Perhaps Mr. Kucinich's altruism would be a little less suspect if he wasn't simultaneously running for president himself?
That's not necessarily a conflict of interest to say, for example, "The Vice President is doing a criminally bad job and I would like to be elected president because I would execute the duties faithfully."
One doesn't even have to assign malign motives to Cheney's actions to consider them impeachable offenses. One could accuse him of criminal behavior without addressing his motives at all. If one stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, one could still be tried for the theft -- although the purity of motive might go a long way when arguing against conviction.
Bill Clinton was not impeached over a BJ. He was impeached for "The charges were perjury and obstruction of justice, arising from the Lewinsky scandal."
So if you lie about something that isn't anyone's business regarding the behavior of two consenting adults, then it's an impeachable offense. On the other hand, if you lie about matters of improper squandering of our nation's lives and treasure, you're just being persecuted for political gain?
Something any one of us would do jail time for.
No. It's just not true. You couldn't find a prosecutor in this country who would prosecute either of us for lying about a BJ unless there were some ulterior motive behind it. And you wouldn't find an honest judge who would entertain such arguments.
This process produces a strong optical appearance of a "Blue Sky" but for exactly the same reason that the the primary paint colors are Red Yellow and Blue while the light primary colors are Red Green and Blue (See your color Video Monitor for details) this makes plants green.
Plants are green because the Flying Spaghetti Monster paints them that way with His Noodly Appendage.
French voting..........As well engineered as the Maginot Line!
The illustration was an ES&S iVotronic machine, designed in Omaha, NE, USA, with hardware and embedded software work farmed out to Lenexa (USA) and Taiwan. Assembled in the Philippines.
Just look at the thing . . . It looks like total crap, no wonder that people have difficulties by using it.
Is that a joke? The illustration shows a touch-screen iVotronic displaying the welcome message (in French). The UI hasn't even appeared yet, so what are you commenting on? The aesthetics of the packaging?
I don't really see the benefit of these machines. Sure, you get the results a little bit earlier, but that's hardly important. So why are some countries adopting voting machines, while others don't even think about it?
One selling point is that the machines can be adapted for people with disabilities. The iVotronic, apparently the machine in question here, has a headphone jack so that a blind or vision-impaired voter can use the machine without getting assistance from a sighted person to cast his/her vote.
What is the TCO of these things anyway? These machines are used maybe once a year. Will they still work in ten years down the line? Lots of motherboards don't due to failing CMOS batteries for example. It seems to me that given the rapid pace of changes in the field of computing and networking, it would be very difficult to maintain such a system over decades. Do voting machines use modems? What if everybody uses VoIP and cell phones in ten years?
These devices aren't general-purpose computers, so storing a bunch of configuration in CMOS is not necessary. The lithium battery on board keeps the clock running. Each "electronic ballot" has a battery, too. That's the blocky thing you can see in the picture on the Wikipedia page. Diebold gave ES&S a lot of flak for using an old Embedded version of the 386 in the "iVo", but it does the job.
Don't get me wrong, though. There are plenty of problems with electronic voting machines--especially the audit-able reliability of the embedded code.
If only there were some way to file in March, or even February. But that could only happen if employers had a deadline to send out W-2 forms by like the end of January.
I know you're being sarcastic, and I don't mean to harsh your mellow, but 1099s are not necessarily ready by the end of January. And even if they are, it's good practice to wait a while to see if they get updated. Easier to procrastinate than to file twice (once the original return, once for the amended return). I've gotten restated 1099s in April -- after I'd filed my 1040. And that made me a sad panda.
I can't say I have any sympathy for the procrastinators.
If you really filed that early, you might investigate amending your return to claim the phone tax credit. A number of changes to the tax code weren't really in place in January. This was the year of the procrastinator, not the pig -- thanks to congress and the IRS.
Seriously, they need to think these things throught just a wee bit more - Whether requiring a given level of flame-resistance and then bitching about the toxicity of most flame retardants, or banning leaded gasoline in the '70s, only to replace it with MTBE that behaves exactly like lead in the environment
Lead as a gasoline additive was banned because it poisoned catalytic converters. Catalytic converters reduced the emission of chemicals that pollute the atmosphere and combine to create smog. Reduction of lead in the air, soil and water -- and therefore people's blood -- was a beneficial side effect.
MTBE was an improvement over tetra-ethyl lead. I don't know what "behaves exactly the same in the environment" means. It's not perfect, especially when it gets into ground water. But I wouldn't want the days before catalytic converters back.
Plus once you've gone through the frustration of multiple test cycles, fixes and detailed documentation, the last thing you want to hear is that you've missed something, so again, skepticism is the first reaction.
The really, really last thing you want to hear is that you missed something, then fixed it, then hear about it again because the latest version isn't in your customers hands, yet. Or better yet -- your customer finds out that the problem is fixed in the next version, which was shipped to him last week -- and he asks you "when will it be fixed in the old version?"
But you're absolutely right, it helps to have a less-interested party in between customer and developer, i.e. the tech support guy, who doesn't have to feel personal failure for any problems the customer has. One my worst nightmares was getting a call from one of our salesmen, asking how you would do (or fix) something with a product of ours, then hearing: "great, I got the guy with the problem on the other line, let's conference him in and you can explain that again to him."
One thing that really surprised me after reading these comments first and then the article, is that stations can't just move to independent music. From TFA:
5. Well... independent music is cool. Why not just play independent music?
This is very important to understand, as lots of people see this as a solution. The statutory webcast license covers ANY copyright music, from the biggest labels, down to the smallest, and even independently-released music. Again, the license covers ANY copyright music. The copyright owner need NOT be part of SoundExchange or the RIAA. The ONLY exceptions to this are (A) direct deals with each and every sound recording copyright owner, (B) copyright owners that are willing to make a blanket "waive" of fees, or (C) non-copyright, public domain music.
It sure sounds like they're admitting to racketeering, here. In the US, we could use RICO against them, except that's only used against political protests now.
What's next? If I tell you to turn off the sound, will you up the volume to maximum and play a recording of "SHUTTING SOUND OFF NOW!" in a really whiny voice?
In the United States, at least, the income distribution is roughly normal, with admittedly a long (but very low probability) tail in the higher incomes. The blog's example has 150 people making $30K or less, and 11 making $30,001 or more.
Fair enough. And it's Saturday, so I'm game.
I took the mean income of Bumfuckville of just under $25,000 and I normalized US census data to match. Then I divided Bumfuckville into 10 bins with percentages matching US Census income data (normalized to Bumfuckville's average income). I got this:
This raises Bumfuckville's total income to $4.47 million from $4 million. That's because I actually used Bumfuckville's mean income instead of median (which would have been $10k) due to their small size and relative poverty -- a fact you had noticed in the income distribution. That does indeed depress the median. With these changes, Bumfuckville approximates the distribution of income in the US more closely. You pointed out the long tail of income at the top end. Bumfuckville is really too small to be statistically likely to have any superrich people . ..
At the flat 5% tax rate, the top 20% of earners of Bumfuckville pay about 35% of the taxes, and the bums at the bottom 20% pay only 4.5% or so.
like, $5000 per person. That's only "regressive" in socialist-speak.
"Regressive" and "progressive" WRT to rate tables are not social judgments. It's mathematical. It just means that the rates decrease or increase (respectively) with the amount taxed.
You're actually saying that, and then linking to an "analysis" that cites a fictional town with a flat tax rate as an example of why he's wrong?
The "flat tax" example just illustrates that you can make the "20% of taxpayers pay 80% of the taxes" argument even with a flat tax. That it's not an artifact of the progressive tax code.
Let's rewrite Bumfuckville's income tax code to something more "fair":
The town budget is $200,000. So to meet the budget we need to collect that much in taxes. But everyone in town must pay the same amount, right? To be fair? There are 161 people in Bumfuckville. So let's divide the town budget by 161: Thats $1242 per person. Fair, right? Here's Bumfuckville's new tax table:
Income bracket/Old tax rate/New tax rate
$10,000/5%/12.4%
$30,000/5%/4.1%
$100,000/5%/1.2%
$500,000/5%/0.25%
Now there's none of this commie "progressive tax" or socialist "flat tax". Now we've got a tax code that even Jesus would be proud of: The Fair Tax.
Tax rates are kind of high on the lower income folks, but that's because the town has just been wasting most of that budget on gold plated drinking fountains for city hall and the pinko mayor. Let's cut the budget in half to $100,000. That'll provide some much needed tax relief:
Income Bracket/Original Tax Rate/Fairer Rate (after budget cuts)
$10,000/5%/6.2%
$30,000/5%/2.1%
$100,000/5%/0.6%
$500,000/5%/0.13%
Now we're reduced waste and made the tax code "fair". Can I get an "Amen"?
The unstated, and invalid, assumption on that site is that a flat percentage tax is somehow "fair." It is not. That one person at the high end, who pays $25,000 in taxes, does not receive significantly more government services than a person on the low end, who pays $500 in taxes. That's extremely unfair. The person on the high end is bearing 50x the burden.
Are you seriously arguing for a regressive tax table, like 20% taxes on the first $10k, then 10% taxes on the next $20k, then 5%, then 1% then 0%. Like that? Just checking.
Slashdot Mirror
This was on the CNN website Tuesday afternoon, in the "US News" section, along with a story about Cheney's leg and a blood clot therein.
That's not necessarily a conflict of interest to say, for example, "The Vice President is doing a criminally bad job and I would like to be elected president because I would execute the duties faithfully."
One doesn't even have to assign malign motives to Cheney's actions to consider them impeachable offenses. One could accuse him of criminal behavior without addressing his motives at all. If one stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, one could still be tried for the theft -- although the purity of motive might go a long way when arguing against conviction.
So if you lie about something that isn't anyone's business regarding the behavior of two consenting adults, then it's an impeachable offense. On the other hand, if you lie about matters of improper squandering of our nation's lives and treasure, you're just being persecuted for political gain?
No. It's just not true. You couldn't find a prosecutor in this country who would prosecute either of us for lying about a BJ unless there were some ulterior motive behind it. And you wouldn't find an honest judge who would entertain such arguments.
You can't really dust for CO2 emissions.
It's an unusual band, not a very well known band. Although they've earned their place in history as one of England's loudest bands.
Don't be a square, man. Things are already too serious. The world would be a sad place indeed without a little "stoner physics" before breakfast.
Plants are green because the Flying Spaghetti Monster paints them that way with His Noodly Appendage.
So, in Serbian mines, Jadar contains kryptonite.
The illustration was an ES&S iVotronic machine, designed in Omaha, NE, USA, with hardware and embedded software work farmed out to Lenexa (USA) and Taiwan. Assembled in the Philippines.
Is that a joke? The illustration shows a touch-screen iVotronic displaying the welcome message (in French). The UI hasn't even appeared yet, so what are you commenting on? The aesthetics of the packaging?
One selling point is that the machines can be adapted for people with disabilities. The iVotronic, apparently the machine in question here, has a headphone jack so that a blind or vision-impaired voter can use the machine without getting assistance from a sighted person to cast his/her vote.
These devices aren't general-purpose computers, so storing a bunch of configuration in CMOS is not necessary. The lithium battery on board keeps the clock running. Each "electronic ballot" has a battery, too. That's the blocky thing you can see in the picture on the Wikipedia page. Diebold gave ES&S a lot of flak for using an old Embedded version of the 386 in the "iVo", but it does the job.
Don't get me wrong, though. There are plenty of problems with electronic voting machines--especially the audit-able reliability of the embedded code.
I'd have a holodeck with a seven of nine program. For when I got tired of T'Pol. Jeez.
I know you're being sarcastic, and I don't mean to harsh your mellow, but 1099s are not necessarily ready by the end of January. And even if they are, it's good practice to wait a while to see if they get updated. Easier to procrastinate than to file twice (once the original return, once for the amended return). I've gotten restated 1099s in April -- after I'd filed my 1040. And that made me a sad panda.
If you really filed that early, you might investigate amending your return to claim the phone tax credit. A number of changes to the tax code weren't really in place in January. This was the year of the procrastinator, not the pig -- thanks to congress and the IRS.
Lead as a gasoline additive was banned because it poisoned catalytic converters. Catalytic converters reduced the emission of chemicals that pollute the atmosphere and combine to create smog. Reduction of lead in the air, soil and water -- and therefore people's blood -- was a beneficial side effect.
MTBE was an improvement over tetra-ethyl lead. I don't know what "behaves exactly the same in the environment" means. It's not perfect, especially when it gets into ground water. But I wouldn't want the days before catalytic converters back.
The really, really last thing you want to hear is that you missed something, then fixed it, then hear about it again because the latest version isn't in your customers hands, yet. Or better yet -- your customer finds out that the problem is fixed in the next version, which was shipped to him last week -- and he asks you "when will it be fixed in the old version?"
But you're absolutely right, it helps to have a less-interested party in between customer and developer, i.e. the tech support guy, who doesn't have to feel personal failure for any problems the customer has. One my worst nightmares was getting a call from one of our salesmen, asking how you would do (or fix) something with a product of ours, then hearing: "great, I got the guy with the problem on the other line, let's conference him in and you can explain that again to him."
It sure sounds like they're admitting to racketeering, here. In the US, we could use RICO against them, except that's only used against political protests now.
dammit, i also get the lameness filter . . . why doesn't it stop people when they post in all lower case????
I guess we could all try dying prematurely. I suppose that would address the rampant consumerism at the same time.
Cell phone manufacturers beat them to it.
Fair enough. And it's Saturday, so I'm game.
I took the mean income of Bumfuckville of just under $25,000 and I normalized US census data to match. Then I divided Bumfuckville into 10 bins with percentages matching US Census income data (normalized to Bumfuckville's average income). I got this:
People/Income
14/$2,682
21/$8,045
20/$13,408
18/$18,771
15/$24,134
13/$29,497
11/$34,860
9/$40,223
7/$45,586
6/$50,949
16/$67,038
5/$93,853
This raises Bumfuckville's total income to $4.47 million from $4 million. That's because I actually used Bumfuckville's mean income instead of median (which would have been $10k) due to their small size and relative poverty -- a fact you had noticed in the income distribution. That does indeed depress the median. With these changes, Bumfuckville approximates the distribution of income in the US more closely. You pointed out the long tail of income at the top end. Bumfuckville is really too small to be statistically likely to have any superrich people . . .
At the flat 5% tax rate, the top 20% of earners of Bumfuckville pay about 35% of the taxes, and the bums at the bottom 20% pay only 4.5% or so.
"Regressive" and "progressive" WRT to rate tables are not social judgments. It's mathematical. It just means that the rates decrease or increase (respectively) with the amount taxed.
The "flat tax" example just illustrates that you can make the "20% of taxpayers pay 80% of the taxes" argument even with a flat tax. That it's not an artifact of the progressive tax code.
Let's rewrite Bumfuckville's income tax code to something more "fair": The town budget is $200,000. So to meet the budget we need to collect that much in taxes. But everyone in town must pay the same amount, right? To be fair? There are 161 people in Bumfuckville. So let's divide the town budget by 161: Thats $1242 per person. Fair, right? Here's Bumfuckville's new tax table:
Income bracket/Old tax rate/New tax rate
$10,000/5%/12.4%
$30,000/5%/4.1%
$100,000/5%/1.2%
$500,000/5%/0.25%
Now there's none of this commie "progressive tax" or socialist "flat tax". Now we've got a tax code that even Jesus would be proud of: The Fair Tax. Tax rates are kind of high on the lower income folks, but that's because the town has just been wasting most of that budget on gold plated drinking fountains for city hall and the pinko mayor. Let's cut the budget in half to $100,000. That'll provide some much needed tax relief:
Income Bracket/Original Tax Rate/Fairer Rate (after budget cuts)
$10,000/5%/6.2%
$30,000/5%/2.1%
$100,000/5%/0.6%
$500,000/5%/0.13%
Now we're reduced waste and made the tax code "fair". Can I get an "Amen"?
And yet, that's exactly what that is, in a mathematical sense. Don't agree with their math? It's just arithmetic, do it yourself and see.
Are you seriously arguing for a regressive tax table, like 20% taxes on the first $10k, then 10% taxes on the next $20k, then 5%, then 1% then 0%. Like that? Just checking.