>From my perspective, television offers no real benefit over the internet for transferring video.
Except, of course, for the lack of network congestion when 6000 people are either transfering 2.5MB/s total to watch an episode of Star Trek or 15,000 MB/S to watch one episode of Star Trek, all at the exact same moment.
My first few years in college were focused on a degree in nuclear physics, I later changed to chemistry and have a bachelors of science in chemistry so I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about on this topic.
Not good enough, sonny jim! While you may be right about the potential to extend nuclear fuel life span thousands or billions of years, you're completely ignoring the fact that we'll run well out of nuclear material before people go, "Oh, shit, should we have done that?" We know how to now, and have acknowledged the need; but foresight is blurry and focused on the horizon, and hindsight is 20/20. Yeah, we know, but we don't quite see the point just yet.
You're not in the position to take up a project lead role and lobby to improve the state of nuclear technology. Like telling China that they're developing and thus exempt from Kyoto, but that they really should tone down their emissions for public health reasons, and also because retro-fitting "clean technology" is harder and more expensive than a ground-up approach... they'll notice the public health disaster in 10 years, and the economic costs of retrofitting, and go, "... oh, you mean we really should have?" They're doing some of that "clean-up" now, granted; but they did take the exemption, and took a laxed approach. I think Olympics Beijing really got them some negative publicity and they are currently doing a mating dance....
There's no doubt that some fraction of the hydrocarbon soup that makes up a "fossil" fuel does come from non-living sources. However it is extremely difficult (from an entropy [avogadro.co.uk] standpoint) to build complex hydrocarbons through non-living (abiogenic) processes so it's extremely likely that the vast majority of "fossil" fuels are produced from formerly-living sources.
The sun evaporates water, drives the winds, allows plant growth, among other effects. We can tap the results of this energy but in doing so we upset other things. Water power and wind power disrupt natural flow patterns, plant growth ends up trapping heat due to decreased surface albedo, and so on. Yes, this will continue for some time but it's not infinite either. Even more troubling is that we ignore the side effects of tapping these sources because they seem to be free of consequence.
This is exactly the subject of the 2 year old blog post you quoted (which was my first thought on the subject). Everything we do draws heat. Solar power collects heat (rather than reflecting it) and then uses it to drive things (which emits heat as waste), heating up the planet. I don't think back then I had considered wind and hydro; although when I was like 5 I asked questions about hydro-electric dams pertaining to... well you drop a fucking concrete wall in a river, my first thought was how do the fish get through; my second was what about the water level rise? Wind power... people bitch about chopping pigeons but you're right, you get energy from SOMEWHERE and the argument I hear is "it'll never be significant" (stupid).
And yet... I can learn a language fluently without paying much attention, with minimal exposure... and I can play Go... and I can understand things on a fundamental level most people can't even fit into their rigid world view...
Oh well. I'm going to move to Japan one day and meditate on the precipice of a mountain.
There was a case of a beggar beating a man in the face, then suing him for the cost of the service of "bloodletting." The judge sided with the beggar... so the man slugged the judge and then billed him for bloodletting, to be paid at the market price as set by the beggar, and directly paid to the beggar.
There was a 13 year old girl that gave a hungry traveler food. When the town found out, they raped her, strung her up, tortured her, and killed her. How dare you be nice.
I'm sorry but God was right, that place needed to be burned.
So? 13 is a wonderful age to have sex. Why, at 12 the girl is already betrothed to be married to a nice, rich, 28 year old suitor! By 14 she should be on her honeymoon giving up her virginity to a man not less than twice her age, after all. At 14 she can name her first son, and begin breast feeding.
How are words on a page illegal? Words are thoughts, not actions; IMAGES are actions, as images are imaged from the real world, where actions take place. Illustrations (and computer generated graphics etc) are not images, they are not imaged from the real world and thus are simply thoughts penned to paper. Words much less so, since they're not even graphic.
one person is taking home $20,600 and one person is taking home $37,080 after taxes.
One person is making 300% as much as the other person, and taking home 185% as much. Do you know why I need to make 3 times as much money? I NEED a $250,000/year salary because an $80,000/year salary is on the poverty line, just a few thousand above a McDonalds worker. That in turn means that 2 other people that could be well off at $80,000 working with me will have to go jobless searching trash bins for food.
He was informed a plane hit the WTC, not the pentagon. If I remember right, a plane hit the WTC first, that was number one. Nobody was going, "Mr. President, 3 planes came down all over the country targeting large civilian and military installations, something is wrong." And even if it did, his response would have been correct: "Find out what the hell happened and get back to me; you're in the 'intelligence' community for a reason." Seriously, the president has the intelligence community to keep him informed so he doesn't do something retarded.
First off, I lean more toward the body of the scientific community that proposes oil comes from something other than dead dinosaurs. It's a minority consensus, but it's also well-accepted that the "fossil fuel" model may be wrong.
Second, abuses of technical terms get the point across pretty well. Every argument I've heard for "renewable energy" contrasts it with "fossil fuels"... if it's not a "fossil fuel," it's "renewable energy." People have tended to talk about nuclear power like it's some sort of infinite resource: Nuclear fissile power will last forever, while nuclear fusion power will produce ungodly amounts of power--enough to power the whole world from two or three reactors. These views are ridiculous; nuclear power is not a renewable resource.
The life of nuclear fuel can be extended; if you are some sort of nuclear engineer then start making it happen, because most of us can just talk about it. That said, pessimistic estimates of world-wide peak uranium point at 2035, while optimistic estimates don't even span 100 years "on known resources" (and somehow claim about 300 years on "yet undiscovered resources"). However, utilizing breeder reactors to extend the life of uranium fuel, estimates go from 8000+ years to well over 5 billion years (by then the sun will explode).
Given our technology and mindset, we will run out of uranium, and maybe then extend the remaining 20 year supply for 2000 years (more like 5 year supply for 100 years, given mankind's track record). If we get nuclear fusion, we'll learn in 50 years tops that "peak water is coming." We are really bad at this.
It's not my opinion, it's the opinion of Herbert Stein, Nixon's economic adviser, in the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and of the Encyclopedia of Economics which I looked up in the library.
Okay, so it's secondary consensus. I'll give you a bye for that one; it's a valid argument point, but I do dislike secondary consensus when interpreting another person's statements.
I'm not sure I follow you, but you seem to be saying that a $1,000 a year raise is greater from $20,000 to $21,000 than it is from $60,000 to $61,000, because you take home more of it at the $20,000 level. That's the way it should be. We have progressive taxation in this country (and every major industrial country, as far as I know).
Yes, but the side-effect of this is that the gap between $20k and $50k is larger than the gap between $50k and $100k. In other words, when I'm making $20k I want $30k; when I'm making $60k I want $80k. The "rich" would be just as "rich" making $80k instead of $150k if they didn't pay so damn much in taxes... then we could give them an $80k salary and hire 2 of them. Look, 2 jobs instead of 1!
There is exhaustive documentation, from the Journal of the American Medical Association, the National Institutes of Health, the Wall Street Journal, and many other consistent sources, that about 20% of the population can't afford health care, and about 50,000 people die every year of preventable deaths as a result.
I believe that we (or any society) should provide those people with the health care they need, at a higher priority than the manufacture and sale of X-Boxes. It's a greater benefit to society to prevent some 50-year-old man from having a stroke paralyzing half his body, and spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair unable to feed himself, than it is to give some nerd an X-Box. I think preventing strokes is more interesting than playing an X-Box anyway.
And I think you're confusing "quality of life" with "enforced mediocrity." Everyone should be able to afford food... and diverse manufacturing is expensive. So, all food will now be synthetic vegetable oil amalgamations with soy and bits of meat and plant matter and such mixed in for flavor and texture. Everything is somewhat pasty, almost-meat, american cheese (solidified vegetable oil with milk fat solids), etc; but everyone can afford to eat.
Once we've taken care of the necessities -- like health care for the needy -- you can spend all you want on X-Boxes. But first things first.
Eventually the cost of supporting one person is such a weight on society that it is insurmountable. It's like a drug society: the lost labor, economic destruction (money flowing to easily-made drugs, which concentrates in the hands of a few lone growers... think about how much pot one farmer with 10 acres of land can grow by himself!), and overall impact on health (pot effects on unborn babies, people doing stupid shit high, hard drug overdoses on opium, etc... the things we already complain about from alcohol and cigarettes) is yet another economic drain as society tries to support it. With socialized health care (this is the same meaning as socialism, but is not socialism; socialism is a complete political system, not a single service) you have a similar issue: some people become incredibly expensive to support, and then we euthanize them.
The conservatives claim that we can provide health care through the free market. The overwhelming evidence is that the free market doesn't do that. You can let them die or pay for their health care out of taxes. I think we should pay for it out of taxes.
I think you really need to study statistics. Anyone who claims we can supply EFFECTIVE health care to 100% of the population in any way is delusional. I have a lot of canadian friends and your callbacks to the canadian healthcare system are interesting: You can get an X-ray in a few days, sometimes right away
How is this possible with Cuba's medical tourism? You go to Cuba, you're not from Cuba, they want to show you Cuba's excellent health care system so you spend money getting treated in Cuba and tell your friends to fly to Cuba to spend money for good medical care.
If Cuba is so poor, then who do you think the rich are? If you go to Cuba for treatment, you will get excellent healthcare; but the reports I've seen have documented that this isn't the same healthcare a poor useless Cuban gets. This is healthcare for people who can bring hard currency into the country. It's an export.
Terrorists were attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the government was evacuating the White House and the Congress for fear they would be the next targets, and "nothing seriously needing George W. Bush's attention was actually happening."
Yep, sounds like the situation is under control to me. Apparently Bush didn't order the evacuations; he did order the CIA to do some stuff but that was basically a murmured "keep me informed." That's their job anyway, he could have just nodded and ignored them... they would have been back as soon as something else interesting happened. Which basically means what Bush actually DID do did nothing; the whole machine runs pretty well as-is.
What Moore was actually criticizing was the fact that the president just sat there, staring, for seven minutes without interacting with anyone in any way while events were unfolding which he should have stayed on top of, just in case it was an even broader state-funded attack that might have required, say, presidential authority to shoot down commercial passenger planes.
He WAS staying on top of events. The CIA was right there, with radios plugged into their ears. They were instructed (pointlessly, as this is their job) to alert him the moment something interesting was known-- a plane hitting a building is not a terrorist attack, it is a weather problem or a pilot asleep or something stupid. Or a terrorist attack. This is the same as saying that a foil-wrapped log is a discarded hotdog... or a bomb. (Google it) We've had plenty of planes hit shit and fall out of the sky since then, and none of them were terrorist attacks; some of them hit the news because ditching a plane in the Hudson river and not killing anyone is fucking hard, and somebody did it because he is fucking awesome.
What the president DIDN'T do is get up in front of a bunch of first graders, excuse himself, and march out while a bunch of secret agents were whispering secret agent stuff in his ear. He really had nowhere to be anyway.
Although you would expect the president to get up and act immediately, you can't for the life of you think of anything he could actually do except piss himself and request a new pair of pants?
What the fuck? No, seriously, what the fuck?!?! Fucking A, do you really believe this?
Yeah, there wasn't much he could do at the current time. There was no source of attack known and he can't personally gather intelligence on this. Someone will tell his secretary if Russia calls, and the CIA will be informed, and he will get a notification immediately.
Like, maybe getting informed as to what was happening beyond shit whispered in his ear?
Already happening, that's what the intelligence community does. If they know it, he'll know it.
Calling up National Guard, declaring disaster areas, etc?
Well, generally the state of new york and the locality of new york city are going to respond first. Nobody claimed an attack yet, so we're not automatically at war. Plane crashes are considered a "disaster," not an "attack." So the governor of New York State or the mayor of New York City would be calling in the New York National Guard, fire department, etc, and setting disaster areas.
At this point, it's the President's job to either run around going "what what I'm confused did somebody blow shit up what's happening?!" or kick his feet up on his desk smoking a cigar telling "the boys" to keep him informed. There's no cigars allowed in first grade classrooms.
Is that what he said, or what you said? Is that "not what he meant" or "not what proportional means"? A percentage of your income is a proportion; a percentage of taxes paid is a proportion; paying more taxes than the next guy means you pay a larger proportion of the total taxes paid.
In other words, is this an opinion or is it fact?
In economics 101, a flat tax is called a regressive tax.
Yes, that's why we raise sales tax instead of regular tax in Maryland: the legislature wants to keep the poor here poor, so they make sure they're taxed more. Food is not taxed; but prepared food (McDonalds) is taxed. That means if you have somewhere to live and a way to cook, you're just paying more taxes for clothes, car parts, gas/electric (...), and the like. If you live on the street, you need a dollar six for a one dollar burger.
If I make $100 a week, and you make $1,000 a week, 20% of my income is a much greater burden for me than it is for you.
False.
As I moved up the rung from "$8/hr employee" to "$25/hr employee," I noticed that I need several thousand dollars more in raises to get a raise. Before, the extra couple hundred a month was awesome; but now, the extra couple hundred a month is about 2/3 as much after taxes. It seems that before, when I got a $1,000/mo raise, I saw $750 more on my pay check; but now, I see $600 more.
What this means is as I make more money, I need to make more money. If I desire a raise, I don't desire the extra $5k/year or a 3% raise anymore; a 3% raise is excellent at $20k/year, it's about 50 cents an hour and trust me that's hard to get at Best Buy or k-mart! The problem is at the $60k/year level, a 10k raise is only worth 6k; at 20k, a 10k raise is worth $7.5k. I would be ecstatic to make $3k more a year... but rather than needing $4k, I need about $5.5k more a year. So instead of a 6.7% raise, I need a 9.2% raise. See it?
If Steve Forbes makes $1 billion a year, and he has to pay 20%, it wouldn't affect his lifestyle significantly (if at all). After $1 million a year, most consumption is luxuries.
Unless you have a mansion, maids (who have rooms to live in and get food for free, and a salary, and maybe you supply them with a car and insurance), and a private yacht (which you pay to keep moored, waxed, and tended to... think of all these jobs created). Having a personal mechanic that you pay $60k/year just to have on-call 24x7 to work on your car is a luxury.
Adam Smith opposed luxuries. He thought they were a wasteful and didn't contribute anything to the economy. He thought tax policy should discourage luxury.
Then he was firmly an idiot. We wouldn't have televisions, we wouldn't have personal cars or motorcycles, we wouldn't have Wiis, we wouldn't have X-Box but that's an improvement... Luxury is how society evolves. The luxury of having enough money to not work two jobs means you can do yoga and meditate, or play Go, or spend your extra money going to college to broaden your knowledge. Or you could buy a nice piano-- a piano is a luxury, should we all stop buying instruments?
Pascal said that the benefit of money was in proportion to the logarithm of the amount. So if I make $100 a week, my benefit is 2x. If you make $1,000 a week, your benefit is 3x. Our combined benefit is 5x.
Suppose we transfer $450 a week from you to me. We both make $550. Our benefit is 2.7x each. Our combined benefit is 5.4x. So by equalizing income, we've increased the total benefit by 0.4x.
This is all handwaving. It's at best based on the idea that peoples' "benefit" is entirely needs-based. It also ignores incentive; again, as before I would have looked at a 5k-7k pay increase as large, but now if you want to lure me off my job you need to pony up a $15k/year raise. $10k would be fine, but I'm no longer paying 25% in taxes (back in the day I was paying 19% total...). My overall is about 32% and I lose about 40% off the top, so my raises are about half of the gross.
More advanced societies don't have social security.
Slashdot Mirror
>From my perspective, television offers no real benefit over the internet for transferring video.
Except, of course, for the lack of network congestion when 6000 people are either transfering 2.5MB/s total to watch an episode of Star Trek or 15,000 MB/S to watch one episode of Star Trek, all at the exact same moment.
or go unload the dishwasher
You do THAT to your girlfriend while she's washing dishes?!
I don't even watch Hulu!
Hard-coded secondary keys are pretty big programming mistakes. Maybe for debugging, or an old recovery mechanism that was disabled?
My first few years in college were focused on a degree in nuclear physics, I later changed to chemistry and have a bachelors of science in chemistry so I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about on this topic.
Not good enough, sonny jim! While you may be right about the potential to extend nuclear fuel life span thousands or billions of years, you're completely ignoring the fact that we'll run well out of nuclear material before people go, "Oh, shit, should we have done that?" We know how to now, and have acknowledged the need; but foresight is blurry and focused on the horizon, and hindsight is 20/20. Yeah, we know, but we don't quite see the point just yet.
You're not in the position to take up a project lead role and lobby to improve the state of nuclear technology. Like telling China that they're developing and thus exempt from Kyoto, but that they really should tone down their emissions for public health reasons, and also because retro-fitting "clean technology" is harder and more expensive than a ground-up approach... they'll notice the public health disaster in 10 years, and the economic costs of retrofitting, and go, "... oh, you mean we really should have?" They're doing some of that "clean-up" now, granted; but they did take the exemption, and took a laxed approach. I think Olympics Beijing really got them some negative publicity and they are currently doing a mating dance ....
There's no doubt that some fraction of the hydrocarbon soup that makes up a "fossil" fuel does come from non-living sources. However it is extremely difficult (from an entropy [avogadro.co.uk] standpoint) to build complex hydrocarbons through non-living (abiogenic) processes so it's extremely likely that the vast majority of "fossil" fuels are produced from formerly-living sources.
The sun evaporates water, drives the winds, allows plant growth, among other effects. We can tap the results of this energy but in doing so we upset other things. Water power and wind power disrupt natural flow patterns, plant growth ends up trapping heat due to decreased surface albedo, and so on. Yes, this will continue for some time but it's not infinite either. Even more troubling is that we ignore the side effects of tapping these sources because they seem to be free of consequence.
This is exactly the subject of the 2 year old blog post you quoted (which was my first thought on the subject). Everything we do draws heat. Solar power collects heat (rather than reflecting it) and then uses it to drive things (which emits heat as waste), heating up the planet. I don't think back then I had considered wind and hydro; although when I was like 5 I asked questions about hydro-electric dams pertaining to ... well you drop a fucking concrete wall in a river, my first thought was how do the fish get through; my second was what about the water level rise? Wind power ... people bitch about chopping pigeons but you're right, you get energy from SOMEWHERE and the argument I hear is "it'll never be significant" (stupid).
TRON is a command line program that turns tracing on.
Actually I use the DOD back door in EFS all the time. I found it while tracing EFS in IDA Pro for an exercise.
... three ways...erotica... the bible...news ...explicit...oranges.
And yet... I can learn a language fluently without paying much attention, with minimal exposure... and I can play Go... and I can understand things on a fundamental level most people can't even fit into their rigid world view...
Oh well. I'm going to move to Japan one day and meditate on the precipice of a mountain.
Well, for one, they were giant assholes.
There was a case of a beggar beating a man in the face, then suing him for the cost of the service of "bloodletting." The judge sided with the beggar... so the man slugged the judge and then billed him for bloodletting, to be paid at the market price as set by the beggar, and directly paid to the beggar.
There was a 13 year old girl that gave a hungry traveler food. When the town found out, they raped her, strung her up, tortured her, and killed her. How dare you be nice.
I'm sorry but God was right, that place needed to be burned.
So? 13 is a wonderful age to have sex. Why, at 12 the girl is already betrothed to be married to a nice, rich, 28 year old suitor! By 14 she should be on her honeymoon giving up her virginity to a man not less than twice her age, after all. At 14 she can name her first son, and begin breast feeding.
Isn't that how it's always been done?
How are words on a page illegal? Words are thoughts, not actions; IMAGES are actions, as images are imaged from the real world, where actions take place. Illustrations (and computer generated graphics etc) are not images, they are not imaged from the real world and thus are simply thoughts penned to paper. Words much less so, since they're not even graphic.
one person is taking home $20,600 and one person is taking home $37,080 after taxes.
One person is making 300% as much as the other person, and taking home 185% as much. Do you know why I need to make 3 times as much money? I NEED a $250,000/year salary because an $80,000/year salary is on the poverty line, just a few thousand above a McDonalds worker. That in turn means that 2 other people that could be well off at $80,000 working with me will have to go jobless searching trash bins for food.
Do you see it?
He was informed a plane hit the WTC, not the pentagon. If I remember right, a plane hit the WTC first, that was number one. Nobody was going, "Mr. President, 3 planes came down all over the country targeting large civilian and military installations, something is wrong." And even if it did, his response would have been correct: "Find out what the hell happened and get back to me; you're in the 'intelligence' community for a reason." Seriously, the president has the intelligence community to keep him informed so he doesn't do something retarded.
What Amazon said was that they would no longer remove books remotely without a court order. What happened here?
First off, I lean more toward the body of the scientific community that proposes oil comes from something other than dead dinosaurs. It's a minority consensus, but it's also well-accepted that the "fossil fuel" model may be wrong.
Second, abuses of technical terms get the point across pretty well. Every argument I've heard for "renewable energy" contrasts it with "fossil fuels" ... if it's not a "fossil fuel," it's "renewable energy." People have tended to talk about nuclear power like it's some sort of infinite resource: Nuclear fissile power will last forever, while nuclear fusion power will produce ungodly amounts of power--enough to power the whole world from two or three reactors. These views are ridiculous; nuclear power is not a renewable resource.
The life of nuclear fuel can be extended; if you are some sort of nuclear engineer then start making it happen, because most of us can just talk about it. That said, pessimistic estimates of world-wide peak uranium point at 2035, while optimistic estimates don't even span 100 years "on known resources" (and somehow claim about 300 years on "yet undiscovered resources"). However, utilizing breeder reactors to extend the life of uranium fuel, estimates go from 8000+ years to well over 5 billion years (by then the sun will explode).
Given our technology and mindset, we will run out of uranium, and maybe then extend the remaining 20 year supply for 2000 years (more like 5 year supply for 100 years, given mankind's track record). If we get nuclear fusion, we'll learn in 50 years tops that "peak water is coming." We are really bad at this.
It's not my opinion, it's the opinion of Herbert Stein, Nixon's economic adviser, in the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and of the Encyclopedia of Economics which I looked up in the library.
Okay, so it's secondary consensus. I'll give you a bye for that one; it's a valid argument point, but I do dislike secondary consensus when interpreting another person's statements.
I'm not sure I follow you, but you seem to be saying that a $1,000 a year raise is greater from $20,000 to $21,000 than it is from $60,000 to $61,000, because you take home more of it at the $20,000 level. That's the way it should be. We have progressive taxation in this country (and every major industrial country, as far as I know).
Yes, but the side-effect of this is that the gap between $20k and $50k is larger than the gap between $50k and $100k. In other words, when I'm making $20k I want $30k; when I'm making $60k I want $80k. The "rich" would be just as "rich" making $80k instead of $150k if they didn't pay so damn much in taxes... then we could give them an $80k salary and hire 2 of them. Look, 2 jobs instead of 1!
There is exhaustive documentation, from the Journal of the American Medical Association, the National Institutes of Health, the Wall Street Journal, and many other consistent sources, that about 20% of the population can't afford health care, and about 50,000 people die every year of preventable deaths as a result.
I believe that we (or any society) should provide those people with the health care they need, at a higher priority than the manufacture and sale of X-Boxes. It's a greater benefit to society to prevent some 50-year-old man from having a stroke paralyzing half his body, and spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair unable to feed himself, than it is to give some nerd an X-Box. I think preventing strokes is more interesting than playing an X-Box anyway.
And I think you're confusing "quality of life" with "enforced mediocrity." Everyone should be able to afford food... and diverse manufacturing is expensive. So, all food will now be synthetic vegetable oil amalgamations with soy and bits of meat and plant matter and such mixed in for flavor and texture. Everything is somewhat pasty, almost-meat, american cheese (solidified vegetable oil with milk fat solids), etc; but everyone can afford to eat.
Once we've taken care of the necessities -- like health care for the needy -- you can spend all you want on X-Boxes. But first things first.
Eventually the cost of supporting one person is such a weight on society that it is insurmountable. It's like a drug society: the lost labor, economic destruction (money flowing to easily-made drugs, which concentrates in the hands of a few lone growers... think about how much pot one farmer with 10 acres of land can grow by himself!), and overall impact on health (pot effects on unborn babies, people doing stupid shit high, hard drug overdoses on opium, etc... the things we already complain about from alcohol and cigarettes) is yet another economic drain as society tries to support it. With socialized health care (this is the same meaning as socialism, but is not socialism; socialism is a complete political system, not a single service) you have a similar issue: some people become incredibly expensive to support, and then we euthanize them.
The conservatives claim that we can provide health care through the free market. The overwhelming evidence is that the free market doesn't do that. You can let them die or pay for their health care out of taxes. I think we should pay for it out of taxes.
I think you really need to study statistics. Anyone who claims we can supply EFFECTIVE health care to 100% of the population in any way is delusional. I have a lot of canadian friends and your callbacks to the canadian healthcare system are interesting: You can get an X-ray in a few days, sometimes right away
That is indeed an engineering error.
How is this possible with Cuba's medical tourism? You go to Cuba, you're not from Cuba, they want to show you Cuba's excellent health care system so you spend money getting treated in Cuba and tell your friends to fly to Cuba to spend money for good medical care.
The explanation for Cuba's healthcare system that I've always heard is it's a tourist attraction. http://articles.latimes.com/1996-11-29/news/mn-4098_1_health-care
If Cuba is so poor, then who do you think the rich are? If you go to Cuba for treatment, you will get excellent healthcare; but the reports I've seen have documented that this isn't the same healthcare a poor useless Cuban gets. This is healthcare for people who can bring hard currency into the country. It's an export.
Terrorists were attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the government was evacuating the White House and the Congress for fear they would be the next targets, and "nothing seriously needing George W. Bush's attention was actually happening."
Yep, sounds like the situation is under control to me. Apparently Bush didn't order the evacuations; he did order the CIA to do some stuff but that was basically a murmured "keep me informed." That's their job anyway, he could have just nodded and ignored them... they would have been back as soon as something else interesting happened. Which basically means what Bush actually DID do did nothing; the whole machine runs pretty well as-is.
What Moore was actually criticizing was the fact that the president just sat there, staring, for seven minutes without interacting with anyone in any way while events were unfolding which he should have stayed on top of, just in case it was an even broader state-funded attack that might have required, say, presidential authority to shoot down commercial passenger planes.
He WAS staying on top of events. The CIA was right there, with radios plugged into their ears. They were instructed (pointlessly, as this is their job) to alert him the moment something interesting was known-- a plane hitting a building is not a terrorist attack, it is a weather problem or a pilot asleep or something stupid. Or a terrorist attack. This is the same as saying that a foil-wrapped log is a discarded hotdog... or a bomb. (Google it) We've had plenty of planes hit shit and fall out of the sky since then, and none of them were terrorist attacks; some of them hit the news because ditching a plane in the Hudson river and not killing anyone is fucking hard, and somebody did it because he is fucking awesome.
What the president DIDN'T do is get up in front of a bunch of first graders, excuse himself, and march out while a bunch of secret agents were whispering secret agent stuff in his ear. He really had nowhere to be anyway.
Although you would expect the president to get up and act immediately, you can't for the life of you think of anything he could actually do except piss himself and request a new pair of pants?
The sad truth is that most people don't actually understand [anything] in the United States
Fixed that for you. I'm sure somebody will be along with the next iteration soon.
What the fuck? No, seriously, what the fuck?!?! Fucking A, do you really believe this?
Yeah, there wasn't much he could do at the current time. There was no source of attack known and he can't personally gather intelligence on this. Someone will tell his secretary if Russia calls, and the CIA will be informed, and he will get a notification immediately.
Like, maybe getting informed as to what was happening beyond shit whispered in his ear?
Already happening, that's what the intelligence community does. If they know it, he'll know it.
Calling up National Guard, declaring disaster areas, etc?
Well, generally the state of new york and the locality of new york city are going to respond first. Nobody claimed an attack yet, so we're not automatically at war. Plane crashes are considered a "disaster," not an "attack." So the governor of New York State or the mayor of New York City would be calling in the New York National Guard, fire department, etc, and setting disaster areas.
At this point, it's the President's job to either run around going "what what I'm confused did somebody blow shit up what's happening?!" or kick his feet up on his desk smoking a cigar telling "the boys" to keep him informed. There's no cigars allowed in first grade classrooms.
That's not what Adam Smith meant.
Is that what he said, or what you said? Is that "not what he meant" or "not what proportional means"? A percentage of your income is a proportion; a percentage of taxes paid is a proportion; paying more taxes than the next guy means you pay a larger proportion of the total taxes paid.
In other words, is this an opinion or is it fact?
In economics 101, a flat tax is called a regressive tax.
Yes, that's why we raise sales tax instead of regular tax in Maryland: the legislature wants to keep the poor here poor, so they make sure they're taxed more. Food is not taxed; but prepared food (McDonalds) is taxed. That means if you have somewhere to live and a way to cook, you're just paying more taxes for clothes, car parts, gas/electric (...), and the like. If you live on the street, you need a dollar six for a one dollar burger.
If I make $100 a week, and you make $1,000 a week, 20% of my income is a much greater burden for me than it is for you.
False.
As I moved up the rung from "$8/hr employee" to "$25/hr employee," I noticed that I need several thousand dollars more in raises to get a raise. Before, the extra couple hundred a month was awesome; but now, the extra couple hundred a month is about 2/3 as much after taxes. It seems that before, when I got a $1,000/mo raise, I saw $750 more on my pay check; but now, I see $600 more.
What this means is as I make more money, I need to make more money. If I desire a raise, I don't desire the extra $5k/year or a 3% raise anymore; a 3% raise is excellent at $20k/year, it's about 50 cents an hour and trust me that's hard to get at Best Buy or k-mart! The problem is at the $60k/year level, a 10k raise is only worth 6k; at 20k, a 10k raise is worth $7.5k. I would be ecstatic to make $3k more a year... but rather than needing $4k, I need about $5.5k more a year. So instead of a 6.7% raise, I need a 9.2% raise. See it?
If Steve Forbes makes $1 billion a year, and he has to pay 20%, it wouldn't affect his lifestyle significantly (if at all). After $1 million a year, most consumption is luxuries.
Unless you have a mansion, maids (who have rooms to live in and get food for free, and a salary, and maybe you supply them with a car and insurance), and a private yacht (which you pay to keep moored, waxed, and tended to... think of all these jobs created). Having a personal mechanic that you pay $60k/year just to have on-call 24x7 to work on your car is a luxury.
Adam Smith opposed luxuries. He thought they were a wasteful and didn't contribute anything to the economy. He thought tax policy should discourage luxury.
Then he was firmly an idiot. We wouldn't have televisions, we wouldn't have personal cars or motorcycles, we wouldn't have Wiis, we wouldn't have X-Box but that's an improvement... Luxury is how society evolves. The luxury of having enough money to not work two jobs means you can do yoga and meditate, or play Go, or spend your extra money going to college to broaden your knowledge. Or you could buy a nice piano-- a piano is a luxury, should we all stop buying instruments?
Pascal said that the benefit of money was in proportion to the logarithm of the amount. So if I make $100 a week, my benefit is 2x. If you make $1,000 a week, your benefit is 3x. Our combined benefit is 5x.
Suppose we transfer $450 a week from you to me. We both make $550. Our benefit is 2.7x each. Our combined benefit is 5.4x. So by equalizing income, we've increased the total benefit by 0.4x.
This is all handwaving. It's at best based on the idea that peoples' "benefit" is entirely needs-based. It also ignores incentive; again, as before I would have looked at a 5k-7k pay increase as large, but now if you want to lure me off my job you need to pony up a $15k/year raise. $10k would be fine, but I'm no longer paying 25% in taxes (back in the day I was paying 19% total...). My overall is about 32% and I lose about 40% off the top, so my raises are about half of the gross.
More advanced societies don't have social security.