The really *great* thing about estate taxes, especially as they used to be formulated in the US, is that they encourage bequests to eligible organisations. As a result, many public institutions and charities in the US have required far less money from the government than they otherwise would.
As for this:
Politicians should learn to operate within a real budget like the rest of us.
In a capitalist republic, politicians only have one source of income: taxes. If they don't keep to a reasonable budget, it isn't their fault, it's the fault of the people who voted for them.
I'm sorry that you feel the need to make assumptions about my nationality, intelligence and motivation. I guess you found my little snippet of hard reality a bit hard to swallow. Perhaps you own some real estate that's uncomfortably close to sea level. Permit me to dilate slightly on my original point:
There are plenty of good reasons why we should stop polluting the planet, not the least of which is that air and water pollution kill people. I find it constantly annoying that people bang on about CO2 - which may or may not be a problem - and completely ignore the fact that people are dying from air pollution now. I know why they do this: the exact consequences of global warming are largely unknown, so people are free to imagine a catastrophe on whatever scale tickles their fancy; whereas the current death toll from pollution happens out of sight, in hospitals and doctors' rooms. One's a big, dramatic story, and the other one isn't.
In the meantime, it will take many decades for developed nations to phase out their fossil-fuel-burnin' ways. As they do so, the developed world will ramp up their consumption of fossil fuels, because they can't afford fancy nucular reactors and wind turbines. So the long-term trend will be something like a constant level of CO2 emissions. It might fall a little, or it might rise a lot. India is the biggest unkknown factor in this, but it's probably going to be a bigger influence that China.
So I'd say we have at least another 30 years of CO2 emissions at their current levels. This means that despite what you might want, Mr Cowboy, we will have to learn to live with the effects of global warming, and frankly, I fail to see how that can be interpreted as "giving up". Learning to live with climate change is a huge challenge. I'd say it's probably less of a challenge than trying to stop or reverse climate change, but it's still going to be very hard to do.
And frankly, I also think it's a very prudent position. I certainly don't want to pin all my hopes on nuclear power and wind turbines when it might all have been beyond our control, anyway.
Let us assume for a moment that the climate change is man-made. Let us further assume that all developed nations take immediate steps to completely eliminate their CO2 emissions. What will happen?
CO2 emissions will keep rising. China is building coal-fired power stations at a tremendous rate, and will probably keep doing so for a few decades, at least; India - which will have a larger population than China in a couple of decades - will be doing exactly the same thing. They're doing this because they need electricity to modernise their economies, and coal is both plentiful and cheap. Between them, they will probably pump out enough CO2 to fully compensate for the CO2 not emitted by the developed world.
Conclusion: it doesn't matter whether global warming is man-made or not. If it's natural, there's nothing we can do about it, and if it's man-made, it isn't going to be arrested any time soon.
So we are just going to have to live with the consequences.
Naturally, the article is riddled with errors, because (1) the author isn't a subject matter expert and (2) good sub-editing is no longer considered essential.
However, there are applications that "share memory" over networks; Oracle RAC springs to mind, where the nodes in the cluster share database blocks as required. However, Oracle recommend gigabit point-to-point connections between nodes, rather than a general-purpose network. The latter tends to make the cluster unusable.
There is a battery that can be charged in two minutes - the vanadium redox battery. Some shady business shenanigans (no, really!) have kept it off the market, unfortunately.
I'll admit Fox News has its ups and downs, but the ire and hatred that liberals have for it is over the top.
I hate to rock your world, but not everybody who denigrates Fox is a "liberal". A lot of people just think Fox is strongly and consistently biased. Which it is.
(And to crudely paraphrase Anthony Burgess: to many Americans, "liberal" is all overtones and no fundamental note.)
First of all, 'War of the Worlds' wasn't exactly a remake, in the same sense that the 'Lord of the Rings' movies weren't remakes. They were all movies derived from novels, which is a slightly (but not entirely) different thing.
Secondly, Hollywood remakes are nothing new. Plenty of films that we regard as 'classics' are remakes. The remakes of 'The Maltese Falcon', 'The Man Who Knew Too Much', 'Gunfight at the OK Corral' and 'The Thing' are all more highly regarded than their originals.
That said, the current crop of Hollywood remakes have mostly been egregious travesties.
b. Global warming (arc) is speeding up, tenfold in just the last five years;
That's your "cold hard truth"?
No. It isn't possible to measure climate change on that timescale, because the errors are larger than the changes you're measuring. Climate change can only be measured on a timescale of decades, and even then, only with significant uncertainty.
In other words, any claim based on less than 10 years' data is inherently suspect.
The very high share price of BH doesn't mean that the company is inherently great, nor that witholding profit guidance is a good thing; in fact, all it means is that BH don't so stock splits. There are plenty of other companies around that would have prices like BH, except they recognise that having an extremely high share price is a barrier to entry for a lot of investors, so they regularly do stock splits to keep the prices in a reasonable range.
OTOH, it's great marketing for BH to have a very high stock price. It's "cool" to own one. For a lot of people, it's the stock market equivalent of buying a Merc. The mere fact that BH could split their stock 85,000:1, have a stock price of $1, and still be the exact same company, is probably lost on such people.
More on-topic: generally, there are two kinds of company that withold profit guidance. There are good companies, like BH, and there are companies that are trying to hide Very Bad News. The latter outnumber the former by a huge magin.
H&R Block do people's personal taxes. I think you can probably trust them with that task, most of the time.
Company taxes are a whole different thing. The rules are different, are more complex, and change often. In many instances, the rules are somewhat rubbery, but what you can get away with will come down to how good your lawyers are. Also, while H&R Block staff do the taxes of hundreds of thousand of people every year, their accountants only do the company taxes once a year. Mistakes are likelier.
So there's no "irony" here, nor is there any "comeuppance". It's just a common bookkeeping error.
The book starts out by mentioning how large mammals went extinct in America and Australia when humans reached there. The reason was because these animals evolved without co-existing with man(hunter) and hence did not develop a natural fear of man. As a result when man came upon them, he literally clubbed them to extinction.
That might have happened in some places at some time, but to state it like that (and I know that Diamond uses a lot of 'just-so-stories' like this in his book) is a gross oversimplification. For example, in most places, the ice age megafauna that he's talking about were regularly killed by predators, so we have no reason to expect that they'd ignore human predators when they arrived. There's also the issue of climate change, and environmental change brought on by human presence, such as the regular burning of undergrowth, which probably caused a number of extinctions on their own.
However, it is true that some large animals in some regions lacked predators, so it's safe to assume that humans had a hand in their extinction - for example, the New Zealand moa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa). But in that case, you also have a human population explosion, the much easier task of stealing moa eggs, a small geographic region, and other factors that make extinction more likely than just killing adult birds the size of Andre the Giant.
Back in 1981, I bought my wine-buff brother a bottle of $2.95 moselle as a joke. (It was Ben Ean, for those Australians reading this.) To return the favour, he laid it down, and opened it nine years later on my 30th birthday.
The years had been kind to it. It was almost a dessert wine; thick, golden yellow, and sweet. Frankly, it was very good. Certainly a lot better than when bought.
On the other hand, I had some Merlot turn into vinegar very quickly. Come to think of it, I still have a bottle of that stuff in the cupboard. I dread opening it.
Who needs film? I have in my possession a copy of the British Photographic Society Yearbook and Almanac from 1877. It contains details instructions on how to make dry glass plates. So even when film vanishes from the world, I'll still be making black-and-white images with my home-made, large-format camera.
Damn Nikon. Damn Kodak. Damn them all. They can't stop me having fun.
Cobalt-60 emits gamma radiation, which is comprised of high-energy photons. Photons only react with electrons, not nuclei, so if element X is exposed to them, it will still be element X afterwards, with its atomic number and mass unchanged.
Anyone interested in this stuff should pop over to Germany and visit the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum (http://www.hnf.de/index_en.html)in Paderborn. There's even a liquid-cooled Cray. How great is that?
Evolution is a phenomenon. It can be observed easily, even in something as trivial and obvious as dog breeding.
Natural selection is a theory that explains why we have the natural species that we do. Sexual selection is a different theory that explains, inter alia, the appearance of species that reproduce sexually.
Mutation is a theory that explains certain aspects of evolution, and is used in the theory of natural selection.
All of that aside, we all need somebody to ridicule as yokels. It makes is feel better. Europe has Austria, Australia has New Zealand, and the US has Kansas. It's the natural order of things, and must not be disturbed.
If the motivation for sustainability comes from an external source to the people living in the sustainable environment (namely the government), then that is what many see as extreme leftism at work.
Then they would be naive. Both left and right wing governments coerce their citizens; neither has a monopoly on the abuse of political power.
Re:The hypocrisy of "sustainable"
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When you see "sustainable", you can think of this tagline: "Sustainable. By rich liberals, for rich liberals."
Clearly some new definition of "insightful" is being applied here... perhaps one where it means the same thing as "wrong" or "ill-reasoned" or "prone to political name-calling to discourage critical thought".
Sustainability, or something close to it, has been the norm for most of human existence. It's also easy to achieve today, and the simplest way is to just consume a whole lot less. I don't believe that using fewer consumer goods and less energy requires one to be rich. It would appear to be an option available to most people.
I would also like to point out that the survivalist movement is very big on sustainability - though perhaps not for for ecological reasons - and I doubt that anyone will be calling them "liberals" any time soon.
Do I love my new job? Hell yeah. In three years? Who knows?
That "in three years" is the catch.
Most people face about 40 years in the workforce. Forty years is a long, long time. Hell, I've been a DBA for 15 years, and that seems like an awfully long time to me. People just starting out may well work for much longer, given advances in medical technology.
So when I said, "most jobs suck," I was simply stating the truth, based on my own extensive experience. Starting a new job is a lot like getting married - even assuming a happy honeymoon, the general level of happiness soon returns to its usual level. Therefore, I think it's important to be realistic about working life, and not build it up by saying that you job *should* make you happy. It might, but chances are it won't.
I don't wish to sound harsh, but why is a fresh graduate giving people career advice? It's not as if he has a surfeit of experience to draw on.
And it shows. Take advice number one: "don't work in a cubicle". You'll be looking a long time for a job that comes with its own office. Most corporations, especially, make sure that offices only go to managers above a certain rank. That's just how it is.
On the matter at hand, though, my advice to anyone wondering if they should quit is this: quit if going to work makes you feel sick to your stomach every day, and even then, only if you have a choice. If you have a mortgage or dependents, find another job *first*.
Oh, yeah, and one last piece of advice: it's called "work", not "happy fun playtime". Most jobs suck. Come to terms with that, and you'll be a man, my son.
Ideal solution: hire a good librarian. (Or "knowledge manager", as they prefer to be known.)
Google, Wiki, Notes and similar machinery are all well and good, but if you just let everybody stuff documents into the system, you'll end up with a large, undifferentiated heap of files in a dozen or more different formats. Ever tried searching for an Excel workbook with Wiki? A Visio file? An obscure CAD package file? An old CD-ROM of critical documentation in a proprietary format?
Managing documents is quite hard to do - fairly close to programming in terms of the skills needed. It doesn't happen on its own. It requires a cluey person who understands the business and the documents, who can classify and index the material as it comes in, and record where it is so that it can be found.
At the very least, it's a process that requires considerable thought, planning, and management. It needs to be viewed in that light - not "which search engine should I use?"
...and a far more lucrative, less stressful career in management.
I'll buy "more lucrative", but less stressful? In all my years in the techical field, I've rarely seen a happy manager. Most are miserable bastards. Not that I have any sympathy for them; no doubt they signed up for management for the money and power, not realising it's a lousy, dog-eat-dog job.
Slashdot Mirror
That's very ill-informed.
The really *great* thing about estate taxes, especially as they used to be formulated in the US, is that they encourage bequests to eligible organisations. As a result, many public institutions and charities in the US have required far less money from the government than they otherwise would.
As for this:
Politicians should learn to operate within a real budget like the rest of us.
In a capitalist republic, politicians only have one source of income: taxes. If they don't keep to a reasonable budget, it isn't their fault, it's the fault of the people who voted for them.
Mr Cowboy:
Words fail me. No, wait, they don't!
I'm sorry that you feel the need to make assumptions about my nationality, intelligence and motivation. I guess you found my little snippet of hard reality a bit hard to swallow. Perhaps you own some real estate that's uncomfortably close to sea level. Permit me to dilate slightly on my original point:
There are plenty of good reasons why we should stop polluting the planet, not the least of which is that air and water pollution kill people. I find it constantly annoying that people bang on about CO2 - which may or may not be a problem - and completely ignore the fact that people are dying from air pollution now. I know why they do this: the exact consequences of global warming are largely unknown, so people are free to imagine a catastrophe on whatever scale tickles their fancy; whereas the current death toll from pollution happens out of sight, in hospitals and doctors' rooms. One's a big, dramatic story, and the other one isn't.
In the meantime, it will take many decades for developed nations to phase out their fossil-fuel-burnin' ways. As they do so, the developed world will ramp up their consumption of fossil fuels, because they can't afford fancy nucular reactors and wind turbines. So the long-term trend will be something like a constant level of CO2 emissions. It might fall a little, or it might rise a lot. India is the biggest unkknown factor in this, but it's probably going to be a bigger influence that China.
So I'd say we have at least another 30 years of CO2 emissions at their current levels. This means that despite what you might want, Mr Cowboy, we will have to learn to live with the effects of global warming, and frankly, I fail to see how that can be interpreted as "giving up". Learning to live with climate change is a huge challenge. I'd say it's probably less of a challenge than trying to stop or reverse climate change, but it's still going to be very hard to do.
And frankly, I also think it's a very prudent position. I certainly don't want to pin all my hopes on nuclear power and wind turbines when it might all have been beyond our control, anyway.
Let us assume for a moment that the climate change is man-made. Let us further assume that all developed nations take immediate steps to completely eliminate their CO2 emissions. What will happen?
CO2 emissions will keep rising. China is building coal-fired power stations at a tremendous rate, and will probably keep doing so for a few decades, at least; India - which will have a larger population than China in a couple of decades - will be doing exactly the same thing. They're doing this because they need electricity to modernise their economies, and coal is both plentiful and cheap. Between them, they will probably pump out enough CO2 to fully compensate for the CO2 not emitted by the developed world.
Conclusion: it doesn't matter whether global warming is man-made or not. If it's natural, there's nothing we can do about it, and if it's man-made, it isn't going to be arrested any time soon.
So we are just going to have to live with the consequences.
Wrong! All they need is no date, a two-litre bottle of Shasta, and an all-Rush mix tape.
On the other hand, they could just breathe it. Human respiration produces H2O as a waste product; it could be condensed in the ventilation system.
Naturally, the article is riddled with errors, because (1) the author isn't a subject matter expert and (2) good sub-editing is no longer considered essential.
However, there are applications that "share memory" over networks; Oracle RAC springs to mind, where the nodes in the cluster share database blocks as required. However, Oracle recommend gigabit point-to-point connections between nodes, rather than a general-purpose network. The latter tends to make the cluster unusable.
There is a battery that can be charged in two minutes - the vanadium redox battery. Some shady business shenanigans (no, really!) have kept it off the market, unfortunately.
I'll admit Fox News has its ups and downs, but the ire and hatred that liberals have for it is over the top.
I hate to rock your world, but not everybody who denigrates Fox is a "liberal". A lot of people just think Fox is strongly and consistently biased. Which it is.
(And to crudely paraphrase Anthony Burgess: to many Americans, "liberal" is all overtones and no fundamental note.)
First of all, 'War of the Worlds' wasn't exactly a remake, in the same sense that the 'Lord of the Rings' movies weren't remakes. They were all movies derived from novels, which is a slightly (but not entirely) different thing.
Secondly, Hollywood remakes are nothing new. Plenty of films that we regard as 'classics' are remakes. The remakes of 'The Maltese Falcon', 'The Man Who Knew Too Much', 'Gunfight at the OK Corral' and 'The Thing' are all more highly regarded than their originals.
That said, the current crop of Hollywood remakes have mostly been egregious travesties.
b. Global warming (arc) is speeding up, tenfold in just the last five years;
That's your "cold hard truth"?
No. It isn't possible to measure climate change on that timescale, because the errors are larger than the changes you're measuring. Climate change can only be measured on a timescale of decades, and even then, only with significant uncertainty.
In other words, any claim based on less than 10 years' data is inherently suspect.
The very high share price of BH doesn't mean that the company is inherently great, nor that witholding profit guidance is a good thing; in fact, all it means is that BH don't so stock splits. There are plenty of other companies around that would have prices like BH, except they recognise that having an extremely high share price is a barrier to entry for a lot of investors, so they regularly do stock splits to keep the prices in a reasonable range.
OTOH, it's great marketing for BH to have a very high stock price. It's "cool" to own one. For a lot of people, it's the stock market equivalent of buying a Merc. The mere fact that BH could split their stock 85,000:1, have a stock price of $1, and still be the exact same company, is probably lost on such people.
More on-topic: generally, there are two kinds of company that withold profit guidance. There are good companies, like BH, and there are companies that are trying to hide Very Bad News. The latter outnumber the former by a huge magin.
H&R Block do people's personal taxes. I think you can probably trust them with that task, most of the time.
Company taxes are a whole different thing. The rules are different, are more complex, and change often. In many instances, the rules are somewhat rubbery, but what you can get away with will come down to how good your lawyers are. Also, while H&R Block staff do the taxes of hundreds of thousand of people every year, their accountants only do the company taxes once a year. Mistakes are likelier.
So there's no "irony" here, nor is there any "comeuppance". It's just a common bookkeeping error.
The book starts out by mentioning how large mammals went extinct in America and Australia when humans reached there. The reason was because these animals evolved without co-existing with man(hunter) and hence did not develop a natural fear of man. As a result when man came upon them, he literally clubbed them to extinction.
That might have happened in some places at some time, but to state it like that (and I know that Diamond uses a lot of 'just-so-stories' like this in his book) is a gross oversimplification. For example, in most places, the ice age megafauna that he's talking about were regularly killed by predators, so we have no reason to expect that they'd ignore human predators when they arrived. There's also the issue of climate change, and environmental change brought on by human presence, such as the regular burning of undergrowth, which probably caused a number of extinctions on their own.
However, it is true that some large animals in some regions lacked predators, so it's safe to assume that humans had a hand in their extinction - for example, the New Zealand moa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa). But in that case, you also have a human population explosion, the much easier task of stealing moa eggs, a small geographic region, and other factors that make extinction more likely than just killing adult birds the size of Andre the Giant.
Back in 1981, I bought my wine-buff brother a bottle of $2.95 moselle as a joke. (It was Ben Ean, for those Australians reading this.) To return the favour, he laid it down, and opened it nine years later on my 30th birthday.
The years had been kind to it. It was almost a dessert wine; thick, golden yellow, and sweet. Frankly, it was very good. Certainly a lot better than when bought.
On the other hand, I had some Merlot turn into vinegar very quickly. Come to think of it, I still have a bottle of that stuff in the cupboard. I dread opening it.
Who needs film? I have in my possession a copy of the British Photographic Society Yearbook and Almanac from 1877. It contains details instructions on how to make dry glass plates. So even when film vanishes from the world, I'll still be making black-and-white images with my home-made, large-format camera.
Damn Nikon. Damn Kodak. Damn them all. They can't stop me having fun.
Cobalt-60 emits gamma radiation, which is comprised of high-energy photons. Photons only react with electrons, not nuclei, so if element X is exposed to them, it will still be element X afterwards, with its atomic number and mass unchanged.
Anyone interested in this stuff should pop over to Germany and visit the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum (http://www.hnf.de/index_en.html)in Paderborn. There's even a liquid-cooled Cray. How great is that?
It's worse than that - there still isn't a univerally-accepted definition of "species"...
Evolution is a phenomenon. It can be observed easily, even in something as trivial and obvious as dog breeding.
Natural selection is a theory that explains why we have the natural species that we do. Sexual selection is a different theory that explains, inter alia, the appearance of species that reproduce sexually.
Mutation is a theory that explains certain aspects of evolution, and is used in the theory of natural selection.
All of that aside, we all need somebody to ridicule as yokels. It makes is feel better. Europe has Austria, Australia has New Zealand, and the US has Kansas. It's the natural order of things, and must not be disturbed.
If the motivation for sustainability comes from an external source to the people living in the sustainable environment (namely the government), then that is what many see as extreme leftism at work.
Then they would be naive. Both left and right wing governments coerce their citizens; neither has a monopoly on the abuse of political power.
When you see "sustainable", you can think of this tagline: "Sustainable. By rich liberals, for rich liberals."
Clearly some new definition of "insightful" is being applied here... perhaps one where it means the same thing as "wrong" or "ill-reasoned" or "prone to political name-calling to discourage critical thought".
Sustainability, or something close to it, has been the norm for most of human existence. It's also easy to achieve today, and the simplest way is to just consume a whole lot less. I don't believe that using fewer consumer goods and less energy requires one to be rich. It would appear to be an option available to most people.
I would also like to point out that the survivalist movement is very big on sustainability - though perhaps not for for ecological reasons - and I doubt that anyone will be calling them "liberals" any time soon.
Do I love my new job? Hell yeah. In three years? Who knows?
That "in three years" is the catch.
Most people face about 40 years in the workforce. Forty years is a long, long time. Hell, I've been a DBA for 15 years, and that seems like an awfully long time to me. People just starting out may well work for much longer, given advances in medical technology.
So when I said, "most jobs suck," I was simply stating the truth, based on my own extensive experience. Starting a new job is a lot like getting married - even assuming a happy honeymoon, the general level of happiness soon returns to its usual level. Therefore, I think it's important to be realistic about working life, and not build it up by saying that you job *should* make you happy. It might, but chances are it won't.
I don't wish to sound harsh, but why is a fresh graduate giving people career advice? It's not as if he has a surfeit of experience to draw on.
And it shows. Take advice number one: "don't work in a cubicle". You'll be looking a long time for a job that comes with its own office. Most corporations, especially, make sure that offices only go to managers above a certain rank. That's just how it is.
On the matter at hand, though, my advice to anyone wondering if they should quit is this: quit if going to work makes you feel sick to your stomach every day, and even then, only if you have a choice. If you have a mortgage or dependents, find another job *first*.
Oh, yeah, and one last piece of advice: it's called "work", not "happy fun playtime". Most jobs suck. Come to terms with that, and you'll be a man, my son.
Ideal solution: hire a good librarian. (Or "knowledge manager", as they prefer to be known.)
Google, Wiki, Notes and similar machinery are all well and good, but if you just let everybody stuff documents into the system, you'll end up with a large, undifferentiated heap of files in a dozen or more different formats. Ever tried searching for an Excel workbook with Wiki? A Visio file? An obscure CAD package file? An old CD-ROM of critical documentation in a proprietary format?
Managing documents is quite hard to do - fairly close to programming in terms of the skills needed. It doesn't happen on its own. It requires a cluey person who understands the business and the documents, who can classify and index the material as it comes in, and record where it is so that it can be found.
At the very least, it's a process that requires considerable thought, planning, and management. It needs to be viewed in that light - not "which search engine should I use?"
...and a far more lucrative, less stressful career in management.
I'll buy "more lucrative", but less stressful? In all my years in the techical field, I've rarely seen a happy manager. Most are miserable bastards. Not that I have any sympathy for them; no doubt they signed up for management for the money and power, not realising it's a lousy, dog-eat-dog job.