Living paycheck to paycheck is a big mistake; the slightest miscalculation, unanticipated expense, emergency, or disaster will break you if you do this.
Obviously. And that's a strong argument that the poorest people should have their tax burden lightened, since that's one of the only few ways to increase their available income. But of course that means that you need to tax the rich more to make up for the difference.
In other words, you are arguing against your own point here.
Like the negative savings index, it is only relatively recently in our history that so many people have chosen to do this. We should be educating people about why this is a mistake, not looking for ways to make it more comfortable to make this mistake.
This is not a "mistake", this is a natural result of falling wages. Basically, an increasing number of people can barely afford food and rent on their paycheck, making it impossible to save up anything. You have the libertarian and other right-wing crowd to thank for that.
Oh well, I hope that Europe learns from USA's mistakes before we, too, pass the point of no return.
One person should pay the same tax rate as any other person, regardless of income. That would be proportionate. A higher income person paying 20% taxes would pay more taxes than a lower income person paying 20% taxes. Making him pay 30% is just robbery.
No. The higher your income, the smaller proportion of it are you paying for necessary maintenance (food, rent, etc). The goal is to make you pay the same proportion of your disposable income - the part you are using for luxuries.
Another thing to consider is that it's not desirable for the society to have huge income disparity, since that tends to lead to unrest. Progressive taxation is one of the ways to decrease said disparity, thus helping to stabilize society.
The only difference between "BP" taking our money at the gas pumps to pay, or the USG taking our tax money to pay, is whom has a more efficient cash handling system, whom can skim more money off, etc.
Um, no. The difference is whether and how much BP executives get bonuses for a job well done. That's the only difference between "private" and government.
I don't know about that. BP Stock has dropped by about 33%. That's enough for any public company to axe the CEO. Remember, the CEO still serves the board, and the board serves their bank accounts.
The CEO and the board both serve their bonuses, nothing less, nothing more. And they are going to get bonuses, after which the CEO - if he's going to be fired - will get a golden parachute.
The gasoline retail industry is notorious for having a pricing strategy of "the maximum the consumer can withstand".
Yes. That's what I said. BP will extract every last burnt wooden penny it can from the customer/victim, as does every other business.
As soon as BP raises prices (which they won't have to, that's not where they make their money anyway) the neighbouring stations would raise their prices too.
So why haven't they done it already and raked in higher profit margins?
In any case BP, Exxon, Chevron etc. don't make their profits at the pump. They run refineries, they supply fuel direct to major consumers like airlines, they sell raw crude on the commodities market. What average Joe pays at the station is not their cash cow - any small fluctuations in price benefit the individual station owners, not the big mega-corp.
That's nice. Now where does the money ultimately come from? From Joe Average at the the pump.
Any damages applied to them would simply be passed on to the consumers.
Bullshit. BP is already pricing its oil to whatever brings it most profits. It can't pass anything to consumer since rising prices would send consumers to competitors instead, leading to less profits for BP.
Why are the more worried about porn than actual crimes?
Because implementing a filter is easier than stopping actual crimes.
Any logical person can see that banning porn would likely make the rape situation even worse.
Any logical person would see than banning porn is completely pointless, since there's no way to stop people from getting what they want. For reference, see: any attempt to ban alcohol ever, any attempt to ban drugs ever, MAFIAA.
Laws only work when most people agree with them. Legislation does not define morality, morality defines legistalition.
I'm glad to see they've got their priorities straight.
The cynic in me says that the priority is for various morality groups make it seem like they're doing something, possibly to themselves.
But I know it when I see it". If a law is worded strongly enough to limit "pornography" then it can probably be used to limit other types of speech as well; speech which the original authors perhaps didn't intend to limit, but have silenced all the same.
I assert that the kind of people who want to censor pornography also want to censor anything else they don't agree with. Therefore, this ambiguity is not accidental but entirely intentional: it allows them to stop anything they dislike by simply claiming it's "obscene". So it's entirely intentional.
SA needs AIDS to keep the population growth down. If you combat every gawddamm illness in Africa, then many more people will die worse later.
Bullshit. The population growth rate in every industrial country is around zero. AIDS, by disturbing economy and thus keeping the quality of life down, is making the problem worse, not better. Also, you really can't die much worse than from AIDS.
The whole "population explosion" scare has been debunked by reality; it turns out that humans simply expand to whatever their environment can comfortably support and then stay there.
The spice girls google example is a lesson, teachers should not randomly type things into google in front of students, if they want kid-safe search results they need to use a kid-safe search engine. That is not just cause for censorship.
Even better, understand that kids aren't going to be harmed by seeing naked women, or even people having sex. Those who are too young will simply ignore it, and those who are old enough will get more fuel for their fantasies. That's all.
Doesn't mean that you should go out of your way to show porn to children, but if they see it, it's not the end of the world, so stop overreacting.
It takes A LOT of money to get a drug approved, if the market for the drug itself is not there then the work just does not get done.
That raises a question: should cures for illnesses with nearly 100% kill ratio be held to the same standards as cures for illnesses that are unlikely to kill you? After all, if the drug is guaranteed to kill the virus, then as long as it's less likely to kill you than the virus is it's in your best interests to take it. In the case of Ebola, drugs with mortality rates less 50% (90% for some strains of the virus) are going to increase your chances of survival, so does it really make any sense to keep them from market even if they kill 1 in 10 patient?
A set of axioms which defines a given theory of mathematics, has not been found that does not eventually lead to some sort of contradiction. The trivial claim may be falsified within a given framework, but a given framework has not been found that does not falsify itself.
You have yet to show how Peano axioms contradict themselves. You have, in fact, yet to show any kind of evidence, much less proof, for your claim.
"The vast majority of contemporary mathematicians believe that Peano's axioms are consistent, relying either on intuition or the acceptance of a consistency proof such as Gentzen's proof.
Ah, so they are proven consistent, then!
The small number of mathematicians who advocate ultrafinitism reject Peano's axioms because the axioms require an infinite set of natural numbers."
So, not only are Peano's axioms consistent, but the only objection is philosophical (namely, that you can't write down all natural numbers).
As OpenCL and other "abuses" of GPU power become more popular, "colors a pixel wrong" will eventually happen in the wrong place at the wrong time on someone using a "gaming" card.
Of course, the driver could simply tune each shader core to stress either reliability or speed, based on whether it's running a pixel shader or compute shader.
Coming to think of it, don't some dialects of Lisp let you tell the compiler the desired tradeoff between speed, reliability, generality etc. in a per-function basis?
Folding is only 65-70C, and yet it'll make my computer BSOD unless I underclock it.
And that strongly suggests that it's not just the card that's faulty. Why would the OS crash just because a calculation unrelated to it gave the wrong result?
And you know why this is? Because there is nothing to be gain and a lot to be lost in actively opposing religion.
Yes... But that truth is more fundamental than you think. If you managed to eradicate all existing religion... People would simply invent new ones. Their system of belief might not involve anything supernatural, but wthat ouldn't make it more rational; ask anyone who's ever lived in a communist country if you don't believe me. Human beings get obsessive about things, it's in our blood, so it's actually better to have them obsess over supernatural things, since that has less impact on how to behave in this world than getting obsessed over, say, left- or right-wing politics.
I think we should all be happy that religion's around, or do you want to see what happens when all that energy directed towards God gets directed towards Karl Marx or Adam Smith instead? Or, even worse, towards some living demagogue?
Why would anyone need to be "in the closet" about anything?
Because scientists are still humans, and humans care about petty things.
Scientists should be above such petty things.
Scientists are still humans, and humans care about petty things.
Science is purely objective, why do the personalities of those who practice it matter? Reproducible results are all that matter.
Because scientists are still humans, and for humans, being in the right - and especially getting everyone else to acknowledge it - is all that matters.
If there is a discrimination problem, what should be done about it?
Cool story, bro.
No, seriously: whenever someone is wrong, and it doesn't matter, answer them so. Whenever someone utters something utterly stupid, answer them so. Make it your first, reflexive answer to any insult, blasphemy, or just plain main-numblingly stupid thing someone might say. That way you can keep emotionally disconnected from the Richard Dawkins's and Fred Phelps's of this world and don't feel the need to start arguing them, allowing you to go on your merry way and not care if they waste their time making fools out of themselves.
Really, human species needs to learn to stop taking itself so bloody seriously. Almost nothing is really worth getting worked over (except things I care about, those are Serious Business). So relax, throw down a few pints of beer, and watch the fireworks as those less enlightened than you provide you with plenty of hilarious entertainment.
I was often taught that education was an effective remedy for small-mindedness, and the uneducated are far more inclined to be closed-minded. Come to think of it, it was educated people who told me that.
A sense of humour is the only true remedy for closed-mindedness. A clown told me that, just before getting a pie on the face.
Many unions are mafia-controlled, especially in the northeast. It's a sad fact of life. Deal with it.
Many unions are not Mafia-controlled, especially anywhere but the northeast of the USA. It's a sad fact of life for the right-wing zealots who dislike serfs getting uppity. Deal with it.
Funny, from my diverse perspective, destruction, oppression, and authoritarianism are left-wing ideals. What is the leftist position on the creativity allowed by free enterprise?
Leftist position summarized: human life, dignity and freedom are more important than corporate profits.
"Free enterprise" is a fine ideal, but it inevitably leads to monopolies that prey on people. Government regulation is needed both to keep corporations from growing into such monopolies, and to allow people options besides starvation and slavery. A megacorporation is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from a government agency - yes, even in the "use of force" department: after all, a rich enough person or corporation can easily bribe the government to do its bidding.
I'm not sure you understand what "falsifiable" means". It doesn't mean that there is evidence that the theory/theorem is incorrect, it simply means that there are clearly defined conditions that would prove the theory incorrect if they were ever achieved. For example, Intelligent Design is not falsifiable because no matter what evidence someone might come up with, an ID supporter can always claim it's part of God's plan, while Fermat's Last Theorem is falsifiable because all you have to do to show it false is find three integers greater than 2 that satisfy the equation.
Anyway, I'm just being pedantic here. For all practical purposes the Scientific Method has proven itself a very useful tool for doing science; but even so, it's just a tool.
You can show any system of mathematics that we've ever devised as inconsistent with itself at some point, after all.
ReallyPlease show how Peano axioms contradict themselves, then? Go on, I'm waiting.
Anything can be systematically studied, but that doesn't make it science. I can go through the Quran, Bible, Book of Mormon and The Amazing Spider Man, page by page, systematically, thoroughly, and with great thought, and it still doesn't make it science.
Robots are more durable than humans, but humans are more flexible.
I re-iterate: Hubble is close enough to Earth that you can directly control a repair robot. By direct control I mean you can have someone put on a force feedback glove on the surface and control every last motion made by the robot directly.
In other words, you get the best of both worlds: the flexibility of human minds and the durability of robot bodies.
You are completely, 100%, wrong. Ignorance is bliss after all. If I drank beer to get high, then having a pint would be pointless. I'm 6'5" 280lbs. One beer does absolutely nothing in terms of intoxication, but damn do I love the taste of beer.
I weight 10 kilograms less than you, and I get high from a pint. It won't last long, but I sure as hell can tell the difference.
BTW. You might wish to lose some weight. You are, to put it bluntly, morbidly obese (weight index 33.4). Maybe you should stop drinking for a while?
A well brewed beer should not sting going down, just like a well-aged whiskey, a fine wine, and quality vodka (no really, good liquor doesn't have to burn).
Liquor always burns, due to the presence of ethanol. It has nothing to do with taste buds; just try rubbing alcohol to a wound and you get the same sensation.
All the lovers of beer, wine, malt, rum are only in it for their addiction and would prefer milkshakes for the taste?
Well, I do. Can't speak for anyone else, of course, but to me wine tastes like rotten fruit juice and beer is only tolerable because it gets your drunk. Ethanol tastes utterly horrible, in a way even outright spoiled food doesn't, and I can't imagine anyone drinking anything with it for any other reason than getting drunk.
There's a difference between Unions and Mafia now?
Why yes: A Labour Union is a bunch of employees who have joined together to get equivalent negotiating position to employers, while the Mafia is a bunch criminals who have joined together to rob peopel more effectively. They have nothing to do with each other, except in right-wing rethoric where demanding payment for a job is evil since it cuts to the profits of billionaires.
I learn something new every day...
If only you right-wing nuts did, the economy wouldn't be in the toilet now. But I guess you can't help your destructive, oppressive and authoritarian nature - after all, if you could, you wouldn't be right-wing.
No. Repairing complex instruments like the Hubble couldn't have been done by robot.
Of course it could have been done by a robot. In fact, fixing Hubble via a robot would had been easier than by a human, since Hubble is close enough to Earth that direct control is possible, and a robot doesn't need a bulky spacesuit, making it more dexterous.
It remains that you can't understand how to live in space long term, if you don't have people doing things in space at some point.
This is true. However, at the present, we have problems building self-sufficient colonies even here on Earth. So, it might be wise to direct the money towards solving this problem first and worrying about making them spaceworthy after it's solved.
Finally, far more public money is squandered on other things such as wars, government retirement and health care services, and corruption.
This might surprise you, but in most of the world a government is supposed to provide retirement and health care. Equating them with corruption and wars does nothing except make you seem like a right-wing fundamentalist.
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Obviously. And that's a strong argument that the poorest people should have their tax burden lightened, since that's one of the only few ways to increase their available income. But of course that means that you need to tax the rich more to make up for the difference.
In other words, you are arguing against your own point here.
This is not a "mistake", this is a natural result of falling wages. Basically, an increasing number of people can barely afford food and rent on their paycheck, making it impossible to save up anything. You have the libertarian and other right-wing crowd to thank for that.
Oh well, I hope that Europe learns from USA's mistakes before we, too, pass the point of no return.
No. The higher your income, the smaller proportion of it are you paying for necessary maintenance (food, rent, etc). The goal is to make you pay the same proportion of your disposable income - the part you are using for luxuries.
Another thing to consider is that it's not desirable for the society to have huge income disparity, since that tends to lead to unrest. Progressive taxation is one of the ways to decrease said disparity, thus helping to stabilize society.
Um, no. The difference is whether and how much BP executives get bonuses for a job well done. That's the only difference between "private" and government.
That's a good indicator that you're doing something right.
The CEO and the board both serve their bonuses, nothing less, nothing more. And they are going to get bonuses, after which the CEO - if he's going to be fired - will get a golden parachute.
Personal responsibility is for the serfs.
Yes. That's what I said. BP will extract every last burnt wooden penny it can from the customer/victim, as does every other business.
So why haven't they done it already and raked in higher profit margins?
That's nice. Now where does the money ultimately come from? From Joe Average at the the pump.
Bullshit. BP is already pricing its oil to whatever brings it most profits. It can't pass anything to consumer since rising prices would send consumers to competitors instead, leading to less profits for BP.
Because implementing a filter is easier than stopping actual crimes.
Any logical person would see than banning porn is completely pointless, since there's no way to stop people from getting what they want. For reference, see: any attempt to ban alcohol ever, any attempt to ban drugs ever, MAFIAA.
Laws only work when most people agree with them. Legislation does not define morality, morality defines legistalition.
The cynic in me says that the priority is for various morality groups make it seem like they're doing something, possibly to themselves.
I assert that the kind of people who want to censor pornography also want to censor anything else they don't agree with. Therefore, this ambiguity is not accidental but entirely intentional: it allows them to stop anything they dislike by simply claiming it's "obscene". So it's entirely intentional.
Bullshit. The population growth rate in every industrial country is around zero. AIDS, by disturbing economy and thus keeping the quality of life down, is making the problem worse, not better. Also, you really can't die much worse than from AIDS.
The whole "population explosion" scare has been debunked by reality; it turns out that humans simply expand to whatever their environment can comfortably support and then stay there.
Even better, understand that kids aren't going to be harmed by seeing naked women, or even people having sex. Those who are too young will simply ignore it, and those who are old enough will get more fuel for their fantasies. That's all.
Doesn't mean that you should go out of your way to show porn to children, but if they see it, it's not the end of the world, so stop overreacting.
That raises a question: should cures for illnesses with nearly 100% kill ratio be held to the same standards as cures for illnesses that are unlikely to kill you? After all, if the drug is guaranteed to kill the virus, then as long as it's less likely to kill you than the virus is it's in your best interests to take it. In the case of Ebola, drugs with mortality rates less 50% (90% for some strains of the virus) are going to increase your chances of survival, so does it really make any sense to keep them from market even if they kill 1 in 10 patient?
You have yet to show how Peano axioms contradict themselves. You have, in fact, yet to show any kind of evidence, much less proof, for your claim.
Ah, so they are proven consistent, then!
So, not only are Peano's axioms consistent, but the only objection is philosophical (namely, that you can't write down all natural numbers).
That page says that Peano axioms have been proven consistent.
Of course, the driver could simply tune each shader core to stress either reliability or speed, based on whether it's running a pixel shader or compute shader.
Coming to think of it, don't some dialects of Lisp let you tell the compiler the desired tradeoff between speed, reliability, generality etc. in a per-function basis?
And that strongly suggests that it's not just the card that's faulty. Why would the OS crash just because a calculation unrelated to it gave the wrong result?
Yes... But that truth is more fundamental than you think. If you managed to eradicate all existing religion... People would simply invent new ones. Their system of belief might not involve anything supernatural, but wthat ouldn't make it more rational; ask anyone who's ever lived in a communist country if you don't believe me. Human beings get obsessive about things, it's in our blood, so it's actually better to have them obsess over supernatural things, since that has less impact on how to behave in this world than getting obsessed over, say, left- or right-wing politics.
I think we should all be happy that religion's around, or do you want to see what happens when all that energy directed towards God gets directed towards Karl Marx or Adam Smith instead? Or, even worse, towards some living demagogue?
Because scientists are still humans, and humans care about petty things.
Many unions are not Mafia-controlled, especially anywhere but the northeast of the USA. It's a sad fact of life for the right-wing zealots who dislike serfs getting uppity. Deal with it.
Leftist position summarized: human life, dignity and freedom are more important than corporate profits.
"Free enterprise" is a fine ideal, but it inevitably leads to monopolies that prey on people. Government regulation is needed both to keep corporations from growing into such monopolies, and to allow people options besides starvation and slavery. A megacorporation is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from a government agency - yes, even in the "use of force" department: after all, a rich enough person or corporation can easily bribe the government to do its bidding.
One might reasonably argue that physics is art too. They certainly seem to be following several of the same principles - symmetry, for example.
Any mathematical claim can be falsified; for example, all you have to do to falsify the claim " no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than two " is to find three such integers.
I'm not sure you understand what "falsifiable" means". It doesn't mean that there is evidence that the theory/theorem is incorrect, it simply means that there are clearly defined conditions that would prove the theory incorrect if they were ever achieved. For example, Intelligent Design is not falsifiable because no matter what evidence someone might come up with, an ID supporter can always claim it's part of God's plan, while Fermat's Last Theorem is falsifiable because all you have to do to show it false is find three integers greater than 2 that satisfy the equation.
Anyway, I'm just being pedantic here. For all practical purposes the Scientific Method has proven itself a very useful tool for doing science; but even so, it's just a tool.
ReallyPlease show how Peano axioms contradict themselves, then? Go on, I'm waiting.
Yet such study gave us Occam's Razor.
I re-iterate: Hubble is close enough to Earth that you can directly control a repair robot. By direct control I mean you can have someone put on a force feedback glove on the surface and control every last motion made by the robot directly.
In other words, you get the best of both worlds: the flexibility of human minds and the durability of robot bodies.
I weight 10 kilograms less than you, and I get high from a pint. It won't last long, but I sure as hell can tell the difference.
BTW. You might wish to lose some weight. You are, to put it bluntly, morbidly obese (weight index 33.4). Maybe you should stop drinking for a while?
Liquor always burns, due to the presence of ethanol. It has nothing to do with taste buds; just try rubbing alcohol to a wound and you get the same sensation.
Just how the heck do you mask that?
Well, I do. Can't speak for anyone else, of course, but to me wine tastes like rotten fruit juice and beer is only tolerable because it gets your drunk. Ethanol tastes utterly horrible, in a way even outright spoiled food doesn't, and I can't imagine anyone drinking anything with it for any other reason than getting drunk.
Why yes: A Labour Union is a bunch of employees who have joined together to get equivalent negotiating position to employers, while the Mafia is a bunch criminals who have joined together to rob peopel more effectively. They have nothing to do with each other, except in right-wing rethoric where demanding payment for a job is evil since it cuts to the profits of billionaires.
If only you right-wing nuts did, the economy wouldn't be in the toilet now. But I guess you can't help your destructive, oppressive and authoritarian nature - after all, if you could, you wouldn't be right-wing.
Of course it could have been done by a robot. In fact, fixing Hubble via a robot would had been easier than by a human, since Hubble is close enough to Earth that direct control is possible, and a robot doesn't need a bulky spacesuit, making it more dexterous.
This is true. However, at the present, we have problems building self-sufficient colonies even here on Earth. So, it might be wise to direct the money towards solving this problem first and worrying about making them spaceworthy after it's solved.
This might surprise you, but in most of the world a government is supposed to provide retirement and health care. Equating them with corruption and wars does nothing except make you seem like a right-wing fundamentalist.