Just hold on a minute, you're telling me there are ads on the internet?
In all seriousness though, I'm very thankful for adblock. Users too dumb to use it subsidize an ad-free internet for me full of rich and useful services (like Gmail) that I don't have to pay for--people who see the ads pay for them for me. The internet breaks the free rider problem since it'll never come crashing down for people like me like it often does in real world cases. There will always be millions more users who don't know how to block ads or just don't care.
Any info your insurance company gets will only be used to make you pay more, I guarantee it. You're not going to get any hand outs or kindness from that industry. Them having more information about you can only work against you, it's like talking to police; even when you're 100% innocent it benefits you to never cooperate.
Unfortunately, society seems to have chosen a different way, and the vast majority cannot choose to opt-out of participation if they want to keep their relationships and careers. Try getting a job these days when you tell them you don't have a cellphone, or you will only be reachable on it when it's convenient for you.
What if they share that info with insurance companies, and you end up paying more for life or car insurance because they flag you for buying alcohol in an amount they consider excessive? Or condoms, or pregnancy tests.
I'm using the internet from an Amtrak train right now, using my unofficial AT&T jailbroken tethering;)
Until Amtrak joins the rest of the Western world and gets internet in their trains I will keep doing this. I set my user agent string to the iPhone just in case. If they threaten to charge me an extra $45 a month I'll happily take the opportunity in the change of contract to cancel without a termination fee. They can shove it. I signed up a few years ago for one of their *truly* unlimited plans and I haven't renewed since so they have nothing they can do except cancel me and turn me into a Verizon user.
The impasse seems to be then, that I don't believe anyone is entitled to keep all that they make. I don't believe that anyone in society is genuinely successful 100% by their own hard work. Everyone who is rich benefited from the rest of society, and society has the right to take back from them.
I think it is very short sighted indeed to think that you cannot eliminate the worst forms of human suffering in society while at the same time allowing individuals to flourish and prosper due to their hard work and merit. Making sure that no one goes hungry, unclothed, or unsheltered is not an impossible task, and it can be accomplished with minimal sacrifice by the rest of society.
As to the flat tax being fair, it's simply not for an easy to understand but often dismissed reason. Simply put, the more money you have, the less impact you feel from losing n amount. 10% for a person making 25k a year is HUGE, that's the difference between losing his home or being evicted, making several car payments, keeping himself fed for a month, paying for medicine, etc. 10% for someone making 25 million is the difference between a second vacation home or a new private jet. The two scenarios are simply not comparable on any terms, and it's lunacy to suggest it's fair to ask the same percent from both of those people.
I'm sure you already know this, but there is a jailbreak hack that enables native tethering without having to pay AT&T any extra money. Jailbreak your iPhone, add the hackulous repo to Cydia, and then install tetherme. You'll be able to use tethering just like you had paid to enable it.
Seriously though, as a political science major, I do take exception to that. There are plenty of people in the field doing good research that widens our view of how government operates, when and how it fails, how to avoid the problems of the past, and give us new ideas and models to use in the future. Society is sufficiently complex that we need people trained specifically to write, analyze, and revise policy that implements the will of the people. It is capable of being just as rigorous, worthwhile, and beneficial to society as a career track in any of the hard sciences.
The problem I have is that people complaining about the tax code needing to be simplified are usually the ones saying the solution should be a flat tax, "fair" tax, or some sort of national sales tax (in lieu of an income tax). I'll admit, that would be a lot simpler, but so would a simple function. Our tax code can be both simple AND steeply curved so that the very wealthy in society pay their share based on notions of social justice and the fact that they are only wealthy because they exist within a larger society that has allowed them to become so and must pay back into accordingly. Yes, we need to simplify the tax code, but the top marginal rate needs to be much, much higher than it is now--think close to 90+%. While the income level where the lowest rate kicks in needs to be brought up, so that families who actually work pay less or nothing at all for the majority of their income. While we're at it, we absolutely need to get rid of the most regressive taxes we have which are sales and use taxes that disproportionately fall on the poor and working class. We won't need them anyway once we rationalize our tax code. There are other numerous things we can do, like not tax (or tax at a very low rate) a family's first home as long as they live there. If you can afford a second home, you need to pay a lot in taxes for it because there are people who can't even afford a first one.
I would also be eying the obscenely bloated defense budget as the primary target for spending reduction and redirection. Reduce it by 5% each year for at least 10 years. This would gradually step us down to reasonable levels considering there are no global threats left that can be defeated or challenged militarily or by throwing money at it in an age of nuclear weapons. The war on terror is absolutely a war of choice, and we'd stop being a target if we minded our own business, left the Muslim and Arab world to run their own affairs, abandoned our support for Israel regardless of their atrocities, and didn't attempt to impose Western style democracy on other people.
With all that money I've just freed up, funding a robust, manned presence in space, Mars, and beyond would be a major goal. It must become THE goal for mankind if we are to survive to see the turn of another millennium.
That's not a woe of the free market--from the people advocating for the free markets POV--, it's a desirable outcome for business that needs desperate workers that can be exploited to provide cheap labor.
If you had a trillion people where will all the land to grow there food come from? Or fibers to make clothes? Trees to make furniture? Farmland != undeveloped land reserved as nature preserves. Every human needs several acres at least to grow his or her food and livestock. We also need freshwater for all of them but I'll allow that the oceans could be tapped and desalinated if we had sufficient energy to do so, and solar, even passive solar desalinization, could do that.
It's not a matter of just needing living space, although that is a concern, you also need acres and acres of land per person to support that person's life.
How is cheating nature by discovering a "natural" way to have sex without conception any more moral than using a latex condom or the pill?
Also, you can preach whatever you want, it's abundantly clear that abstinence WOULD work when practiced...but people don't. So effectively, by promoting abstinence only, they are complicit in spreading STDs and unplanned pregnancy. They either know it's not working and don't care, because more babies is the goal anyway, or they don't know that it doesn't work in practice because they refuse to look at and believe the evidence.
Wouldn't unchecked growth create poverty, famine, disease, and other social problems? You'd save more lives, and improve the lives of those who are born by advocating responsible family planning practices. If they really cared about life, and the quality of it, that's what they'd be doing. Organized religion doesn't really care about that. That's why they preach that life is all about suffering and pain--just keep enduring it until you die and go to heaven where you'll finally be better off. Make as many more people while you're here so they can donate to the church what little they make.
Packing everyone into 8x10 cells, isn't an acceptable solution to me. Any solution that doesn't allow for wide open space of undeveloped land, wilderness, forests, jungles, deserts, is suboptimal. We could cram everyone into skyscrapers that cover the entire earth in one giant planet wide city, but what kind of life would that be? Quality of life and quality of our living space are important things to consider. Humans were not meant to be packed like sardines into crowded cities with no where to escape to. The health effects both known and unknown would be profound.
Is space on the earth infinite? No. And an individual human's need for space is much greater than zero. Given those two fact there is a limit, just on living space, for how many humans the earth can support. Now, what that limit is exactly isn't known for sure, it's a moving target because technology keeps pushing it higher and higher but there definitely is a limit. Same with water, and food production. You can squeeze more and more efficiency out of the system but eventually you're going to hit a limit, even if it's 100% that still won't allow for growth for ever and ever. People in the past have been wrong about the specific numbers and dates, but the underlying principle is sound.
When you are competing for the minds of as many humans as possible the best way to gain followers is to encourage them to reproduce as rapidly and as often as possible. Very few religions gain members through conversion, so breeding new members is really the only option. It's no coincidence that nearly all major religions discourage birth control or family planning practices, and encourage you to have as many children (and sometimes wives) as you can support. Add to that the selfish and myopic idea that nothing we do in this life really matters (as long as you follow the rules in $HOLY BOOK) and you have a recipe for ecological disaster.
Now, I have met religious people who believe that the earth is a gift to us, and we must serve as guardians of it, protecting and managing its resources responsibly; that living in harmony and balance is what god intended for us. Unfortunately when I compare those beliefs to what is actually said in the bible for example, it's apparent that they are not closely following their religion. The bible is very clear when it comes to the earth: this place is a rental, and it's all going to come to an end very, very soon. If you believe that, truly believe that, why would you bother recycling?
Competition doesn't work when there are only a few players that all agree with each other on what to charge and what kind of service to deliver. This inevitably happens in any market after enough time, and even quicker when the barrier to entry is so high as it is in wireless telecommunications. And as others have said the EM spectrum is a public good, that should be administered by the government with the best interest of the public in mind. When a player is price gouging, or degrading service in the name of extra profits, it's time for new regulation.
I used 10GB once on my AT&T account, which is double the supposed limit of 5GB for their "unlimited" plan. I didn't get charged extra and never heard anything from them. I had to try hard to get to that, I was commuting on the train a lot and tethering the 3G connection to my laptop (jailbroken iPhone). With my home connection I use 500-1000GB a month (heavy torrenting and seeding), every month, and have never heard anything from my ISP, Charter Cable. There are good ISPs in the US, but I don't think it'll be that way for much longer. Hard caps and overage charges are becoming more common.
Oh come on, Japan pumps out just as much pop-culture garbage as the US does. There are gems from both sides of the Pacific, but let's not forget that the majority of entertainment that both countries produce is mass market crap. Insisting on unique nomenclature to hide this fact just shows your culture preference for Japan.
According to the US definition, yes, it would be. "Child" porn is anything under 18 and it's all lumped into the same category; which makes it a meaningless and arbitrary definition IMO.
Since I am part of the glorious ad-blocker using internet master race I'm fine with my usage patterns being research and used to serve up more relevant ads--as long as I never have to see them. The day it becomes impossible to strip the ads out of some service is the day I stop using it. People like us should be happy about the new business model, it provides free services without ads subsidized by people too incompetent, lazy, or principled to block ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Just hold on a minute, you're telling me there are ads on the internet?
In all seriousness though, I'm very thankful for adblock. Users too dumb to use it subsidize an ad-free internet for me full of rich and useful services (like Gmail) that I don't have to pay for--people who see the ads pay for them for me. The internet breaks the free rider problem since it'll never come crashing down for people like me like it often does in real world cases. There will always be millions more users who don't know how to block ads or just don't care.
Any info your insurance company gets will only be used to make you pay more, I guarantee it. You're not going to get any hand outs or kindness from that industry. Them having more information about you can only work against you, it's like talking to police; even when you're 100% innocent it benefits you to never cooperate.
Unfortunately, society seems to have chosen a different way, and the vast majority cannot choose to opt-out of participation if they want to keep their relationships and careers. Try getting a job these days when you tell them you don't have a cellphone, or you will only be reachable on it when it's convenient for you.
What if they share that info with insurance companies, and you end up paying more for life or car insurance because they flag you for buying alcohol in an amount they consider excessive? Or condoms, or pregnancy tests.
I'd be surprised if anyone trapped during the earthquake or tsunami were still alive. It'll only be bodies we find from now on.
I'm using the internet from an Amtrak train right now, using my unofficial AT&T jailbroken tethering ;)
Until Amtrak joins the rest of the Western world and gets internet in their trains I will keep doing this. I set my user agent string to the iPhone just in case. If they threaten to charge me an extra $45 a month I'll happily take the opportunity in the change of contract to cancel without a termination fee. They can shove it. I signed up a few years ago for one of their *truly* unlimited plans and I haven't renewed since so they have nothing they can do except cancel me and turn me into a Verizon user.
The impasse seems to be then, that I don't believe anyone is entitled to keep all that they make. I don't believe that anyone in society is genuinely successful 100% by their own hard work. Everyone who is rich benefited from the rest of society, and society has the right to take back from them.
I think it is very short sighted indeed to think that you cannot eliminate the worst forms of human suffering in society while at the same time allowing individuals to flourish and prosper due to their hard work and merit. Making sure that no one goes hungry, unclothed, or unsheltered is not an impossible task, and it can be accomplished with minimal sacrifice by the rest of society.
As to the flat tax being fair, it's simply not for an easy to understand but often dismissed reason. Simply put, the more money you have, the less impact you feel from losing n amount. 10% for a person making 25k a year is HUGE, that's the difference between losing his home or being evicted, making several car payments, keeping himself fed for a month, paying for medicine, etc. 10% for someone making 25 million is the difference between a second vacation home or a new private jet. The two scenarios are simply not comparable on any terms, and it's lunacy to suggest it's fair to ask the same percent from both of those people.
I'm sure you already know this, but there is a jailbreak hack that enables native tethering without having to pay AT&T any extra money. Jailbreak your iPhone, add the hackulous repo to Cydia, and then install tetherme. You'll be able to use tethering just like you had paid to enable it.
I resemble that remark.
Seriously though, as a political science major, I do take exception to that. There are plenty of people in the field doing good research that widens our view of how government operates, when and how it fails, how to avoid the problems of the past, and give us new ideas and models to use in the future. Society is sufficiently complex that we need people trained specifically to write, analyze, and revise policy that implements the will of the people. It is capable of being just as rigorous, worthwhile, and beneficial to society as a career track in any of the hard sciences.
The problem I have is that people complaining about the tax code needing to be simplified are usually the ones saying the solution should be a flat tax, "fair" tax, or some sort of national sales tax (in lieu of an income tax). I'll admit, that would be a lot simpler, but so would a simple function. Our tax code can be both simple AND steeply curved so that the very wealthy in society pay their share based on notions of social justice and the fact that they are only wealthy because they exist within a larger society that has allowed them to become so and must pay back into accordingly. Yes, we need to simplify the tax code, but the top marginal rate needs to be much, much higher than it is now--think close to 90+%. While the income level where the lowest rate kicks in needs to be brought up, so that families who actually work pay less or nothing at all for the majority of their income. While we're at it, we absolutely need to get rid of the most regressive taxes we have which are sales and use taxes that disproportionately fall on the poor and working class. We won't need them anyway once we rationalize our tax code. There are other numerous things we can do, like not tax (or tax at a very low rate) a family's first home as long as they live there. If you can afford a second home, you need to pay a lot in taxes for it because there are people who can't even afford a first one.
I would also be eying the obscenely bloated defense budget as the primary target for spending reduction and redirection. Reduce it by 5% each year for at least 10 years. This would gradually step us down to reasonable levels considering there are no global threats left that can be defeated or challenged militarily or by throwing money at it in an age of nuclear weapons. The war on terror is absolutely a war of choice, and we'd stop being a target if we minded our own business, left the Muslim and Arab world to run their own affairs, abandoned our support for Israel regardless of their atrocities, and didn't attempt to impose Western style democracy on other people.
With all that money I've just freed up, funding a robust, manned presence in space, Mars, and beyond would be a major goal. It must become THE goal for mankind if we are to survive to see the turn of another millennium.
That's not a woe of the free market--from the people advocating for the free markets POV--, it's a desirable outcome for business that needs desperate workers that can be exploited to provide cheap labor.
If you had a trillion people where will all the land to grow there food come from? Or fibers to make clothes? Trees to make furniture? Farmland != undeveloped land reserved as nature preserves. Every human needs several acres at least to grow his or her food and livestock. We also need freshwater for all of them but I'll allow that the oceans could be tapped and desalinated if we had sufficient energy to do so, and solar, even passive solar desalinization, could do that.
It's not a matter of just needing living space, although that is a concern, you also need acres and acres of land per person to support that person's life.
How is cheating nature by discovering a "natural" way to have sex without conception any more moral than using a latex condom or the pill?
Also, you can preach whatever you want, it's abundantly clear that abstinence WOULD work when practiced...but people don't. So effectively, by promoting abstinence only, they are complicit in spreading STDs and unplanned pregnancy. They either know it's not working and don't care, because more babies is the goal anyway, or they don't know that it doesn't work in practice because they refuse to look at and believe the evidence.
Wouldn't unchecked growth create poverty, famine, disease, and other social problems? You'd save more lives, and improve the lives of those who are born by advocating responsible family planning practices. If they really cared about life, and the quality of it, that's what they'd be doing. Organized religion doesn't really care about that. That's why they preach that life is all about suffering and pain--just keep enduring it until you die and go to heaven where you'll finally be better off. Make as many more people while you're here so they can donate to the church what little they make.
Packing everyone into 8x10 cells, isn't an acceptable solution to me. Any solution that doesn't allow for wide open space of undeveloped land, wilderness, forests, jungles, deserts, is suboptimal. We could cram everyone into skyscrapers that cover the entire earth in one giant planet wide city, but what kind of life would that be? Quality of life and quality of our living space are important things to consider. Humans were not meant to be packed like sardines into crowded cities with no where to escape to. The health effects both known and unknown would be profound.
Is space on the earth infinite? No. And an individual human's need for space is much greater than zero. Given those two fact there is a limit, just on living space, for how many humans the earth can support. Now, what that limit is exactly isn't known for sure, it's a moving target because technology keeps pushing it higher and higher but there definitely is a limit. Same with water, and food production. You can squeeze more and more efficiency out of the system but eventually you're going to hit a limit, even if it's 100% that still won't allow for growth for ever and ever. People in the past have been wrong about the specific numbers and dates, but the underlying principle is sound.
When you are competing for the minds of as many humans as possible the best way to gain followers is to encourage them to reproduce as rapidly and as often as possible. Very few religions gain members through conversion, so breeding new members is really the only option. It's no coincidence that nearly all major religions discourage birth control or family planning practices, and encourage you to have as many children (and sometimes wives) as you can support. Add to that the selfish and myopic idea that nothing we do in this life really matters (as long as you follow the rules in $HOLY BOOK) and you have a recipe for ecological disaster.
Now, I have met religious people who believe that the earth is a gift to us, and we must serve as guardians of it, protecting and managing its resources responsibly; that living in harmony and balance is what god intended for us. Unfortunately when I compare those beliefs to what is actually said in the bible for example, it's apparent that they are not closely following their religion. The bible is very clear when it comes to the earth: this place is a rental, and it's all going to come to an end very, very soon. If you believe that, truly believe that, why would you bother recycling?
Competition doesn't work when there are only a few players that all agree with each other on what to charge and what kind of service to deliver. This inevitably happens in any market after enough time, and even quicker when the barrier to entry is so high as it is in wireless telecommunications. And as others have said the EM spectrum is a public good, that should be administered by the government with the best interest of the public in mind. When a player is price gouging, or degrading service in the name of extra profits, it's time for new regulation.
I used 10GB once on my AT&T account, which is double the supposed limit of 5GB for their "unlimited" plan. I didn't get charged extra and never heard anything from them. I had to try hard to get to that, I was commuting on the train a lot and tethering the 3G connection to my laptop (jailbroken iPhone). With my home connection I use 500-1000GB a month (heavy torrenting and seeding), every month, and have never heard anything from my ISP, Charter Cable. There are good ISPs in the US, but I don't think it'll be that way for much longer. Hard caps and overage charges are becoming more common.
Oh come on, Japan pumps out just as much pop-culture garbage as the US does. There are gems from both sides of the Pacific, but let's not forget that the majority of entertainment that both countries produce is mass market crap. Insisting on unique nomenclature to hide this fact just shows your culture preference for Japan.
There's only one way to tell if someone has actually forgotten a password...dissect his brain!
According to the US definition, yes, it would be. "Child" porn is anything under 18 and it's all lumped into the same category; which makes it a meaningless and arbitrary definition IMO.
Since I am part of the glorious ad-blocker using internet master race I'm fine with my usage patterns being research and used to serve up more relevant ads--as long as I never have to see them. The day it becomes impossible to strip the ads out of some service is the day I stop using it. People like us should be happy about the new business model, it provides free services without ads subsidized by people too incompetent, lazy, or principled to block ads.
Yeah, been there. Although technically I guess the last one was actually me, and the other guy was the second person you mention