The NRC can't do that because it would be spending Entergy's money, which it has no right to do, or else spending public money fixing something that belongs to Entergy, which again it has no right to do. Entergy has to fix it. But people are so disgusted with Entergy's message-managing that they don't trust that Entergy will actually do what it takes to keep the plant running safely. It's a really crappy situation--you're right that fixing the plant might well be cheaper than replacing it--but it's a situation Entergy created of their own free will, and now they (and we) are reaping the consequences.
Millions dumped into the local economy aren't worth much if the entire area is rendered uninhabitable by a serious radiation leak. That's just hell on property values, whether you are a smug liberal or a stingy reactionary. Yes, it sucks that if this sticks, a bunch of people will lose their jobs. No argument from me. But the decision was taken as a result of some very bad behavior on the part of Entergy officials. If these people screw up badly, we all (that is, all of us who live in the area) lose in a very big way. So if we can't trust them, it really doesn't matter whether or not the plant is actually safe: we can't *tell* whether or not it's safe, and so we have to assume it's not.
Yup. The irony here of course is that by creating this kerfuffle, they've completely eliminated any actual security the webcam system might have given them. Now everybody knows that these laptops have hidden cameras, so they'll just tape over them. So there's little chance that the cameras will ever actually be used to identify any thief now.
The purpose of updating is not to have the latest shiny. It's to not have your business hacked. And this is a genuine risk - businesses are starting to discover that their bank accounts have been raided because they were running IE6, and they got infected, and their bank info got snooped.
It's really frustrating that people think that upgrading is all about getting new goodies. Of course, we create that impression by continually providing new goodies in updates, but we shouldn't buy into the mistake ourselves.
- you let individuals or groups to amass unlimited wealth
Who's the "you" in this sentence? If you can't say who it is, then the sentence and everything it implies is meaningless. If you can say who it is, then perhaps you mean "we." But your anti-democratic rhetoric would suggest otherwise.
The fact is that government is not something you can let fester in the dark. If you want it to work well, you must stay involved. There is no other option. You can't say "I'm too busy," or "my vote doesn't count" or some other nonsense. It's clear that popular effort *can* affect the outcome of elections, and we saw that last year. Maybe we didn't get what we want, but we did have some input.
So if you don't like the way things are, stop talking about some faceless "you" who made a mistake, and start doing your civic duty by getting involved in the political process, learning what's going on, stop listening to propaganda, and do something.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 1
Wow, you sound like you know what you're talking about, and then you claim that contractors pay capital gains tax? How does that work? When I did contract work, everything was done on a 1099, and I had to pay *more* tax, not less, because I had to pay self-employment tax, which at the time was 17%,
Nope, it's your rejoinder that doesn't hold water. If I couldn't pay taxes without special TaxBux [tm], and if I went out and bought some TaxBux and it turned out that they weren't compatible with the IRS office in my state, then you'd have a similar situation.
Also, when was the last time you had to follow the rules to eat a banana? Sure, you bought the banana from someone, and that was following the rules, just like buying a DVD is following the rules. But once you had the banana, you could just eat it. There was no question as to whether the banana would be compatible with your digestive system. DRM that doesn't work with a monitor that's supposed to support that kind of DRM is like a banana you can't eat.
The difference is that there has to be a revenue stream to support the company. If the DRM becomes obsolete, the revenue stream dries up. As that point it's only a matter of time before your media stops working. ICANN's revenue stream is not at risk, because we have to pay every year to renew our domains, and ICANN gets a cut.
Bullshit relativism redux. A freedom fighter doesn't kill people, by my definition. But even by your definition, who do you think it is that funds and approves the evils that your supposed "freedom fighter" is opposing? It's the civilians! Did we band together and put a stop to Bush's atrocities? No. Why not? Because a vast majority of us believe that killing can be done in the service of good.
If you want to know why the World Trade Center was destroyed, just ask Thomas Aquinas.
Right now a lot of the reason that we are so energy-inefficient is not because we aren't being taxed enough, but because things like building codes are heavily biased against energy efficient homebuilding. So most of the homes that are build are insanely inefficient. Office buildings tend to be more efficient, but still not at the level of efficiency that would be possible if the codes were biased in favor of efficiency, rather than against it. E.g., I'm building a house in Vermont. The guy at the local lumber company was *aghast* when I told him I wanted 14" thick walls and R40 insulation. Nobody does that! In *Vermont*! That's just lame - there's no excuse for building an energy-inefficient house. They're more comfortable, hugely cheaper to heat and cool, and don't cost much extra to build--yes, you spend more on insulation, but you can buy a cheaper heater or chiller.
Another problem is the tragedy of the commons: nobody's willing to conserve first. So everybody buys an SUV, because everybody else is buying an SUV, and so we all need SUVs to avoid being crushed by other SUVs, or whatever. To solve this sort of mexican standoff, government regulation is actually a really effective solution. CAFE standards work. Unfortunately the anti-regulation climate of the past 30 years has prevented them from doing much good as technology has advanced--ironically, CAFE standards could have prevented the extraordinarily painful market correction that came to a head in 2008 in the auto industry, but since the auto industry lobbied so hard against it for so long, they had to be bailed out.
So sure, maybe carbon taxes aren't the right idea. Maybe there are other things we should do first. But for some reason nobody seems to be doing them.
The theory with carbon taxes is to offset them against other taxes, so that they are revenue-neutral for people who are being reasonably conservative, revenue-positive for people who are being very conservative, and revenue-negative for people who are being outright wasteful. So if you modify your behavior, carbon taxes *should* save you money. But sure, for people who aren't willing to do that, they'll suck. And consequently, they'll probably never be enacted, because nobody likes to tighten their belts. And so later on we'll all get to tighten our belts a lot, suddenly, instead of a little, steadily.
This is the situation we are in: we may or may not have a very serious problem. Most of the people who would have to do the work, and pay the price, of solving the problem do not have the time or the interest to study the matter deeply enough to know whether the situation is bad. So we have to choose who to trust. Do we trust the person who is telling us what we want to hear, or do we trust the peer-reviewed science?
We don't have the third choice that you propose, where we figure out whether the guy who wasn't peer-reviewed is telling us something we need to know, because we don't have the time or the interest to check his or her work. We can *hope* that if what he is saying is valid, and can be verified, that it will make it through the gauntlet of scientific skepticism. But until it does, we simply don't know whether or not to listen to it.
If we listen to everything that might be true, before it passes through this filter, then we *inevitably* are going to be guided by our own prejudices, because we simply have no other way to decide who to listen to.
So yeah, I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying here. I'm in the same boat you are. But I just can't buy your argument, because it leads nowhere. And if enough people buy your argument, and refuse to use the tools that they actually have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and if this really is the serious situation that we are being told it is, then we are going to be begging our children for forgiveness, because it is they, and not we, who will pay the price for our choice.
No, being an "arsehole" is when you do something annoying without a good reason. Having a good reason for doing something doesn't stop it from being annoying, but the worst "arseholes" are the ones who never do anything that might annoy anybody, and in the process let whatever project they're running go straight to hell.
He's forcing the point. If you are the one upon whom the point is being forced, I guess you could see it in the way you've described, but it's just a tactic for making the right thing happen. To the extent that you can say anything is his job, this is his job. Linux wouldn't be where it is today, for better or for worse, without Linus being the benevolent tyrant.
And, ironically, this article does exactly what it ascribes to people in general: it frames the discussion as essentially a matter of opinion, labels scientists on one side of the issue "partisan," and uses false teaming to get the reader to accept these tidbits as background information that need not be questioned, rather than as the main focus of the article. The article itself claims to be about what people think, and the implications of "climategate" for the thinking habits of the general populace, but really the main point of the article is simply to repeatedly assure the reader that climate science isn't science.
You know, generally speaking, if a big company wants to take a piece of "open source" hardware and make it cheaper, that would be a big win. If you are making open source hardware to make money making hardware, this will be bad for you. If you are making open source hardware to scratch an itch, this will be good for you. Just make sure you get the license right--you don't want them to start making the hardware, and then close it up and use their revenue stream to pay lawyers to shut you out.
Brian was a fairly new employee, so that's not really a valid point in this particular case. The question is whether or not they discriminated on the basis of his age, not whether or not discriminating on the basis of age is a good thing or a bad thing. Discriminating on the basis of age is illegal, so that latter point has already been settled.
However, to speak to the point you are making, this is actually a really bad model for how to do things. If your older employees are more productive, obviously they should be paid more. Or if they make the company more productive, even if they themselves are not more productive, they should be paid more. This is the usual rationale for retaining older employees and paying more for seniority.
As a person who has been aging steadily his whole life, I care more about the former than the latter. I don't want to go job hunting and not get a job because the company I'm applying to feels they can't afford me, simply on the basis of my age--if I am willing to work for what a younger employee would accept, and I would do as good as or better of a job, I should have an equal chance at the job.
As an employer, I would not want to be forced to retain you out of a sense of fairness, if retaining you is against the interests of my company as a whole. I don't mean that fairness is wrong, just that this is a bad way to be fair. It makes companies top-heavy, and creates situations like the situation in the car industry, where the situation gets progressively worse and worse until it looks so bad that the company can get permission to break all its promises to older employees and former employees. Why let the system get so out of whack in the first place?
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The NRC can't do that because it would be spending Entergy's money, which it has no right to do, or else spending public money fixing something that belongs to Entergy, which again it has no right to do. Entergy has to fix it. But people are so disgusted with Entergy's message-managing that they don't trust that Entergy will actually do what it takes to keep the plant running safely. It's a really crappy situation--you're right that fixing the plant might well be cheaper than replacing it--but it's a situation Entergy created of their own free will, and now they (and we) are reaping the consequences.
Millions dumped into the local economy aren't worth much if the entire area is rendered uninhabitable by a serious radiation leak. That's just hell on property values, whether you are a smug liberal or a stingy reactionary. Yes, it sucks that if this sticks, a bunch of people will lose their jobs. No argument from me. But the decision was taken as a result of some very bad behavior on the part of Entergy officials. If these people screw up badly, we all (that is, all of us who live in the area) lose in a very big way. So if we can't trust them, it really doesn't matter whether or not the plant is actually safe: we can't *tell* whether or not it's safe, and so we have to assume it's not.
Yup. The irony here of course is that by creating this kerfuffle, they've completely eliminated any actual security the webcam system might have given them. Now everybody knows that these laptops have hidden cameras, so they'll just tape over them. So there's little chance that the cameras will ever actually be used to identify any thief now.
Yeah, too bad that story is an urban legend...
The purpose of updating is not to have the latest shiny. It's to not have your business hacked. And this is a genuine risk - businesses are starting to discover that their bank accounts have been raided because they were running IE6, and they got infected, and their bank info got snooped.
It's really frustrating that people think that upgrading is all about getting new goodies. Of course, we create that impression by continually providing new goodies in updates, but we shouldn't buy into the mistake ourselves.
Who's the "you" in this sentence? If you can't say who it is, then the sentence and everything it implies is meaningless. If you can say who it is, then perhaps you mean "we." But your anti-democratic rhetoric would suggest otherwise.
The fact is that government is not something you can let fester in the dark. If you want it to work well, you must stay involved. There is no other option. You can't say "I'm too busy," or "my vote doesn't count" or some other nonsense. It's clear that popular effort *can* affect the outcome of elections, and we saw that last year. Maybe we didn't get what we want, but we did have some input.
So if you don't like the way things are, stop talking about some faceless "you" who made a mistake, and start doing your civic duty by getting involved in the political process, learning what's going on, stop listening to propaganda, and do something.
Wow, you sound like you know what you're talking about, and then you claim that contractors pay capital gains tax? How does that work? When I did contract work, everything was done on a 1099, and I had to pay *more* tax, not less, because I had to pay self-employment tax, which at the time was 17%,
If you leave a pile of shit behind you at your last contract, how long do you think you're going to continue getting new contracts?
I believe it needs to be fought against too, but how do you propose to do it? Whatever we're doing now doesn't seem to be having any impact.
Someone mod this post up: +1 insightful. The cloud is just wispy handcuffs for your data, if you don't keep a local copy.
My taxes went up, not down, when I moved from Massachusetts to California. Thanks for playing, though.
Nope, it's your rejoinder that doesn't hold water. If I couldn't pay taxes without special TaxBux [tm], and if I went out and bought some TaxBux and it turned out that they weren't compatible with the IRS office in my state, then you'd have a similar situation.
Also, when was the last time you had to follow the rules to eat a banana? Sure, you bought the banana from someone, and that was following the rules, just like buying a DVD is following the rules. But once you had the banana, you could just eat it. There was no question as to whether the banana would be compatible with your digestive system. DRM that doesn't work with a monitor that's supposed to support that kind of DRM is like a banana you can't eat.
The difference is that there has to be a revenue stream to support the company. If the DRM becomes obsolete, the revenue stream dries up. As that point it's only a matter of time before your media stops working. ICANN's revenue stream is not at risk, because we have to pay every year to renew our domains, and ICANN gets a cut.
Hm, how would you make a nuclear weapon using Thorium? If the answer is, "you wouldn't," then that makes Thorium a better choice than uranium.
B&N Nook tie-in. Need I say more?
Bullshit relativism redux. A freedom fighter doesn't kill people, by my definition. But even by your definition, who do you think it is that funds and approves the evils that your supposed "freedom fighter" is opposing? It's the civilians! Did we band together and put a stop to Bush's atrocities? No. Why not? Because a vast majority of us believe that killing can be done in the service of good.
If you want to know why the World Trade Center was destroyed, just ask Thomas Aquinas.
Right now a lot of the reason that we are so energy-inefficient is not because we aren't being taxed enough, but because things like building codes are heavily biased against energy efficient homebuilding. So most of the homes that are build are insanely inefficient. Office buildings tend to be more efficient, but still not at the level of efficiency that would be possible if the codes were biased in favor of efficiency, rather than against it. E.g., I'm building a house in Vermont. The guy at the local lumber company was *aghast* when I told him I wanted 14" thick walls and R40 insulation. Nobody does that! In *Vermont*! That's just lame - there's no excuse for building an energy-inefficient house. They're more comfortable, hugely cheaper to heat and cool, and don't cost much extra to build--yes, you spend more on insulation, but you can buy a cheaper heater or chiller.
Another problem is the tragedy of the commons: nobody's willing to conserve first. So everybody buys an SUV, because everybody else is buying an SUV, and so we all need SUVs to avoid being crushed by other SUVs, or whatever. To solve this sort of mexican standoff, government regulation is actually a really effective solution. CAFE standards work. Unfortunately the anti-regulation climate of the past 30 years has prevented them from doing much good as technology has advanced--ironically, CAFE standards could have prevented the extraordinarily painful market correction that came to a head in 2008 in the auto industry, but since the auto industry lobbied so hard against it for so long, they had to be bailed out.
So sure, maybe carbon taxes aren't the right idea. Maybe there are other things we should do first. But for some reason nobody seems to be doing them.
The theory with carbon taxes is to offset them against other taxes, so that they are revenue-neutral for people who are being reasonably conservative, revenue-positive for people who are being very conservative, and revenue-negative for people who are being outright wasteful. So if you modify your behavior, carbon taxes *should* save you money. But sure, for people who aren't willing to do that, they'll suck. And consequently, they'll probably never be enacted, because nobody likes to tighten their belts. And so later on we'll all get to tighten our belts a lot, suddenly, instead of a little, steadily.
This is the situation we are in: we may or may not have a very serious problem. Most of the people who would have to do the work, and pay the price, of solving the problem do not have the time or the interest to study the matter deeply enough to know whether the situation is bad. So we have to choose who to trust. Do we trust the person who is telling us what we want to hear, or do we trust the peer-reviewed science?
We don't have the third choice that you propose, where we figure out whether the guy who wasn't peer-reviewed is telling us something we need to know, because we don't have the time or the interest to check his or her work. We can *hope* that if what he is saying is valid, and can be verified, that it will make it through the gauntlet of scientific skepticism. But until it does, we simply don't know whether or not to listen to it.
If we listen to everything that might be true, before it passes through this filter, then we *inevitably* are going to be guided by our own prejudices, because we simply have no other way to decide who to listen to.
So yeah, I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying here. I'm in the same boat you are. But I just can't buy your argument, because it leads nowhere. And if enough people buy your argument, and refuse to use the tools that they actually have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and if this really is the serious situation that we are being told it is, then we are going to be begging our children for forgiveness, because it is they, and not we, who will pay the price for our choice.
No, being an "arsehole" is when you do something annoying without a good reason. Having a good reason for doing something doesn't stop it from being annoying, but the worst "arseholes" are the ones who never do anything that might annoy anybody, and in the process let whatever project they're running go straight to hell.
He's forcing the point. If you are the one upon whom the point is being forced, I guess you could see it in the way you've described, but it's just a tactic for making the right thing happen. To the extent that you can say anything is his job, this is his job. Linux wouldn't be where it is today, for better or for worse, without Linus being the benevolent tyrant.
Oh come on, man, don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel! :')
And, ironically, this article does exactly what it ascribes to people in general: it frames the discussion as essentially a matter of opinion, labels scientists on one side of the issue "partisan," and uses false teaming to get the reader to accept these tidbits as background information that need not be questioned, rather than as the main focus of the article. The article itself claims to be about what people think, and the implications of "climategate" for the thinking habits of the general populace, but really the main point of the article is simply to repeatedly assure the reader that climate science isn't science.
Propaganda 101.
You know, generally speaking, if a big company wants to take a piece of "open source" hardware and make it cheaper, that would be a big win. If you are making open source hardware to make money making hardware, this will be bad for you. If you are making open source hardware to scratch an itch, this will be good for you. Just make sure you get the license right--you don't want them to start making the hardware, and then close it up and use their revenue stream to pay lawyers to shut you out.
Yup, that name is bad juju.
Brian was a fairly new employee, so that's not really a valid point in this particular case. The question is whether or not they discriminated on the basis of his age, not whether or not discriminating on the basis of age is a good thing or a bad thing. Discriminating on the basis of age is illegal, so that latter point has already been settled.
However, to speak to the point you are making, this is actually a really bad model for how to do things. If your older employees are more productive, obviously they should be paid more. Or if they make the company more productive, even if they themselves are not more productive, they should be paid more. This is the usual rationale for retaining older employees and paying more for seniority.
As a person who has been aging steadily his whole life, I care more about the former than the latter. I don't want to go job hunting and not get a job because the company I'm applying to feels they can't afford me, simply on the basis of my age--if I am willing to work for what a younger employee would accept, and I would do as good as or better of a job, I should have an equal chance at the job.
As an employer, I would not want to be forced to retain you out of a sense of fairness, if retaining you is against the interests of my company as a whole. I don't mean that fairness is wrong, just that this is a bad way to be fair. It makes companies top-heavy, and creates situations like the situation in the car industry, where the situation gets progressively worse and worse until it looks so bad that the company can get permission to break all its promises to older employees and former employees. Why let the system get so out of whack in the first place?