Top bracket taxpayers are overwhelmingly small business owners paying their business taxes on their personal tax returns. Cutting taxes means more money to reinvest in small businesses that produce most new jobs in America and providing less discouragement for workaholic small business owners to keep working when they really don't have to.
Giving money (tax cuts or whatever) to top bracket tax payers, means that some worker somewhere has to provide goods/services/labour to the rich person to get that money flowing back into the economy. Giving money (tax cuts or whatever) to the poor/disadvantaged, means that some worker somewhere has to provide goods/services/labour to the poor people to get that money flowing back into the economy. The difference isn't the stimulatory affect but rather who benefits from the economic redirection.
Of course I don't see America as a country that is lacking in cars, so I don't see the point of focusing funding in that direction.
I think that it would be better to break up the servers in some sort of meaningful way like say, play time limits. Have a server with unlimited time, one with a limit of 20 hours a week, 5 hours, etc. That way you can cater to a wide variety of players and they can all have a meaningful impact within the way they wish to play. If you rely on procedurally generated content then there shouldn't be a major issue with supporting different outcomes on different servers.
You've always got an advantage on the enemy; you've been through the level before, you know where they're going to be
This is what puts me off most FPS games these days. They make it so incredibly hard such that the only way to get through is to play it over and over till you've memorized the level. It takes away most of the fun of the game and justs makes it a frustrating experience. If you want to negate the deja vu knowledge of the player, make the game change each time it's played again.
Are you saying they're missing something important that only Google has?
Google has brand name recognition, almost everyone with any exposure to computers will recognise Google. Only people familiar with Linux will know Ubuntu.
The market sets prices, and when the market price exceeds the natural price by enough, competition to begin.
Except it's not the current market price that determines whether a new competitor enters the market, it's the expected price within the market once they've entered. If the potential new competitor knows the existing market player(s) will drop prices enough to prevent an acceptable ROI for the new competitor, they will stay out of the market regardless of how high the current prices are.
Why? Because one person in every 24,000,000 can't handle it?
No, because it's a mitigatable risk.
I disagree. The plaintiff's case was based upon a key point: The coffee was too hot. The fact is, it was not. (I've posted detailed elsewhere in this thread.)
The temperature that produces optimum flavor is irrelevant. It was "too hot" in the context of safety.
Acting like an asshat is not illegal.
It may not be criminal, but needlessly putting other people at risk is a valid reason for a lawsuit.
McDonald's had quite a few options:
a) Serve coffee at a safe temperature
b) Serve coffee in a safe container (sealed and resistant to possible impact or pressure)
c) Don't serve coffee through the drive through
But no, they decided to put people at risk just to make a buck. And that is why the lawsuit is valid.
... and could potentially be more productive overall...
Basically every study I've seen supports the opposite, over the long term. Sure the reduction in stress from smoking and taking breaks can be beneficial in the short term, however the medium & long term health effects far outweigh the short term benefits that you mention.
However, I don't believe that socializing medicine is a good idea, and as such, smokers would have to pay more for themselves
Unfortunately even without a 'socialized' health system, many smokers are poor and cannot afford to pay for the health care they'll eventually need. Coupling the fact that it's unfeasible to determine insurance status for emergency procedures with the increased occurrence and cost of smokers' emergency treatment and you'll see that smokers increase the cost to the health system and in many cases will be unable to pay.
then those funds should probably be used to cover additional costs, instead of it being a special sin tax that it is today.
Oh I agree that the tax should be determined by the 'marginal cost' of the effects of smoking the cigarettes and I'm against the notion of a 'sin tax'. That said, given the scientific evidence of the harm of second hand smoke, I'm for banning of smoking in all public places.
You could say the same about a multitude of perfectly legal accepted behaviors.
Many of the things you list, the major risk is injury (or death) which to much cheaper to treat (bandages, plaster cast, a few weeks in hospital or just a coffin) than the long term illness (years of in & out of hospital, expensive drugs and dedicated caring) that smoking creates. Others such as obesity, unhealthy diet, no exercise I would support a tax on. As for uv radiation, you could tax solariums but taxing people in the sunlight is just unfeasible.
There are some things you list such as driving where the benefits gained outweigh the costs, i.e. if no one drove then society would be so much less productive that we may not even have hospitals. Smoking is almost completely unproductive.
I flatly refuse to believe all these 'secondary-smoke' alarmist advertisements, stories, and studies. They fly in the face of common sense, and I believe they are constructed as a reason to further regulate and legislate behaviors for the sake of politics power and money.
Up until this point you had somewhat of an argument. Now you're just being silly and paranoid. There's scientific evidence behind the notion that second hand smoke causes harm. If it was about power and money then wouldn't "The Man" be all for pushing this high tax, high price addictive substance?
It is the nature of humans to engage in risky behaviors, even those that they know are harmful to themselves. The only way to stop it is to put everyone in a Matrix-type tube of goo for their entire lives.
It's not about stopping people doing it, it's about ensuring the cost the person pays represents the entire cost of the action (the tax0 and preventing that person making the choice for someone else (bans on smoking in public places). Besides, if it's not going to stop you, what are you complaining about?
Sure, by all means make sure people understand the risks, and try to place minimal, well-reasoned, and practical restrictions that are agreed to by the majority on the extremes, but drop the idea that you can or should try to regulate through law and taxes every behavior that someone thinks may be harmful, for it may be something that matters to *you* that may be the next crusade of the behavior-gestapo.
Come up with methods for other issues that distribute the hidden costs and I'll support it.
Those atrocities were survival of the fittest in action though, the weak cultures being destroyed by the strong. Of course a strong society isn't necessarily going to be te best society for individuals to live in, and unlikely to be the most moral.
I think you're quote misses the fact that religion is in a sense a form of mind control, and while it can be used for power and destruction, it can also be used to create a stable and productive society. So religion may not be directly a good or bad influence, but merely a magnifier of the influence of the leadership, and the resultant influence is determined by the actions of the leaders. Given the ability of power to corrupt I'd say that it might tend towards the negative.
Evolution is a pretty slow process... I guess 3000 years or so isn't quite long enough to breed out the religious nutjobs.
Unfortunately, while their religion may have negative repercussions for society, I'm not sure it has negative repercussions on the breeding of those individuals. If anything they seem to be breeding faster...
Societies may have "invented" the notion of religion because religion led to ethics, which led to less killing of their neighbors. All of the sudden, it's survival of the fittest, as non-ethical tribes tended to be killed off, while religious tribes thrived.
This is a good illustration of my point. With the 'default' society with no religion, a system of natural selection would have existed within the tribe. While there may have been stronger individuals within that tribe, the 'religious' societies produced stronger tribes as a whole.
So my question is: Even if there is no God, and you are an atheist, is it possible that a world containing religious people is actually a "better" society than a world full of atheists?
Sure it's possible that a society with a uniform belief system could create a better society in the short term, however given such uniformity is likely to restrict innovative thought, they may fall behind in the long run.
The mixed-belief world appears to be the "fittest" world, as opposed to such less-fit worlds of all atheists or all Christians, as examples.
I don't think history really provides enough data to draw such a conclusion. The success of civilizations has depended much more on a mix of resources, technology, polics and chance than religion alone.
I'd also like to point out that my original comments were more orientated towards those who apply the principles of evolution to economics (ie free-market). While a free-market will produce the fittest (ie most profitable) businesses, it may not produce the best overall economy.
The hypothesis is supported by the observation that so many people reject the notion that evolution-like systems such as Wikipedia, prediction markets, and recommendation systems can actually be effective.
While there may be many that reject that these systems can be effective at all, I'd suggest that there's many more that would actual argue that while these systems do work, they aren't necessarily the best or only method that is effective.
Except that in order to stimulate the brain to create an experience, one must understand how that portion of the brain works and how the external stimuli triggers the feeling. We could stimulate the sensing of a colour because we understand how light works. Similarly they can stimulate this euphoric sensation because they understand the process of how that brain section works. And a god isn't part of that understanding.
Besides, an all powerful being would be able to directly manipulate our brains and not need a special sensory system.
No this doesn't prove that there is no god, however it does provide a scientific explanation for those people who claim to 'feel' god or Jesus or whatever.
...Mom was busy with cooking and cleaning and other chores.
Not to discredit the work done by housewives, but housework doesn't consume a full days work. It's most likely why women are/were culturally notorious for chatting, fussing over petting things such as immaculate appearance and hobbies such knitting. It's not that they would have been 100% devoted to supervising children, but would have provided for a continuous meaningful influence. Something that is not present today and something that teachers or child care workers cannot hope to emulate.
...reading actual books and research
If you're going to claim research it might pay to quote or reference books, rather than accuse the rest of us as being ignoramuses.
As someone who has two family members who are teachers I'd have to agree with most of what you've said. I do think there's an issue with your third point.
You get rid of the business mentality infesting schools that kids are like widgets. Drop tests, drop standardized curriculum and you drop grade levels. Test scores and grade levels are a joke. They are a means to make believe that all students fit into nice neat little boxes. They don't! They are individual *mashups* of personality traits, learning skills, abilities, beliefs, biologicals (hormones, vision, hearing, sensory ability,...), lifestyles, desires, etc.
I do think there is a need for standardised curriculum and testing across at least some subjects. Core subjects such as English, maths and science that directly lead into further education do need to be standardised so that educators further down the line can work from some assumed knowledge and skill base. There is certainly room for significant leeway in other subjects such as history where there's a small set of basic skills (research, understanding) that should be common, but a variation in content and approach could prove benefitial.
Additionally, grading is important in multiple ways; primarily in that it provides guidance to the student as an individual and evidence of their ability that they can use for job application or college entry. Secondly it provides feedback to the teachers and education system as to how effective their teaching has been and identifies possible areas where they could improve. Thirdly it teaches the greatly important lesson that at the end of the day, the real world doesn't give a damn about their individuality but instead cares about what they are capable of producing. It seems that you've been indoctrinated into the school of caring more about the child's feelings than their education. Yes, there's more to a person than simply their raw skills and knowledge, and yes, there's the risk that they might be mis-assessed, however these negatives don't negate the overall benefit of assessing students.
(I.E. when 'quality time' was unheard of and parents weren't expected to sacrifice themselves utterly for their children.)
You do realise it used to be 'normal' to only have one working parent (usually father) with the mother at home doing parenting things such as disciplining children for misbehaviour, showing them how to be productive (chores) and educating by reading them stories right? Or were you born yesterday?
You can't get someone 'back to' where they never were in the first place.
During my early school years, my parents and others quite often volunteered to help at school by taking kids our of class and reading to them or helping them with basic arithmetic. It used to be common, but these days mothers are earning that second income.
And how many kids (or teachers for that matter) understand the chemistry behind chalk and why it behaves the way it does? The point isn't that their use of technology makes them smarter but that the improvements in efficiency it enables in other aspects of life means it should be more common in the educational environment.
The problem lies in the fact that the current generation of teachers are not up to scratch in their ability to use this new technology so it may take a generation for new systems of teaching to filter through.
Slashdot Mirror
Giving money (tax cuts or whatever) to top bracket tax payers, means that some worker somewhere has to provide goods/services/labour to the rich person to get that money flowing back into the economy. Giving money (tax cuts or whatever) to the poor/disadvantaged, means that some worker somewhere has to provide goods/services/labour to the poor people to get that money flowing back into the economy. The difference isn't the stimulatory affect but rather who benefits from the economic redirection.
Of course I don't see America as a country that is lacking in cars, so I don't see the point of focusing funding in that direction.
It doesn't matter how profitable a potential business is, if you can't raise the capital to build it, it won't get built.
I think that it would be better to break up the servers in some sort of meaningful way like say, play time limits. Have a server with unlimited time, one with a limit of 20 hours a week, 5 hours, etc. That way you can cater to a wide variety of players and they can all have a meaningful impact within the way they wish to play. If you rely on procedurally generated content then there shouldn't be a major issue with supporting different outcomes on different servers.
Yeah, but you can't rule the world with people who are inclined to get stoned and laid.
The tough question just is: Is 55% off unrealistic?
Here in Oz we routinely get ads for rug stores with 90% off.
You've always got an advantage on the enemy; you've been through the level before, you know where they're going to be This is what puts me off most FPS games these days. They make it so incredibly hard such that the only way to get through is to play it over and over till you've memorized the level. It takes away most of the fun of the game and justs makes it a frustrating experience. If you want to negate the deja vu knowledge of the player, make the game change each time it's played again.
I'm guessing all the slashdoters who would mod this down are probably somewhere else right now...
Are you saying they're missing something important that only Google has?
Google has brand name recognition, almost everyone with any exposure to computers will recognise Google. Only people familiar with Linux will know Ubuntu.
The market sets prices, and when the market price exceeds the natural price by enough, competition to begin.
Except it's not the current market price that determines whether a new competitor enters the market, it's the expected price within the market once they've entered. If the potential new competitor knows the existing market player(s) will drop prices enough to prevent an acceptable ROI for the new competitor, they will stay out of the market regardless of how high the current prices are.
I thought nVidia and ATI/AMD have been doing this kind of thing for years with the number of parallel units activated on their GPUs.
A 1% variation will alternately select candidates and that is unacceptable.
If you're (re)counting votes and can't explain differences in the counts, then you're doing it wrong.
Why? Because one person in every 24,000,000 can't handle it?
No, because it's a mitigatable risk.
I disagree. The plaintiff's case was based upon a key point: The coffee was too hot. The fact is, it was not. (I've posted detailed elsewhere in this thread.)
The temperature that produces optimum flavor is irrelevant. It was "too hot" in the context of safety.
Acting like an asshat is not illegal.
It may not be criminal, but needlessly putting other people at risk is a valid reason for a lawsuit.
McDonald's had quite a few options:
a) Serve coffee at a safe temperature
b) Serve coffee in a safe container (sealed and resistant to possible impact or pressure)
c) Don't serve coffee through the drive through
But no, they decided to put people at risk just to make a buck. And that is why the lawsuit is valid.
... and could potentially be more productive overall...
Basically every study I've seen supports the opposite, over the long term. Sure the reduction in stress from smoking and taking breaks can be beneficial in the short term, however the medium & long term health effects far outweigh the short term benefits that you mention.
However, I don't believe that socializing medicine is a good idea, and as such, smokers would have to pay more for themselves
Unfortunately even without a 'socialized' health system, many smokers are poor and cannot afford to pay for the health care they'll eventually need. Coupling the fact that it's unfeasible to determine insurance status for emergency procedures with the increased occurrence and cost of smokers' emergency treatment and you'll see that smokers increase the cost to the health system and in many cases will be unable to pay.
then those funds should probably be used to cover additional costs, instead of it being a special sin tax that it is today.
Oh I agree that the tax should be determined by the 'marginal cost' of the effects of smoking the cigarettes and I'm against the notion of a 'sin tax'. That said, given the scientific evidence of the harm of second hand smoke, I'm for banning of smoking in all public places.
You could say the same about a multitude of perfectly legal accepted behaviors.
Many of the things you list, the major risk is injury (or death) which to much cheaper to treat (bandages, plaster cast, a few weeks in hospital or just a coffin) than the long term illness (years of in & out of hospital, expensive drugs and dedicated caring) that smoking creates. Others such as obesity, unhealthy diet, no exercise I would support a tax on. As for uv radiation, you could tax solariums but taxing people in the sunlight is just unfeasible.
There are some things you list such as driving where the benefits gained outweigh the costs, i.e. if no one drove then society would be so much less productive that we may not even have hospitals. Smoking is almost completely unproductive.
I flatly refuse to believe all these 'secondary-smoke' alarmist advertisements, stories, and studies. They fly in the face of common sense, and I believe they are constructed as a reason to further regulate and legislate behaviors for the sake of politics power and money.
Up until this point you had somewhat of an argument. Now you're just being silly and paranoid. There's scientific evidence behind the notion that second hand smoke causes harm. If it was about power and money then wouldn't "The Man" be all for pushing this high tax, high price addictive substance?
It is the nature of humans to engage in risky behaviors, even those that they know are harmful to themselves. The only way to stop it is to put everyone in a Matrix-type tube of goo for their entire lives.
It's not about stopping people doing it, it's about ensuring the cost the person pays represents the entire cost of the action (the tax0 and preventing that person making the choice for someone else (bans on smoking in public places). Besides, if it's not going to stop you, what are you complaining about?
Sure, by all means make sure people understand the risks, and try to place minimal, well-reasoned, and practical restrictions that are agreed to by the majority on the extremes, but drop the idea that you can or should try to regulate through law and taxes every behavior that someone thinks may be harmful, for it may be something that matters to *you* that may be the next crusade of the behavior-gestapo.
Come up with methods for other issues that distribute the hidden costs and I'll support it.
Those atrocities were survival of the fittest in action though, the weak cultures being destroyed by the strong. Of course a strong society isn't necessarily going to be te best society for individuals to live in, and unlikely to be the most moral.
I think you're quote misses the fact that religion is in a sense a form of mind control, and while it can be used for power and destruction, it can also be used to create a stable and productive society. So religion may not be directly a good or bad influence, but merely a magnifier of the influence of the leadership, and the resultant influence is determined by the actions of the leaders. Given the ability of power to corrupt I'd say that it might tend towards the negative.
Evolution is a pretty slow process... I guess 3000 years or so isn't quite long enough to breed out the religious nutjobs.
Unfortunately, while their religion may have negative repercussions for society, I'm not sure it has negative repercussions on the breeding of those individuals. If anything they seem to be breeding faster...
Societies may have "invented" the notion of religion because religion led to ethics, which led to less killing of their neighbors. All of the sudden, it's survival of the fittest, as non-ethical tribes tended to be killed off, while religious tribes thrived.
This is a good illustration of my point. With the 'default' society with no religion, a system of natural selection would have existed within the tribe. While there may have been stronger individuals within that tribe, the 'religious' societies produced stronger tribes as a whole.
So my question is: Even if there is no God, and you are an atheist, is it possible that a world containing religious people is actually a "better" society than a world full of atheists?
Sure it's possible that a society with a uniform belief system could create a better society in the short term, however given such uniformity is likely to restrict innovative thought, they may fall behind in the long run.
The mixed-belief world appears to be the "fittest" world, as opposed to such less-fit worlds of all atheists or all Christians, as examples.
I don't think history really provides enough data to draw such a conclusion. The success of civilizations has depended much more on a mix of resources, technology, polics and chance than religion alone.
I'd also like to point out that my original comments were more orientated towards those who apply the principles of evolution to economics (ie free-market). While a free-market will produce the fittest (ie most profitable) businesses, it may not produce the best overall economy.
The hypothesis is supported by the observation that so many people reject the notion that evolution-like systems such as Wikipedia, prediction markets, and recommendation systems can actually be effective.
While there may be many that reject that these systems can be effective at all, I'd suggest that there's many more that would actual argue that while these systems do work, they aren't necessarily the best or only method that is effective.
Except that in order to stimulate the brain to create an experience, one must understand how that portion of the brain works and how the external stimuli triggers the feeling. We could stimulate the sensing of a colour because we understand how light works. Similarly they can stimulate this euphoric sensation because they understand the process of how that brain section works. And a god isn't part of that understanding.
Besides, an all powerful being would be able to directly manipulate our brains and not need a special sensory system.
No this doesn't prove that there is no god, however it does provide a scientific explanation for those people who claim to 'feel' god or Jesus or whatever.
You do realise it used to be 'normal' to only have one working parent (usually father) with the mother at home doing parenting things such as disciplining children for misbehaviour, showing them how to be productive (chores) and educating by reading them stories right? Or were you born yesterday?
During my early school years, my parents and others quite often volunteered to help at school by taking kids our of class and reading to them or helping them with basic arithmetic. It used to be common, but these days mothers are earning that second income.
And how many kids (or teachers for that matter) understand the chemistry behind chalk and why it behaves the way it does? The point isn't that their use of technology makes them smarter but that the improvements in efficiency it enables in other aspects of life means it should be more common in the educational environment.
The problem lies in the fact that the current generation of teachers are not up to scratch in their ability to use this new technology so it may take a generation for new systems of teaching to filter through.
One game, one ending, and on to the next one please.
Sounds like you'd have better luck watching movies...
WRT Article 27, I wonder at what stage something moves from being someone's artistic production to being part of the cultural life of the community?
e.g. Mickey Mouse. Someone's artistic work, or part of the culture of the community?