This sounds like a post from CNN. A bunch of what-if's, followed by blaming the Russians. I'm open to the discussion but you have to somehow provide me 2 things to get me to even consider this scenario.
1. Give me context. How many other countries 'meddle' in our election. If fake news and random facebook posts are attempts to 'hack' our election, then there is zero chance that only Russia was involved. Of course they are trying to influence our elections, virtually everyone is. If Saudi Arabia or France was trying to 'meddle' and posted facebook ads for team Clinton would we know? How many elections before has this happened. How many total 'fake news' or ads where there? If it's 1 ad per million than so what. I seriously need context and no one is added any to this discussion. 2 years and not once has CNN given any context to this. How many people in power worldwide know the Clinton's, she was Secretary of State if you didn't know that. How many contacts do they have in the US? How much did they tweet? Post? Call?
2. Please explain to me exactly how the 10,000 people in Michigan that decided to not show up was directly related to Russians? I mean seriously. Was anyone physically threatened in the entire country by a Russian? Were there Trump vans blocking polls? The argument you seem to be making is that Americans are so dumb that Russia puts a fake ad on facebook so we believe it and therefore do not go and vote for a Clinton. The only way this works (because I'm not seeing actual 'hacking' being blamed) is if people are so easily persuaded in voting for the wrong person that anyone could do it. Of course this then begs the question of why doesn't everyone put out dumb ads? This falls flat on itself as no one is able to make a decision because we're so easily duped; or we're so stupid as a whole that we deserve whomever they want us to vote for.
Whenever one side loses they look for reasons; CNN and the dems sat around a table and threw out ideas. Russia and Trump stuck enough and they ran with it, and ran with it, and pushed it, and ran with it, and ignored real news, and ignored context, and ran with it...
I used to think exactly like this, could have written this post myself, but there is more logic to apply to this. Remember that these workers in China are actually doing better now than before these jobs came in. The next step for them is to start to demand all the above that you mention (labor laws, minimum wage, working hours, etc...); can you think of a country that didn't start at the bottom?
Do you think that Norway a thousand years ago had environmental laws and overtime rules?
The cheap labor in China actually improves the standard of living for millions of people worldwide buying their products while also slightly improving their standard of living as well. When, and it's already happening, they start demanding more rights the prices rise and the cheapest labor shifts to India and other poor highly populated areas looking for any wage. If the government was a democracy the process would be much quicker and poverty worldwide would shrink quicker. We need to let people start at the bottom; not eating at McD's hurts the young kid trying to make enough to get an education to not have to work at McD's.
Now, we can play a role in minor improvements, myself prefer to buy something at Target over Walmart because Target treats their employees better.
where a virtual company with a free product is going to use their powers as a monopoly to affect my life? If you think that facebook, which is a voluntary, needs to be broken up because it's too big than you've got some screws loose.
No one is forced to use it (hopefully), other social media exists and is allowed to be created whenever by whomever, and it actually increases in value the larger it gets. A town owned facebook is useless.
Handling outage on production caused by code defect:
2 support people @ 0.5 hour
2 ops people @ 1 hour
1 developer @ 1 hour
1 mid-manager @ 0.5 hour
1 exec @ 0.5 hour (to keep asking what's going on)
Total: 5 man hours during the incident.
The after incident review is roughly the same, including preparation time.
Grand total: 10 man hours
Peer review: 1 developer @ 0.25 hours
Where I'm from, 0.25 is less than 10.
Peer review is one of the best ways of "gaining speed and reduce people needed".
This is a near perfect breakdown of time. The 0.5 hour from the exec and mid-manager is so true. There are 2 parts to the equation that you're missing however that get those numbers much closer to each other:
1. Not all production pushes have bugs that cause outages
2. Peer reviews do not catch 100% of those bugs
The total equation ends up 10 hours * %ChanceOfBug less than? 0.25 hours + (10.25 hours * %ChanceOfBug * %ChancePeerDetected)
I'm not the OP, but this is a really easy one to field.
No human has ever done enough work to justify $600,000,000. Even if you could claim that someone created that much wealth, they didn't do it on their own - they did it off the back of hard work of hundreds of other people who will never see a penny of that money, despite earning it for them.
Bill Gates has clearly added $600,000,000 in value toward society. The amount of worldwide jobs, enhancements, competitors, etc... that he helped start. Are you kidding?
Off the backs, seriously, wow; ya Steve Ballmer is super poor. Satya can probably barely feed a family. I heard that Paul Allen is on foodstamps now. Now that I reflect on your post it must be a joke. Microsoft has made thousands of people millionaires; and arguably indirectly created more jobs and raised the standard of living worldwide more than anything else in human history. At least the industry itself could claim that and Microsoft is a large player.
The fear of a corporate monopoly is misplaced and overblown. Corporate monopoly with government backing is IMHO the worst possible option. The current US Healthcare system is doing more harm than any corporate monopoly in history. We're taught to be petrified of these corporate monopolies taking over our lives, but even the Hudson Bay Company at it's height still had competition; everyone was scared of oil prices under Rockefeller, yet doomsday never actually came. Breaking up Ma Bell saved us from... we don't know.
Has there been a time or place that a corporate monopoly somewhere brought the people to their knees? Hard to find in history; De Beers, Luxottica, and Caviar are probably some of the most successful. If you avoid Diamonds, sun glasses and smelly fish you aren't even effected. However it isn't hard to find in the present day governments that are much more fearful and destructive. It's logical to be more fearful of a government monopoly.
The government spends money on wars, prisons, corporate welfare, and subsidies for a bloated and wasteful healthcare system.
Also infrastructure, education, public safety, human welfare, law enforcement, and unprofitable scientific research, but who needs that stuff right?
Google really needs that money, after all. CEOs' megayachts have to fly now.
All of those things are still paid for. The employees all pay taxes, and google is able to pay higher salaries because they dodge taxes. Local government and local taxes are generally better run, less wasteful, and able to fail and adapt; therefore distributing taxes to the employees and where they choose to shop, live, eat, etc... is a better model than dumping it in the massive federal level of a mess.
You're essentially trading advancement opportunity and part of your pay for security of a job. State laws, especially in CA, cover the vast majority of why Unions used to need to exist; now it's more about the bottom finding a way closer to the middle by forcing others there as well.
I haven't gone out to go shopping for months, and before that time, it was also probably 4-6 months. When I did go out the shopping was sort of incidental; a stop for something after a movie or dinner out typically.
and get over it. Whenever a city/state tries to mandate something that is the most common current cause of something bad it fails and just limits our freedoms more. In Mass we made it illegal to text while driving; why? well obviously because the odds of driving poorly are much higher while texting - which is very true; however just pull over people that are driving poorly. There is already a law for that. The result was accidents actually went up because most people try to hide their texting now.
Would you rather be on the road with someone texting and driving perfectly or someone driving like a nut because they felt like it? San Fran gains nothing from this information; if there is a new problem because of Uber and Lyft then directly address it, vote on it and fix it.
I'm sorry - but clearly people can and should earn millions of dollars each year. Everyone should want more and more people making millions a year - not less people. Most people work somewhere with a 'ladder' type layout, and at each step up you make a bit more. The misconception is that there is this guy making millions and below him are minimum wage workers; completely not the norm. If someone is making a million a year - directly below him/her are probably 10 people making 800k, and 20 people making 500k below them, etc...
Sports are the clearest place to look for what people can/should earn. Sports are the closest to 'fair' salaries because they prove day in and day out if they are worth it - and what they make is tied to how many people are willing to go watch them. If you're the best player in a sport you just might be worth 20 million a year - and sports are small compared to businesses. Picture if there were 500 professional sport teams in NY alone (pretend all business were as clear competitors as sports) - how much would Tom Brady be worth at that scale? Even Tim Tebow would be a starting QB (CEO) probably making close to 200 million per year. Business competes globally as well.
'Hard-earned' and worth are somewhat separate and you're thinking about it the wrong way. If you were on the board of a company making it big and competing against an IBM good luck trying to hire a CEO for less than a million a year and still existing in 5 years. In fact if you are already that big then there are already people there making far more than that; or you're paying a crap load of people good money to not do anything.
OnePlus 3 is close to what you're looking for. I personally got the Nexus 5 ($349) 3 years ago and it's the best phone I've used. It also still gets updates; whereas 1 year old $700 Samsung's hardly do (depending on carrier). I'm assuming the Vanilla Andriod OS is most of why it works so well - because the hardware at that price shouldn't be superior. I wish the Pixel could stay in the $400~ range, but I might just get the Nexus 6P for that; debating between the OnePlus 3.
If you buy a Samsung on Verizon you get bloat from both companies on the phone, and although Samsung wants it to work well - who do you think is programming for Verizon to make sure their 2-year-old-app-that-is-forced-in-the-background-to-run works perfectly with a new AndriodOS release? Not enough incentive for Verizon to bother - instead spending research on making the newer phones even better. They even prefer if you 'upgrade', even though the hardware is still really good.
Do you realize that the richest people in the world are all walking around with the same exact smart phone as many of the poorest? Talk about leveling the playing field. Who cares if someone is richer than ever but many things they can't even buy a better version of. There will never be a scenario where the richest want to create something for so cheap that everyone can afford it, but so many people are unemployed that no one can afford it.
The cotton gin also caused massive unemployment; however everyone could then afford a shirt!
So with this precedence would the judge rule it illegal if I 'heard' that one brand of tractor was better than another but couldn't remember the exact source?
Of course if you run a business and people randomly post crap about it for no reason it sucks; but it sucks in person too. If someone randomly tells me to never to shop at Sears, oh well.
Could Nokia have a tablet in the works? If so could they release them with Ubuntu or would their Microsoft agreement limit them to Windows on those as well?
I believe that was actually more of an Inventory issue. The bubble burst - the economy sucked - gas was through the roof, and American car makers focused mostly on larger gas guzzlers. The number of 'new' cars already built that weren't going to sell that year was going to be a gigantic financial hit. They lobbied to help get those cars out of the way.
How are you going to compete when some guy in China can do your job for less than the US poverty level?
Trade Tariffs.
True, trade tariffs are really the only tool against this - but at some point I think economically it makes more sense to give up.
If a country is willing to subsidize a product and keep their people in complete poverty to a level that even after a big tax still beats our prices, then I say move on, buy the product and forget about it.
Think about it - if China wants to sell their Hankook tires at a price far below American tires with similar quality by taxing their own people then you can't win that battle. Buy their tires or make advancements far beyond Chinese tires. Yes it can/will hurt American jobs at first, but the entire country will be able to afford better tires at a cheaper price. We'll get more jobs elsewhere and our standard of living will improve off their poverty. The cotton gin destroyed thousands of American jobs as well - but everyone could afford a shirt. Advancements play out to be a positive economic move.
There are many economic situations that there are not easy solutions; in fact I'd argue we chase better solutions for indefinitely (i.e. financial regulations). We need to stop spending so much time and effort on problems with no solutions. Financial regulation will never catch up to the market. Name a time when the regulations were ahead of the market. Solution: put people in jail that steal/commit fraud/etc... Don't bail those out that fail. Done - move on.
Ron Paul is not a hypocrite for this - and I'm shocked at the lack of intelligence of Slashdot on this one.
The site was setup to profit from his name from day one. It doesn't matter if they 'fought' for the guy. Without his name the site and merchandise had no value. This is a strong trademark - something that acquired secondary meaning but would otherwise be nondescript.
You can try to argue that there are other Ron Paul's - which is true for the domain name, but the domain name value is all tied directly to the Ron Paul. They aren't generating sales and traffic because of Ron Paul the plummer.
I doubt Ron Paul's views often - but anything you specifically disagree with, look deeper, normally you'll find you were misinformed or confused.
The big question is that given that cell phone bans don't make much statistical difference in accident rates, should we have them?
No we shouldn't have them. It is a fine line, but aggressive driving always effects other traffic by definition. Even if you are the best aggressive driver out there it doesn't mean the people you affect are not going to get in accidents because of your 'waves' of change. There is no way to inform them, "Hey, I'm Mario Andriette, keep driving like I'm not even here, you'll be fine."
Now, if someone is driving on the phone but is indistinguishable from other traffic that should not be banned. If you rear-end someone because the reaction time was slow, then you are at fault. If changing the radio station was the reason it doesn't mean we should ban that as well.
If you are txting while driving I think you're an idiot. If you drive without a seat belt you're an idiot too. Call me a librarian but neither should be illegal. Freedom limited to 'smart' decisions only is no freedom at all. Not taking a bath, eating nothing but Milky Ways and watching TV all day isn't a good decision either.
While your numbers are actually correct (some electric motors can be high 90% efficient) you are missing a major factor.
If you think of gas as a battery (since it is simply stored energy), the amount of energy you get from 1 L ~= 35MJ
For 1 L of the best batteries you get ~1.3MJ
So even if the electric automobile was 100% efficient your still 5.4 times more efficient with gas (7MJ per/L versus 1.3MJ/L)
Perhaps the model wasn't off by much, rather the rate of mac growth being so high that 16% is already a guarantee with the current adoption/switch-over rate.
The problem with the millionaire's surtax is your talking about a band-aid at best. The rich already pay the vast amount of taxes in this country. According to CNN 48% of people don't even pay federal taxes anymore. Even ignoring that - history shows the government will take in ~18% of GDP at the end of the day; no matter what they tax who. Think about how important that is - even if they tax the rich 85% - they'll still get the same amount at the end of the day. There are lots of reasons for that magic number - but some of it comes down to how much of their own money people want to keep at the end of the day. The more they are taxed the more they will hide, or they will make less. Would you work for 30 cents on the dollar - perhaps - but as hard as you'd work for 80?
The government really does have a spending problem only. Revenue is quite static; however the big trouble they got themselves into is their deficit spending. GDP is C + I + G +-exports basically. G (government spending) is a huge part of GDP, but government overspending is roughly 12% of our GDP. Think about that - 'fake demand' is really all it is.
If the government spends what they take in next year (which they should) our GDP will shrink 12% automatically. No one wants that - because that cycle gets worse - revenue goes down the year after and now they have to spend even less, etc...
Option 2 is what the President, most dems, and many repubs want - 'kick the can'. Now some are smart enough to know that only makes the inevitable worse. Some probably really do believe we can borrow more and more - even though to even stay at our current state we have to borrow 'exponentially' more every year. Run that through your head - to sustain our current economic situation (which isn't that good) we have to borrow at record rates - to the point where in 10 years we'll have to borrow as much as our entire country produces in one year - just to keep where we are.
Bottom line - we take the hit now and ride through it - or we ride it out until it collapses entirely.
Your argument is moot. We tax ourselves enough to fix every bridge/road/highway/tunnel in the entire world twice-a-year, but only 1% goes to the Department of Transportation. There are plenty of valid arguments out there for taxing more but please don't give me the 'we need better infrastructure' bit.
Also you can tax the rich all you want but history shows at the end of the day the government will pull in 18% of the GDP as revenue. No matter what the tax code has been they always end up with the same amount of income. They have to spend as much as they take in. Period. The worst part is that for the past 20 years roughly 10% of the GDP is actually them overspending; so think about that after ten years of that - they have pumped in an entire year of GDP of 'fake' demand. Money getting moved around creating jobs that are unsustainable - unless we borrow even more. Think about that - the housing market - electronics - services; anything and everything has been inflated by their overspending.
So here we are - best case scenario we smarten up and cut back by about 10% on government spending every year for 10+ years (under what they take in that is). Things will continue to get worse but we'll make it. The other scenario is we continue to play 'kick the can' or default. Some could argue the government should default as it was their fault for getting in this mess - but think about who gets affected; social security, medicare, infrastructure, pensions, etc... Do the banks or the rich lose anything? Those that benefited most by the pumping of the money in the system. Kicking the can is just as bad - as the fall becomes much much worse the longer we put it off. Oh, and it is all just math - nothing to do with political views - the math will balance out there is no question.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like a post from CNN. A bunch of what-if's, followed by blaming the Russians. I'm open to the discussion but you have to somehow provide me 2 things to get me to even consider this scenario.
1. Give me context. How many other countries 'meddle' in our election. If fake news and random facebook posts are attempts to 'hack' our election, then there is zero chance that only Russia was involved. Of course they are trying to influence our elections, virtually everyone is. If Saudi Arabia or France was trying to 'meddle' and posted facebook ads for team Clinton would we know? How many elections before has this happened. How many total 'fake news' or ads where there? If it's 1 ad per million than so what. I seriously need context and no one is added any to this discussion. 2 years and not once has CNN given any context to this. How many people in power worldwide know the Clinton's, she was Secretary of State if you didn't know that. How many contacts do they have in the US? How much did they tweet? Post? Call?
2. Please explain to me exactly how the 10,000 people in Michigan that decided to not show up was directly related to Russians? I mean seriously. Was anyone physically threatened in the entire country by a Russian? Were there Trump vans blocking polls? The argument you seem to be making is that Americans are so dumb that Russia puts a fake ad on facebook so we believe it and therefore do not go and vote for a Clinton. The only way this works (because I'm not seeing actual 'hacking' being blamed) is if people are so easily persuaded in voting for the wrong person that anyone could do it. Of course this then begs the question of why doesn't everyone put out dumb ads? This falls flat on itself as no one is able to make a decision because we're so easily duped; or we're so stupid as a whole that we deserve whomever they want us to vote for.
Whenever one side loses they look for reasons; CNN and the dems sat around a table and threw out ideas. Russia and Trump stuck enough and they ran with it, and ran with it, and pushed it, and ran with it, and ignored real news, and ignored context, and ran with it...
I've actually switched to Brave recently. Still can't live without Chrome or Firefox, but Brave has been working well.
I used to think exactly like this, could have written this post myself, but there is more logic to apply to this. Remember that these workers in China are actually doing better now than before these jobs came in. The next step for them is to start to demand all the above that you mention (labor laws, minimum wage, working hours, etc...); can you think of a country that didn't start at the bottom?
Do you think that Norway a thousand years ago had environmental laws and overtime rules?
The cheap labor in China actually improves the standard of living for millions of people worldwide buying their products while also slightly improving their standard of living as well. When, and it's already happening, they start demanding more rights the prices rise and the cheapest labor shifts to India and other poor highly populated areas looking for any wage. If the government was a democracy the process would be much quicker and poverty worldwide would shrink quicker. We need to let people start at the bottom; not eating at McD's hurts the young kid trying to make enough to get an education to not have to work at McD's.
Now, we can play a role in minor improvements, myself prefer to buy something at Target over Walmart because Target treats their employees better.
where a virtual company with a free product is going to use their powers as a monopoly to affect my life? If you think that facebook, which is a voluntary, needs to be broken up because it's too big than you've got some screws loose. No one is forced to use it (hopefully), other social media exists and is allowed to be created whenever by whomever, and it actually increases in value the larger it gets. A town owned facebook is useless.
Handling outage on production caused by code defect: 2 support people @ 0.5 hour 2 ops people @ 1 hour 1 developer @ 1 hour 1 mid-manager @ 0.5 hour 1 exec @ 0.5 hour (to keep asking what's going on)
Total: 5 man hours during the incident. The after incident review is roughly the same, including preparation time. Grand total: 10 man hours
Peer review: 1 developer @ 0.25 hours
Where I'm from, 0.25 is less than 10. Peer review is one of the best ways of "gaining speed and reduce people needed".
This is a near perfect breakdown of time. The 0.5 hour from the exec and mid-manager is so true. There are 2 parts to the equation that you're missing however that get those numbers much closer to each other:
1. Not all production pushes have bugs that cause outages
2. Peer reviews do not catch 100% of those bugs
The total equation ends up 10 hours * %ChanceOfBug less than? 0.25 hours + (10.25 hours * %ChanceOfBug * %ChancePeerDetected)
I'm not the OP, but this is a really easy one to field.
No human has ever done enough work to justify $600,000,000. Even if you could claim that someone created that much wealth, they didn't do it on their own - they did it off the back of hard work of hundreds of other people who will never see a penny of that money, despite earning it for them.
Bill Gates has clearly added $600,000,000 in value toward society. The amount of worldwide jobs, enhancements, competitors, etc... that he helped start. Are you kidding?
Off the backs, seriously, wow; ya Steve Ballmer is super poor. Satya can probably barely feed a family. I heard that Paul Allen is on foodstamps now. Now that I reflect on your post it must be a joke. Microsoft has made thousands of people millionaires; and arguably indirectly created more jobs and raised the standard of living worldwide more than anything else in human history. At least the industry itself could claim that and Microsoft is a large player.
The fear of a corporate monopoly is misplaced and overblown. Corporate monopoly with government backing is IMHO the worst possible option. The current US Healthcare system is doing more harm than any corporate monopoly in history. We're taught to be petrified of these corporate monopolies taking over our lives, but even the Hudson Bay Company at it's height still had competition; everyone was scared of oil prices under Rockefeller, yet doomsday never actually came. Breaking up Ma Bell saved us from... we don't know.
Has there been a time or place that a corporate monopoly somewhere brought the people to their knees? Hard to find in history; De Beers, Luxottica, and Caviar are probably some of the most successful. If you avoid Diamonds, sun glasses and smelly fish you aren't even effected. However it isn't hard to find in the present day governments that are much more fearful and destructive. It's logical to be more fearful of a government monopoly.
The government spends money on wars, prisons, corporate welfare, and subsidies for a bloated and wasteful healthcare system.
Also infrastructure, education, public safety, human welfare, law enforcement, and unprofitable scientific research, but who needs that stuff right?
Google really needs that money, after all. CEOs' megayachts have to fly now.
All of those things are still paid for. The employees all pay taxes, and google is able to pay higher salaries because they dodge taxes. Local government and local taxes are generally better run, less wasteful, and able to fail and adapt; therefore distributing taxes to the employees and where they choose to shop, live, eat, etc... is a better model than dumping it in the massive federal level of a mess.
You're essentially trading advancement opportunity and part of your pay for security of a job. State laws, especially in CA, cover the vast majority of why Unions used to need to exist; now it's more about the bottom finding a way closer to the middle by forcing others there as well.
I haven't gone out to go shopping for months, and before that time, it was also probably 4-6 months. When I did go out the shopping was sort of incidental; a stop for something after a movie or dinner out typically.
Clearly you do not have kids
and get over it. Whenever a city/state tries to mandate something that is the most common current cause of something bad it fails and just limits our freedoms more. In Mass we made it illegal to text while driving; why? well obviously because the odds of driving poorly are much higher while texting - which is very true; however just pull over people that are driving poorly. There is already a law for that. The result was accidents actually went up because most people try to hide their texting now.
Would you rather be on the road with someone texting and driving perfectly or someone driving like a nut because they felt like it? San Fran gains nothing from this information; if there is a new problem because of Uber and Lyft then directly address it, vote on it and fix it.
I'm sorry - but clearly people can and should earn millions of dollars each year. Everyone should want more and more people making millions a year - not less people. Most people work somewhere with a 'ladder' type layout, and at each step up you make a bit more. The misconception is that there is this guy making millions and below him are minimum wage workers; completely not the norm. If someone is making a million a year - directly below him/her are probably 10 people making 800k, and 20 people making 500k below them, etc...
Sports are the clearest place to look for what people can/should earn. Sports are the closest to 'fair' salaries because they prove day in and day out if they are worth it - and what they make is tied to how many people are willing to go watch them. If you're the best player in a sport you just might be worth 20 million a year - and sports are small compared to businesses. Picture if there were 500 professional sport teams in NY alone (pretend all business were as clear competitors as sports) - how much would Tom Brady be worth at that scale? Even Tim Tebow would be a starting QB (CEO) probably making close to 200 million per year. Business competes globally as well.
'Hard-earned' and worth are somewhat separate and you're thinking about it the wrong way. If you were on the board of a company making it big and competing against an IBM good luck trying to hire a CEO for less than a million a year and still existing in 5 years. In fact if you are already that big then there are already people there making far more than that; or you're paying a crap load of people good money to not do anything.
OnePlus 3 is close to what you're looking for. I personally got the Nexus 5 ($349) 3 years ago and it's the best phone I've used. It also still gets updates; whereas 1 year old $700 Samsung's hardly do (depending on carrier). I'm assuming the Vanilla Andriod OS is most of why it works so well - because the hardware at that price shouldn't be superior. I wish the Pixel could stay in the $400~ range, but I might just get the Nexus 6P for that; debating between the OnePlus 3.
If you buy a Samsung on Verizon you get bloat from both companies on the phone, and although Samsung wants it to work well - who do you think is programming for Verizon to make sure their 2-year-old-app-that-is-forced-in-the-background-to-run works perfectly with a new AndriodOS release? Not enough incentive for Verizon to bother - instead spending research on making the newer phones even better. They even prefer if you 'upgrade', even though the hardware is still really good.
Do you realize that the richest people in the world are all walking around with the same exact smart phone as many of the poorest? Talk about leveling the playing field. Who cares if someone is richer than ever but many things they can't even buy a better version of.
There will never be a scenario where the richest want to create something for so cheap that everyone can afford it, but so many people are unemployed that no one can afford it.
The cotton gin also caused massive unemployment; however everyone could then afford a shirt!
So with this precedence would the judge rule it illegal if I 'heard' that one brand of tractor was better than another but couldn't remember the exact source?
Of course if you run a business and people randomly post crap about it for no reason it sucks; but it sucks in person too. If someone randomly tells me to never to shop at Sears, oh well.
Would you rather:
It's better when the government does it?
Could Nokia have a tablet in the works? If so could they release them with Ubuntu or would their Microsoft agreement limit them to Windows on those as well?
I believe that was actually more of an Inventory issue. The bubble burst - the economy sucked - gas was through the roof, and American car makers focused mostly on larger gas guzzlers. The number of 'new' cars already built that weren't going to sell that year was going to be a gigantic financial hit. They lobbied to help get those cars out of the way.
How are you going to compete when some guy in China can do your job for less than the US poverty level?
Trade Tariffs.
True, trade tariffs are really the only tool against this - but at some point I think economically it makes more sense to give up.
If a country is willing to subsidize a product and keep their people in complete poverty to a level that even after a big tax still beats our prices, then I say move on, buy the product and forget about it.
Think about it - if China wants to sell their Hankook tires at a price far below American tires with similar quality by taxing their own people then you can't win that battle. Buy their tires or make advancements far beyond Chinese tires. Yes it can/will hurt American jobs at first, but the entire country will be able to afford better tires at a cheaper price. We'll get more jobs elsewhere and our standard of living will improve off their poverty. The cotton gin destroyed thousands of American jobs as well - but everyone could afford a shirt. Advancements play out to be a positive economic move.
There are many economic situations that there are not easy solutions; in fact I'd argue we chase better solutions for indefinitely (i.e. financial regulations). We need to stop spending so much time and effort on problems with no solutions. Financial regulation will never catch up to the market. Name a time when the regulations were ahead of the market. Solution: put people in jail that steal/commit fraud/etc... Don't bail those out that fail. Done - move on.
What a hypocrite
Ron Paul is not a hypocrite for this - and I'm shocked at the lack of intelligence of Slashdot on this one.
The site was setup to profit from his name from day one. It doesn't matter if they 'fought' for the guy. Without his name the site and merchandise had no value. This is a strong trademark - something that acquired secondary meaning but would otherwise be nondescript.
You can try to argue that there are other Ron Paul's - which is true for the domain name, but the domain name value is all tied directly to the Ron Paul. They aren't generating sales and traffic because of Ron Paul the plummer.
I doubt Ron Paul's views often - but anything you specifically disagree with, look deeper, normally you'll find you were misinformed or confused.
The big question is that given that cell phone bans don't make much statistical difference in accident rates, should we have them?
No we shouldn't have them. It is a fine line, but aggressive driving always effects other traffic by definition. Even if you are the best aggressive driver out there it doesn't mean the people you affect are not going to get in accidents because of your 'waves' of change. There is no way to inform them, "Hey, I'm Mario Andriette, keep driving like I'm not even here, you'll be fine."
Now, if someone is driving on the phone but is indistinguishable from other traffic that should not be banned. If you rear-end someone because the reaction time was slow, then you are at fault. If changing the radio station was the reason it doesn't mean we should ban that as well.
If you are txting while driving I think you're an idiot. If you drive without a seat belt you're an idiot too. Call me a librarian but neither should be illegal. Freedom limited to 'smart' decisions only is no freedom at all. Not taking a bath, eating nothing but Milky Ways and watching TV all day isn't a good decision either.
While your numbers are actually correct (some electric motors can be high 90% efficient) you are missing a major factor.
If you think of gas as a battery (since it is simply stored energy), the amount of energy you get from 1 L ~= 35MJ
For 1 L of the best batteries you get ~1.3MJ
So even if the electric automobile was 100% efficient your still 5.4 times more efficient with gas (7MJ per/L versus 1.3MJ/L)
The all electric vehicle will not be the future.
Perhaps the model wasn't off by much, rather the rate of mac growth being so high that 16% is already a guarantee with the current adoption/switch-over rate.
The problem with the millionaire's surtax is your talking about a band-aid at best. The rich already pay the vast amount of taxes in this country. According to CNN 48% of people don't even pay federal taxes anymore. Even ignoring that - history shows the government will take in ~18% of GDP at the end of the day; no matter what they tax who. Think about how important that is - even if they tax the rich 85% - they'll still get the same amount at the end of the day. There are lots of reasons for that magic number - but some of it comes down to how much of their own money people want to keep at the end of the day. The more they are taxed the more they will hide, or they will make less. Would you work for 30 cents on the dollar - perhaps - but as hard as you'd work for 80?
The government really does have a spending problem only. Revenue is quite static; however the big trouble they got themselves into is their deficit spending. GDP is C + I + G +-exports basically. G (government spending) is a huge part of GDP, but government overspending is roughly 12% of our GDP. Think about that - 'fake demand' is really all it is.
If the government spends what they take in next year (which they should) our GDP will shrink 12% automatically. No one wants that - because that cycle gets worse - revenue goes down the year after and now they have to spend even less, etc...
Option 2 is what the President, most dems, and many repubs want - 'kick the can'. Now some are smart enough to know that only makes the inevitable worse. Some probably really do believe we can borrow more and more - even though to even stay at our current state we have to borrow 'exponentially' more every year. Run that through your head - to sustain our current economic situation (which isn't that good) we have to borrow at record rates - to the point where in 10 years we'll have to borrow as much as our entire country produces in one year - just to keep where we are.
Bottom line - we take the hit now and ride through it - or we ride it out until it collapses entirely.
Your argument is moot. We tax ourselves enough to fix every bridge/road/highway/tunnel in the entire world twice-a-year, but only 1% goes to the Department of Transportation. There are plenty of valid arguments out there for taxing more but please don't give me the 'we need better infrastructure' bit.
Also you can tax the rich all you want but history shows at the end of the day the government will pull in 18% of the GDP as revenue. No matter what the tax code has been they always end up with the same amount of income. They have to spend as much as they take in. Period. The worst part is that for the past 20 years roughly 10% of the GDP is actually them overspending; so think about that after ten years of that - they have pumped in an entire year of GDP of 'fake' demand. Money getting moved around creating jobs that are unsustainable - unless we borrow even more. Think about that - the housing market - electronics - services; anything and everything has been inflated by their overspending.
So here we are - best case scenario we smarten up and cut back by about 10% on government spending every year for 10+ years (under what they take in that is). Things will continue to get worse but we'll make it. The other scenario is we continue to play 'kick the can' or default. Some could argue the government should default as it was their fault for getting in this mess - but think about who gets affected; social security, medicare, infrastructure, pensions, etc... Do the banks or the rich lose anything? Those that benefited most by the pumping of the money in the system. Kicking the can is just as bad - as the fall becomes much much worse the longer we put it off. Oh, and it is all just math - nothing to do with political views - the math will balance out there is no question.