Unfortunately, Mechassault never gained that ability. The second version was a dimwitted "boss-based" platformer, and the third... remains a dream.
I do all my gaming on the XBoxes (orig and 360), pS2 and 3, Wii, Gamecube and PSP. No PC gaming (Mac user), and I generally look for sims like Mechassult or Project Gotham, which I also enjoy very much (for very similar reasons... racing against people.) I own lots of mech games, from the controller-heavy Steel Battalion (yech... gameplay is pitiful, though the controller is awesome) to a bunch of others. Mechassault I is still my favorite.
Though... was it mechwarrior 2 on the PC that had that awesome intro where the one mech was coming to the relief of the other, and gets blasted into smithereens? That was great. I used the sounds from that for my system power up and down for years.:)
I'm the author of a very compact, complete and quite speedy 6809/FLEX emulator... I'd love to port that to the iP(o|a)d. Hadn't even tried because of the "no emulated code" policy Apple inflicts on developers. If they approve this DOS thing - eventually, I understand they're still rejecting on that basis right now - I'll hit that baby hard. What a trip it would be to go from my old SS-50 system, really quite a bit of hardware ca. 1970s, to having it in my pocket. Hoo. Double hoo. In the meantime, back to my usual level of discontent...
My favorite game was the first Mechassault on the XBox. Completion of the story mode took about a day or two; and sure, it was fun. But that wasn't where the value of the game really was. If anything, that was just practice.
Mechassault sported local player against local player, local player against computer, and local player against online player game modes. Several of them, in fact. Co-operative and otherwise. And it was in those modes that I spent - and continue to spend - hour after hour in the game. To this day, I have found nothing as satisfying as the dual-team (about six against six, IIRC) online mode - absolute mayhem. And I like mayhem.:) The graphics are now hugely dated, the game is more than just "familiar", and yet it never lost its playability... I just got cut off from the online modes when someone dropped the support ball in the transition from the old XBox Live to the new. We (my friends and I) still play it in local mode using my home theater, and it's still the best game I've ever played. If my XBox dies, I will immediately replace it simply on the strength of this one particular game.
Now, I recognize that Mechassault appeals to me, and certainly not to everyone, but there is a common thread here and that is those extra modes. No computer (yet) is going to be as wily, as clever, as unpredictable, as a human opponent. IMHO, games that correctly leverage this, and have that perfect mix of great control and a compelling theme will always trump those that don't, and they have the potential for high quality replayability as long as you can find an experienced partner or partners to have a game with.
So... I don't really care if a game's story mode, or whatever it's called these days, is relatively short. I have no, and I do mean zero, interest in cut scenes, those in-game movies... I want to play, and generally speaking, I want to play with other people. That'll probably remain the same until some real breakthroughs are made in AI, and I'm not holding my breath for that.
...that PharmaCorp, if it is indeed to turn this into a dilation "drug", will have to jump through many very expensive hoops in the form of tests, hearings, and so forth. It will cost them a lot to do that. So, one can expect the price to initially reflect an attempt to recoup those expenses.
In the meantime, surely there are enough hints here for home remedies:
"same" bitter receptors as on the tongue.
"same" materials that stimulate the tongue
"better dilation than drugs"
I mean, really... if this doesn't spawn a series of home remedies, of which the public will quickly determine which ones work (and which ones kill or have nasty side effects), then the whole "home remedy" movement should probably go hide under some crystal pyramids.
It's not like you can't obtain a vaporizer, or any number of other tools you might need for such antics. I suspect most of them would already be in the bathroom, medicine chest, and kitchen of any well equipped home.
And there are many home remedies that work very well indeed. Cayenne pepper included in various home-made candies will do more for a sore throat than many OTC remedies; A Tums, intended for tummy acid issues, will do wonders for many cramping episodes, as will large amounts of milk or other calcium-rich substances; Etc. If the report is accurate, perhaps we'll have something else to add to the list of "here, try this" home remedies.
Good tip. So you went to time machine, grabbed an older version, and you were recovered?
I regularly copy these to my laptop, too; I suppose I ought to zip 'em and test them before the copy, eh? Because I don't regularly look at them there...
This is an OS X based outlining system that supports images, sounds, text, pretty much whatever. I use several outlines. One contains general information, from password and login data for every web site I use to ideas for t-shirts and guitar tabs; the other is an organized timeline, a diary of sorts, that has every year since I was born in it, and all the events I have been able to remember from before I started using it, and all the significant events since (much more dense there, of course.)
The collapsible outline format is ideal for a timeline; All decades but the current one are closed; all years in the current decade but the current one are closed; all months but the current one are closed; so the display is very compact, yet I have almost instant access to anything, any time, organized and coherent. Just as an aside, once written, I was able to recall a lot more by reading it to myself as if it were a story... concurrent events floated up to the surface almost unbidden... highly recommended if you're into journaling.
For everything else, it works very well, though a lot depends on the initial format you pick. Mine ended up with six root headings.
Under each of those are many more headings and megabytes of textual content I've generated over the years. Also images, musical performances (of mine), poetry, etc. Some of it came from text files I maintained prior to obtaining this software; I'm glad those days are gone. I'm sure other's organizations would be different, mine grew somewhat organically, and I might do it differently today, but it works extremely well as is, so then again, maybe not.
I'm not affiliated with the program developers at all; I'm just a really satisfied customer. For the money, the organizational chops I gained were hugely worth it.
Sounds like they've got a misconfigured VM, or something similarly wrong. My VMs boot in just a few seconds. Both windows and linux. Also on my Macbook pro, though I only run one at a time there.
You're all a bunch of newbies. I still have a working paper tape reader, and can load tiny BASIC from it. 3k. Bytes. On one strip of paper. And yes, that's an original copy of tiny BASIC. And if you want to give me trouble about that, I can use the toggle switches on the front panel to load stuff in a bit at a time.
Run Linux in a VM? Why oh why not just install Linux at the side
Because when you have the ability to run OS X, linux, and Windows programs all at once, you get a synergy that is greater than the sum of its parts. I can use Aperture to process my photos; WinImages to apply effects and stack my astrophotos; all the while running tests on the proper version of linux for my production server code. No re-booting, no "oh darn, that program is for another OS"; no letting windows loose on the Internet where it'll get run over by the first car driven by a script-kiddie; complete, transparent full-machine backups of the linux and windows VMs under OS X time machine without me having to do a thing; bottom line, lots of time saved, convenience is extremely high, and when I'm not inconvenienced, I work better.
Even the 1.66Ghz Core Duo in my 4-year-old Mac Mini doesn't choke on web browsing
Well, maybe for a very limited set of values of "choke."
I think you'd find the speed increase of my 8-core, 8GB, 3GHz Mac Pro doing web browsing, or one of the new 6- or 12-cores, quite noticeable. Especially when the webmaster of the site being browsed has decided that they're going to dump the processing load on the client.
How do I know? I've got three Mac Minis. One in the music studio, one in the ham shack, and one in the media center. They're ok for what they are, but fast... well, that's not what they are. Even the latest versions are just sort of middle of the road computers WRT speed. The cool things about Minis are the footprint, power consumption, and lack of noise.
its ok man, there just using the phrase losely. you have to learn to except it and ignore the affects on you're sensibilities. you no what I mean? People in all woks of life make these mistakes; you just have to stuff them in your mental chester drawers and forget about them. that way, for all intensive porpoises, you donut run around with emotions all penned up.
The word "gold" does not appear on that page. Nor did I see anything about accounting for the metals in the spacecraft in the general sense. So I'm still in the dark. Unless there's something indirect there you expected me to follow?
I have to wonder how much of that gold was debris from the spacecraft - plating for connections, etc. Once the thing hit, I would imagine (and I am just guessing) that the plume that resulted was pretty well mixed with well-blended spacecraft.
Oh well, with the article behind a paywall, I'm not about to find out. Nice to pay for the science - NASA - out of the taxpayers pocket, then charge us again for the results, eh?
And this is why we charge higher income tax rates for higher levels of income (i.e., make taxes progressive) - because we want to do our best to avoid what you are showing here.
Yeah, the thing is, it doesn't work. Even when you tax the rich guy at 90%.
The rich guy has something to sell. Otherwise he wouldn't be earning that million bucks. When you tax him at 90%, then when the poor person goes to buy the thing he sells, the poor person's money only does a fraction of the purchasing that it would on something bought from a fellow who isn't making a million bucks, but is instead just getting by. The millionaire may be selling bread, which the poor person really needs, while the guy who is just getting by is selling handcrafted chairs and tables, which the poor guy doesn't need.
Income tax is an insidious, inherently unfair funding mechanism. The less money you have, the more significant damage is done to your purchasing power. If you're earning $10k/year, you really need your money to work as effectively as possible for you. If that gets you into the 0% tax bracket, that only means the feds don't smack you when you earn it. But they're going to smack you, and quite hard, when you spend it -- because the amount of work it can do is hugely reduced by the taxes they apply to the person you're buying from. And the higher the income taxes are on the entity you purchase your goods/services from are, the less work your money will do for you. That's why graduated income taxes that supposedly penalize high incomes are stealth taxes on the poor. It's also why it would be better if those who are taxed, were taxed at a flat rate. That way, all products and services get the same amount of leverage out of a dollar.
A system that taxed consumption above a basic standard of living would be far superior even to a flat tax (and vastly superior to any possible income tax), because it would be transparent, and far more honest, and because it would be amenable to considerably more control by the individual - frugality would mean a lot more than it does now, and so would excess.
And yes, certainly, as money flows through the hands of one non-government entity after another, it is repeatedly taxed. However, the effect is only felt when earned and spent; in other words, if you earn $142, give up $42 to the feds, spend your $100 on the plumber, the plumber loses his $30, gives you what he can for the $70 he actually gets to keep... that's the end of what you feel.
Here's why: Say the plumber spends the $70 he got to keep on a similar service (perhaps on an electrician), so he puts out all $70, but the feds take their $21, and so all the value he can get out of that $70 is $49. This doesn't have any significant effect on you -- you still received the same amount of service from the plumber, and your finances aren't affected any further, either. The plumber is catching it on the spending end (which you don't feel) and on the earning end (which is your spending end) so you did feel that.
In order to understand where the effects are, you have to examine what work the money is doing for any one transaction. If you're involved, either earning or spending, then it'll affect you by increasing the amount of work you have to do to get a measured amount of product or service. If you're not, it won't.
The money itself, though, keeps being tapped each time it serves as the pivot of a transaction. How much of a hit it takes depends on the tax rates of the buyer and seller, and sometimes the goods themselves. For instance, you buy gasoline, a lot of the tax isn't on income to the seller, but is in the form of fees added right at the pump which are used to pay for roads. Liquor, fuel, real estate are all examples of goods with taxes as added fees at the transaction level, independently of taxes on income.
It's also worth pointing out that a sales tax can be designed to not be regressive by exempting basic needs from the sales tax. X amount of whatever allowed per person, and above that, you pay the sales tax. POS systems could easily manage this. In this way, a poor person could live tax free; a middle income person could live like a poor person and save and live tax free, or live well and pay taxes, or a mix of saving and indulgence; a high income person could live in any style they please, just as they can now.
Human nature pretty much assures that the more money one has, the more comfortable one will be spending it on non-essentials. The sales tax is visible at all times, while income tax hides from most consumers as they don't understand they're being hit again when they buy things.
That's why a well designed sales tax would be hugely superior to any possible income tax. The effect is visible; it's easier to plan for, especially if you're not all that financially intuitive. And importantly, it can be designed to actually not be regressive, which cannot be done with income taxes - they always bite when the poor person spends the money. Unfortunately, if we ever get a sales tax, most likely it will be in addition to the income tax, which will make it just another way to make things worse.
There is no tax-free situation for the poor with income tax in place.
Assume 30% average tax rate. Poor person pays zero. Then buys a service, such as plumbing. Plumber pays 30%. Poor person pays $100; Plumber gets $70, government takes $30; poor person gets (maybe) $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for poor person: 30%.
Of course, it's higher if you're middle class: You earn $142; taxed at 30%, you keep $100; you pay plumber $100; government takes $30; you get $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for middle class: 50%.
Whereas if you're Google, you pay 2.4%, so you earn $102.45, keep $100, pay the plumber $100, govt gets $30, Google gets $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for Google: 31.6%
By taxing incomes, the government ensures that everyone, most definitely including the poor, pays taxes by catching you (often again) when you spend your money on anything that is taxed. The only way to avoid paying is to only buy things that themselves are not taxed in any way. And good luck with that.
Jews don't seem to be nearly as up-tight about sex
Oh, they're plenty uptight. Ask them about homosexuality; ask them about polyandry and polygyny; ask them about pornography; ask them about personal liberties as opposed to dogmatic requirements. And remember that there are quite a few varieties of Judaism, just as there are of Christianity -- they've all got their hangups.
Muslims are centuries behind Jobs; compared to them, he's open-minded.
Good thing he's not pushing Judo-Christian mores on you then, right?
Wrong. Buddists don't have a single line in their patter that tells people outside their faith that sex is something to be ashamed of, hidden away, . That's really a Jewish / Christian problem, both the attitude itself, and the attempt to enforce it upon others.
Jobs also criticized the Android Marketplace, pointing out that there are at least three other app stores being launched by vendors, causing confusion for users and work for developers. "This is gonna be a mess for both users and developers,"
Yes, because people have proven that having more than one drug store, supermarket, or fast food chain inevitably disorients them and fouls up their lives. Oh, wait.
I really do like my Apple products, but not for the reasons Jobs pushes; more like in spite of his ideas. I'd love another store, particularly one where Jobs Judeo-Christian mores aren't pushed upon me; or, conversely, if Apple's store stopped insisting that apps have to work they way they think they should, or that apps "can't duplicate functionality." I'm hugely fond my my iPad, but the idea that it would be less useful to me if there were more than one app store available to me... that's just wrong.
Oh, no. You underestimate the creativity of the French. They'll simply implement a V6 to V4 translation mode called "retreat", huck a cow at the filthy English k-nig-its, and call it a day. In the meantime, US users who could barely count to 255 as it was, will be absolutely buffaloed by IPV6, and the infrastructure will fall apart. Then the French step back in, collude with the English to open a filthy cheese shop in which you can order any block size you like, although it won't be available, and then you'll have to go to the ministry of silly walks, who will (eventually) send you down the hall to Abuse, and thence to Argument. It'll all be resolved by random numbers assigned via confuse-a-cat, and everyone will get free condoms. Because the parrot is dead, you see.
And in all of that incoherent rant you never quoted scripture once.
Nonsense: Original scripture quote from the NT, repeated for you, Jesus himself speaking:
Matthew 5:17-18, in which Jesus said:
17: "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill.
18: For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled."
Now, follow along with Jesus. He says he didn't come to destroy the OT, that is, the law it comprises or the prophets it quotes. He says he fulfills; but the obvious implication is that it is the prophecies he fulfills (as you can't fulfill a law... that'd be like drinking a rock.)
Then he goes further, and says that until heaven and earth pass away -- which I would simply point out to you they have not done -- "one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law", so in no way is the law, meaning again the OT, obsolete, "fulfilled" or otherwise not in force.
You want more? Remember Jesus at the woman's stoning? (John 8:1 - 11) Where he said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"? You notice he didn't say that the law didn't apply, right? He was just saying that hypocrites had no right to judge or punish. Otherwise, he'd have stepped right up and said "hey, the OT doesn't count anymore, let her go."
AND HE DID THAT. HE FULFILLED THEM. THAT IS WHAT I SAID YOU MORON.
Look. If I present a sentence with two possible targets, like this: "I have a duck and a glass" and then follow up with "I drained half the liquid and then I plucked the feathers", you will assume I drained the glass and plucked the duck, right? Unless you're an idiot.
Jesus mentions the law and the prophets. Then he said he came to fulfill. The obvious reading is that he came to fulfill the prophecies, not the law, because the concept of fulfilling the law is equivalent to plucking feathers from the glass. The former makes perfect contextual sense; the latter does not. Your problem is that your ability to parse language is down at the grade school level and you fail utterly to understand what Jesus was saying.
Furthermore, he immediately thereafter goes into considerable detail to tell you that the law has not been rendered inapplicable (what you're trying to say with your misunderstanding of the word fulfill); instead, he points out that until heaven and earth pass away the law will apply. That means right now because... wait for it... the earth is still here, isn't it?
You armchair theists never fail to amaze me with your lack of knowledge of what your own book tells you. You have no idea what you're doing. On the off chance that there is a god and a Jesus, they're quite clearly going to be waiting to take your head off for not following the rules.
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Unfortunately, Mechassault never gained that ability. The second version was a dimwitted "boss-based" platformer, and the third... remains a dream.
I do all my gaming on the XBoxes (orig and 360), pS2 and 3, Wii, Gamecube and PSP. No PC gaming (Mac user), and I generally look for sims like Mechassult or Project Gotham, which I also enjoy very much (for very similar reasons... racing against people.) I own lots of mech games, from the controller-heavy Steel Battalion (yech... gameplay is pitiful, though the controller is awesome) to a bunch of others. Mechassault I is still my favorite.
Though... was it mechwarrior 2 on the PC that had that awesome intro where the one mech was coming to the relief of the other, and gets blasted into smithereens? That was great. I used the sounds from that for my system power up and down for years. :)
I'm the author of a very compact, complete and quite speedy 6809/FLEX emulator... I'd love to port that to the iP(o|a)d. Hadn't even tried because of the "no emulated code" policy Apple inflicts on developers. If they approve this DOS thing - eventually, I understand they're still rejecting on that basis right now - I'll hit that baby hard. What a trip it would be to go from my old SS-50 system, really quite a bit of hardware ca. 1970s, to having it in my pocket. Hoo. Double hoo. In the meantime, back to my usual level of discontent...
My favorite game was the first Mechassault on the XBox. Completion of the story mode took about a day or two; and sure, it was fun. But that wasn't where the value of the game really was. If anything, that was just practice.
Mechassault sported local player against local player, local player against computer, and local player against online player game modes. Several of them, in fact. Co-operative and otherwise. And it was in those modes that I spent - and continue to spend - hour after hour in the game. To this day, I have found nothing as satisfying as the dual-team (about six against six, IIRC) online mode - absolute mayhem. And I like mayhem. :) The graphics are now hugely dated, the game is more than just "familiar", and yet it never lost its playability... I just got cut off from the online modes when someone dropped the support ball in the transition from the old XBox Live to the new. We (my friends and I) still play it in local mode using my home theater, and it's still the best game I've ever played. If my XBox dies, I will immediately replace it simply on the strength of this one particular game.
Now, I recognize that Mechassault appeals to me, and certainly not to everyone, but there is a common thread here and that is those extra modes. No computer (yet) is going to be as wily, as clever, as unpredictable, as a human opponent. IMHO, games that correctly leverage this, and have that perfect mix of great control and a compelling theme will always trump those that don't, and they have the potential for high quality replayability as long as you can find an experienced partner or partners to have a game with.
So... I don't really care if a game's story mode, or whatever it's called these days, is relatively short. I have no, and I do mean zero, interest in cut scenes, those in-game movies... I want to play, and generally speaking, I want to play with other people. That'll probably remain the same until some real breakthroughs are made in AI, and I'm not holding my breath for that.
In the meantime, surely there are enough hints here for home remedies:
I mean, really... if this doesn't spawn a series of home remedies, of which the public will quickly determine which ones work (and which ones kill or have nasty side effects), then the whole "home remedy" movement should probably go hide under some crystal pyramids.
It's not like you can't obtain a vaporizer, or any number of other tools you might need for such antics. I suspect most of them would already be in the bathroom, medicine chest, and kitchen of any well equipped home.
And there are many home remedies that work very well indeed. Cayenne pepper included in various home-made candies will do more for a sore throat than many OTC remedies; A Tums, intended for tummy acid issues, will do wonders for many cramping episodes, as will large amounts of milk or other calcium-rich substances; Etc. If the report is accurate, perhaps we'll have something else to add to the list of "here, try this" home remedies.
Good tip. So you went to time machine, grabbed an older version, and you were recovered?
I regularly copy these to my laptop, too; I suppose I ought to zip 'em and test them before the copy, eh? Because I don't regularly look at them there...
This is an OS X based outlining system that supports images, sounds, text, pretty much whatever. I use several outlines. One contains general information, from password and login data for every web site I use to ideas for t-shirts and guitar tabs; the other is an organized timeline, a diary of sorts, that has every year since I was born in it, and all the events I have been able to remember from before I started using it, and all the significant events since (much more dense there, of course.)
The collapsible outline format is ideal for a timeline; All decades but the current one are closed; all years in the current decade but the current one are closed; all months but the current one are closed; so the display is very compact, yet I have almost instant access to anything, any time, organized and coherent. Just as an aside, once written, I was able to recall a lot more by reading it to myself as if it were a story... concurrent events floated up to the surface almost unbidden... highly recommended if you're into journaling.
For everything else, it works very well, though a lot depends on the initial format you pick. Mine ended up with six root headings.
Under each of those are many more headings and megabytes of textual content I've generated over the years. Also images, musical performances (of mine), poetry, etc. Some of it came from text files I maintained prior to obtaining this software; I'm glad those days are gone. I'm sure other's organizations would be different, mine grew somewhat organically, and I might do it differently today, but it works extremely well as is, so then again, maybe not.
I'm not affiliated with the program developers at all; I'm just a really satisfied customer. For the money, the organizational chops I gained were hugely worth it.
Sorry, didn't even see your message's parent. :)
Sounds like they've got a misconfigured VM, or something similarly wrong. My VMs boot in just a few seconds. Both windows and linux. Also on my Macbook pro, though I only run one at a time there.
You're all a bunch of newbies. I still have a working paper tape reader, and can load tiny BASIC from it. 3k. Bytes. On one strip of paper. And yes, that's an original copy of tiny BASIC. And if you want to give me trouble about that, I can use the toggle switches on the front panel to load stuff in a bit at a time.
Because when you have the ability to run OS X, linux, and Windows programs all at once, you get a synergy that is greater than the sum of its parts. I can use Aperture to process my photos; WinImages to apply effects and stack my astrophotos; all the while running tests on the proper version of linux for my production server code. No re-booting, no "oh darn, that program is for another OS"; no letting windows loose on the Internet where it'll get run over by the first car driven by a script-kiddie; complete, transparent full-machine backups of the linux and windows VMs under OS X time machine without me having to do a thing; bottom line, lots of time saved, convenience is extremely high, and when I'm not inconvenienced, I work better.
Well, maybe for a very limited set of values of "choke."
I think you'd find the speed increase of my 8-core, 8GB, 3GHz Mac Pro doing web browsing, or one of the new 6- or 12-cores, quite noticeable. Especially when the webmaster of the site being browsed has decided that they're going to dump the processing load on the client.
How do I know? I've got three Mac Minis. One in the music studio, one in the ham shack, and one in the media center. They're ok for what they are, but fast... well, that's not what they are. Even the latest versions are just sort of middle of the road computers WRT speed. The cool things about Minis are the footprint, power consumption, and lack of noise.
its ok man, there just using the phrase losely. you have to learn to except it and ignore the affects on you're sensibilities. you no what I mean? People in all woks of life make these mistakes; you just have to stuff them in your mental chester drawers and forget about them. that way, for all intensive porpoises, you donut run around with emotions all penned up.
The word "gold" does not appear on that page. Nor did I see anything about accounting for the metals in the spacecraft in the general sense. So I'm still in the dark. Unless there's something indirect there you expected me to follow?
I have to wonder how much of that gold was debris from the spacecraft - plating for connections, etc. Once the thing hit, I would imagine (and I am just guessing) that the plume that resulted was pretty well mixed with well-blended spacecraft.
Oh well, with the article behind a paywall, I'm not about to find out. Nice to pay for the science - NASA - out of the taxpayers pocket, then charge us again for the results, eh?
Yeah, the thing is, it doesn't work. Even when you tax the rich guy at 90%.
The rich guy has something to sell. Otherwise he wouldn't be earning that million bucks. When you tax him at 90%, then when the poor person goes to buy the thing he sells, the poor person's money only does a fraction of the purchasing that it would on something bought from a fellow who isn't making a million bucks, but is instead just getting by. The millionaire may be selling bread, which the poor person really needs, while the guy who is just getting by is selling handcrafted chairs and tables, which the poor guy doesn't need.
Income tax is an insidious, inherently unfair funding mechanism. The less money you have, the more significant damage is done to your purchasing power. If you're earning $10k/year, you really need your money to work as effectively as possible for you. If that gets you into the 0% tax bracket, that only means the feds don't smack you when you earn it. But they're going to smack you, and quite hard, when you spend it -- because the amount of work it can do is hugely reduced by the taxes they apply to the person you're buying from. And the higher the income taxes are on the entity you purchase your goods/services from are, the less work your money will do for you. That's why graduated income taxes that supposedly penalize high incomes are stealth taxes on the poor. It's also why it would be better if those who are taxed, were taxed at a flat rate. That way, all products and services get the same amount of leverage out of a dollar.
A system that taxed consumption above a basic standard of living would be far superior even to a flat tax (and vastly superior to any possible income tax), because it would be transparent, and far more honest, and because it would be amenable to considerably more control by the individual - frugality would mean a lot more than it does now, and so would excess.
It's not logic. It's just math.
And yes, certainly, as money flows through the hands of one non-government entity after another, it is repeatedly taxed. However, the effect is only felt when earned and spent; in other words, if you earn $142, give up $42 to the feds, spend your $100 on the plumber, the plumber loses his $30, gives you what he can for the $70 he actually gets to keep... that's the end of what you feel.
Here's why: Say the plumber spends the $70 he got to keep on a similar service (perhaps on an electrician), so he puts out all $70, but the feds take their $21, and so all the value he can get out of that $70 is $49. This doesn't have any significant effect on you -- you still received the same amount of service from the plumber, and your finances aren't affected any further, either. The plumber is catching it on the spending end (which you don't feel) and on the earning end (which is your spending end) so you did feel that.
In order to understand where the effects are, you have to examine what work the money is doing for any one transaction. If you're involved, either earning or spending, then it'll affect you by increasing the amount of work you have to do to get a measured amount of product or service. If you're not, it won't.
The money itself, though, keeps being tapped each time it serves as the pivot of a transaction. How much of a hit it takes depends on the tax rates of the buyer and seller, and sometimes the goods themselves. For instance, you buy gasoline, a lot of the tax isn't on income to the seller, but is in the form of fees added right at the pump which are used to pay for roads. Liquor, fuel, real estate are all examples of goods with taxes as added fees at the transaction level, independently of taxes on income.
It's also worth pointing out that a sales tax can be designed to not be regressive by exempting basic needs from the sales tax. X amount of whatever allowed per person, and above that, you pay the sales tax. POS systems could easily manage this. In this way, a poor person could live tax free; a middle income person could live like a poor person and save and live tax free, or live well and pay taxes, or a mix of saving and indulgence; a high income person could live in any style they please, just as they can now.
Human nature pretty much assures that the more money one has, the more comfortable one will be spending it on non-essentials. The sales tax is visible at all times, while income tax hides from most consumers as they don't understand they're being hit again when they buy things.
That's why a well designed sales tax would be hugely superior to any possible income tax. The effect is visible; it's easier to plan for, especially if you're not all that financially intuitive. And importantly, it can be designed to actually not be regressive, which cannot be done with income taxes - they always bite when the poor person spends the money. Unfortunately, if we ever get a sales tax, most likely it will be in addition to the income tax, which will make it just another way to make things worse.
So are income taxes.
There is no tax-free situation for the poor with income tax in place.
Assume 30% average tax rate. Poor person pays zero. Then buys a service, such as plumbing. Plumber pays 30%. Poor person pays $100; Plumber gets $70, government takes $30; poor person gets (maybe) $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for poor person: 30%.
Of course, it's higher if you're middle class: You earn $142; taxed at 30%, you keep $100; you pay plumber $100; government takes $30; you get $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for middle class: 50%.
Whereas if you're Google, you pay 2.4%, so you earn $102.45, keep $100, pay the plumber $100, govt gets $30, Google gets $70 worth of plumbing. Effective tax rate for Google: 31.6%
By taxing incomes, the government ensures that everyone, most definitely including the poor, pays taxes by catching you (often again) when you spend your money on anything that is taxed. The only way to avoid paying is to only buy things that themselves are not taxed in any way. And good luck with that.
It's solidly rigged in favor of the rich and the corporations.
Nothing new here; vote with and for the republicans to keep things this way.
Oh, they're plenty uptight. Ask them about homosexuality; ask them about polyandry and polygyny; ask them about pornography; ask them about personal liberties as opposed to dogmatic requirements. And remember that there are quite a few varieties of Judaism, just as there are of Christianity -- they've all got their hangups.
Muslims are centuries behind Jobs; compared to them, he's open-minded.
Wrong. Buddists don't have a single line in their patter that tells people outside their faith that sex is something to be ashamed of, hidden away, . That's really a Jewish / Christian problem, both the attitude itself, and the attempt to enforce it upon others.
Yes, because people have proven that having more than one drug store, supermarket, or fast food chain inevitably disorients them and fouls up their lives. Oh, wait.
I really do like my Apple products, but not for the reasons Jobs pushes; more like in spite of his ideas. I'd love another store, particularly one where Jobs Judeo-Christian mores aren't pushed upon me; or, conversely, if Apple's store stopped insisting that apps have to work they way they think they should, or that apps "can't duplicate functionality." I'm hugely fond my my iPad, but the idea that it would be less useful to me if there were more than one app store available to me... that's just wrong.
Oh, no. You underestimate the creativity of the French. They'll simply implement a V6 to V4 translation mode called "retreat", huck a cow at the filthy English k-nig-its, and call it a day. In the meantime, US users who could barely count to 255 as it was, will be absolutely buffaloed by IPV6, and the infrastructure will fall apart. Then the French step back in, collude with the English to open a filthy cheese shop in which you can order any block size you like, although it won't be available, and then you'll have to go to the ministry of silly walks, who will (eventually) send you down the hall to Abuse, and thence to Argument. It'll all be resolved by random numbers assigned via confuse-a-cat, and everyone will get free condoms. Because the parrot is dead, you see.
Nonsense: Original scripture quote from the NT, repeated for you, Jesus himself speaking:
Matthew 5:17-18, in which Jesus said:
17: "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill.
18: For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled."
Now, follow along with Jesus. He says he didn't come to destroy the OT, that is, the law it comprises or the prophets it quotes. He says he fulfills; but the obvious implication is that it is the prophecies he fulfills (as you can't fulfill a law... that'd be like drinking a rock.)
Then he goes further, and says that until heaven and earth pass away -- which I would simply point out to you they have not done -- "one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law", so in no way is the law, meaning again the OT, obsolete, "fulfilled" or otherwise not in force.
You want more? Remember Jesus at the woman's stoning? (John 8:1 - 11) Where he said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"? You notice he didn't say that the law didn't apply, right? He was just saying that hypocrites had no right to judge or punish. Otherwise, he'd have stepped right up and said "hey, the OT doesn't count anymore, let her go."
Look. If I present a sentence with two possible targets, like this: "I have a duck and a glass" and then follow up with "I drained half the liquid and then I plucked the feathers", you will assume I drained the glass and plucked the duck, right? Unless you're an idiot.
Jesus mentions the law and the prophets. Then he said he came to fulfill. The obvious reading is that he came to fulfill the prophecies, not the law, because the concept of fulfilling the law is equivalent to plucking feathers from the glass. The former makes perfect contextual sense; the latter does not. Your problem is that your ability to parse language is down at the grade school level and you fail utterly to understand what Jesus was saying.
Furthermore, he immediately thereafter goes into considerable detail to tell you that the law has not been rendered inapplicable (what you're trying to say with your misunderstanding of the word fulfill); instead, he points out that until heaven and earth pass away the law will apply. That means right now because... wait for it... the earth is still here, isn't it?
You armchair theists never fail to amaze me with your lack of knowledge of what your own book tells you. You have no idea what you're doing. On the off chance that there is a god and a Jesus, they're quite clearly going to be waiting to take your head off for not following the rules.
So are the divorces.