Hilarious. First of all, I'm not a conservative, I'm a libertarian. Second of all, every political hack from every part of the spectrum says whatever they want with no data to prove it. That's what you get when you deal in politics.
Humans are bad at managing the environment? I would argue to the contrary.
And if I had hours to waste, I could cite a million examples of how we have tried to tame nature and fucked something else up in the process.
You mention dykes, canals, and dams as examples of our success. All of these have had substantial influences, but my point is the results are not all positive. Consider the animals affected by dams. I'm not saying we shouldn't make dams, but the results are not always what we imagine.
Also, please explain why we should not attempt to halt or reduce air pollution (as you seem to be suggesting) because we're worried about causing other problems that may or may not exist.
I didn't say we shouldn't attempt to reduce air pollution. However, imagine if a law was passed that you weren't allowed to operate your car more than X miles per day. Now you're reducing air pollution, but at a great cost to our economy, which could do far worse damage in the long run. What if we destroy our economy fixing air pollution, only to send us back in history to a point where people are burning wood, coal, and noxious substances in their homes in order to stay warm?
Sorry, wrong. Stock in most companies is a share of ownership of that company. It has essentially an intrinsic value (a percentage of what the company is actually worth) and a market premium (increase or decrease in value based on the market's views on the company). At the end of the day, if the company has $5 billion in cash or assets, and no debt, your stock is worth a percentage of that cash at the very least.
A lottery ticket (pre-drawing) simply has a market premium, no intrinsic value. Usually that's $1 per ticket. Once the drawing is over, most tickets are worth $0.
Global climate change scares me. Not for the usual reasons, but because humans are notoriously bad at "managing" the environment, and I sure hope whatever we come up with to "fix" the problem is not worse than nature's own course.
Granted, we are generating a lot of pollution, and it would be great if we could stop without majorly fucking something else up in the process.
But that last part there has been VERY DIFFICULT for us humans to do.
The chinese curse is alive and well. Whenever I hear the latest global warming scaremongering, I can't help but think of it. "May you live in interesting times." Indeed!
- whether an event is public, private, or shared and with who - whether people can see the details of the event (the tags?) or just that you're busy at that time.
If I'm expecting emails from my bank, I'll be putting them on my safelist anyway!
Typical reply heard from someone that has given this 2 seconds of thought, and doesn't have to deal with sending legitimate email to real people on a day-to-day basis.
So you're just going to whitelist everyone you "want" to get email from, like your bank. Uh huh. And which of their thousand email addresses and dozen domains will you know to put in your whitelist? What if they out-source their email sending to a different company? (After all they are supposed to be your bank, not a super email sending service.)
I hope you have a damn smart whitelisting service and you remember to check your "suspect" queue frequently and weed out the legit attempts from unmanned addresses which are common for transactional emails, because most of our users can't.
Why should the government (i.e. taxpayers) give medicaid benefits to able-bodied people on a permanent basis?
If we didn't do that, the people would be forced to work to earn enough money to pay for their medical insurance and care. If they didn't have the cushion to fall back on, Wal-mart would be forced to pay them enough in wages to cover their medical care, or those people wouldn't be able to work at walmart. Supply and demand would apply.
I'm sorry, but his point, I believe, was that the media actually amplify the image radicals pose upon all arabs, which is true.
Radicals? You mean like the reformed government of Afghanistan, who now has a man on trial for converting to Christianity over a decade ago, and are now trying him for this crime against Islam. Punishment being sought? Death.
"It replaces federal income taxes including, personal, estate, gift, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment, and corporate taxes. "
Payroll taxes? If we eliminated payroll taxes, you'd just see your salary decrease by 15%.
Why would your salary DECREASE if your employer and you are both paying less in taxes?
Great, I can no-longer deduct my mortgage interest
First, this deduction you value so highly is on the high taxes you are forced to pay now. You'll be paying less in taxes in the future, therefore a deduction like this is not needed.
Second, interest rates should drop, for a variety of reasons covered on the fairtaxvolunteer.org site, if the fairtax is implemented.
Great, I can no-longer deduct my mortgage interest, but I have to pay a 23%/$69k hit on $300k?
I don't really understand what you mean by 23%/$69k hit on $300k. What $300k?
If I buy a "used" house I don't have to pay it? Take a wild guess what that will do to new home construction? Not good.
The problem is you are only thinking about part of the issue. Yes, if you bought a new home, it would be taxed. But what you're not asking is would new homes cost as much as they do now? No -- because the taxes on all the business-to-business goods and services that it takes to build those new houses are eliminated. New house prices would drop, and even after the tax is added, you're not talking about a big difference between new homes and used homes. Same as the difference we have now, a premium is paid for new homes.
I'm not going to bother responding point by point, because I see someone else already did a great job of that. I would just like to re-iterate that you are misunderstanding most of these issues, and they are all explained on www.fairtaxvolunteer.org more fully... please read that site.
Really, I think the "Fair Tax" crowd has critically examined the current problem, which is certainly well due and admirable, but I don't think they've critically examined their solution
Actually, tens of millions has been spent researching their solution, not counting the analysis of many esteemed economists from universities across the country. (Many of whom have endorsed the fairtax.)
The tax structure we have now is designed to induce certain behavior in many sectors. It is also designed to pay for certain _types_ of consumption, like gas taxes paying for the interstate pavement based on use. You consume pavement, you pay for the pavement.
Two points: First, these taxes are not targeted by the FairTax. The FairTax would eliminate taxes related to income and business taxes. Second, the taxes you mention are often not targeted correctly, and may indeed benefit from being replaced by the fairtax in the future. For example, hybrids consume less gas, pay less in gas taxes, yet use the pavement just as much as a regular car.
I think the big point you're missing with FairTax is that it is not meant to be perfect, just simpler and better than what we have now. It meets that criteria splendidly. You're also forgetting that a lot of what makes FairTax great is its ability to tax people who are currently evading taxes in the black market, cash market, etc.
Re:Please, they sold out to the Chinese
on
Gauging Google's Gaffes
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sold out to the Chinese? How so? They aren't preventing Chinese people from getting to google.com, China may be, though. All they did was add servers in China that make trade-offs: you get better, faster access to our site, but we filter some results (and tell you about it).
they are required to do as corporation
Typical ignorant statement repeated ad nauseum by Slashdot socialists. It's wrong on so many levels. You guys like to think that a corporation is legally required to do whatever it takes to make a profit, and you're flat out fucking wrong about that point. But you just never let it go. One of these days you should take Economics 101.
Remember folks, Do No Evil is a marketing slogan, not legal contract.
Actually it's a mission statement, which most companies have. Theirs is just succinct. Good and Evil is black and white. Operating your servers in China is a shade of grey. They never said Don't Be Grey, they said Don't Be Evil. Just because you have a problem with something doesn't make it evil across the board.
I think the China move was a smart one, I don't have a problem with it. Then again, I seem to be one of the few that can look past the B.S. and see what they actually did -- added some services for Chinese users, while leaving existing services alone. If that's evil, call me Darth Vader.
You can drink up buddy. Let that artificial sugar like substance ravage through your body on a daily basis. Then when you got some kind of rare disease because your corporate sponsors put something in your soda you weren't aware of...
All the health nut types I know (and I'm not one of them)
You're not a health nut, you're just a nut.
(I wrote this while enjoying a cool, refreshing Coke Zero. The Zero stands for Zero Poison.)
how the often libertarian gestalt of Slashdot suddenly advocates government-sponsored trade protectionism as soon as the topic of *computer-related* jobs comes up.
Let me give you a clue: the libertarians aren't the ones advocating government-sponsored protectionism. You do realize there are thousands of people responding on this site right? Some are libertarians. I am. And I realize just as the north outsourced jobs to the south during the time of the abe lincoln, the usa is outsourcing jobs to poorer countries.
The people against outsourcing jobs are also often the ones in favor of unions controlling the work place. Perhaps they were aiming a gun at their feet?
Also, EVERYONE complaining about this is a spammer. They don't think they are spammers, but they are. If the recepients want you on their email, they will put you in their address book and you won't be charged a thing.
You have the typical Slashdot myopic viewpoint, "if I'm not doing something, no one does it." You have clearly never had to send large amounts of legitimate email that people actually want.
The first problem is sometimes it's not technically possible for the AOL user to whitelist all sending addresses, for example if you are running a mailing list with many contributors. How does the AOL user whitelist those other users? And ignoring mailing lists, there are times when your organization has to use multiple addresses to send email. How do you get them to whitelist all addresses you might possibly ever use? It is daunting.
Your second problem is AOL user apathy. Telling them "you definitely want to whitelist this, this and this," doesn't mean they'll do it. But they sure will complain to you later when they didn't get your email. That costs ME more money, not AOL.
And what about mailing lists where the reply-to address is different for each mailing that goes out? Should the AOL users whitelist every member on the mailing list? Great idea.
AOL has made a series of poor choices with their email program/system, for years on end. Some highlights:
- They only display the email address of the person sending you email. You have to open the email to find out the name of the sender! (Shouldn't this have been fixed 15 or so years ago when AOL first started letting outsiders send email to their members?)
- If an AOL user wants to include part of your email in their reply to you, they have to copy and paste it themselves, there is no notion of inserting quoted text as with every other email program on earth.
- They put the "Report Spam" button right next to the delete button, and from the user's perspective it does the same thing: email disappears when you click it, with no warning. But on the back-end, AOL counts these against the sender, even if the person did it by mistake (since it is right next to the Delete button, this is very common).
- And the best of them all: plaintext emails to AOL members do not have URLs hyperlinked! They have to copy and paste the URL into the web browser in AOL, or the sender has to format the plaintext as a link, using A HREF, even though everyone ELSE that receives the email in this fashion will see this tag surrounding the URL. If you want everyone to have a nice view of your email and be able to click on the links, you have to format it as HTML.
Now here is where this email tax comes in. Right now, if an AOL member clicks on a link in your HTML email to them, they will get a warning that links are disabled, unless you are in their address book, or you are in the AOL Enhanced Whitelist. You get on this whitelist by having a clean record of sending a lot of email to AOL members, and not being reported too often as "spam." I.e. you're a company sending a lot of legitimate email.
In this case, they click on your links and they just work. If you're not on the enhanced whitelist, and you're not in their address book, they have to click on a "enable links for this email" button for EVERY EMAIL.
Now AOL wants to replace this enhanced whitelist system with the email tax system run by GoodMail.
The problem here is not safety or spammers, it's:
1. AOL's spam detection sucks. 2. AOL's email program sucks.
If they fixed those two problems, there would be no need for an enhanced whitelist or goodmail!
As for their line, "We believe more choices, and more alternatives, for safety and e-mail authentication is a good thing for the Internet, not bad..." Let me ask them, "So why are you dropping the enhanced whitelist?" That's not more choices, that's dropping one in favor of another... another that will provide you with some much needed profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Hilarious. First of all, I'm not a conservative, I'm a libertarian. Second of all, every political hack from every part of the spectrum says whatever they want with no data to prove it. That's what you get when you deal in politics.
Humans are bad at managing the environment? I would argue to the contrary.
... be careful what you wish for.
And if I had hours to waste, I could cite a million examples of how we have tried to tame nature and fucked something else up in the process.
You mention dykes, canals, and dams as examples of our success. All of these have had substantial influences, but my point is the results are not all positive. Consider the animals affected by dams. I'm not saying we shouldn't make dams, but the results are not always what we imagine.
Also, please explain why we should not attempt to halt or reduce air pollution (as you seem to be suggesting) because we're worried about causing other problems that may or may not exist.
I didn't say we shouldn't attempt to reduce air pollution. However, imagine if a law was passed that you weren't allowed to operate your car more than X miles per day. Now you're reducing air pollution, but at a great cost to our economy, which could do far worse damage in the long run. What if we destroy our economy fixing air pollution, only to send us back in history to a point where people are burning wood, coal, and noxious substances in their homes in order to stay warm?
The point is
Sorry, wrong. Stock in most companies is a share of ownership of that company. It has essentially an intrinsic value (a percentage of what the company is actually worth) and a market premium (increase or decrease in value based on the market's views on the company). At the end of the day, if the company has $5 billion in cash or assets, and no debt, your stock is worth a percentage of that cash at the very least.
A lottery ticket (pre-drawing) simply has a market premium, no intrinsic value. Usually that's $1 per ticket. Once the drawing is over, most tickets are worth $0.
Lottery tickets are closer to options than stock.
Global climate change scares me. Not for the usual reasons, but because humans are notoriously bad at "managing" the environment, and I sure hope whatever we come up with to "fix" the problem is not worse than nature's own course.
Granted, we are generating a lot of pollution, and it would be great if we could stop without majorly fucking something else up in the process.
But that last part there has been VERY DIFFICULT for us humans to do.
The chinese curse is alive and well. Whenever I hear the latest global warming scaremongering, I can't help but think of it. "May you live in interesting times." Indeed!
You can specify:
- whether an event is public, private, or shared and with who
- whether people can see the details of the event (the tags?) or just that you're busy at that time.
I bet your post would be funnier if I was a physics dork.
If I'm expecting emails from my bank, I'll be putting them on my safelist anyway!
Typical reply heard from someone that has given this 2 seconds of thought, and doesn't have to deal with sending legitimate email to real people on a day-to-day basis.
So you're just going to whitelist everyone you "want" to get email from, like your bank. Uh huh. And which of their thousand email addresses and dozen domains will you know to put in your whitelist? What if they out-source their email sending to a different company? (After all they are supposed to be your bank, not a super email sending service.)
I hope you have a damn smart whitelisting service and you remember to check your "suspect" queue frequently and weed out the legit attempts from unmanned addresses which are common for transactional emails, because most of our users can't.
Your comments are a nice attempt at humor, but there probably are people out there that feel this way.
Apple's been rumored to be dying forever, and have had a tiny slice of the computing market all that time.
Maybe now that they are doing well, rather than shorting stock you should buy it -- it could mean they break past the 10% marketshare ceiling.
Why should the government (i.e. taxpayers) give medicaid benefits to able-bodied people on a permanent basis?
If we didn't do that, the people would be forced to work to earn enough money to pay for their medical insurance and care. If they didn't have the cushion to fall back on, Wal-mart would be forced to pay them enough in wages to cover their medical care, or those people wouldn't be able to work at walmart. Supply and demand would apply.
Dear sir,
I have performed this exact experiment.
The cat does in fact land on its feet.
However, getting the cat's fur off the overturned buttered toast is a chore.
I was assuming my "radical arabs" the poster actually was refering to islamofascists.
I'm sorry, but his point, I believe, was that the media actually amplify the image radicals pose upon all arabs, which is true.
c hristian/
Radicals? You mean like the reformed government of Afghanistan, who now has a man on trial for converting to Christianity over a decade ago, and are now trying him for this crime against Islam. Punishment being sought? Death.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/03/21/afghan.
Yes, the media sucks... but sometimes the source of their hype sucks worse.
Then, where are these "hidden" taxes again?
m l#2
m l#21m l#28
e s
Like I said, it's all covered on the site:
http://www.fairtaxvolunteer.org/smart/faq-main.ht
"It replaces federal income taxes including, personal, estate, gift, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment, and corporate taxes. "
Payroll taxes? If we eliminated payroll taxes, you'd just see your salary decrease by 15%.
Why would your salary DECREASE if your employer and you are both paying less in taxes?
Great, I can no-longer deduct my mortgage interest
First, this deduction you value so highly is on the high taxes you are forced to pay now. You'll be paying less in taxes in the future, therefore a deduction like this is not needed.
Second, interest rates should drop, for a variety of reasons covered on the fairtaxvolunteer.org site, if the fairtax is implemented.
Refer to these two answers:
http://www.fairtaxvolunteer.org/smart/faq-main.ht
http://www.fairtaxvolunteer.org/smart/faq-main.ht
Great, I can no-longer deduct my mortgage interest, but I have to pay a 23%/$69k hit on $300k?
I don't really understand what you mean by 23%/$69k hit on $300k. What $300k?
If I buy a "used" house I don't have to pay it? Take a wild guess what that will do to new home construction? Not good.
The problem is you are only thinking about part of the issue. Yes, if you bought a new home, it would be taxed. But what you're not asking is would new homes cost as much as they do now? No -- because the taxes on all the business-to-business goods and services that it takes to build those new houses are eliminated. New house prices would drop, and even after the tax is added, you're not talking about a big difference between new homes and used homes. Same as the difference we have now, a premium is paid for new homes.
Here's another answer to this issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax#Housing_pric
If you "simplify" the system like this, all other things will NOT remain equal.
Exactly. They get better.
I'm not missing the point, I'm disagreeing with it.
Based on the comments above, I still think you're not informed enough about how the FairTax would work to judge it as harshly as you're doing.
I'm not going to bother responding point by point, because I see someone else already did a great job of that. I would just like to re-iterate that you are misunderstanding most of these issues, and they are all explained on www.fairtaxvolunteer.org more fully... please read that site.
4 5733
Really, I think the "Fair Tax" crowd has critically examined the current problem, which is certainly well due and admirable, but I don't think they've critically examined their solution
Actually, tens of millions has been spent researching their solution, not counting the analysis of many esteemed economists from universities across the country. (Many of whom have endorsed the fairtax.)
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=
The tax structure we have now is designed to induce certain behavior in many sectors. It is also designed to pay for certain _types_ of consumption, like gas taxes paying for the interstate pavement based on use. You consume pavement, you pay for the pavement.
Two points: First, these taxes are not targeted by the FairTax. The FairTax would eliminate taxes related to income and business taxes. Second, the taxes you mention are often not targeted correctly, and may indeed benefit from being replaced by the fairtax in the future. For example, hybrids consume less gas, pay less in gas taxes, yet use the pavement just as much as a regular car.
I think the big point you're missing with FairTax is that it is not meant to be perfect, just simpler and better than what we have now. It meets that criteria splendidly. You're also forgetting that a lot of what makes FairTax great is its ability to tax people who are currently evading taxes in the black market, cash market, etc.
Sold out to the Chinese? How so? They aren't preventing Chinese people from getting to google.com, China may be, though. All they did was add servers in China that make trade-offs: you get better, faster access to our site, but we filter some results (and tell you about it).
they are required to do as corporation
Typical ignorant statement repeated ad nauseum by Slashdot socialists. It's wrong on so many levels. You guys like to think that a corporation is legally required to do whatever it takes to make a profit, and you're flat out fucking wrong about that point. But you just never let it go. One of these days you should take Economics 101.
Remember folks, Do No Evil is a marketing slogan, not legal contract.
Actually it's a mission statement, which most companies have. Theirs is just succinct. Good and Evil is black and white. Operating your servers in China is a shade of grey. They never said Don't Be Grey, they said Don't Be Evil. Just because you have a problem with something doesn't make it evil across the board.
I think the China move was a smart one, I don't have a problem with it. Then again, I seem to be one of the few that can look past the B.S. and see what they actually did -- added some services for Chinese users, while leaving existing services alone. If that's evil, call me Darth Vader.
Actually, lots of companies provide the third. The room is generally tiled and has a row of tiny offices equipped with porceline chairs.
True. To coin the grandparent poster, I often experience "the flow" when in these private sanctuaries.
This shouldn't be a problem unless high value sites start linking to boxxet pages.
Behold the power of pagerank.
You can drink up buddy. Let that artificial sugar like substance ravage through your body on a daily basis. Then when you got some kind of rare disease because your corporate sponsors put something in your soda you weren't aware of ...
All the health nut types I know (and I'm not one of them)
You're not a health nut, you're just a nut.
(I wrote this while enjoying a cool, refreshing Coke Zero. The Zero stands for Zero Poison.)
Wow, this is a Good Thing. People might ending up only quoting part of the emails and not attaching the whole fscking thread they answer on.
No, what happens is it's such a pain in the ass to do, they never quote anything, and so you have no idea what they are responding to when they reply.
So people can not just click on every link they see but have to copy and paste to catch the latest Windows Virus?
99% of the links people try to click on are to legitimate pages, not windows viruses. Nice try at being cute, but you're mistaken about the effects.
how the often libertarian gestalt of Slashdot suddenly advocates government-sponsored trade protectionism as soon as the topic of *computer-related* jobs comes up.
Let me give you a clue: the libertarians aren't the ones advocating government-sponsored protectionism. You do realize there are thousands of people responding on this site right? Some are libertarians. I am. And I realize just as the north outsourced jobs to the south during the time of the abe lincoln, the usa is outsourcing jobs to poorer countries.
The people against outsourcing jobs are also often the ones in favor of unions controlling the work place. Perhaps they were aiming a gun at their feet?
Lower prices only benefit you if your salary stays constant...and you continue to have one.
So if your salary dips down, you're saying lower prices don't benefit you as well?
Your logic sucks.
Also, EVERYONE complaining about this is a spammer. They don't think they are spammers, but they are. If the recepients want you on their email, they will put you in their address book and you won't be charged a thing.
You have the typical Slashdot myopic viewpoint, "if I'm not doing something, no one does it." You have clearly never had to send large amounts of legitimate email that people actually want.
The first problem is sometimes it's not technically possible for the AOL user to whitelist all sending addresses, for example if you are running a mailing list with many contributors. How does the AOL user whitelist those other users? And ignoring mailing lists, there are times when your organization has to use multiple addresses to send email. How do you get them to whitelist all addresses you might possibly ever use? It is daunting.
Your second problem is AOL user apathy. Telling them "you definitely want to whitelist this, this and this," doesn't mean they'll do it. But they sure will complain to you later when they didn't get your email. That costs ME more money, not AOL.
And what about mailing lists where the reply-to address is different for each mailing that goes out? Should the AOL users whitelist every member on the mailing list? Great idea.
"No, is too much, let me sum up."
AOL has made a series of poor choices with their email program/system, for years on end. Some highlights:
- They only display the email address of the person sending you email. You have to open the email to find out the name of the sender! (Shouldn't this have been fixed 15 or so years ago when AOL first started letting outsiders send email to their members?)
- If an AOL user wants to include part of your email in their reply to you, they have to copy and paste it themselves, there is no notion of inserting quoted text as with every other email program on earth.
- They put the "Report Spam" button right next to the delete button, and from the user's perspective it does the same thing: email disappears when you click it, with no warning. But on the back-end, AOL counts these against the sender, even if the person did it by mistake (since it is right next to the Delete button, this is very common).
- And the best of them all: plaintext emails to AOL members do not have URLs hyperlinked! They have to copy and paste the URL into the web browser in AOL, or the sender has to format the plaintext as a link, using A HREF, even though everyone ELSE that receives the email in this fashion will see this tag surrounding the URL. If you want everyone to have a nice view of your email and be able to click on the links, you have to format it as HTML.
Now here is where this email tax comes in. Right now, if an AOL member clicks on a link in your HTML email to them, they will get a warning that links are disabled, unless you are in their address book, or you are in the AOL Enhanced Whitelist. You get on this whitelist by having a clean record of sending a lot of email to AOL members, and not being reported too often as "spam." I.e. you're a company sending a lot of legitimate email.
In this case, they click on your links and they just work. If you're not on the enhanced whitelist, and you're not in their address book, they have to click on a "enable links for this email" button for EVERY EMAIL.
Now AOL wants to replace this enhanced whitelist system with the email tax system run by GoodMail.
The problem here is not safety or spammers, it's:
1. AOL's spam detection sucks.
2. AOL's email program sucks.
If they fixed those two problems, there would be no need for an enhanced whitelist or goodmail!
As for their line, "We believe more choices, and more alternatives, for safety and e-mail authentication is a good thing for the Internet, not bad..." Let me ask them, "So why are you dropping the enhanced whitelist?" That's not more choices, that's dropping one in favor of another... another that will provide you with some much needed profit.
I'm sure their motives are pure.
Bush wants to hog all the snorting for himself!
Also, maybe during the 45 days they can find out what "open source" means, and how that Israeli company can already own and modify a copy of Snort.