower levels has stagnated for close to a decade now.
For taxation levels, see this then correlate it to this.
You are probably correct in that his income is nowhere what it used to be in the years past (when it had to be huge to get to the point of the huge wealth he is at now) but I simply used Gates as one of the most recognisable of the iconic greedmongers to highlight the point I was making. It was purely a rethorical device.
I must point out that "average income" is never reliably representative of any population in any country. It takes only one multi-billionaire to render the whole metric useless. That is why "average income" is a darling of various economic propagandists rather then those who try to figure out the economy seriously. That is of course why "average income" is very frequently and breathlessly being talked about by the brainless press which is probably the very reason the GP is so upset with me for daring to go against the "wisdom" Mr. Murdoch's employees.
Which of course makes no sense whatsoever. Why use a deeply flawed metric of "average income" at all, if it is only good when it reasonably aproximates the real metric of "median income"? Why not simply use the median?
They are both wrong except that the GP is (by accident) closer to the truth.
Also your accusation of my replies being based on Slahsdot moderation is comical. First of all when I did reply the post was not moderated at all. Two, the whole point of moderation is to bring posts to one's attention. And thus to guarantee they get red more and get more replies. Or has that part escaped you?
Averages (when it comes to income) are used by various dishonest propagandists to fool the arithmetically challenged voters into believing that various economic scenarious represent the exact opposite of what they represent. Subsequently you can find the so-called "mainstream" media bloviating about "average" incomes all over the place. Actual researchers do no such thing because they do have a grasp of mathematics. I even gave you a practical example to illustrate how the averages are a completely useless metric when it comes to vastly diverging incomes, but then again you missed that part too.
That is why no sane economist ever uses averages. They use median income.
If Bill Gates walks into a bar full of out-of-work drunk bums, the "average" income in that bar is suddenly into tens of millions.
A very similar scenario is playing in China where a tiny fraction of the population accounts for nearly all of the income from the economic boom.
I say that the taxation curves were in a major way a contributing factor to the post-war boom ... and he comes back and announces that the very post-war boom I was talking about was responsible for ... the post-war boom.
You win the Golden Pretzel of Circular Logic. Congratulations.
There is none per se. The curve starts increasing from low taxation levels at the median of middle class income (that way most middle class pays less taxes then today) and starts to increase progressively from there. The idea is to make sure that the taxation income is reasonable but that pathological greed (which the avarice-afflicted can't resist - its their warped nature) is converted to public good as they desperately (and insanely) struggle to make "billions". The actual steepness of the curve is something to be computed based on mathematical models of the economy and optimised based on multiple factors. Note that most small businesses, if the curve is sensible, would pay taxes comparable or moderately lesser (as the number of small businesses increases and mega-corporations fall apart) to those of present levels. Remeber, the system is designed to consume (and convert to common good) Gates', Carnegie's, Rockefeller's etc type of insanity but not block much smaller scale personal enterprise since, sadly, a significant chunk of the population seems to be motivated by their base lizard brain instincts to a degree. That is why Capitalism can be such a successful trick to be played on that primordial brain circuitry.
That of course depends on the kind of government one has. If it is a truly enlightened representative democracy, with full transparency and strong checke-and-balances on its power held in the hands of the common citizens, there is litte fear. If it is a mega-corporate kleptocracy full of "lobbyists" whose source of financing comes from the coffers of multi-national feudal fiefdoms more wealthy then most nations, then of course the citizens stand no chance. Does that second description sound familiar?
You are mistaken. The objective is not to remove the ability to earn more then the average member of the middle class, it is to make it progressively harder to climb the wealth scale, which is the exact oposite to the natural state of affairs in which wealth accumulation past certain point results in the sheer volume of capital in one's control creating ever more opportunities for more profit. Making it impractical for a single individual to expand his business exponentially by definition opens room for competition from other individuals in the same marketplace. This results in a multitude of smaller companies being created as long as the demand exceeds supply as opposed to the current mechanism of mergers and acquisitions which reduces competition drastically until oligopolies and monopolies are all that remains.
As a matter of fact this very system was in place in the USA during its most prosperous for most of its citizens time, that is in 1950s and 1960s when the middle class expanded rapidly and innovation bloomed like in no time before.
Yet at that very time top bracket tax rates were around 90%.
Coincidence? Me thinks not.
The problem, which you obviously have missed from my previous post, is that there appears to be no relationship between the transferring and the "capability".
This of course is one of the funnier non-sequiturs. An ultimately "productive" worker is one which operates fully-automated, 100% efficient factory which employs exactly zero other employees. Furthermore, an ultimately efficient enterprise (owned by that last Capitalist who now nears 99% of ownership of everything if current trends continue) would promptly fire that last worker and replace him with more automation. Ponder that when you espouse virtues of "productivity" and "efficiency".
The point of societies is not efficiency. It is happiness of its members. There is no race to be won by being more "efficient" then the some other lifeform on Pluto. But our lives are short and filled with problems and pain in no small part because of the fact that some people managed to pervert the society to put precedence of "efficiency" ahead of well being of the majority of its members for the sake of stroking egos and enriching very few of them.
That green little man on Pluto must be getting ahead because you are concerned about how fast we "grow" our output of plastic lawn chairs from China and other worthless crap, while creating completely unsustainable energy and environmental (not to mention social and financial) nightmare so that we can outpace his "growth". Why else would you and the other nutcases be concerned with increasing the growth rate as opposed to general well being of individuals? USA is "growing" faster then Europe and yet there are 40 million medically uninsured people here to ... zero in Europe or Canada. What the fuck is the point of all this growth then?!!
You seem to have missed the entire point of Capitalism.
Well, in respect to Microsoft (and other mega-multi-national-oligo/mono-polies) it only goes to show that the system is broken.
If the economic rules were set up properly creation of such a monopoly would be impossible -- regardless of the megalomaniac dreams of the CEO -- by simply making the cost prohibitive (i.e. progressive taxation curve reaching 99.999% at the levels of Microsoft revenue).
I am in awe of your insight. One can only speculate about what would have happened if Booth's ideology was successful. Why, the present hostilities at the Canadian - Mexican border would never have happened for one. But one cannot bemoan spilled milk. What, what! By Jove, those chaps do have to keep stiff upper lip over there in Her Majesty's Canadian Province of Ohio or we will be all speaking Spanish!
Please take a look at the argument I made in the other post below. Even if Verisign is slowing down only their own DNS lookups of the .com domain, they are still messing around with the public good since they are de-facto custodians of the publicly owned .com domain itself. So Joe Sixpack who wants to go to his hockey site will get a slowdown of his legitimate lookup of hockey.com even though both the domain owner and Joe are not part of the spam domain "tasting" scheme and both he and hockey.com owners are likely to be extorted by Verisgin (and through them by the squatters/spammers) by allowing Verisign an excuse to jack up registration fees (or alternatively to reduce further the performance of the .com domain).
Well this theory has been around for a long time, most famously advanced by Hobbes. And his silly recipe to address that problem was ... monarchy. Go figure.
I personally view human society as an evolution-induced struggle of older animalistic instincts with newer higher order reasoning and logic. Subsequently the individuals within it vary in world-views ranging from lizard-brained "winner takes all", "reproduce at all costs" strategies you and Mr.Hobbes agree on to that of gentle phillosophers and visionary scientists, more to the liking of Mr. Rousseau. So both were right in a sense.
I see a further differntiation occuring between individuals and societies as time goes on, resulting in division of those who value reason and those who wish for existence more akin to locusts or maggots. You can guess which I am likely to root for.
That does not mean that the more advanced societies which attact more enlightened individuals will be in the majority. In fact they are likely to constitute a tiny fraction of humanity at first. But sooner or later their influence must expand to that of the whole globe ... or humanity is simply not worth the trouble and should wither away.
I personally still haven't seen a true proto-society of that sort where dogmatic, organized religion is only considered as a punch-line in a joke and where personal avarice, instead of personal ambition to help the fellow citizens and to advance the understanding of the Universe, is an aliment to be cured by the psychiatrists.
The North American experiments in constitutional democracy and capitalism represent great advances over monarchies and feudalism but they, as you can plainly see, are a mere first step in the right direction and a constant danger of being subsumed back by the forces of greed, ignorance and mindless tribal authoritarianism.
Capitalism for example is a brilliant trick (when working properly) to be played on the most greedy: the idea is to rig the rules so that by pursuing their primordial greed they end up advancing society for all its members. The avarice-afflicted are fitted with snuggly-fitting collars of competition and taxation which, when their animalistic instincts force them to push forward, straining and wheezing with foam at their snouts, drag the payload of civilization behind them, something which in their natural animal state they would never do. This of course only works when the collars and chains are in place. Otherwise it is no longer useful to allow the clinically greedy to run dangerously amok.
So you can now understand why I think capitalism is a workable, useful, albait temporary tool, as long as those basic principles are followed.
Also I realized that there is another flaw in your reasoning: the .com (and all the other TLDs) are in fact public resources. Just because their maintenance was (unwisely in my view) farmed out to some corporate crooks does not change this.
Consider the fact that by allowing all those spam domains Verisign is slowing down their own operations for all users of the Internet not just those jackals who paid for spam domains. So average users who are not customers of Verisign, but who must access the public property of the .com domain through Verisign, end up being impacted by Verisign's mis-managment of that public property which Verisign have been entrusted to care for. Your very own links show the Verisgn's crooked activity clearly. So in the long term the public loses here because some corporate hyenas managed to use an inane right-wing political ideology to position themselves as gatekeepers of public property so that they can make profit by abusing the commons which belong to all of us.
But all of the lookup requests for those spam domains must go through the root servers. As all lookups start at the TLD, more useless spam domains there are (pushed by spam emails for example) more spam lookups occur to the TLDs, right? (I am exluding caching here).
Furthermore the other "public" resource at stake here is the pool of unused domain names in the sense that if all the possible words in all possible useful combinations are squatted at, the whole DNS system comes to a grinding halt as the only possible new domains one can register without being subject to gangland extortion are of the type of "1255ajjsay.com".
Which is under assault by mass domain registrations and re-registrations. The very topic of the Slashdot article. Or do you imagine that those DNS zone databases, which are now heading towards 90% spam contents, reside on a magical cloud and update by magic? Not to mention that cost-free, completely magical little winged fairies are involved in retrieving useful data out of heaps of spam every milisecond of every day, no?
No, they favor squatters because they (along with the squatters) can profit from abusing the communal resource: the DNS servers.
Also I would like you to explain to me the benefit to the society the squatters represent. Focus your effort particularly on the wonderfully stimulating and helpful extortion applied by the squatters to any legitimate startup company wishing to register their new domain.
That buzzer was for you.
My point is that the system is failing miserably, although most head-up-the-ass promoters of "unrestricted capitalism" probably haven't figured it out yet so the social unrest which is on its way will be a real surprise to them.
Probably because they think of watching 24/7 "news" of Paris Hilton while cherishing their ability to buy truckloads of useless plastic crap from China for their "interest-only" financed 6000 sqft paper and sticks house, while having no savings and a negative net worth in general as "success".
Communism is alive and well in many places where it was always alive and well: Quaker and Mennonite communes. Oh you meant the State Capitalism / Totalitarian Governance combo which the Soviet Union practiced? That one croaked indeed. But not because because it could not out way desire for "extraordinary success". One set of supreme jerks simply lost to another set of supreme jerks. Oligarchs replaced Politburo appointees and then got replaced by ex-KGB "businessmen" who conduct business via 9mm pistol rounds.
I have news for you: the governing principle of our supposed Capitalist society, the very reason it appears acceptable for the general populace, is that one's wealth is supposed to be proportional to one's merit to society. You break that rule badly enough, long enough and you will end up with Feudalism, Corporatism or some other Fascist abomination.
No I am "shooting" for proportionality of reward to merit. That is all.
No man or woman is 1000 times (or more) "smarter" then even the dumbest of janitors. No fashion model is more meritous then a productive cancer researcher or an accomplished researcher in quantuum physics. No CEO is worth 400 times the average worker in salary and 1000 times in bonuses when the very company he is heading is going bankrupt. No trust fund kid is "better" then that of a minimum-wage diner waitress just because he inhereited $2 billion from papa. And so on.
Yes, for the DNS infrastructure and therefore for all the useful sites/services on the Internet.
One problem is that jerks like that original poster abuse the system to the point of breakage of all the other useful sites. Not to mention the resulting extortion that is going on for all the legitimate domain names which people want to register their actual startup businesses at.
And systemic destruction of some communal resource is always a result of their smug abuse of one "loophole" or another.
See above. Furthermore the GP is advocating, with glee may I add, general attitude of abuse of "loopholes", not just that restricted to cybersquatting. Tax evasion, pollution of the environment, investment scams, fraudulent advertising, sham companies, etc and so on. All can be accomplished via "loopholes" in the system.
I already mentioned the ways how they impact the net in this case.
But your approach in general is extremely dangerous because it is precisely what the jerks want. In most cases their scams affect only small percentage of the population and they count on you to have this incredibly naive and anti-social attitude of "it does not imapct me, I got mine, let all the others fend for themselves, not my problem".
This is the very mindset that results in old ladies getting mugged in broad daylight in the middle of a busy street during rush hour, with hundreds of passer-bys turning their eyes away and thinking "I am not getting mugged, so I don't give a fuck".
Actually it is.
And no, it is not how "smart" people make money, it is how sociopathic jerks make money. Enough people with your attitude and Capitalism would turn into a kleptocratic dog-eat-dog anyting-goes nightmare where top 1% owns 90% of everything with no relationship of wealth-to-merit of any sort while the rest does not even have health-care ... oh wait there appears to be enough of jerks in charge already!
The results of such activities by you jerks are of course in the long term counter-productive as your messing up of the society sooner or later results in your findng yourselves up against the wall (either figuratively or literally), which is usually when you discover that your smug jerkiness ceases to be an "asset".
Which I was not, since clearly there are major domains where "domain.com" and "www.domain.com" are not one and the same.
Since my position was only that such sites do exist, existence of even one example is sufficient. You did not "cover" anything since your rambling had nothing to do whatsoever with my point. And still does not.
Again, you tried to concoct some fake "evidence" in support of the various strawmen you have created by escaping a telnet session and hoping I won't notice. And then called the process of such fakery and pretense a "sound technical methodology".
You are losing it. My point is up there at the top of this thread, well above your rant. One would hope you did notice that this establishes the precedence quite clearly. Otherwise you need to take your medication now.
Err, you quoted yourself again, clearly hoping that by repeating your nonsense over and over you will somehow give it more weight. I do understand that you like the sound of your own voice and reading of your own scribblings but I have to break the sad news to you: neither does constitute "contextually relevant".
I simply dismissed the whole of your pretentious, vacuous, self-centered, pointless and completely off-topic ramblings. And that of pathetic fakery. Which naturally would constitute "flailing crazily at you" in your delusional state. I am sure your doctor is also "flailing crazily at you" when he gently tries to talk you out of calling yourself Julius Caesar and out of demanding that your centurions report to you. As a matter of fact I strongly suspect that the entire universe is "flailing crazily" at poor, misunderstood you.
Here's the salient facts:
Something I never denied but which would never stop you from manufacturing such a wonderful strawman out of. I mentioned a '"www" sub-domain' in passing as a reference to another point. I could have called it '"www" host'. Both irrelevant to the actual point I was discussing since the exact classification of the "www" was never part of the discussion and only served as something that you could latch on to dispense spittle. Or point out where I did otherwise. You cannot but yet your first post was "proving" me horribly "wrong".
More straw for men of straw. You do love them so. Remember, before you showed up to burn straw, I only claimed that "domain.com" and "www.domain.com" are not always one and the same. No mention of any "responsive servers" and the like. Or point out where I claim otherwise. You cannot but yet your first post was "proving" me horribly "wrong".
It did not because ... wait for it ... I never claimed otherwise. Or perhaps you are having difficulty reading my original post? Or point out where I claim otherwise. You cannot but yet your first post was "proving" me horribly "wrong".
You are comically delusional.
The entire point of my original post was to contradict a dude who was claiming that "example.com" and "www.example.com" are always synonymous.
Following which I gave examples why they are, in many cases, not.
Then you roll in spewing spittle all over about how horribly wrong I am, moaning and bitching incoherently about third level domains being always host names and HTTP redirect requests.
So I show you a rather prominent site which does precisely what I was claiming.
Then you pretend it is not so.
So I demosntrate that beyond any doubt, leaving no room for you to wiggle,
And so in your desperation you now turn to some ridiculous sophistry about the meaning of "if". Something along the lines of: "If hosts do not fall into the frequently occuring cases which you described ... then .... then .... they do not fall into the frequently occuring cases you described!!! Aha!!! You failed to contradict me!! Gotcha!!! Be in awe of my towering intellect!! All look at my gigiantic intellect!!"
I must be a glutton for punishment even replying to this tedious drivel.
That is what I meant by indiscriminately. As opposed to keeping some and firing some, based on some unknown murky criteria.
You gotta be kidding. After all of these years of evidence to the contrary you pretend that Bush administration was basing anything on performance instead of politics? What planet are you from?!
I am not sure what scheme was employed with the attorneys originally but it sure as hell was not "performance"-based. More like trying to keep one's options open in case they "misbehave". Unless of course that is what you meant by "performance".
Again, an example of "performance problems" would be getting caught accepting bribes or losing 100% of one's cases. None of that occured here. The "performance-based replacements" were completely inexperienced bible-thumping home-schooled wackos whose "law" credentials involve attending fundie "law" schools run by megalomaniac Christianists and a career of ass-licking, slavish servitude to the top neo-con gangsters. Performance my ass.
Riiight. So GOP sued over this and lost with prejudice in court. And how is the Attorney General is supposed to be involved in this? Investigating what? The judges? Or by the same logic the 2000 Florida election results should have been investigated to death by the Florida AG, over and over until Gore came up winner?
"Voter fraud" is the catch-all excuse for losing elections. I expect any closely contested election (and many which are not) being subject to whining about "voter fraud". And as soon some GOP stooge wins, the Diebold boxes will be "foolproof" and "extremely reliable" etc. A Democrat wins and suddenly there are "hordes of triple-voting illegals" everywhere.
While Democrats are not immune from partisan hackery and far from being infallible, they are complete amateurs when compared to the filth the GOP and its supporters like you have visited on the USA and the rest of the planet. And your baseless assumptions are showing. I am not a Democrat. And I cannot be, since I am a Canadian observing this idiocy as a spectator from abroad.