I can understand that some people will disagree with my post. I don't understand why itgot moderated as a troll. It's almost like the moderators here think anyone who disagrees with them is trolling. You used to be able to metamoderate, moderate the moderators, but that's been taken away. Now it seems that there's a little insider Slashdot clique that gets to decide what opinions people can hold. Shameful.
If you took your social security taxes, and invested them instead, you would end up with MORE money than what SS would give you. This is a positive no matter how you look at it. Social security is broken, and based on outdated demographics. It can be fixed, but only if we stop treating it as a retirement plan.
You have a low opinion of investing, but it's what provides the capital for expanded production. The economy is not a zero-sum game, your investment will not only grow, it will spur growth. It's not guaranteed (nothing in life is, duh) but I guarantee you that zero investments will always result in zero returns.
People want to be busy, to be productive. One way to do that is by working. Some people retire and then work fulltime with community or charity projects. Other spend all their times with their grandchildren. Others go RVing full time. BUT SOME choose to continue working at their jobs! If your job is fulfilling, why quit?
You seem to have a very negative opinion on jobs. I suggest you start looking for a different line of work. Stop treating it as something you have to do, and start looking for something you want to do. It may take a while, but if you lose your pessimism you might just find something that's both personally and financially rewarding. Something that you'll want to keep doing after you retire.
p.s. "Neocon" has a specific meaning, which you are not using.
Some of the ideas for Chrome are good ones. But a lot of them seem to be reinventing the operating system. From Google's perspective the browser is the operating system, but that's not the real world. We used to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Emacs, but soon we're going to have to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Google!
Here's a big shocker: not everything is a web app! No really. There are problems operating systems solved decades ago that Chrome is just now gettng around to fixing, just because some people want their apps to be on the web. You can have distributed apps and ubiquitous data *without* HTML/CSS/ECMA/Ajax/Flash. Back when computers were so expensive no one could afford their own, everything was distributed. Now that computers are cheap enough that everyone has two or three, the industry is wondering how to distribute stuff.
Good for you. I consider myself honest as well. I have never knowingly lied on my tax forms. But I find it hard to fault those who do. Taxes are not voluntary, they are legal extortion. I cannot fault someone who attempts to hide their money from an extortionist.
I applaud these people and their creative bookkeeping. It's not the government's money, it's theirs! This is no more immoral than sticking some money in your shoe so muggers won't find it. Or to provide you lefties with a frame of reference, no more immoral than draft dodging. No more immoral than not paying social security on your illegal alien gardener. Taxes may be a necessary evil, but they are still an evil.
The pragmatism of the matter is a different affair. It's always impractical to get caught, so one should stick to "legal" means of tax avoidance as much as possible.
I think you must be thinking of a different set of Republican candidates than I am. McCain, Giuliani, Romney, Huckabee, Tancredo, Thompson, Thompson, Gilmore, Duncan, etc. all wholeheartedly supported the war.
Don't tell anyone, but I'm not reporting my internet purchases on the California tax forms either. Why should I have to keep track of every plushie I buy from ThinkGeek? I know I'm going to get burned one of these days for not paying it, but screw it.
As a libertarian inside the Republican Party, my sense of things is that many conservatives are starting to wake up to the damage Bush/Cheney have done to conservatism. Even taking the horribly expensive Iraq war out of the picture, Bush is still the king of Big Government-Massive-Spending presidents. He made an alliance with the neo-cons and theo-cons, and small government conservatives got thrown from the bus. The sad thing is that the media still portrays Bush as a "small government" Republican.
So why does the GOP stick up for Bush (and McCain)? Simply because of the R after his name. They would rather have a small government R in the White House, but if they can't get one they'll take a big government R over a big government D.
Followup: So why didn't Ron Paul get much support in the primaries? Several reasons for that, but I think the main ones are that he opposed the war and alienated the neocons, and opposed the nannystate and alienated the theocons. (The conspiracy-loons who surrounded him didn't help either).
It drives me nuts when movie/television superheroes (Smallville, Hancock, etc) catch a falling victim. Lois Lane falls from the top of the the Daily Planet building. Superman is busy battling foes. We see a shot of Lois Lane still falling. Back to Clark Kent, who suddenly see's Lois' peril. He rushes over and catches her... and her brains splatter all over his arms! She was falling at terminal velocity, and landing on Superman's forearms isn't going to be any softer than landing on concrete. Clark needs to jump up, grab Lois, and *decelerate* her.
I really hope Barr will be a "spoiler". I'll be happy if McCain loses the election. But I'll also be happy if Obama loses. Either one of them losing is a good thing. But if both lose I'll be so ecstatic that I'll probably wet myself.
The desert isn't dead. Paving over enough desert to power California is going to destroy a crapload of ecology. I'm not an environmentalist (at least not the religious variety) but it seems to me that burning petroleum that comes from underneath the desert is a lot better for the environment than paving over a desert.
That's why I also advocate spending cuts. I know it marks me as a dangerous heretic to suggest it, but every tax cut needs to be combined with an equal spending cut. Government does not produce anything, so every dollar is spends comes from us. We like tax cuts because taxes are felt imediately. But financing that spending through borrowing or inflation is just as damaging to the economy.
The government is like a drunk wino. It doesn't matter if he's buying his Ripple with cash or a credit card, he needs to stop buying the Ripple in the first place!
As a FreeBSD user, I don't get proprietary closed-source Flash anyway. Boo hoo. Frankly, it makes the intertubes seem a lot more intelligent without it. I love the hypocrisy of the Linux movement: one year you hate Flash because it's proprietary, the next year you love it because Macromedia gave you a Linux binary. Now it's "broken" so you whine.
I love tax cuts and tax credits. But they need to be uniform, and not targeted at narrow interests, because they can distort the market when unevenly applied. The problem isn't that oil companies are getting tax breaks, it's that the tax structure is a kind of tariff on all other forms of energy.
We are never going to get one fifth of our energy from renewable in two years in this state. It ain't going to happen. Californians are under this delusion that passing a law can change reality. We're rather stupid that way.
We simply don't have the technology to produce 20% of our current electricity from renewable source within two years. This law will either be ignored or the state will end up suing itself for non-compliance. We might be able to do it if we dammed up some major rivers but we couldn't build the dams and get them filled in time.
We'll eventually get cheap and efficient solar cells we can roof our houses and pave our streets with. But bulldozing twelve and a half square miles to erect mirrors is going to cause a lot of permanent damage to the environment for almost negligible gain. It's stupid in a way only California can be stupid.
I much prefer tax credits over vouchers. Send your kid to private school (or donate to a scholarship) and get a 100% tax credit. But if the government must ensure that everyone gets an education, then vouchers are a better way to do it that the one-size fits all model we took from Bismark. The government doesn't make everyone eat the same crappy food, or live in the same crappy housing, so why does it make us go to the same crappy schools?
If you want to talk about a de facto caste system, then talk about the inner city schools. Even when they get more money they don't do any better. If we really did care about the poor, we would give them a way out of that horrible mess. There's nothing more disgusting than some rich white liberal wringing his hands about the poor black people in poor black neighborhoods while at the same time promoting the very policies that keep them that way.
I'll be loyal to a company if the company is loyal to me. Unfortunately the nature of publicly traded corporations in the US is such that discourages loyalty to employees. I've worked for public companies and private companies. I vastly prefer the latter. My current (private) company has earned my loyalty. Yet it ain't Japanese.
Actually, the only thing the Bush "tax cuts" had to do with tax cuts was the name. It was just a bone to throw to the Republicans, and the Democrats bitching about it was just as politically shallow. The overall tax rate for the average American didn't significantly change.
I want to see tax cuts that make the government feel the pinch! And equivalent spending cuts to go along with it (I hate people invoking the Laffer Curve as an excuse to keep spending).
Blame government for this situation. Local city councils have long passed out exclusive monopolies to telphone and cable companies. It has (mostly) stopped now, but the damage has been done. Local governments are also crowding out private ISPs by creating their own lowest common denominator numi-networks. Then you have state governments classifying certain companies as "utilities" or "common carriers", placing them under a body of regulatory law designed to prevent competition. To top it off, people here on Slashdot are already lobbying the Federal Government to get involved in the pricing structure (ei. Net Neutrality).
The fact is, the internet does not operate in a market environment. It's a bureaucratic haze of ineptitude.
If you're cynical enough, you could postulate that the destruction of the US education system is no a political misadventure, but a deliberate act to keep the working class in a poorly educated state
Are you aware of the history of public schools in the US? There really is no prior system that this one devolved from. Except for central control by the Federal Government, public schools today are essentially identical to the public schools of last century. The curricula may change slightly here and there, but the goals are identical. We have a "lowest common denominator" school system because that was the intent from the beginning. That this results in keeping the "working class" stupid is merely an unintended consequence of government meddling.
If we want to fix our schools, the first step must be to return it to local city and county control. In the long term however, we must get government out of the education business, or our schools will continue to crank out sheeple.
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand that some people will disagree with my post. I don't understand why itgot moderated as a troll. It's almost like the moderators here think anyone who disagrees with them is trolling. You used to be able to metamoderate, moderate the moderators, but that's been taken away. Now it seems that there's a little insider Slashdot clique that gets to decide what opinions people can hold. Shameful.
If you took your social security taxes, and invested them instead, you would end up with MORE money than what SS would give you. This is a positive no matter how you look at it. Social security is broken, and based on outdated demographics. It can be fixed, but only if we stop treating it as a retirement plan.
You have a low opinion of investing, but it's what provides the capital for expanded production. The economy is not a zero-sum game, your investment will not only grow, it will spur growth. It's not guaranteed (nothing in life is, duh) but I guarantee you that zero investments will always result in zero returns.
People want to be busy, to be productive. One way to do that is by working. Some people retire and then work fulltime with community or charity projects. Other spend all their times with their grandchildren. Others go RVing full time. BUT SOME choose to continue working at their jobs! If your job is fulfilling, why quit?
You seem to have a very negative opinion on jobs. I suggest you start looking for a different line of work. Stop treating it as something you have to do, and start looking for something you want to do. It may take a while, but if you lose your pessimism you might just find something that's both personally and financially rewarding. Something that you'll want to keep doing after you retire.
p.s. "Neocon" has a specific meaning, which you are not using.
Some of the ideas for Chrome are good ones. But a lot of them seem to be reinventing the operating system. From Google's perspective the browser is the operating system, but that's not the real world. We used to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Emacs, but soon we're going to have to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Google!
Here's a big shocker: not everything is a web app! No really. There are problems operating systems solved decades ago that Chrome is just now gettng around to fixing, just because some people want their apps to be on the web. You can have distributed apps and ubiquitous data *without* HTML/CSS/ECMA/Ajax/Flash. Back when computers were so expensive no one could afford their own, everything was distributed. Now that computers are cheap enough that everyone has two or three, the industry is wondering how to distribute stuff.
Good for you. I consider myself honest as well. I have never knowingly lied on my tax forms. But I find it hard to fault those who do. Taxes are not voluntary, they are legal extortion. I cannot fault someone who attempts to hide their money from an extortionist.
I applaud these people and their creative bookkeeping. It's not the government's money, it's theirs! This is no more immoral than sticking some money in your shoe so muggers won't find it. Or to provide you lefties with a frame of reference, no more immoral than draft dodging. No more immoral than not paying social security on your illegal alien gardener. Taxes may be a necessary evil, but they are still an evil.
The pragmatism of the matter is a different affair. It's always impractical to get caught, so one should stick to "legal" means of tax avoidance as much as possible.
But none of them were in the Republican primaries! Which is what we were talking about!
I think you must be thinking of a different set of Republican candidates than I am. McCain, Giuliani, Romney, Huckabee, Tancredo, Thompson, Thompson, Gilmore, Duncan, etc. all wholeheartedly supported the war.
Stop apologizing for taxes! It's not a loophole. A brick and mortar store can do exactly the same thing and start selling out of state.
Don't tell anyone, but I'm not reporting my internet purchases on the California tax forms either. Why should I have to keep track of every plushie I buy from ThinkGeek? I know I'm going to get burned one of these days for not paying it, but screw it.
As a libertarian inside the Republican Party, my sense of things is that many conservatives are starting to wake up to the damage Bush/Cheney have done to conservatism. Even taking the horribly expensive Iraq war out of the picture, Bush is still the king of Big Government-Massive-Spending presidents. He made an alliance with the neo-cons and theo-cons, and small government conservatives got thrown from the bus. The sad thing is that the media still portrays Bush as a "small government" Republican.
So why does the GOP stick up for Bush (and McCain)? Simply because of the R after his name. They would rather have a small government R in the White House, but if they can't get one they'll take a big government R over a big government D.
Followup: So why didn't Ron Paul get much support in the primaries? Several reasons for that, but I think the main ones are that he opposed the war and alienated the neocons, and opposed the nannystate and alienated the theocons. (The conspiracy-loons who surrounded him didn't help either).
It drives me nuts when movie/television superheroes (Smallville, Hancock, etc) catch a falling victim. Lois Lane falls from the top of the the Daily Planet building. Superman is busy battling foes. We see a shot of Lois Lane still falling. Back to Clark Kent, who suddenly see's Lois' peril. He rushes over and catches her... and her brains splatter all over his arms! She was falling at terminal velocity, and landing on Superman's forearms isn't going to be any softer than landing on concrete. Clark needs to jump up, grab Lois, and *decelerate* her.
I really hope Barr will be a "spoiler". I'll be happy if McCain loses the election. But I'll also be happy if Obama loses. Either one of them losing is a good thing. But if both lose I'll be so ecstatic that I'll probably wet myself.
The irony will be all the Californians whining about how horrible it is that megacorporations are running the energy industry...
The desert isn't dead. Paving over enough desert to power California is going to destroy a crapload of ecology. I'm not an environmentalist (at least not the religious variety) but it seems to me that burning petroleum that comes from underneath the desert is a lot better for the environment than paving over a desert.
That's why I also advocate spending cuts. I know it marks me as a dangerous heretic to suggest it, but every tax cut needs to be combined with an equal spending cut. Government does not produce anything, so every dollar is spends comes from us. We like tax cuts because taxes are felt imediately. But financing that spending through borrowing or inflation is just as damaging to the economy.
The government is like a drunk wino. It doesn't matter if he's buying his Ripple with cash or a credit card, he needs to stop buying the Ripple in the first place!
As a FreeBSD user, I don't get proprietary closed-source Flash anyway. Boo hoo. Frankly, it makes the intertubes seem a lot more intelligent without it. I love the hypocrisy of the Linux movement: one year you hate Flash because it's proprietary, the next year you love it because Macromedia gave you a Linux binary. Now it's "broken" so you whine.
What about Jambi? Qt for Java. High quality easy to use UI framework. Yeah, I know it's Nokia now, but so what.
I love tax cuts and tax credits. But they need to be uniform, and not targeted at narrow interests, because they can distort the market when unevenly applied. The problem isn't that oil companies are getting tax breaks, it's that the tax structure is a kind of tariff on all other forms of energy.
We are never going to get one fifth of our energy from renewable in two years in this state. It ain't going to happen. Californians are under this delusion that passing a law can change reality. We're rather stupid that way.
We simply don't have the technology to produce 20% of our current electricity from renewable source within two years. This law will either be ignored or the state will end up suing itself for non-compliance. We might be able to do it if we dammed up some major rivers but we couldn't build the dams and get them filled in time.
We'll eventually get cheap and efficient solar cells we can roof our houses and pave our streets with. But bulldozing twelve and a half square miles to erect mirrors is going to cause a lot of permanent damage to the environment for almost negligible gain. It's stupid in a way only California can be stupid.
I much prefer tax credits over vouchers. Send your kid to private school (or donate to a scholarship) and get a 100% tax credit. But if the government must ensure that everyone gets an education, then vouchers are a better way to do it that the one-size fits all model we took from Bismark. The government doesn't make everyone eat the same crappy food, or live in the same crappy housing, so why does it make us go to the same crappy schools?
If you want to talk about a de facto caste system, then talk about the inner city schools. Even when they get more money they don't do any better. If we really did care about the poor, we would give them a way out of that horrible mess. There's nothing more disgusting than some rich white liberal wringing his hands about the poor black people in poor black neighborhoods while at the same time promoting the very policies that keep them that way.
I'll be loyal to a company if the company is loyal to me. Unfortunately the nature of publicly traded corporations in the US is such that discourages loyalty to employees. I've worked for public companies and private companies. I vastly prefer the latter. My current (private) company has earned my loyalty. Yet it ain't Japanese.
Actually, the only thing the Bush "tax cuts" had to do with tax cuts was the name. It was just a bone to throw to the Republicans, and the Democrats bitching about it was just as politically shallow. The overall tax rate for the average American didn't significantly change.
I want to see tax cuts that make the government feel the pinch! And equivalent spending cuts to go along with it (I hate people invoking the Laffer Curve as an excuse to keep spending).
Blame government for this situation. Local city councils have long passed out exclusive monopolies to telphone and cable companies. It has (mostly) stopped now, but the damage has been done. Local governments are also crowding out private ISPs by creating their own lowest common denominator numi-networks. Then you have state governments classifying certain companies as "utilities" or "common carriers", placing them under a body of regulatory law designed to prevent competition. To top it off, people here on Slashdot are already lobbying the Federal Government to get involved in the pricing structure (ei. Net Neutrality).
The fact is, the internet does not operate in a market environment. It's a bureaucratic haze of ineptitude.
Are you aware of the history of public schools in the US? There really is no prior system that this one devolved from. Except for central control by the Federal Government, public schools today are essentially identical to the public schools of last century. The curricula may change slightly here and there, but the goals are identical. We have a "lowest common denominator" school system because that was the intent from the beginning. That this results in keeping the "working class" stupid is merely an unintended consequence of government meddling.
If we want to fix our schools, the first step must be to return it to local city and county control. In the long term however, we must get government out of the education business, or our schools will continue to crank out sheeple.